The National Gallery of Australia (NGA) has an exhibition on the short, brilliant career of Hugh Ramsay.  Although the Gallery is closed now, along with many other of the world’s museums, I thought I’d share the work of this remarkable Australian artist.

Born in Scotland in 1877, Ramsay came to Australia on a ship with his parents. He lived in Australia his entire life, except for a short stint in England and France in 1900 to 1902. Although he died at the young age of 28 from tuberculosis, his paintings represent some of the greatest works of portraiture in Australian art. The NGA website’s search function allows people to enter his name to see more of his many drawings and paintings.
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Ramsay grew up as one of nine children, and family played a large role throughout his life. His talent appeared early. He painted Kookaburra at age 14. 

In 1897, at age 21, he painted The Tent, a modern and abstract work for the time. That same year, he painted Lamplight, which is reminiscent of some of JMW Turner’s work.

​His interest in portraits started early. In 1897, he painted his sister Madge. What I found most interesting about this portrait was the Australian landscape in the background. 

​In 1901, Ramsay travelled to Paris and learned from artists like Diego Velázquez, John Singer Sargent, and James McNeill Whistler. He painted himself and his roommate, a fellow artist, many times.

My favorite painting of his from this period is The Four Seasons, inspired by the Pre-Raphaelites and Alphonse Mucha.

​For his health, Ramsay returned to Australia. There, he focused on portraits of family and the occasional landscape.

His masterpiece is probably Two Girls in White, painted in 1904. Inspired by Sargent’s painting of a group of sisters in gowns, Ramsay’s rendition is less formal. He places his sisters close to us, making viewers part of the scene.

He died in 1906, aged 28, at his family home in Melbourne. Ramsay has been called an “artist’s artist,” admired by many in his own generation and those that followed. One of his early mentors wrote after his death, “Australia, I think, does not yet realise what she has lost in him but she will in time, and I and some others I know will do what we can to make his memory live.”
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This exhibition does indeed bring Ramsay and his work alive for a modern audience.

When visiting Glasgow recently, as I wrote last week, I found an unexpected connection to Australia. During the same visit, as I walked away from the Glasgow Cathedral, I found another. 

This giant mural was painted by Australian artist Sam Bates, also known as Smug. Born in the small town of Nowra, New South Wales (about three hours south of Sydney), he has lived and worked in Glasgow for 16 years.
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The mural is beloved to Glaswegians and depicts a modern-day representation of Mungo, Glasgow’s patron saint. The birds in the mural symbolize the story of the Bird that Never Flew, one of St. Mungo’s miracles. The nearby Glasgow Cathedral is the final resting place of St. Mungo.

As a follow up to St. Mungo, Smug painted another mural at the corner of High Street and George Street. Here, St. Mungo is breastfed by his mother St. Enoch. Again, a bird appears in the mural.   

Smug has painted several other murals in Glasgow, and his work is known for both its photorealism and gentle humor.
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I happened upon this mural by Smug, which was commissioned for the Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth Games. Tucked beneath the Kingston Bridge, the swimmers look as if they’re competing in the chilly River Clyde. 

The mural below remembers that people are not the only residents of Glasgow. These animals can be found in Glasgow’s parks and green spaces.

​Near Central Station is this mural of a girl with a magnifying glass. Towering above pedestrians, it looks as if she’s ready to pick up something or someone. 

This video excerpt from a Rick Steves’ episode about Glasgow includes one theory about this mural along with a look at street art by Smug and other artists.  

Finding signs of Australia in Glasgow reminded me that the world is interconnected and sometimes it feels like a smaller, cozier place.

Recently I saw the exhibition Storytime: Australian Children’s Literature, which runs until February 2020 at the National Library of Australia. It traces the development of children’s literature from colonial days to the present and includes everything from picture books for small children to novels aimed at young adults. For many native Australians, this would be a nostalgic journey, reminding them of many old favorites from childhood. For me it was an odyssey through a whole new landscape—a chance to learn more about Australia’s culture by exploring what stories authors have chosen to tell children.    
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No surprise, I gravitated to the stories featuring iconic animals like kangaroos, possums, koalas, and wombats. Women have written many of these books, and the work of three authors resonated with me.

The earliest work, written by Ethel C. Pedley and published in 1899, is called Dot and the Kangaroo. A kangaroo comes to help Dot, a young girl who’s lost in the bush. After eating berries that the kangaroo offers her, Dot can understand the animals around her.  The other bush animals help the kangaroo and Dot to find her way home. The book was made into an award-winning film in 1977 and eight more movies were made about Dot. Both the book and the movies include the idea that humans have had a terrible effect on the lives of native animals.

Mem Fox focused on possums, and in 1983, finally published Possum Magic. She started writing an early draft in 1978, and like Jackie French later, the book was rejected many times. The possum protagonist is Hush, whose grandma made her invisible to keep her safe. The problem is, Grandma has forgotten how to reverse the spell, but she knows it has something to do with food. The pair leave the bush to journey across Australia, trying traditional Australian foods along the way to find out which ones will make Hush visible again. This story, a popular favorite for Scholastic Books, has never been out of print since it was published and was turned into a musical. 

Five years later, in 1988, Mem Fox wrote Koala Lou, when Australian singer Olivia Newton-John asked her to write a book about a koala named Blue. That idea led to Koala Lou, a determined little koala who enters the Bush Olympics to get her mother’s affection and approval.

​Jackie French has written more than 140 books. Her breakthrough picture book, Diary of a Wombat, published in 2002, features a lively, demanding wombat named Mothball. The book is in the form of Mothball’s diary entries for a week as she tries to coexist with her new human neighbors. She soon learns how to train them to give her carrots, her favorite treat. With charming illustrations and Mothball’s deadpan delivery, this picture book is laugh-out-loud funny.  
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After seeing this exhibition, I not only feel like I learned a lot about Australian culture through its children’s literature, but I also made some new literary friends along the way.

The Birds of Australia—a massive seven-volume work published between 1840 to 1848 and one of the most influential books about Australian birds—contains stunning illustrations by a woman named Elizabeth Gould … but you’d never know it. Her name doesn’t appear on the title page. The individual plates are credited only to “J & E Gould.” The “J” is John Gould, Elizabeth’s husband, a taxidermist and ornithologist. The book’s author, he took credit for each illustration, even though the work was his wife’s. She was reduced to an initial.

Born into a military family in England in 1804, Elizabeth was probably taught to draw and paint, skills that were expected of middle- and upper-class women of the time. At 22, she was working (unhappily) as a governess. Her brother, a taxidermist, introduced her to one of his colleagues, John Gould. They married in 1829 when they were both 24.

John wanted to write a book about birds from the Himalayas and informed a no-doubt-surprised Elizabeth that she would do all the drawings, paintings, and lithographs. She taught herself the new art of lithography while pregnant with their first child. Elizabeth designed and illustrated 80 lithographs of 100 bird species, all hand colored.

When the book was published, John listed only himself on the title page. In the preface, John noted her “well-known abilities” in “delineating these birds.” Although Elizabeth didn’t sign any of her artwork, each plate bears a small credit: “Drawn from nature on stone by E. Gould.” The book was a huge success, leading to another project on the birds of Europe.

Over the next five years, Elizabeth worked on the illustrations and created 448 plates for the book. She also gave birth to five more children, but only three survived.
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During this time, Charles Darwin brought back bird specimens from the Galapagos Islands, and Elizabeth created the illustrations to go with John’s text about the birds. One of these was of the famous Galapagos finches, referred to in Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Elizabeth’s name didn’t appear on any of the illustrations. 

Again, when Birds of Europe was published, Elizabeth’s name was not on the title page. Worse, each illustration now had John’s initials along with Elizabeth’s. He often claimed that she contributed only the lithographs, while he was responsible for the original art. Both contemporary sources and documentary evidence of the original sketches confirms his assertion was untrue.

With another successful book, John now wanted to tackle Australian birds. Elizabeth’s brothers both had farms in New South Wales, so the Goulds could base themselves there for the new project.

Elizabeth didn’t want to travel to Australia. The Goulds had four surviving children, and the plan was to take their oldest son (age seven) with them, leaving the three youngest children with Elizabeth’s mother. The idea of leaving behind her youngest child Louisa (only six months old) was extremely distressing, and Elizabeth nearly didn’t go. However, John insisted, so they traveled to Australia in 1838.

In her letters to her mother and diaries, she didn’t talk about her art. She missed her children and mother and was frustrated by the separation. She stayed busy, working on hundreds of drawings and paintings and learning about native plants as well as the birds. She worried about how many bird specimens her husband was collecting, calling him “a great enemy of the feathered tribe,” and wrote to her mother: “I hope he leaves some of the birds in the skies.”
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As a zoological artist, Elizabeth faced real challenges in the days before photography. Bird specimens to draw from were collected, killed, and stuffed. The resulting illustration was often stilted and unnatural, a style referred to now as “birds on a stick.” Their time in Australia allowed Elizabeth to observe and draw birds in their native habitat. Her art had to be scientifically accurate, lifelike, and beautiful—she achieved all three. 

​Elizabeth spent a little more than two years in Australia, returning to England in 1840. A year later, she died of puerperal fever after giving birth for the eighth time. Another artist had to finish the lithography from her drawings and paintings.

While John Gould never put her name on the title page of any of their books, he did name an Australian bird to memorialize Elizabeth, calling it the Gouldian Finch. He noted that his late wife had “laboriously assisted me with her pencil, accompanied me to Australia, and cheerfully interested herself in all my pursuits.” Ironically, even though he named the bird in honor of Elizabeth, he used only his surname.

​Today, although her husband is still sometimes credited for her work, Elizabeth’s enormous contributions are becoming better known through Her Natural History campaign, related presentations, and a novel written about her. The enormous breadth of her work can be seen in various archives, including this one of her lithographs, thanks to the Biodiversity Heritage Library. 

A recent post compared the government shutdown in the United States to Australia’s 1975 crisis over passing an appropriations bill. To resolve the crisis, the Queen’s representative, Sir John Kerr, who served as Governor-General, sacked Australia’s prime minister and put in the opposition leader to pass a bill before the supply (appropriations money) ran out on 27 November. When Parliament sought a no-confidence vote for the new prime minister, Kerr dissolved Parliament and called for elections. Kerr’s actions have remained controversial all the way up to today, and I noted there was a pending court case to make his communications with the Queen public, to determine to what extent Queen Elizabeth II was involved with her Governor-General’s decisions. Buckingham Palace has always maintained she knew nothing at all.

A court recently found that the palace letters between Kerr and Queen Elizabeth II will remain off-limits to the public. The decision has outraged many Australians and prompted more discussion about becoming a republic versus remaining a constitutional monarchy. This article explains the case and the constitutional ramifications of the court’s decision.

Canberra, the capital of Australia, is a planned city. The designers were two American architects selected in a worldwide competition. Although Canberra still reveres Walter Burley Griffin, history has overlooked the other half of the partnership: his wife Marion Mahony Griffin.

Marion Mahony was born in Chicago in 1871. She was the second woman to graduate in architecture from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1894, making her one of the first licensed female architects in the world.

Beginning in 1895, Marion Mahony worked for Frank Lloyd Wright as part of the Prairie School architectural movement. She was his first employee and later one of seven draftsman who contributed to the style of architecture that made Wright famous. She is best known for her drawings and watercolor renderings of Wright’s designs. In 1910, a book of Frank Lloyd Wright’s designs was published in Germany, which became one of the most important publications about architecture in the last century and influenced Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier. Mahony’s drawings, retraced in ink, made up more than half the book. When people see her drawings and watercolor renderings, they think of Frank Lloyd Wright, but the notoriously arrogant architect never gave her any credit for her work.

Marion Mahony married Walter Burley Griffin in 1911, another Prairie School architect she had met in Wright’s studio. She devoted herself to furthering her new husband’s career. She persuaded him to enter a competition for the design of Australia’s proposed capital city in Canberra. They collaborated on the entry, and Marion created 14 large presentation drawings of Walter’s design. Ironically, neither Marion nor Walter had ever seen Australia. Her drawings captured the imagination of the judges, and the couple won the competition.

In 1914, they moved to Canberra to oversee the building. After many bruising, bureaucratic battles over the new capital city, very little of their vision survived. Although only small parts of their original plan were implemented, the couple had other successful projects in Australia. Marion managed their Sydney office and did the designs for their private commissions. Their projects included five new towns, several suburban communities, three campus plans, houses, and some industrial and commercial buildings.

The couple also worked in India, where Walter designed a university library. After her husband died there in 1937, Marion returned to Australia and then to the United States. She continued working and was also known as a horticulturist, graphic designer, and painter. She remained an advocate for community planning and the environment until her death in 1961. In 2005, her paintings were published in the book Marion Mahony Griffin: Drawing the Form of Nature.

In Canberra, memorials to her husband Walter Burley Griffin are easy to find. The lake in the center of the city bears his name. His portrait is on a commemorative postage stamp.

Marion Mahony Griffin is more elusive. The National Archives of Australia exhibited her renderings in 2013 for Canberra’s centennial. That same year, a view from the summit of Mount Ainslie, the subject of her most evocative drawing, was named in her honor.