Somewhere waiting to be found is a painting of a swift parrot which could provide the final piece of a puzzle, a mystery that has left bird-watchers and the art world guessing for three decades.
The story of the painting could read like an Agatha Christie mystery. It started the day Susan Lester was commissioned to produce a portfolio of paintings for a limited-edition, two-volume book to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Examiner newspaper in Launceston.
Susan worked for four years to produce the finely detailed paintings, collaborating with noted ornithologist and Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery curator Dr Bob Green. She also spent much time observing the birds in the bush and drawing museum specimens to ensure accuracy.
But as she delivered the paintings, the Examiner’s parent company ENT was caught in the 1989 Tasmanian political bribery scandal, and company chairman Edmund Rouse was jailed.
Susan heard no more about the book and tried in vain to discover what had happened to her artwork. She had hoped the book could launch a career as an artist but she had to return to the profession she had trained in – radiography – and painting once again became a hobby. She had been banking everything on the book.
Almost a decade after the commission was completed, an accountant in Hobart’s WIN commercial television studio, previously owned by Rouse, found the paintings buried at the bottom of a safe. He took them to the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, where curators helped identify the collection. WIN generously donated the paintings to TMAG, and 40 were displayed in the Bond Store in 2001 in a stunning exhibition.
Susan had received recognition at last for her paintings but she never really got over the disappointment of the book not being published.
“She was devasted,” said her sister, University of Tasmania academic, Libby Lester. “The artwork had represented four years of her time.”
Susan died after a short battle with cancer last year and her family decided to finally publish the book as a tribute to her. The project has revived the hunt for the last picture in the collection, the missing swift parrot, but efforts to track it down have so far drawn a blank. Susan had taken a picture it after she completed the commission and from this the book’s designer, Lynda Warner, has created a ghost, a silhouette for the book, which proclaims: “The Swift Parrot is Missing”. The image is intended to be a reminder of what the Australian environment has already lost and stands to lose. The swift parrot is critically endangered.
The hunt goes on, meantime, for the swift parrot painting. Although it’s too late for the book, the painting would make the Susan Lester Collection at the TMAG complete.
The Birds of Tasmania, by Susan Lester can be pre-ordered at https://outsidethebox.org.au/shop/.