The first time I saw Grace Honora Barnsley I thought she was Queen Elizabeth. The mistake was excusable, I thought; I’d gone into a room at the Dead Finish Museum laid out like a country dining room, so dark wood furniture, cotton lace coverings, good crockery and bone handled silverware on display, and other objects that had been brought in to the room because it was the closest fit to their actual or imagined use. Against one wall, above a small shelf of chinaware, hung two portraits in oil which I first caught out of the corner of my eye. Only when I stopped to look more closely at her and the portrait of the man beside her did I realize that hairstyle, twin sets and fur stole aside, she looked nothing like Elizabeth. And on closer inspection, even if I had only the vaguest idea what Elizabeth looked like, it was highly unlikely the Queen would pose in an Australian bushland setting without some acknowledgement of her power over it. This portrait suggested was that Grace Honora Barnsley was dressed appropriately for a ball but not a bush picnic.
With his square jaw, high brow and steely eyes, Eric Barnsley (“E. B.” to everyone who knew him.) looks the epitome of the successful businessman, so much you know at once from the portrait that it was business, not law, medicine or another profession, that he prospered in. He stands before a background of partially cleared bush, as though a mob of his sheep might be just out of view, but he was never a farmer, always a dealer in vehicles and machinery and he wears a suit and tie, not a hat like a farmer would. Still he knows the landscape; he’s driven through it often enough, and even if he doesn’t work the land, it defines him.
Grace’s portrait is more interesting. She is also before some partially cleared land in the area, only she’s resting against a timber column so she could be by a window or, more likely, on a verandah, and her outfit, the twinset, the stole (probably fox), the pearl earrings, are exactly what a farming wife would not wear to a sitting. So she’s disconnected from the landscape. Even her slightly stiff pose, slightly distant expression hints that she’d like the portrait more if the background was Mayfair or Regent’s Park.
The second time I looked at the portraits was through a camera lens, maybe a week later. During the interim, I’d seen a garden, or rather its ghost, some broken statues and urns, small circular beds of weeds, an Italian peasant girl beside a domed gazebo, but I kept to a rule that I wouldn’t enter and take photographs without permission, so I could only ride past until one morning I saw the new owner, Marion in the garden talking to a man pushing a barrow of yellow sand. She took me through the property, then she went inside and brought out an ABC gardening magazine from the Nineties with an article about the house. There was also photographs of the house inside, with the two portraits at the museum hanging in a hallway. By the time I went back to the museum with the camera, it was clear that Grace Honora Barnsley held a key to understanding the garden, what had once been there anyway.
