National Library of Australia
The Flower Hunter | Ellis Rowan

Desert Flowers

[Trigger Plant (Stylidium), Morning Flag (Orthrosanthus multiflorus), Fan Flower (Scaevola porocarya), Stackhousia, Chamaescilla, Dampiera]  1880Ellis 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)

Bill Baillie: His Life and AdventuresIn 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.

[Christmas Bells (Blandfordia), Flax Lily (Dianella), Haemodorum and Grasses]  1879The ephemeral nature of a newly picked flower meant working quickly andoften onsite. Most of Ellis Rowan’s original watercolour studies on grey paper were executed under extreme difficulties—in 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.

Pink Everlastings Near Laverton, W.A.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 Women’s Work in Hay Street—on 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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