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Hobby Forum Index » Arts - Books - Childrens » R.I.P. Elisabeth Eldershaw, 85, Australia
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| Lenona321 |
 Posted: Sat Jul 31, 2004 4:05 pm |
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From the Sydney Morning Herald.
Lenona.
Elisabeth MacIntyre (Eldershaw) 1916-2004
Elisabeth Eldershaw, who has died at 85, once wrote about
her life: "I am so often reminded of the gardening precept:
pinch the tops to induce bushy growth. Now, looking back
over my bushy growth, I can honestly say that I wouldn't
have missed any of it."
The disability that pinched her top was deafness. But she
tried to avoid thinking or talking about her limitations. "I
hate pity," she often said.
She would much rather have been recognised for her attempts
to produce charming and original Australian design. Right up
to the end of her life she was trying to dissuade mothers
from buying bunny blankets and plates - "a noxious pest that
has done this country a lot of harm"- and persuade
manufacturers to produce her Bush Babies designs instead.
"My modest ambition is to communicate things I know and love
about Australia," she wrote.
This was just one of her enthusiasms which was ahead of its
time.
As early as August 1941, in the first edition of Australia
magazine, she wrote: "Some people don't like Australian wild
flowers, because, compared to other flowers, they look
straggly or woody. But Margaret Preston, in her beautiful
paintings and woodcuts, shows us how to look at them so that
we realise how really unique and lovely they are." It took
about 50 years for the rest of Australia to agree with her.
Her first children's picture book was published in 1941,
when all children's books - except for a very few, such as
May Gibbs's Snugglepot and Cuddlepie (1818), Norman
Lindsay's The Magic Pudding (1918) and Dorothy Wall's Blinky
Bill (1933) - were still imported from Britain. The book was
about Ambrose Kangaroo, who might have become a popular icon
had he been drawn in a later decade.
Seventeen more books for children followed, mostly written
in verse and illustrated by herself.
The then Elisabeth MacIntyre was up an apple tree, picking
fruit, as part of her duties in the Land Army during World
War II when someone handed her a letter from Alice
Dalgliesh, editor at Scribners, New York, "suggesting that I
should do a picture book about what it was like in Australia
because so many American children had fathers and brothers
in the services stationed in that remote continent down
under that nobody seemed to know anything about". As a
result she wrote Katherine.
Eldershaw also perceived the importance of preserving
Australia's native flora and fauna long before it became
trendy. She wrote and illustrated a book for children on the
subject. "A straight book about conservation might seem
dull," she wrote later, "but as I see it, my Affable,
Amiable Bulldozer Man sums up the whole subject painlessly."
Another book on Australian native animals, Hugh's Zoo, won
the Australian Children's Book Council Picture Book of the
Year award in 1965.
Educated at Sydney Church of England Girls Grammar School
and Bowral High School, Eldershaw later studied art at East
Sydney Technical College.
In the early 1950s she married the landscape artist John Roy
Eldershaw and went on extensive camping trips with him,
during which they would both sketch and paint. "For six
months of every year we would travel awa-a-ay outback ...
each year in a different direction," she wrote. "To mountain
ranges around the inland sea of prehistoric times in the
centre, to tropical jungle in North Queensland and the
Barrier Reef. Aboriginal missions and cattle stations in the
Northern Territory. Old whaling ports down south. Across the
flat emptiness of the Nullarbor Plain to Western Australia
.... You name it, we've been there - the hard way!"
She was proud of coming from a pioneering family: Duncan
MacIntyre, her grandfather's cousin, led an expedition to
look for traces of the German explorer Ludwig Leichhardt and
named the MacIntyre River.
Eldershaw never let her profound deafness, and subsequent
difficulty with foreign languages, stop her from living
abroad. She was granted an Australian Literature Board
writers fellowship from 1973 to 1976, and went to live in
Italy.
Later, when she felt it was important to help promote
understanding between the young people of Japan and
Australia, she lived for a time in Japan, with the help of
an Australia-Japan Foundation fellowship awarded in 1977.
She also travelled through New Guinea in the 1960s and wrote
a picture book set there.
Elisabeth Eldershaw is survived by her daughter, Jane, three
nieces and a nephew. Of the 17 books she wrote, the most
autobiographical was The Purple Mouse, about a girl who is
deaf: "In it, I wanted to say something my own life has
proved: that in overcoming any big hurdle ... one achieves a
state of strength and freedom one would not otherwise have
had." |
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