The Wild Flowers Around Melbourne

Fanny Anne Charsley was one of five sisters, all of whom received an ‘ornamental education’, training them in music, dancing, fancy work, recitation, Romance languages and drawing. In terms of art, painting flowers was particularly encouraged– not only was it considered a genre that required less skill than landscape or portrait painting, but botanising was an acceptable (and healthy) pastime for middle-class Victorian women.

Born in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire in 1825, Charsley emigrated to Melbourne, Australia, with her family in 1857, aged 29. During her time in Australia she produced a fine set of watercolours picturing wild flowers around Melbourne. She found a mentor in Ferdinand von Mueller, government botanist and director of Melbourne Botanic Gardens from 1857-1873, who aided Charsley in botanical classifications. Mueller also provided an introduction to Joseph Dalton Hooker, director of Kew Gardens, when she returned to London in 1866. While Hooker declined an invitation to view her works, he encouraged her to pursue publication. She duly engaged Day & Son to publish the work, and used her watercolours to prepare a series of 13 lithographs, all of which she made and hand-coloured herself.

The wild flowers around Melbourne was dedicated to von Mueller. Charsley was modest in her ambition, writing in the preface that she had not set out to produce a work for the public, but that she only did so with the encouragement of her friends. This book is expensively bound and flamboyantly presented. Gold tooling decorates the corners and spine, and the cover features beautifully detailed and handcrafted fretwork, which make this publication a work of art in its own right. Charsley’s hand-coloured lithographs are exquisite and highly detailed. Each plate pictures several plants, picturing 58 different species in total, all of which are named and described in the accompanying text. The text includes botanical classifications as well as notes about seasonal flowering and geographical distribution, in several instances making mention of New Zealand. There are a handful of comments about aboriginal uses of plants, as well as recommendations for their cultivation in England.

Charsley’s book was the first ‘popular’ illustrated publication dedicated to the flora of Victoria, Australia. It invites comparison with and provides context for similar works by women botanical artists working in colonial New Zealand. These include Georgina Hetley, Emily Harris and Sarah Featon, all of whom who produced remarkable colour illustrated publications focussed on New Zealand’s flowering plants in the 1880s, along with Ellis Rowan, who was active in the late colonial period in Australasia and the Pacific, and Isabella Sinclair, who published the first illustrated flora of Hawaii in 1885. Charsley’s publication may have provided inspiration for these women, opening up the possibility of contributing to knowledge of the natural environment in the colonies in a way that was accessible and engaging for a general audience.