Jean Isherwood - "My Country"

"My Country"

In 1974 Isherwood made a trip to Central Australia. On her return journey, passing through Tamworth, New South Wales, she was struck by the beauty of the countryside of that region and in 1976 purchased a property at Moonbi, where she was to live until 1987 when she moved to Tamworth.

Isherwood, as a child, and like most other Australian children for many years, learnt by heart Dorothea Mackellar's iconic poem, "My Country", in which an Australian explains to an English listener how she is not moved by the gentle landscape of England with soft, dim skies and green lanes, but by the harsh beauty of Australia.

The second verse is as follows-

I love a sunburnt country,

A land of sweeping plains,

Of rugged mountain ranges,

Of droughts and flooding rains

I love her far horizons,

I love her jewel sea.

Her beauty and her terror,

The wide, brown land for me!

In 1982 Isherwood heard on the radio that a statue was to be erected as a memorial to Dorothea Mackellar at Gunnedah, on Australia Day, 26 January 1983. Isherwood had long had it in mind to create a series of works illustrating the writer's most famous poem. Prompted by the imminent celebration, Isherwood created a series of thirty four watercolour paintings for exhibition in Gunnedah in conjunction with the unveiling of the statue.

The images represent the diversity of the Australian landscape and include "the filmy veil of greenness' seen from Isherwood's own window, a flood on the Darling River, a bushfire in the Blue Mountains and a forest of ringbarked trees near Armidale. This latter painting is one of Isherwood's most masterly works, showing her exceptional control over both the watercolour technique and perspective. As is usual in a watercolour, those parts of the painting which are white are left unpainted, in this case a forest of dead tree trunks. In the narrow spaces between the array of trees Isherwood has painted a landscape that rolls away in layers to the distance. The subject would have been impressive, in oils. In watercolour, however, the technical demands are extraordinary, as is the facility with which it has been achieved. The paintings were eventually put on permanent display in the Gunnedah Bicentennial Regional Gallery. Isherwood set about painting a series of oils based on the watercolours. These were exhibited at the Artarmon Galleries in Sydney in 1986.

In November 2004, Isherwood exhibited with seven other well-known Australian artists, all over the age of eighty at an exhibition called Eighty and Over, at Max Taylor's Gallery at Summer Hill, Sydney. Jean Isherwood died at home on 6 January 2006, aged 94 years. Her funeral notice requested that those attending should wear bright colours.