"I think I was, at that time, the only girl in Taranaki who ever wrote a line"

A conversation with the authors retrieving Emily Harris

“It's a history of colonial ruin, not a history of colonial progress,” says Michele Leggott, of the Harris family.

We’re talking about Groundwork: The Art and Writing of Emily Cumming Harris, in which she and Catherine Field-Dodgson recall a near-forgotten and fascinating life, the female speck in the history of texts.

Emily’s father Edwin made a big mistake, she says. “He arrived in this country with no money. Everybody who came into New Plymouth in 1841 walked into a minefield in terms of the defective land deeds. And it took 20 years to blow up.”

“And the Harris's at that moment….they never had much money. He was an educated middle class professional surveyor, lucky to pick up surveying work.”

“The only reason I think that he could afford to buy 50 acres of bush was that he applied to his sister, in England, who was married to a very eminent and wealthy engineer.”

“But they struggled, and then when the only son was killed, financial and emotional devastation.”

The telling of this story began, for Michele, as a hunt for a poet. At Puke Ariki in New Plymouth, she listened to transcribed notes from an 1860s diary, the rare perspective of a 23-year-old woman documenting life behind the lines during the war in Taranaki.

“And suddenly she was saying that she had written a poem. She says, I think I was, at that time, the only girl in Taranaki who ever wrote a line. Then she copies out the poem that she wrote that day.”

“I will remember this forever. I was sitting there, gobsmacked. You know, she told us what she was doing. She told us that she wrote a poem after visiting this very important place, Glen Avon, where she had been employed, which is now in ruins. And she wrote a poem about it. And she copied it out.

“And it's a good poem. It's very technically, very proficient. And it's very moving, because she doesn't say it out loud, but three months before writing this poem, she lost her brother. He was killed at Waitara, in an ambush, he was part of the Taranaki militia. And it had devastated the family, of course.”

“So one of the things you have to imagine when you’re listening or reading this poem is that the person writing it is a sister, and she will be dressed in deepest black, because it's only three months since she's lost her brother. And this is ostensibly a poem about visiting a ruined garden, but it's actually about the loss of her brother. It's an elegy. It's a kind of occluded elegy. And when you realise that, it just becomes absolutely fascinating.”

“So of course, for me, that was the bait, you know, I grew up in that place. I just thought, All right, this is a voice coming out of the archive, and she is a poet.”

“She later became an artist. Later on. There's no money in poetry. Wasn't then, and there isn't now. There is money, if you can do it, in painting. “

“And I just thought, Right, if I ever had a signal that there's something to do here, it is to find the poems. Because we found two of them right there at Puke Ariki. We found eight more at Turnbull in one of the books that they have. So that's 10 poems. And we looked and we looked and we looked. To date we have not found the rest.”

The book, Groundwork, is a part of something larger, a search for the pieces of a life of accomplishment that had faded from view and memory.

“We know the poems existed because she's copying them out. She wrote the original in 1860 but the version I was reading at Puke Ariki was probably copied out in the 80s or 90s. So somewhere out there, there is a cache of Emily Harris poems. It's not impossible that somebody somewhere will look in a shoe box or a cupboard and look inside a file or inside a notebook and go, Oh, here are the poems.”

“They won't be in this book, but we keep looking. Our book’s designed to open the field. We’ve done what we can to piece the fragments together. We know there are gaps. We think the gaps are really fascinating. And if other people now come in and they could be botanists, they could be biographers, they could be art historians, because our book kind of glides across all of those categories.”

How much was she of her time, Emily Harris?

She's not like Emily Dickinson, Michele says.

“I do make that comparison because of Dickinson writing all her life in little, little notebooks, which were discovered after her death. But Emily Dickinson..She’s a little bit older than our Emily Harris, and she's a consummate poet of a really amazing and radical nature. You could never call Emily Dickinson Victorian. She's just something else. She's Emily Dickinson, the same way that Walt Whitman is Walt Whitman. They're 19th century, but they're not Victorian.”

“Whereas Emily is a product of her English heritage, the poetry that she adores it's the Romantics onwards, basically. And like everybody in that century, she and her sisters, they learned a bundle of poetry by heart. They could recite anything they wanted. So she comes from that background. But let me say right here, she has a cousin who is a well known and highly regarded English poet called Austin Dobson. He's her cousin, and Austin Dobson is noted. I mean, he's not, he's he's not a minor poet, but he's not, he's not Tennyson or Browning, but he is well regarded, and he's a technician. He's deeply interested in form, and style and play, experimenting with form..and you know, Emily knew it. Didn't know him personally, but she knew of him, and she would have read his work. She's out here on the edge of the empire, just trying writing. She's clearly driven to write, before she's driven to paint, we think.”

“And she is using what she's read, and it's Romantic, and it is Victorian, but I can see in just that one Glen Avon poem, somebody stretching the form, stretching the template. And that's why I wish we could find more poems, the later poems.”

But Emily Harris was most known as a botanical artist.

Michele: “She had what you could call a very successful career. It was in the 1880s and 1890s she becomes quite well known. People are impressed by the accuracy and the beautiful colouring and the composition of her work. They're not botanical works in the sense of being specimens on a page. They are artistic renditions, very accurate ones of our indigenous flora. Because she was interested in showing people who couldn't get to see these sometimes quite rare plants, what they looked like in their natural surroundings.”

“But by the 1900s she was in her late 60s by then, and her kind of art, just it began to fade as something that was interesting. There's other newer and more exciting things coming along. There's a younger generation, and she sort of fades out, and that's - okay, that does happen. She is there in the record. But she is also quite hard to find.”

“The sheer amount that that she accomplished in her lifetime, it is absolutely gob-smacking,” says Catherine, whose masters thesis includes the first detailed study of Emily Harris’s exhibiting practices

“And we're just touching on aspects, but we have been able to make a lot more sense of this stuff, of her paintings, her writing. We've pulled out interesting stories, and we've pulled together a much more extensive exhibiting history.”

She was prolific, she was very much noticed in her time. She was international, and she did contribute to national exhibitions. But much of the exhibition history, which starts in 1869 and finishes in 1924 - more than 50 years of exhibiting - was in the regions, says Michele, which made it very hard to see until the internet came along. "Because a lot of the reviewing, and there was a lot of it, it occurs in local papers. It’s very hard to access those papers if they're on microfiche or microfilm. But then they got digitised. And Papers Past came along. It’s like bringing a whole world into view again. And this is why we think our project and now our book is a template, because this could happen for other figures, particularly women, who have been very hard to see. They’re always there and they're always painting or writing, but they're very hard to see. It is there, but we haven't been able to see it.”

The project has been a rich and rewarding piece of academic teamwork and crowd sourcing. The first three years of the project, she says, “was just digging and digging and digging and finding things and transcribing them and editing them. But then the next point, from 2019 on was constructing a research website so that we could put everything that we had found up there. It's like a giant fishing net. We’ll put something out there, and somebody will pipe up, Oh, yes, well, we've got that painting on our wall, you know, we've never known who that was, but actually, that's great grandmother, Sarah Harris.”

“This is the treasure hunt aspect of the whole thing, which Catherine and I both adore, and I think for most researchers, most scholars, it's the treasure hunt. It's the what I might find and how I can piece it together that just keeps the motor running.”

They were a tight-knit family, Catherine says, “And that goes across the generations as well. The family have kept a treasure trove of letters, of paintings. They've been really generous in allowing us access. One of the descendants had this beautiful little watercolour, which, as soon as I saw a photo of it, I thought, Oh, this is really important. And she generously let me borrow it and I could take it into the Turnbull Library and put it alongside its sort of sister paintings. …and the moment I put it alongside its peers I thought, This is it. This is one of the 1879, like, this is a really significant painting. And I was able to touch the paper as well. I could feel the thickness and the weight was the same. And, yeah, do a lovely comparison.”

“Two years ago we talked to a friend who got an article put in the Evening Mail and the Press, and it ran on Stuff as well. And the title was Check your Auntie's walls asking, Do you have any Emily Harris paintings on your walls? And we actually had someone respond to us and say, Oh, yes, I've got one. Then we met up with her in Nelson, and she showed us, this really large watercolour painting that we had no idea had existed before. It's dated 1899. It's got two butterflies in it. It's quite exquisite, a little faded, but, you know, it's a work we didn't know about, and we know that there will be more.”

“And the thing about this painting, it had been in the same family, passed from a second mother to a daughter to a daughter in law. This is the kind of thing that I think will happen over and over when people know what to look for.”

“And this painting was interesting because she sent us a photo, and I thought, Oh, yeah, that's another lovely little watercolour. But then when we actually saw it, I mean, I'm often reading dimensions, and they don't really process in my head until I actually walk in front of the thing and I'm like, Oh, it's about three times bigger than what I had imagined, it immediately makes you think: What was she trying to do? What was she trying to do with these paintings?

“Sell” says Michele. “You know, make a big painting and sell it for a good price. Often when you see her big watercolours, and the big oils, the thing that impacts most strongly is their size. They're exquisite, etc, etc, but the size tells you that they are for exhibition. And when things are for exhibition, they're up for sale. One of the myths that we want to dispel is that she was untrained and not a professional artist. She was trained. She was trained by her father, who had been trained himself in England, and she is a professional. She's making a living out of selling.”

Catherine: “She’s one of our first women professional artists. She was the consummate marketer.”

Michele: “She was an up-seller before the term was invented. In the letters that she's written to people who have ordered a painting or a book from her, there's always a paragraph that says, Thank you for your order and the payment. I’ll get it in the post to you right away. And by the way I've got a studio full of paintings, and you might like to come by.

“We’ve got a letter in which she offers somebody - he's ordered the books, that's fine, and he's paid up for those. And she says, You might like to order some more. And by the way, I'm sending you in the same package, two or three paintings for sale or return if you like them. Please feel free to purchase and send the others back. She wants to sell. She is ambitious on that score in a way that is totally professional.”

But as successful as she was, it was forever a precarious existence.

Michele: “The family had no money all the way through, which is why the daughters set up a school, basically a dame school, it would have been called, and that, that was their bread and butter. But it also, of course, to - I mean this is the complaint always - the day job was the school, that brought in money, but it took away the time for painting.”

Catherine describes obsessively watching auctions. “For four years every week, that sort of thing. And things are still turning up. That's why we know that we are literally laying the groundwork.”

One recent auction found her bidding energetically for an especially prized piece only to see her hopes dashed by a frozen computer. But the ending of that story was a happy one as told here on the companion website. And it also revealed a potential source of further work, as the collection of one John Perry, collector par excellence, makes its way by instalment into the auction domain.

“We've read accounts of him turning up to auctions with a van, buying all these things at auctions, bundling them into his van, and then driving them back to this amazing old cinema that he'd bought in Helensville - accounts say four tennis courts worth of stuff in the cinema, sort of piled up and things just laid against each other. The photos I've seen are incredible because I've scoured them seeing if I can spot anything else, that might look vaguely Emily Harris. And so when he died a couple of years ago, Webbs, the auction house, were brought in to help go through the vast collection, and they are slowly doing auctions - seems to be about one a year - as much as they can handle. It's a vast collection, a huge collection, an astonishing trove. Honestly, there are a lot of people who are just waiting on tenterhooks for the next, lot of things to roll out. You know, everybody is watching.”

The tale also takes us to the Sub-Antarctic, on a scientific expedition from Wellington, and yields a whole further vein of work.

Catherine: “These men clamber all over the hills, picking every botanical thing they can find, shove them into boxes. They shoot every bird that they can find. They collect eggs. They basically pillage the Sub-Antarctic islands and bring it back to Wellington on the ship... and Emily is in there, which, you know, is quite bizarre, but she was given access to these plants that no one else would have seen at that time. They become really important.”

It was very generous, but it was also recognition of what she was good at doing. You share the specimens so she can bring them to life. You want the artist to make your plant that you want to talk about look good.

This connection in turn enabled the authors, through the publisher, to make more scientific connections.

“Te Papa Press likes to publish these beautiful books that draw out the record of their own collections. And so we suddenly joined up, not only art and science, but also the expedition specimens, which happened to be at Te Papa, it was just, it was one of the magic moments.”

“They opened up a different window, because then we were able to find specimens from other male scientists, you know, amateur scientists, gentleman scientists, citizen scientists, but we can match her paintings to those specimens as well, from the exact date. Everything is dated. I mean, these chaps, they love to date and collect everything and make a record of it.”

She wrote once, Emily: I am like the active verb to be and to do. I am too necessary an appendage to be left out. What do the authors think she would make of all of this?

Catherine: “I think she'd be really pleased.”

Michele: “When we first located the first descendants, they literally said to us, We've always thought that great aunt Emily needed much more recognition than she's had. And at that point, I breathed a sigh of relief: We're on the same page, we think the same thing. And that's a very good basis to start from.”

“100 years after she died in Nelson in 1925 our book brings her back into the light. She's been in the shadows. She's coming out of the shadows. And there's probably quite a lot more to do and find and say.”

Groundwork: The Art and Writing of Emily Cumming Harris by Michele Leggott and Catherine Field Dodgson. Te Papa Pess. $60

Look inside the book

Emily Cumming Harris site