From holidays at a family shack at the Great Lake, a love of nature and painting was born. Celebrating the life and art of Patricia Giles.
Tasmanian artist Patricia Giles’ watercolours inspire with their “love of the Tasmanian landscape, almost of the Tasmanian soul”, says author and historian Dr Alison Alexander.
Alexander recently published an award-winning biography of the late, often overlooked artist, The Waking Dream of Art: Patricia Giles, Painter.
The book, which contains 300 fine reproductions of Giles’ paintings, won the 2022 Dick and Joan Green Family Award for Tasmanian History, one of Australia’s most significant history book awards.
“My biography on Patricia Giles deals with the second half of the 20th century, which was a time of immense change, in which she (Giles) played an important role,” Alexander said.
Patricia Giles was born in Hobart in 1932 and loved art from an early age but needed to work, so was only able to attend art school at night. She began full-time work as an artist in the 1960s, living frugally.
“She didn’t care about money,” Alexander said. “Giles tried all forms of art, but her great love was watercolour landscapes. Her family, when she was a child, had a shack up at the Great Lake, which was unusual for that period, and she fell in love with the wild landscape up there … where there was no sign of human intervention, just the bush, just the Tasmanian landscape.
“In the ‘60s, she joined a painting group that included Max Angus and influenced them in this love. She got them going out into the bush as she did, to mountains, to bush, to coast, to cliffs, to paint just exactly what was there and nothing else, with no human imprint.”
Giles’ love of Tasmanian landscape saw her develop an interest in conservation, She was an advocate for the protection of Lake Pedder, later flooded by the Hydro Electric Commission.
“There have been many women artists in Tasmania’s history, there’s not much been written about them, so this is a way of showing that Patricia at least receives her due,” Alexander said. “Art is really vital to our lives and vital to history.”
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The book’s title comes from a poem written about Giles by James McAuley, well-known poet and former Professor of English at the University of Tasmania.
Judges of the Dick and Joan Green Family Award commented that the biography “addresses a significant gap in documentation of the growth of 20th century Tasmanian visual culture.”
Chair of the judging panel, historian Professor Kate Darian-Smith, executive dean and pro vice-chancellor of the College of Arts, Law and Education at the University of Tasmania, said Dr Alexander’s “rigorous and exhaustive engagement with archival and social sources has resulted in the rich documentation of one of Tasmania's most important but often overlooked female artists. This biography offers an intricate study of gender, politics and environmental activism in the mid to late 20th century, and the influence of these forces on artistic production and cultural life.
“Giles emerges as a modest woman with an extraordinary strength of mind and purpose in pursuing her career as an artist who opened the eyes of many Tasmanians to the wild beauty of the land around them. In awarding the 2022 Dick and Joan Green Family Award for Tasmanian History to Alison Alexander, we recognise the importance of the role of women in Tasmanian history, and the powerful creativity of artists such as Patricia Giles.”
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A seventh-generation Tasmanian, Alison Alexander is the editor of the Companion to Tasmanian History and has written 35 historical works about Tasmania. She was the recipient of the Australian National Biography Award in 2014 for her acclaimed study of Jane Franklin.
She has said that while much of her previous work focuses on the colonial period, “we have got more history than that”.
Speaking on behalf of the Green family, Caroline Johnston, one of Dick and Joan's daughters, said her mother was deeply committed to this award and would have been very proud to see Alison Alexander win the third award for Tasmanian history.
“This book provides a very clear yet sensitive portrayal of Patricia Giles as a person, and her work and her love of the Tasmanian landscape,” Johnston said.
The Dick and Joan Green Family Award for Tasmanian History commemorates the contribution that both the late Joan Green, who passed away in March 2022, and her husband, Dick, made to preserving the heritage of Tasmania. Both Dick and Joan Green were key players in the establishment and ongoing work of the National Trust in Tasmania and strong supporters of the arts and many community organisations.
Dr Katherine Johnson is a science writer and novelist based in Tasmania. She has published in The Conversation, Good Weekend (Sydney Morning Herald) and CSIRO’s ECOS magazine. Her fourth novel, Paris Savages, was released in the UK in 2020. More about her and her writing can be seen at KatherineJohnsonauthor.com
