Taken, 2023

Wide Wednesday was a Wet Wednesday here, and the only trees you will see are those in the sketches of scrapbook we saw at the Dear Kate exhibition in the Allport Library today.

Catherine Mitchell and her sisters recorded the adventurous exploits of settler life in 19th century Tasmania, many involving bush scenes with horseback riding, picnics, fishing and the like. Catherine (Dear Kate) made wonderful vigorous sketches of their activities, her sister Sarah provided diary style summaries of the event. It made me think of blipping, especially as Catherine would annotate her sketches with “Taken” and the date!

Poor Catherine’s life was cut short by hydatids soon after her marriage. Her younger sister Sarah dedicated her life to incorporating the sketches into a beautiful scrapbook (now falling apart).

Tasmanian artist Jane Giblin came across one of the drawings, and on discovering a family connection, was inspired to create a sequence of lithographs reinterpreting the incidents in the sketchbook.

The giant scrapbook pictured here is a commissioned work combining reproductions from the scrapbooks and other historical material with the artist’s sketches.

I took a panorama of a page involving some bush scenes in a feeble attempt to meet the Wide Wednesday theme of trees. (I try to make sure my challenge photos also meet my own goal of diarising my life). A favourite quote from the book accompanying the exhibition was “So, what do we make of Catherine Penwarne Mitchell? Was she the nineteenth-century precursor to the twenty-first century selfie-taker? Yes, and and she was much more.”

If you want to read more about the scrapbook, try this