Desert Flowers
Ellis
Rowan visited Western Australia a number of times during her life. It
was in Albany in 1880 that Rowan met the English painter Marianne North,
and in September 1889 she took part in a painting tour with her flower-painting
friend, Margaret Forrest. They went to Boolantha Station, north of Carnarvon
and Geraldton, to sketch desert spring flowers. Their joint showing at
the Railway Station Reading Room in Perth on 5 November was said to be
the first art exhibition ever held in the colony, with some of the
loveliest flowers ever seen. (J. Gooding and Margaret Forrest, Wildflowers
of Western Australia. Perth: Art Gallery of Western Australia, 1984,
p. 10)
In
1906 she visited Perth and once again turned to the more remote parts
of Australia as a focus for her work, making a foray north-east to the
goldmining area around Kalgoorlie, Laverton and Goongarrie. Despite her
incongruous appearance, the local people regarded her with respect, bringing
her flowers to paint and, presenting her with a baby bilby or bandicoot
rabbit, which she called Bill Baillee.
The
ephemeral nature of a newly picked flower meant working quickly andoften
onsite. Most of Ellis Rowans original watercolour studies on grey
paper were executed under extreme difficultiesin the heat and among
the flies of the dusty desert or in the humid conditions of a tropical
rainforest where snakes and crocodiles lurked. Yet her powers of observation,
compositional skill, sense of colour, her deftness with the brush and
her natural technique of painting without any preliminary sketches, were
without compromise.
At
the Australian Natives Association Hall in Kalgoorlie she held a
successful exhibition including 20 landscapes of the goldmining region
(some of which she later used to illustrate her book Bill Baillee)
and 130 desert flower paintings, including kangaroo paws, orchids, banksias
and the coral creeper. Again she proclaimed her passion for Western Australian
flora, stating that some of the most beautiful flowers were found in the
sand-hills near Laverton, some 500 kilometres north of Kalgoorlie. However,
on return to Perth, she was disappointed when these same paintings, so
widely praised in her desert show, were disregarded at an Australian Exhibition
of Womens Work in Hay Streeton the grounds that she was not
a local artist. She later said: In Western Australia they simply
refused to look at my exhibition because so many of the ladies over there
paint wildflowers themselves (Hazzard, p.106).

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