Queensland Museum & Community Collections

At the end of last year, the Vera Scarth Johnson Association approached me for advice about collection preservation and updating their gallery. Following the Association’s successful application to the Copland Foundation, Cairns-based museum worker and photographer, Michael Marzik, and I are now in the process of undertaking a two staged project to reinvigorate collection management and preservation, and refresh the gallery interpretation.

Vera’s gift

Vera was a remarkable woman. Between 1972 and 1999, Cooktown resident Vera Scarth-Johnson OAM created over 150 botanical illustrations as part of her ‘Endeavour River Series.’ Inspired by the natural environment, the botanical works of Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander and an interest in their Guugu Yimithir language names and usage, her quest to record different species in the Endeavour River Valley ended only when Parkinson’s disease prevented her from continuing.

In 1990, Vera gifted the Endeavour River Series of illustrations to the people of Cooktown in 1990. She hoped it would enrich people’s appreciation of Whalaumbaal – the Endeavour River region and inspire them to preserve it. The works reveals her lifelong passion for native wildflowers, their cultural and scientific use and her commitment to conservation.

Managing Vera’s gift

Of course, a gift like this needed a suitable home. After the donation, the collection was stored in Cooktown in a small gallery on Furneaux Street and at the Sovereign Hotel until the Vera Scarth Johnson Foundation successfully lobbied for a new building. Since 2000, the collection has been housed at Nature’s Powerhouse, a gallery space and information centre in Cooktown’s Botanic Gardens.

Despite the many advantages of having a dedicated gallery facility, managing a collection of works on paper in a tropical climate, and with an idiosyncratic building, is challenging. Challenging, too, is the retention of an active volunteer workforce with the energy and interest to dedicate to the collection’s ongoing care. Yet for the past 24 years, a variety of dedicated volunteers from the Vera Scarth Johnson Association have been caring for the collection and curating changeover exhibitions.

Preserving Vera’s gift

I began working on the project to review the collection in February, develop a new collection policy and review collection management procedures. To prepare for the onsite assessment of the artworks we created an assessment template and procured a range of materials. Michael and I then headed up to Cooktown and spent a week working on the 154 artworks. We set up temporary workstations in the gallery for the different tasks required, including a makeshift studio so we could take high resolution images of each artwork.

Whilst there, we were privileged to work with some wonderful volunteers, full of knowledge of the region’s natural diversity and of passion for Vera’s work. As we trained them in collection management, dismantling artworks, condition assessments, cleaning and reframing, they taught us about the beauty of species in the paintings and told us stories about their time with Vera when she was still alive. For some of the volunteers, it was the first time they had seen the works outside of the frames and they were excited to see them in more detail.

Vera’s choice of canvas materials reveals much about her process and underscores her belief that she was a botanical illustrator first, artist second. Many of the paintings are on matboard offcuts, or coloured paper torn from a sketch pad. But her pragmatism ended there. Each illustration reveals the how keenly she observed the specimens. The works have a delicacy and tenderness, so much so that it almost feels as though she was painting a love letter to each of the species she was depicting.

I’m excited to start working on the next phase of the project to refresh the gallery space with the Vera Scarth-Johnson Association volunteers over the coming months. Stay tuned for updates about the next phase of the project.