Book event

Birds of Tasmania by Susan Lester

This event has now sold out. If you have previously joined the waiting list (now closed) you will be contacted if a place appears.

**Due to popular demand, we have moved to a larger venue for this launch. It will now be held at RACV Hobart Hotel, 154 Collins Street.  

 

Susan Lester was commissioned in the 1980s to produce 200 paintings of Tasmania’s birds for a limited-edition book to commemorate the Examiner newspaper’s 150th anniversary. Sue worked for four years to produce the exquisite, detailed paintings. She collaborated with well-known ornithologist and Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery curator Dr Bob Green, and spent much time observing the birds in the bush and drawing museum specimens to ensure accuracy.

As she delivered the paintings, the Examiner’s parent company ENT was caught in Tasmania’s political bribery scandal, and company chairman Edmund Rouse was jailed. The book project was abandoned and the paintings forgotten.

Almost a decade later, an accountant in Hobart’s WIN commercial television studio, previously owned by Rouse, found the paintings and took them to the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery. TMAG curators helped identify the collection and the extraordinary story of its commission and loss. WIN generously donated the paintings to TMAG, and 40 were displayed in the Bond Store in 2001 in a stunning exhibition.

On 30 January 2022, Sue died after a short, intense battle with cancer.

With the support of TMAG, Sue’s family and OUTSIDE THE BOX / Earth Arts Rights, in conjunction with Warner Design, have now created Birds of Tasmania by Susan Lester, bringing to life the full suite of 200 paintings. Curiously, TMAG only hold 199 of the original 200 works. The mystery of the missing 200th painting of the critically endangered Swift Parrot is ongoing.

In keeping with Sue’s exquisite paintings, Birds of Tasmania is a truly bespoke publication. In the tradition of the folio volumes by significant bird artists of the Victorian age, many of the paintings are reproduced as full-page colour-plate illustrations and are supported with historical commentary — including from Bob Green’s original accompanying notes — and the current conservation status of birdlife in Tasmania.

Professor Libby Lester is a journalist and academic at the University of Tasmania, where she is the UNESCO Chair in Communication, Environment and Heritage and Director of the Institute for Social Change. Her work on environmental communications and politics is internationally recognised. She is Susan Lester’s younger sister.

Also joining the event will be the book’s publishers, Outside the Box, and Eric Woehler. Eric is without question the state’s go-to bird expert: former convenor of Birdlife Tasmania, he has spent around 40 years in the service of bird science and is a global figure, particularly when it comes to seabirds and Antarctic birds in particular. Eric has also trudged the coastline of Tasmania for years to collect data on our shorebirds and beach-nesting seabirds.

Please join us for this very special launch.