artwork photography by Julien Scheffer

IN LOVING MEMORY

My mother was born on the December 5, 1943 in Vancouver, Canada. Christened Pamela Joan Russell, she disliked being called Pam and preferred the gender ambiguity of Jo, after a fictional tom-boy character. Her parents, both from Adelaide, had travelled to Canada where they married in 1941.

During their Canadian travels, when Jo was about five years old, their car slid on an icy road and crashed into a power pole. Recovering in hospital, Jo painted vigorous expressions of her crash experience. A local family took them in while the car was being repaired. One or two older boys in this family taught Jo how to use crayons, a crude medium, to skillfully colour nursery rhyme books. Back on the road again, Jo spent many hours of car travel colouring such books. She learned the subtleties of graded tone and blended colour, an appreciation that was long-lasting.

The Russell family returned to Adelaide in 1948. A neighbour’s son was an artist and Jo found his studio wondrous with its walls covered in red conté drawings and small oil on canvas portraits. Jo loved his sketches and drawings, and she often sat as a model for him.

A relative’s house also made a big impression on her. An elephant foot umbrella stand stood darkly inside the front door, animal pelts dominated the formal dining room, and a huge oil painting depicted lots of natural things: birds, fish, reptiles, shells. Learning to read and write at Adelaide’s Walkerville Infant School, Jo was entranced by the teacher’s skill at making perfect letter forms in chalk on the blackboard. Years later Jo would sign her own art pieces in neat cursive.

Jo’s parents were creative, practical and skilled at making things. Her father, Edward Boon Russell (Pop), was trained as a draughtsman and was an all-round handyman. Pop taught Jo how to use hand tools, and engaged her in all of the processes of building a wooden fishing dingy, from reading the plans to steam curving the frame and ply sheets. Jo’s mother, Nellie Russell née Gluis (Bari), was skilled at sewing, spinning, weaving and ceramics. Bari was acutely conscious of the aesthetics of a room, a feng shui intuitiveness that Jo inherited and later translated into her own home.

Jo’s parents had a wish for greater independence from living close to family relatives in inner city Adelaide, so they bought a block on the sand dunes bordering Semaphore Beach and the swampy mangrove backwaters of the Port Adelaide River. There were very few other houses nearby and they were surrounded by an undisturbed coastal wilderness stretching from Semaphore to Henley Beach. Jo was free-spirited and adventurous and loved to roam the beach and play in the sand dunes with her friend Kay. They identified the tracks of insects, reptiles, birds and mammals, and collected feathers, shells and nests. Jo was curious and fascinated by the natural world, and she drew the things that she collected.

Jo, Kay and Annette rode their bikes to Pennington Primary School. Annette’s mother taught the girls how to make coiled baskets from cane and raffia, an appreciation that stayed with Jo throughout her life. Decades later Jo reconnected with basket weaving when she assisted with an exhibition, Tayenebe, that celebrated Tasmanian Aboriginal women’s fibre work (Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, 2009).

In her final year at Pennington Primary School, Jo won a drawing competition and the prize was enrolment in junior art classes at the South Australian School of Art. After attending art classes she would visit the South Australian Art Gallery nearby, which cemented her passion to become a graphic artist.

Jo’s parents separated in her first year at Woodville High School. She lived with her mother and younger brother Carl in a small, converted shed in the Adelaide Hills, where they lived very frugally. Jo learned to sew and mend her own clothes, and to make hearty meals from a few ingredients. Jo had tremendous vitality and determination. She was very independent, resourceful and innovative, and always preferred to make things rather than buy them. She was highly adept with sewing machines and could repair a horse rug as well as make a lovely dress on the day it was to be worn.

Jo married Ian Eberhard in 1962. She was 19 years old when I was born. I remember during my early school years other kids would often remark at how beautiful my “older sister” looked. I was proud of my beautiful young mother.

Our family moved from Adelaide to Canberra for a short while before settling in Hobart in 1975. Jo fell in love with Tasmania.

While raising four children, she realised a lifelong dream in 1981 by completing a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at the University of Tasmania School of Arts. She followed this up with a Diploma of Education (Visual Arts).

Jo specialised in drawing, painting and printmaking. She used pencil, ink, charcoal, pastel and crayons. For her paintings she used watercolour, acrylic, oil and multi-media. Her printmaking included screen printing, lino-cut, and collagraph. Her works ranged in size from small, exquisitely detailed greeting cards to canvases more than two metres across.

While at art school in 1981 Jo wrote, “My paintings and drawings have always been influenced by my environment, and interest in flora and fauna. Of particular concern to me are adaptations of animals to their environment, and landforms acted on by time and climate – the beauty of raptors, the cryptic coloration of African fauna, the awesomeness of NZ fiords, volcanoes and glaciers, the vulnerability of the seas’ cetaceans, and the drama of Tasmanian skies. My art is the expression of my personal appreciation of the diversity and complexities of natural phenomena.”

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Jo was very observant and could draw things in exact detail. Her skills were well-recognised, but she preferred to do her own thing rather than commercial art. Nonetheless she had a long-held interest in botany and was commissioned to illustrate some of the botanical specimens in Jamie Kirkpatrick’s classic identification guide to the flora and vegetation of Alpine Tasmania (1997, Oxford University Press). Jo was also commissioned to design a T-shirt for the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery’s Secrets of the Frozen World exhibition (ca 1996) which toured nationally. The T-shirt featured a troupe of guano-stained Adélie penguins and became a popular exhibition souvenir.

Jo produced a great body of powerful and evocative art. Much of her work looked at animals and plants, landscapes, skyscapes and waterscapes. Jo loved animals, and they inspired much of her art. She had always been captivated by birds of prey, especially owls, and she made a great variety of sketches, drawings and paintings which encapsulated the charm, mystery and power of raptors.

Jo’s husband, Ian, was a wildlife biologist and our home in Taroona harboured a menagerie of orphaned or injured native animals including raptors, wombats, wallabies, lizards, snakes, frogs and a small bat with a big personality.

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Jo blended real and abstract forms to create stunning, dynamic, and nuanced works. Her works can be exuberant, whimsical, sombre or poignant. Jo drew people, nudes, lovers, limbs, hands, feet, and a penetrating set of self-portraits. She explored female form and landscapes, crumpled paper and snow-clad mountains, water reflections, clouds, and kites. She was inventive and experimented with materials and methods, especially collage.

Jo drew what was around here, and she created a rich body of intimate and tender drawings of her pet cats, and a part-Basenji dog called Jip, who was her dearest companion in later life. A three-month stay in New Zealand inspired a powerful and evocative series of colourful abstract watercolours of snow-clad mountains, glaciers and erupting volcanoes entwined with Maori symbols. Indigenous styles also influenced her landscapes of central Australia, and a trip to South Africa inspired an outpouring of works exploring majestic African wildlife with a focus on zebra camouflage.

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Uniquely Tasmanian animal subjects included Tasmanian masked owls and thylacines. She did a series of large colourful abstracts of the Hazards at Coles Bay, and a moody sketch of Cloudy Bay on Bruny Island, a place she loved to visit in her little Suzuki 4WD.

Some of Jo’s work tackled contentious political issues of the times, most notably a confronting series of screen prints and charcoal-crayon sketches protesting the brutality of whale hunting, shortly before Australia ceased its whaling operations in 1978. Similar progressive political sentiments underly her bright pastel series, titled Electric Mischief, which juxtaposes Tasmanian wilderness against the flooding of the King River for hydro-electric power in the 1990s.

Jo exhibited her work in numerous exhibitions in Hobart, including the Tasmanian Fiesta, Salamanca Place Gallery, Strickland Gallery, Long Gallery, University of Tasmania and others. She twice won the Burnie Acquisitions Exhibition Prize (1981 and 1982). Her works were acquired by the University of Tasmania, and she sold works to private collections in Australia, England, Canada, the US, New Zealand and South Africa.

She was very modest about her artistic skills and achievements and was delighted when anyone expressed admiration for her work. She gifted many of her works.

In 1984 Jo started as projects officer, and later executive director, at the Crafts Council of Tasmania, where she worked to promote the work of other Tasmanian artists and crafts people. In 1989 she joined the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery as anthropology assistant before settling into a role as display assistant (1992-2013). She loved her work at the museum, where she could apply her practical and creative skills and interact with like-minded colleagues, some of whom became dear friends. She valued her friendships.

After my parents’ marriage ended, Jo built a new home for herself at Leslie Vale, nestled amongst the eucalypts of a bush block on the flanks of kunanyi/Mount Wellington. Leslie Vale was her bushland sanctuary where, later in life, she found solitude, peace and tranquility.

Inside her home was minimalist, and always kept neat and clean. She did her art on the dining room table while listening to Vivaldi and other classics. She nurtured a beautiful native garden and every evening she would sit outside relaxing with a wine and cigarette, quietly watching the birds and pademelons that hopped up for a small treat when she whistled. She was very pleased when her block was approved as Land for Wildlife. She collected, pressed and identified all the native plants on her block, and in the process rediscovered a presumed extinct hybrid shrub, Spicer's Everlasting (Argentipallium spiceri) (Papers and Proceedings of the Royal Society of Tasmania, Volume 132, 1998: 71-73).

Jo was a contemplative person who kept her own counsel. She had strong personal values and integrity. Jo avoided confrontation of any kind, and never sought harm to any person or creature. She was a highly sensitive, gentle soul. Life was hard for Jo at times, but even when she was deeply hurt, she never complained or lashed out. While she was reserved and very private in many respects, she was able to express herself freely and passionately in her art.

Through her artistic legacy, I have gained a deeper understanding and appreciation of my mother. Sometimes when I gaze at her work I am struck afresh by its power and intensity, its multi-layered complexity, depth and occasional poignancy, its intimacy and tenderness.

Jo was intelligent and highly perceptive, matched with a wry wit that made people laugh easily. She was friendly and fun to be with. She smiled a lot and had a great capacity for joy. Jo was thoughtful, kind and caring, and always put others first. She adored her four children, and her children’s friends, several of whom she took under her wing and roof when they needed. Everyone thought she was a very cool mum. She taught and mentored children at the Brian Chandler School of Art, and for the Education Department’s Artists in Schools Project. She was a loving grandmother to her four grandchildren. Jo was an inspiration in the lives of many, young and old.

After 24 years of unstintingly loyal service to the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery Jo reluctantly retired in December 2013 as she faced increasing health challenges. After working away, mostly in Western Australia, I finally returned home to Tasmania to be near my mum for the final chapter in her life. It was a bittersweet homecoming. Jo was diagnosed with dementia in 2015 and moved to St Ann’s care home in Hobart. In the last five years of her life I spent a lot of time with her, and we reconnected in spite of, or because of, dementia.

The dementia cruelly took her to terrifying places deep inside her mind, and she completely lost her instinct and compulsion to sketch things on paper. Yet other core essences were not lost, including her keen powers of observation, sharp wit and sense of playfulness. We shared many laughs together, and some tears. Paradoxically, the dementia which stole so much of Jo’s persona also peeled away the protective shield she had built around her heart for so many years. More than ever before she relished love and contact with those around her.

Jo’s childhood curiosity and fascination with the small beauties in nature stayed with her to the end. As we took regular walks on the dog beaches at Sandy Bay and Kingston, in Fitzroy Park, and, nearer the end of her life, in the garden at St Ann’s, her attention was intensely focused on things around her, especially plants in the garden and shells on the beach. She would constantly pause to pick up and feel some small shell or leaf or other interesting natural thing.

Dementia took so much away but it also gave something back. In the last weeks of her life Jo seemed ever more aware of her surroundings, although she could no longer walk or speak, she was calm and her beautiful eyes were wide open, soaking everything in. Confined to a chair bed I wheeled her outside into the garden, next to the trellis hanging with wisteria flowers, where she could look upwards to see the sky and clouds. Jo died on February 5, 2020. After Jo died, we took her home to her beloved Leslie Vale, to be at peace there one last time. Jo’s final wish was that her ashes be scattered on the mountains and seas of Tasmania.

The author would like to thank Julien Scheffer for his collaboration and professional photographing of Jo Eberhard’s art works. Julien Scheffer is a photographer and artist based in Salamanca, Hobart. More about his work can be found at www.julienscheffer.com.

Stefan Eberhard is a scientist, explorer and photographer. He completed a zoology degree at the University of Tasmania and a PhD at Murdoch University, Western Australia. He is the founding director of Subterranean Ecology Pty Ltd and founder, with his wife Bronwen, of Save The Nullarbor Inc, a not-for-profit group dedicated to raising awareness about the natural, scientific and cultural values of the Nullarbor Plain.