The Canberra Museum and Gallery has just emerged from the scrum of an art auction with a beautiful new acquisition bristling with Canberra significances. With just the briefest gander at it here on this page you can see that Ethel Carrick Fox's oil painting, Colonnades of Canberra's Civic Centre (circa 1944), is a merry depiction of some part of Civic that survives today. It's embracing either the Melbourne or Sydney building (perhaps the latter seen from the former?) on a gorgeous autumn day. The poplars' leaves are an egg-yolk yellow and the sky is cornflower blue. Canberrans, who wouldn't be dead for quids on a day like this, are gambolling and shopping in the background. It's jolly cycling weather, the parked bikes in the foreground proclaim. No need to padlock them in those innocent times.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
What's more, this is a painting with 61 mysterious ''lost'' cousins. Sixty-one other paintings of Canberra done at the same time and we don't know where they are. CMAG would dearly love to know. More of this looming detective story in a moment.
CMAG's new acquisition is one of 62 paintings of Canberra Ethel Carrick Fox seems to have painted in 1944 to be sold in Canberra to Canberrans as a contribution by her to the war effort.
CMAG's Deborah Clark, the museum's curator of visual art, advises that Ethel Carrick was born in England in 1872.
''She's well known for her brilliantly coloured post-Impressionist paintings of European subjects of crowded streets, markets, cafes and beach scenes. She met her husband, renowned Australian artist Emanuel Phillips Fox, in Cornwall in England, during her early art student days and the two spent time travelling and painting between Australia, England and Europe,'' Ms Clark said.
Her husband died in 1915, 10 years after they'd married. Ethel Carrick Fox lived until 1952, dying at 80, in Melbourne.
Now, even though her work is held in the National Gallery of Australia and all state and major regional galleries, they're usually of European scenes and there are only a few Australian subjects by Carrick Fox in these collections. And yet we know that in 1944 she exhibited 62 paintings of Canberra at the Masonic Temple in Canberra. CMAG has one of them now but wonders if any of you, reading this, know where the other 61 are? They're certainly not in public collections anywhere. It's highly likely, given that they were paintings of Canberra painted to appeal to Canberrans that some of them are still here, perhaps in the homes of older Canberra. Citizens of Forrest, Deakin, Yarralumla, Red Hill and (upper) Narrabundah, do you have one of the 61 displayed on a wall or gathering cobwebs up in your haunted attic?
Today Canberra is sprinkled with galleries but this was a gallery-impoverished place in 1944. Here is The Canberra Times of September 8, 1944, reporting the aforementioned Ethel Carrick Fox exhibition.
''ART DISPLAYS. Facilities Lacking in Canberra. The exhibition of paintings by Mrs Phillips Fox (Ethel Carrick) at the Masonic Hall yesterday was marred by the lack of display. The pictures were mounted on chairs because no facilities for hanging were available. The general impression was that an excellent exhibition was spoiled by overcrowding and poor lighting, and that the pictures were below the normal eyeline … the disappointment of artists, who desired to exhibit in Canberra, was expressed by Mrs Phillips Fox.
''The exhibition was opened by Baroness van Aerssen, who said that the beauty of Canberra was faithfully recorded on canvas by Mrs Fox. Paintings which attracted considerable interest, were of women workers in patriotic fields [doing war work] including the kitchen at the Canberra Service Club. The greater part of the work dealt with Canberra landscape, including The Hill, Wattle in Blossom, From Sir Ronald Cross' Garden, From Canberra House Gardens, From the War Memorial, Wattle and Snow, Black Wattle and White Blossom, Outside Albert Hall, Peach Blossom, The Racecourse, Post Office in Autumn The Avenue, Church and Blossom, Lister Crescent, Black Mountain, Poplars in Spring, Hospital Corner, Willows in Autumn, Near Duntroon and Civic Centre.
Views of St John's [the church in Reid] were popular … Proceeds of the exhibition, which will continue until 5pm on Sunday, are devoted to Red Cross and the Services Welfare Association.''
Where are these paintings now? Please, Australia, fighting your fears of ghosts and spiders, go and fossick, this very moment, in your attics, sheds and cellars.
So recently acquired Colonnades of Canberra's Civic Centre isn't on display yet but there was enthusiastic talk at CMAG during (he wrote smugly) my private viewing of it yesterday of showing it off very soon, in the spirit in which parents are quick to show off their new babies.
A tale of two young cities
Allen Mawer's just-published Canberry Tales - An Informal History (Arcadia) is full of fine and important things which we expect to occasionally plunder and plagiarise. Meanwhile here is something trivial from it.
In May 1937 Dr Lewis Nott MD, supervisor of the Canberra hospital, fell out with the hospital's advisory board.
The board had contrived to get rid of the hospital's matron, Isobel Everette-Smith.
Nott, cranky, showed up at a hospital board meeting and a passing nurse heard the following angry exchange between Dr Nott and board member Frank Green.
Nott: ''You chaps should have your heads read for allowing such an article to be published in the Queanbeyan Age concerning Matron Everette-Smith allowing gin to be added to the fruitcup at the nurses' Christmas party''.
Frank Green: ''If we were going to get our heads read we wouldn't go to you, Nott.''
Nott: ''With ears like yours you should go to Mackay, the vet.''
