Womba(r)t

Of all our native animals, the one I feel the greatest affinity with is the ‘wombat’. This animal captured the attention of the early settlers and explorers through first contact and was given its current name as early as 1797.  I can still vividly, fondly and ‘treely ruly’ recall listening to the adventures of Ruth Park’s ‘The Muddle-Headed Wombat’ on ABC radio’s Children’s Hour as a child.

As Australia / Invasion / Survival Day approaches I was thinking about our fauna and was disconcerted to discover that wombats are significantly under-represented in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria. Only two works depict this curious marsupial. There is an early engraving by Choubard (1824) after a painting by the French naturalist, explorer and artist, Charles-Alexandre Lesueur who travelled to Australia as the artist with Nicolas Baudin in 1802. A wombat was one of the 100,000 specimens the expedition documented and collected.

The second appearance of an ‘artistic wombat’ is by Lorraine Jenyns  in her earthenware sculpture, A land of far horizons (1978). From the insularity of our island home, Jenyns surrounds herself with our much-loved native animals (kookaburras, kangaroos, a koala, cockatoo, emu and wombat) as she gazes into the distance. The blissful expressions on the animals’ faces and the inclusion of rainbows suggests that ‘over the rainbow’, in the Land of Oz, things are going very nicely.

Jenyns (1945 -) is a local artist who studied at both Caulfield and Melbourne Institutes of Technology in the mid 1960s. As a painter, sculptor and ceramicist, she developed a quirky and naïve figurative style and is best known for her coloured ceramics. These are often satirical and humorous representations of allegorical subjects – frequently with animal imagery – in semi-functional objects like vases and bowls (the NGV ceramic is a lidded bowl). Despite having a long and productive career which included numerous exhibitions, commissions, awards, teaching, acquisitions by many public galleries, and a retrospective at the Ballarat Fine Art Gallery in 1992, Jenyns is now sadly largely forgotten (not even rating a Wikipedia entry – except as the wife of fellow sculptor, Bob Jenyns). I wondered if her pose in the NGV sculpture was a plaintive premonition: I’m still here if only you can see me …

I was surprised that representations of wombats appear to be missing from the NGV’s indigenous art collection. Latje Latje artist, Trevor ‘Turbo’ Brown (1967-2017), from North Western Victoria, painted many animals – including wombats – but his 10 paintings in the NGV collection only feature birds, dingos and platypuses.

Even Stuart Devlin, the Australian goldsmith, whose works were discussed in my Christmas blogpost, and who was responsible for depicting our local animals on our decimal currency coinage, overlooked the wombat preferring the feathertail glider and frill-necked lizard. (For those wondering about the koala and kookaburra, they can be found on rare high-denomination gold and platinum coins).

It struck me that wombats needed to be brought out from their burrows and nocturnal existence, and given their chance to shine. Fortunately, this turned up a curious lead as I discovered that the 19^th century English artists, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, were very fond of, indeed obsessed with, my furry friend. The following information comes from a lecture given by Angus Trumble (Curator of Paintings and Sculpture, Yale Centre for British Art, Connecticut, USA) in 2003 when he was a Harold White Fellow at the National Library of Australia.

From about 1803, live wombats started appearing in Europe as exotic inclusions in menageries. The Empress Joséphine Bonaparte had a wombat among the birds and animals in her enclosure at Malmaison, near Paris. And the English naturalist and early wombat owner, Everard Home, published a paper ‘An Account of Some Peculiarities in the Anatomical Structure of the Wombat’ in the Journal of Natural Philosophy, Chemistry, and the Arts in 1809. Home described his personal wombat as ‘not wanting in intelligence and … attached to those to whom it was accustomed, and who were kind to it’. He kept his ‘pet’ in a ‘domesticated state’ for two years.

While the English ornithologist, John Gould, is best remembered for his seven volume work ‘The Birds of Australia’ (1840-48), his 1838 voyage to Australia also resulted in the three volume  ‘The Mammals of Australia’ (1849-61).  Gould’s early illustrator, Edward Lear, provided a sketch of a wombat from Gould’s notes known as ‘portraites of the inditchenous Beestes of New Olland’. Gould’s depiction of the ‘quiet and docile’ animal in 1855 added to its popular interest and he encouraged locals to visit the two specimens which had been resident in the Gardens of the Zoological Society in Regent’s Park as they ‘may be handled and scratched by all who choose to make so intimate an acquaintance with them’.

However, it was in 1857 when Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a flamboyant member of the group of painters, poets, and art critics known as the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB), received a commission to decorate the vaulted ceiling, upper walls, and windows of the library of the Oxford Union that wombats were part of the process of creation.

Rossetti enlisted many helpers including William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones, Roddam Spencer Stanhope, Arthur Hughes, John Hungerford Pollen and Val Prinsep. As the artists prepared the walls for the fresco, they entertained themselves by drawing numerous wombats on the windows which had been whitewashed to reduce the glare in the room. According to Prinsep, Rossetti described wombats as ‘the most beautiful of God’s creatures’.

Edward Burne-Jones’ depiction of wombats were reputedly the best and he continued to produce wombat sketches for many years. His wife, Georgiana, later chose an Egyptological example – a wombat whizzing past the pyramids of Gizeh – as an illustration for the part of her memoir that dealt with the Oxford Union episode.

It is unclear how Rossetti’s infatuation with wombats began. (The only PRB artist to visit Australia was sculptor Thomas Woolner who came to the Victorian goldfields in 1852. Woolner only lasted a year before returning to England. He had not found gold, he disliked the climate and the landscape, and he had suffered in love. Several of his medallions from his time in Australia (including one of Lieutenant Governor Charles La Trobe) are in the NGV collection.). But Rossetti, having seen wombats in the Acclimatisation Society in London and its Parisian counterpart, demanded that his friends and colleagues share his love of the animal and he would insist on meeting them at the Regent’s Park Zoo Wombat’s Lair – often for hours on end.

When Rossetti moved into his house in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, he began to fill the large garden with exotic birds and animals including: owls, armadillos, rabbits, peacocks, parakeets, jackasses, kangaroos, and wallabies. In 1869, Rossetti bought the first of his two pet wombats from the London wildlife dealer, Charles Jamrach, which was the culmination of over a decade of fascination with the Australian marsupial.

‘Top’ was the wombat’s name  and it referenced Rossetti’s friend, William Morris, who was known as ‘Topsy’ during their university days. When ‘Top’ arrived in Rossetti’s world, the artist was romantically linked with Morris’ wife, Jane, who was often a muse for Rossetti. ‘Mrs Morris and the Wombat’ (c. 1869) is likely a sly reference to Jane’s long-suffering but tolerant husband who is being led around by the couple.

Rossetti was besotted with Top describing him in a letter to his brother as: ‘The wombat is a joy, a triumph, a delight, a madness’. Top had full run of Rossetti’s house and he could be found asleep on the dining table or eating ladies’ straw hats. Rossetti’s sister, Christina, shared his enthusiasm and penned a verse in Italian describing Top as ‘agil, giocondo’ (nimble, cheerful) as well as ‘irsuto e tondo’ (hairy and round). This prompted Rossetti to include a picture of a wombat, among other animals, in his design for the frontispiece of Christina’s book ‘Goblin Market and Other Poems’ (1862).

Not everyone was as enamoured as the artist and his sister. Top was described as: ‘the most lumpish and incapable of wombats, with an air of baby objectlessness’. Sadly, the wombat was not a long-liver. Arriving in September, he died in early November and Rossetti had him stuffed and stationed in his front hall. Top is memoralised by the artist with a sketch lamenting his death.

Despite his short life, Top became the subject of much discussion among Rossetti’s friends. He was praised for burrowing between the jacket and waistcoat of art critic John Ruskin, effectively interrupting his long and dreary monologue; artist James McNeill Whistler claimed that Top had died from eating an entire box of cigars; and Ford Maddox Brown erroneously suggested that Top’s habit of sleeping in a large epergne on the dining table had inspired the dormouse in the teapot incident in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

Rossetti’s second wombat did not achieve the same significance as Top, and also seems to have had a short life. William Bell Scott’s 1871 drawing of ‘Rosetti’s Wombat Seated on His Master’s Lap’ is now thought to be a picture of an American woodchuck which was a better survivor.

In concluding his lecture, Angus Trumble notes that in the 19^th century, Australian birds and animals were seldom discussed in the London press – fleeting mentions of a possum, an echidna and two reportages of kangaroo escapees from menageries. By contrast, the wombat, as an Australian curiosity, attracted unusual attention due to having captured the imagination of Rossetti and his circle.

Sadly, few contemporary artists have embraced ‘the wombat’ with the same passion as the PRB. However, one artist worth considering is Marian Drew. Drew is a Brisbane-based photographer and Associate Professor at Queensland College of Art, Griffith University with an extraordinary exhibition history over more than 30 years. From 2003-2011, Drew created a photographic series ‘Australiana Still Life’. Drawing on the history of ‘still life’ in European art, Drew explored contemporary relations with local wild animals. Using ‘scavenged’ Australian roadkill, she placed these native animals in domestic interiors to: ‘explore the role of history and our changing sense of ethical responsibility to the animals that share our environments’. The National Gallery of Victoria has Drew’s ‘Crow with salt’ (2003) in the collection. An excellent addition would be ‘Wombat with Watermelon’.

Three decades ago, when I was working in an inpatient adolescent mental health unit, I ran a weekly psychoeducational group called WOMBAT. The name was an acronym: Women Or Men Both Are Tricky – and recognized the biopsychosocial challenges of this developmental period. At the time, wombats were part of the contemporary vernacular as the Aussie joke: ‘Why is an Australian bloke like a wombat? Because he eats, roots, and leaves’ – was having a renaissance. The WOMBAT group found talking about sensitive issues easier with this unusual local reference. Thinking back, it now seems entirely appropriate to have a ‘muddle-headed’ name for a group of ‘muddle-headed’ teenagers.