Ash Island – around the area
where the Scott family house once stood (R.Daniel)
Ash Island was once one of a number of islands and
mudflats found in the Hunter River estuary near Hexham near Newcastle NSW. For
thousands of years the Worimi and Awabakal people hunted, fished and collected
food from the area, well supplied by the abundant flora and fauna that included
water birds, shellfish, wetland plants, mammals and fish. The islands were
explored and surveyed by Europeans in 1801.
Helena
Scott
In 1827, Ash Island was granted to Alexander Walker
Scott. He settled there in 1831, with his mother and sister, and made the
island his primary residence after his marriage to Harriet Calcott in 1846,
moving there with her, his step-daughter Mary Ann (his other step-daughter
Frances had married) and two daughters Helena and Harriet.
Helena and Harriet became two of the most talented
natural history artists in Australia.
Ash Island surrounds (R.Daniel)
Surrounded
by unspoilt native vegetation and under the inspiring tutelage of their
artistic father, their shared fascination with the natural world grew. For
almost 20 years, the sisters lived and worked on the island, faithfully
recording its flora and fauna, especially the butterflies and moths.
But
they had another claim to fame which is little known.
The first Australian-themed
Christmas cards were designed by Helena Forde (nee Scott). The cards were
chromolithographed in a set of twelve and depicted native
wildflowers. First advertised in the Sydney Mail on 9 November 1879,
they were marketed by the Sydney publishers Turner and Henderson, whose logo
appears on each card (although they were probably printed in
London). Helena's sister Harriet Scott designed a similar set of twelve
the following year. A new version of the cards were reprinted about 1915,
featuring the images at a smaller scale on stand-up cards, rather than the
original 'postcard' format.
The
Scott sister’s Christmas Cards
Forced
through circumstance to become two of Australia’s earliest ‘professional’
female artists, it was a hard economic road. Harriet, it seems, had always
suspected the challenges that lay in store for a woman in the world of the
19th-century arts and sciences. In a letter to her childhood friend Edward
Ramsay in 1865, she’d revealed her frustrations and great desire to distinguish
herself: ‘... in some way or other and if I were only a man I might do it, but
as I am a woman I can’t try, for I hold it wrong for women to hunt after
notoriety … clearly I ought to have been Harry Scott instead of Hattie Scott.’
Harriet, Mary Ann and AW Scott left Ash Island in
1866 after Mrs Scott’s death and Scott’s bankruptcy. Helena joined them in
Sydney a year later. Their father’s bankruptcy forced the sisters to seek
payment for their art and endure the perceived social shame for doing so. And indeed
it was difficult for either of the sisters to ever receive the honour and
respect that their males counterparts would have received for the exact same
thing.
The sisters continued to draw and paint
commercially throughout their lives, although Harriet did much less work after
her marriage to Dr Cosby William Morgan in 1882, becoming step-mother to his
four daughters. Helena was still actively seeking work in her 70s.
Harriet died in Granville in 1907 and Helena in
Harris Park in 1910. Neither left any descendants.
Reference:
http://australianmuseum.net.au/A-biography-of-the-Scott-sisters#sthash.RaCsCsgk.dpuf
