Ellis Rowan, flower hunter

 

Many interesting women and their stories are woven into the history of the Herbert River district. One such woman is Ellis Rowan. Her exploits and success were remarkable for the era in which she lived. This lenghty blog researched and written with thanks by Chris and Vivienne Parry is a fascinating read. 

Ellis Rowan and her son Puck

Ellis Rowan was Australia's most celebrated flower painter of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. An emancipated woman far ahead of her time, she turned what her fellow Australian artists deemed a 'genteel' female pastime of flower painting into an adventurous and profitable career that took her all over the world. In a career spanning fifty years and ending with her death in 1922, she produced more than 3,000 paintings, many of which she succeeded in placing in public collections. She exhibited her work as far afield as London and New York and achieved acclaim at the great world expositions of her day, winning ten gold, fifteen silver and four bronze medals. Queen Victoria selected three paintings for her private chambers. She was also a writer, she recounted her travels in the popular press and in a book entitled A Flower-Hunter in Queensland and New Zealand, published in 1898.

She was born in 1848 to a wealthy pastoralist family of Victoria. Besides a position of privilege, she inherited a talent for art and natural history. Following her education in Melbourne, she visited England and probably took art lessons, though she claimed, with characteristic exaggeration, to have been entirely self-taught as an artist. She began exhibiting her paintings at about the time of her marriage in 1873 to Frederic Charles Rowan, a British army officer then serving in New Zealand and later a successful Melbourne businessman.

Ellis Rowan trekked to remote and distant places ― all over Australia, New Guinea and to the tropics of Queensland on at least six occasions. She saw herself more as an artist and public educator than a botanical illustrator. She wanted to record not the structure of flowers, but to show how they grew in their native habitats: by sea or swamp, in sparse desert, or as in north Queensland, in dense rainforest.

Though Ellis placed artistic effect over scientific record, the subjects of her paintings are accurate enough to be readily identified. Throughout her career she called on botanists to identify her subjects, sometimes sending specimens as proof.

From 1887, Ellis Rowan travelled extensively in Queensland and Western Australia in an ambitious scheme to record the Australian flora. She found the tropical flowers 'more beautiful than all' and returned again and again to Queensland during the winter months.

To explain her long absences from her husband and young son while on her travels, she invented a socially acceptable excuse: that she could not withstand the severity of Melbourne's winters. The truth is that, despite her fragile appearance, she was a woman of enormous physical stamina and determination. She returned to Melbourne only days before the untimely death of her husband, from pneumonia, in December 1892. It was found that the husband was bankrupt, so needing an income Ellis began seriously exhibiting and selling her paintings.

By then approaching her sixties, her zest for travel had not diminished and she was determined to gain recognition for her life’s work. She travelled in South Australia, Western Australia, Victoria and Queensland, financing her travels with regular exhibitions. Prompted by a commission for paintings of birds of paradise for a Royal Worcester fine china tea set, she made extensive visits to Papua New Guinea in 1916 and 1917. Travelling through rugged and dangerous country to paint the endangered Birds of Paradise, she fell victim to malaria which eventually broke her health.

In Sydney in 1920, she staged what was then Australia's largest art exhibition, showing more than one thousand works. Her takings from sales of over £2,000 set a national record for a woman artist. That’s about $160,000 in today’s money. But Ellis wanted more lasting success. She was determined to place her paintings in the public domain.

Ellis wished to have her own paintings together on public display. For many years Ellis, and later a memorial committee, lobbied the Australian Government to purchase her collection, even though at that time there was no national gallery to house it. The government eventually paid £5,000 for 947 paintings, in today’s money over $460,000. They are now kept in the National Library of Australia, in Canberra.

 Her travels in Queensland

In 1887, at the age of thirty-nine, she made her first painting expedition to Queensland. After time in Brisbane, where she had introductions to the Premier and the Government Botanist, she headed to Mackay by coastal steamer where she had heard there were 'many beautiful flowers' to be found at that time of the year. Not disappointed, she stayed for almost seven weeks.

She travelled to Townsville and from there she went to the sugar plantations of the Herbert and Johnstone Rivers. In the Herbert she stayed at Macknade House, and painted flowers from the gardens and orchids collected from the surrounding rainforest. She arrived in time for the annual Ingham show and race meeting. Here she met many people and gained invitations to other plantation houses and gardens. Ellis especially liked Lucinda Point and did several paintings there.

Herbert River Cocky Apple, Lucinda

To leave the district Ellis had to be rowed out to the coastal steamer with the Herbert River in flood. She wrote that it was very dangerous and she was lucky to survive. She did a sketch of the scene which was reproduced in her book.

On a later visit to the Herbert she stayed at Farnham plantation, where her niece, Joice Nankivell, was a six-year-old. Joice Nankivell went on to become the most famous woman to be born in this district for her work with children escaping Europe in WWII and later helping Greek refugees escape from the war with Turkey. Today there is a monument to Joice in the Ingham Botanical Gardens. After Farnham Plantation went bankrupt Joice and her mother went to live with relatives in Victoria, and there she saw Ellis again and visited her at her home at Mt Macedon. Joice later wrote that it was Ellis who encouraged her to be a journalist and to travel overseas.

Herbert River Shining Starlings

She then continued north to the plantations at the Johnstone River. On this visit to Queensland, she completed at least sixty-four paintings before the heat and an attack of malaria drove her from the tropics in December.

She returned to Queensland in the winters of 1891 and 1892 for more extensive visits. On one visit Ellis made grand tours of the Torres Strait islands in the Queensland Government steamer the Albatross, as guest of John Douglas, the Government Resident at Thursday Island, who was her brother-in-law. On Thursday Island she met Sana Jardine, said to be a Samoan princess, who was the wife of Cape York pioneer Frank Jardine. She invited Ellis to stay at their home, called Somerset, on the Cape York mainland. Somerset had been the home of the Government Resident of Cape York and Ellis did many paintings there. Sana then took Ellis on a boat trip to the outer islands of the Torres Straits.

On at least one of her visits to Cairns, Ellis visited Hambledon House, built by the Swallow family, the wealthiest sugar planters in the district. The house had a huge library and a ballroom lit by crystal chandeliers. Ellis put her sketch of the house in her book.

On her visit of 1892 Ellis Rowan spent some time in Cooktown. Her object on this trip was to paint the Cooktown Orchid. From there she made an expedition to the remote Bloomfield River, and it here beside the river she found much to paint, including the Wonga Vine and the Moonflower. Ellis then made a strenuous climb of Mount Macmillan to look out over the Bloomfield valley to the coast: a scene she described as ’one of the finest in all Queensland’. From 1911 to 1913, Ellis, then in her sixties, undertook more visits to Queensland.

Herbert River Snow Wood

After 1913 she turned her attention to New Guinea, in search of Birds of Paradise. Here, in two trips at the age of 70, she painted 45 of the known species.

Ellis Rowan was possibly the most enthusiastic of all the traveller-artists to visit the Queensland tropics in her day. In 1892, looking out over the Bloomfield Valley, she wrote: ‘... if our Australian artists only knew what rich and endless subjects they would find in Northern Queensland, they would surely make up their minds to endure a little roughing and camping out ...at this time of year. It would well repay them.’

She was fortunate enough to travel when much of the countryside was botanically unexplored and its natural beauty unspoilt, when she could share the joy of finding rare or even unknown specimens. Above all, it was the botanical richness of the tropics that attracted Ellis.

Though she stressed the importance of recording her subjects in situ, working quickly, she usually completed them in a nearby plantation house or hotel. Her book recounts how she laboured into the night, painting specimens collected on excursions or presented to her by local residents. Though executed indoors, the paintings generally have the freshness of works painted in the open air, for she was a rapid and direct worker, proud that she could apply her paints without the aid of pencil under-drawing.

Ellis Rowan did not claim to be a botanical artist in scientific terms, but her evocative paintings and writings did much to raise public appreciation of the Australian flora. She left a precious record of the Queensland landscape in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and of plant species that are now disappearing.

Adapted from Judith McKay, Ellis Rowan: A Flower-Hunter in Queensland (Brisbane: Queensland Museum, 1990)

Other references:

National Library of Australia

Ellis Rowan. A Flower Hunter in Queensland and New Zealand. 1898

M. Hazzard. Australia’s Brilliant Daughter Ellis Rowan. 1984

P. Fullerton. The Flower Hunter Ellis Rowan. 2002 NLA

J McKay. Ellis Rowan A Flower Hunter in Queensland 1990