Ebenezer Edward Gostelow Christobel Mattingley looks at the lifework of one of Australia’s most significant nature painters If you were confronted by a quiz question:
This is because Australian-born Ebenezer Edward Gostelow, registered at birth by a careless clerk as Gostklow, and at death as Gastelow, is not as well known as he should be. He is a prophet in his own country, still without the honour that his work as a self-taught painter of wild flowers and birds deserves. He was named after his father, a building foreman with the New South Wales Education Department, whose family had migrated from Aylesbury in England in 1848. According to family records he was born in 1866, the oldest of eight children of his father’s second wife Martha Taylor. Young Ebb, as his father called him, was a bright student. In 1881 he entered the Education Department as a probationary pupil teacher, and in 1887 won a scholarship to the Teachers Training College, one of 15 candidates state-wide to be selected. At the course conclusion he was awarded the coveted blue ribbon, assuring his appointment in charge of First Class schools, at a salary of £100 (later rising to £120). Gostelow spent many years in country schools across New South Wales—from Nundle on the Great Dividing Range near Tamworth, and Condobolin and Warren in the west, to Harden and Cootamundra in the south—always making the most of opportunities to observe local flora and fauna. He had early discovered his artistic talent, at the age of seven winning three gold medals with entries in an International Exhibition, and according to researcher Dr Mark Cabouret some of his drawings were shown in the Indian and Colonial Exhibition in London in 1885–86. Keen to arouse a love of nature in his pupils, he began depicting birds and flowers in coloured chalks on the blackboard. Without formal training, he then embarked on a project to paint as many wild flowers as he could. In 1920, Gostelow was headmaster of Broken Hill South Public School. In this low rainfall area, mining developments and associated urban infrastructure had already destroyed much vegetation, and continuous grazing by stock of the big pastoralists had contributed further to the devastation. Nevertheless Gostelow had continued here, as elsewhere, his practice of encouraging his students to seek out the local wild flowers. In August 1920 there was a huge downpour in the normally dry region: the Barrier Miner for 24 August reported that no less than 183 points of rain (approx. 40 mm) had fallen the previous afternoon and night! The downpour flooded footpaths and streets, stopped the trams and marooned would-be passengers. Enterprising railway personnel quickly organised a special excursion train to take sightseers to view the River Darling, ‘looking like an inland sea’. For the residents of Broken Hill the rain was a godsend, and for Gostelow it was a special delight: the desert was rejoicing and blossoming like a rose, bringing forth an abundance of seldom-seen wild flowers in the rain’s aftermath.
The Barrier Miner reported that on 25 September the Barrier Field Naturalists’ Club held a wild flower show in the Technical College, with the aim of stimulating interest among school children and the general public in studying and protecting the local flora. There were competitions for the best exhibits, and for days beforehand teachers took their pupils out into the surrounding hills and plains to collect specimens which they arranged for display with name cards and details of locations. Some boys collected as many as 70 fresh specimens and ‘the room was filled with the scent of the wilds’. One of Gostelow’s sons, a student at the High School, won a prize for his pressed flower collection which totalled 74 species. Gostelow’s botanical paintings—150 in all—were a highlight of the show, focussing attention on the diversity and richness of the local wild flowers, and the importance of conserving them. Now, 85 years later, they are an invaluable record of the flora of the Broken Hill region: over 30 sheets, each depicting up to five different plants, often showing seed pods as well as flowers and foliage.
As an artist, Gostelow was both meticulous and original. His representations are exact and accurately annotated, but he also enjoyed creating pictures in ornate settings in the period’s popular Art Deco style. He framed flowers and plants with borders of coloured curlicues or geometric designs in hues to accentuate or contrast with his subjects. He sometimes divided the page into irregular shapes, as a variation on rectangles and ovals, and often painted backgrounds in complementary tinted bands. During the latter period of his 50-year teaching career served in 36 schools, Gostelow taught in Sydney, where he continued to explore the bush, and paint the flowers of the metropolitan area. After retiring, he reworked many of his earlier paintings to improve them. He was a perfectionist, said never to have sold a single painting; he once refused a handsome offer for one, and later destroyed it as not being quite accurate. Now able to work full-time on his painting, he took up the challenge of depicting all the recorded species of Australian birds. His skill and integrity as an artist were well known and respected, so the Australian Museum loaned him skins from which he worked. He meticulously recorded the Museum’s registration number for each stuffed bird with his explanatory notes, which gives the images added reference value. Not surprisingly, in these depictions some birds appear rather static, although from field observations he was able to show others in typical stance and posture, and in lifelike colours. Where possible, he painted lifesize or at least half-size images. In all, he completed 730 studies, illustrating both male and female of the species. He always pictured birds in the authentic flora of their habitat, again drawing upon his extensive observation.
Sadly, Gostelow did not live to complete his third great project—the painting of Australia’s butterflies. He died in 1944, bequeathing his bird paintings to the National Library. Because of wartime petrol rationing, the then National Librarian, H.L. White, applied for a grant to the Liquid Fuel Controller for a special ration to enable Gostelow’s son Cecil to transport the collection to Canberra in his 25-h.p. car. E.E. Gostelow’s cheerful nature, his optimistic approach to life and his love of a joke made him a favourite with students, and endeared him to a big circle of friends, colleagues and grandchildren. A noted cricketer who had played against one of the first English Elevens to visit Australia, Gostelow also coached after school—one of his promising pupils being Victor Trumper. Gostelow had married Ada Mary Finney in 1890, with whom he had three sons and a daughter. His youngest son, Clifford, shared his father’s passion for nature study, and on his father’s death inherited the collection of native flora paintings. In 1969 he presented it to the National Library. Together these two bodies of work—Ebenezer Edward Gostelow’s great labour of love, and the legacy of a lifetime—form a significant part of the Library’s documentation of Australia’s flora and fauna. The paintings are all the more significant now, in this era of rapidly diminishing habitat, which has led to the endangering of numerous species and the tragic extinction of others.
Many of Gostelow’s bird and flower images have been digitised in recent years, and can be viewed on the Library’s website. A number of his bird pictures have also been included in two National Library poetry publications. In A Little Book of Birds (1999), Gostelow’s work illustrates the opening piece, Henry Kendall’s much-loved ‘Bellbirds’, a poem which Gostelow probably shared with many of his pupils. Twelve Gostelow paintings are used to illustrate a revised edition of Judith Wright’s Birds (2003). Dr CHRISTOBEL MATTINGLEY, award-winning author, remembers a 1930s childhood stay in Broken Hill and a picnic to see the wild flowers around Umberumberka Reservoir. Forty years later she visited Broken Hill South Public School in Children’s Book Week and met a headmaster who inspired a character in one of her books. Her first book of poems, Nest Egg, is published this month |
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