| Historical notes: | Turramurra
Turramurra is 170 metres above sea level, 30 metres above Pymble and 17 kilometres from Sydney. It has an average of 1,400 mm of rain per annum, one of the highest for the Sydney metro area. It has a population of close to 11,000 and an area of 6.13 sq km or approx 2 sq miles. It is bordered on one end by the Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park and on the other by Lane Cove National Park. Property value is $926,000 (2007).
Originally a timbergetting area settlement begun in 1822 until after 1850 when the orchardists came to occupy extensive landholdings producing a variety of citrus and other fruits including persimmons, custard apples and Chinese pears.
The Turramurra Railway station was opened on 1 January 1890. The suburb was then known as Eastern Road and it was nearly a year later on 14 December 1890 that Turramurra was named after the Aboriginal word meaning 'high hill'.
The construction of the railway brought immediate progress. In 1881 the population was only 142, by 1891 it was 788 and in 1901 1,306.
There was no electricity until 1927, water was piped from Wahroonga Reservoir and the outside loos were regularly emptied by the nightwatchman. The gaslights were lit each evening by the gaslighter. Those with very large properties kept cows for instant milk supply. Many dairies were established and the milkman delivered twice a day. By 1920 fruit fly put an end to all commercial growing of fruit on the North Shore and the land were converted into Chinese gardens.
Ku-Ring-ai Avenue
The most expensive subdivision, of lots of 10 acres or more available, is the portion around Ku-ring-gai Avenue and Boomerang Street and a number of houses listed in the Sands Directory of 1903 are found here.
Shops - 1912
Chinese gardens - disappeared after WWII
Ku-ring-gai Avenue was owned by a few prominent people. Thomas Cosh, the architect designed and built a number of houses here, possibly as a speculative builder and developer, and lived in a few of them before selling on, including:
2 - Ellerslie 1899 - John Shedden Adam
8 - Mildura 1899 - Slatyer and Cosh
12 - Ballydown 1897 - Charles Slatyer - Martin McIlrath (second owner of Ingleholme)
17 - Glensloy, Wychwood 1901- Robertson and Marks - G. E. McFarlane (tobacco merchant) Originally on a 9-acre site
25 Yacaba 1897 - Walter Vindin (solicitor)
31 - Creighton, Cainga, Tanvally 1899 -Thomas Cosh
34 - Newstead, Yprina 1903 (Lichtner, chemist and importer)
37 Ilanscourt 1897 - Nixon and Allen - W. J. Baker (Cutler and Instrument maker)
43 Sylvan Fels, Cossington 1899 - Nixon and Allen - Grace Cossington Smith gave drawing and painting lessons.
44 - Waiwera 1900 - additions by Spain and Cosh (Sir Joseph Palmer Abbott)
Woodstock 1905 - Spain and Cosh - W. C. Penfold
51 Highfield 1917
54 - Erahor, Cairns 1900 - Spain and Cosh (Thomas Cosh) - Dr Cosh and later J. P Dowling
55 - Hampton 1900 - Alex Joske
56 - Strathendrick 1899 - Spain and Cosh - Mr Ward rented from Cosh
60 - The Terricks 1908 - Spain and Cosh, (Thomas Cosh)
62 - Egelabra 1908 - Spain and Cosh (Thomas Cosh)
77 - Talagon 1897 Arthur Stanton Cook (Edwards, 2009).
Grace Cossington Smith:
1892 Grace Smith is born at Neutral Bay to English migrant Ernest Augustus Smith and Grace (nee Fisher), the second of five children. The extended name "Grace Cossington Smith" appears on her baptism entry at St Augustine in Neutral Bay. Her mother encouraged her to adopt it as part of her identity as an artist and she began actively using it in her twenties as her preferred way of being recognised, personally and professionally (Hart, 2005, 1).
1895 The Allowah Estate in Turramurra is subdivided ("Cossington" will be built on Lot 12).
1899 The house is designed by Nixon and Allen for W.J. Baker. Named "Sylvan Fells", it has an unusual timber lined meeting room which is used for Quaker meetings. According to Quaker researcher Jenny Madeline, William John Baker was a trustee for the Quaker Burial Ground established at Rookwood Necropolis in 1902 following the resumption of the Devonshire Street Cemetery for Central Railway Station. He had had another house built to the design of Nixon and Allen at 37 Kuringai Ave Turramurra in 1897 (Reith and Madeline, 2006). Cossington Smith later would say that the house at Turramurra had been designed for "'Mr Baker the Quaker' as a dwelling that could also function as a Quaker lodge, a kind of church" (Thomas, 2005, 157).
1910 Cossington Smith attends art classes with Dattilo Rubbo in Sydney.
1912-14 Cossington Smith travels to Europe, attending art classes in England and Germany.
1913 Ernest and Grace Smith rent the house at 43 Ku-Ring-Gai Ave Turramurra from Mr Baker.
1914 Cossington Smith rejoins her family in the new home at Turramurra. She would live at Cossington for the next 65 years.
1914 Cossington Smith's father builds a small studio in the garden for her to paint in, as she recalled: "father was a dear, so was my mother; both of them were keen about my painting, and my father built me that dear little studio down at the bottom of the garden, a perfect studio" (Hart, 2005, 11).
1915. Cossington Smith exhibits "The Sock Knitter", an important early work of modern Australian art, based on her sister Madge seated at Cossington. It is later described by Daniel Thomas as "perhaps the first fully Post Impressionist work painted in Australia" (Johnson, 1995, p.451).
1920. Ernest Smith buys the Turramurra house, renaming it "Cossington". Ernest and Grace had also given this name to their first house in Wycombe Road Neutral Bay - "in memory of the Leicestershire parish where Grace Fisher's father had been Rector" (Modjeska, 1999, 214).
1928. At the age of 36 Cossington Smith holds her first solo art exhibition at the Grosvenor Galleries. From 1932 she would hold a further 18 solo exhibitions at the Macquarie Galleries in Sydney. She would also participate in many group exhibitions and be awarded the OBE and the OA.
1931. Cossington Smith's mother passes away.
1938. Cossington Smith's father passes away on 29 September.
1939 Grace and two sisters move out to lodgings in a house nearby in Womerah Street for a few months while "a large well-lit studio was added to the house, to which other minor alterations were also made by the architect Bertram Chisholm" (Thomas, 1973 and Thomas, personal communication, 2006). The studio in the garden gradually deteriorates (considered to be in dangerous state of ill-repair by the late 1970s, it is demolished by Cossington Smith's neice after 1979). The original door from the garden studio is moved to the house-based studio.
1962 Cossington Smith's last surviving sibling Charlotte passes away, leaving Cossington to live alone at Cossington for the next 17 years.
1973 A major retrospective exhibition of Cossington Smith's work is curated by Daniel Thomas at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and tours nationally in all mainland states.
1979 Cossington Smith moves from Cossington to live in a nursing home in Roseville.
1984 Cossington Smith passes away on 20 December. She leaves Cossington to her brother's three children, one of which, Ann Mills, has already been living there since 1979. Ann's brother and sister sell their shares of the house to Ann, happy to keep the house witin the family.
2005 A major retrospective of Cossington Smith's work is curated by Deborah Hart at the National Gallery of Australia and tours nationally.
Comments by art historians:
"Henri Bergson's theory of vitalism, the inner, vibrant living force of all matter so well captured by Cossington Smith in the vivid contrasts of red and green and of solid and broken form in the furniture of 'The Lacquer Room' [c.1935], has been desribed by Mary Eagle as a unifying theme in the work of many Australian artists of the time. For Cossington Smith, though, light was to become both the symbol of her Anglican beliefs and the inspiration and method of her painting'. . . Commenting on the use of her characteristic square brush style, she said: 'I use squares because I feel that in that way that light can be put into the colour'. . . . In her most sophisticated paintings, her later depictions of interiors, Cossington Smith was to give the fleeting moment the awe and dignity of a lasting monument. Small moments of daily living - clothes strewn on a chair, beds made and unmade, windows and wardrobes open or shut - are imbued with spiritual everlastingness by the vibrancy of colour and light, a juncture of the ordinary and the sublime. . . " (Johnson, 1995, p.151)
"Juxtaposed pure colours, applied with a distinctive broad brushstroke, depict intimate views of her home, light-filled and spiritual. She described her work as 'expressing form in colour, colour vibrant with light - but containing this other, silent quality which is unconscious, and belongs to all things created'. (Johnson, 1995, p.451)
"'Interior in Yellow' was begun [probably in 1962]. . . Like the ecstatic, abstract draperies that fill Old Master paintings, the rumpled bed cover and unspecific cloths are devices that connect the spectator to a surge of visual and emotional energy. . .
"The fullness and density of light and air in a particular contained space are certainly here, but a general statement of delight in the morning's silent annunciation of each new day, and its purification of inner space is also apparent. There are dreams and memory of a mother, father, sisters, brother and friends. Bedroom stillness, pain and death are present, but so too is sleep - as a source of renewal and revivification. 'Interior in Yellow' is a rare philosophical meditation upon the unerotic bedroom, chaste but filled with psychic shimmer. And by contrast there is also the unquiet crackle of tense, bounce-back energy surging between inwardness and the outside world. The body was cracking up but Grace was still high-spirited." (Thomas, 2005, 161)
"I was curator of Australian art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in the 1960s and 70s, and prepared the touring exhibition that in 1973 first brought Grace Cossington Smith's work to an Australia-wide audience. I am now retired, as Emeritus Director of the Art Gallery of South Australia. Last year when the National Gallery of Australia prepared another major touring exhibition of Cossington Smith's work I contributed essays to the exhibition book, and I have since further reconsidered her work.
"I would submit a stronger case, for national as well as State heritage significance.
"I now believe that Grace Cossington Smith is more than 'a leading twentieth-century Australian artist'. She is probably the best Australian woman artist of any century, and the best Australian artist of any kind working in the 1920s and 30s. Her later work, more profound and inward than the earlier work, cannot be compared with the very different work of great artists like Sidney Nolan or Fred Williams, but is equal to theirs in excellence. All her paintings have extraordinary vitality; they live, and they express joy in living in an Australian bushland suburb and a great Australian city.
"Her later work often takes its subject matter from the house and garden at Cossington, where her first studio, from 1914, was a hut built for her in the garden; then in 1939 a studio was added to the house itself. The late paintings evoke the lives of several women, artist friends, a sister who was a nurse, and their World War II activities, including church-going. The fact that the house, before the artist's father bought it, had been built as a Quaker meeting house, helped reinforce the sacramental delight in simple living that fills the artist's paintings." (Daniel Thomas, 2006)
"I am not sure there is another artist in the entire history of Australian art for whom there can be the same two-fold association of firstly, a house in which the artist lived for entirety of a career - more than six decades - and secondly, where the interior structure itself - ie the rooms inside - formed the basis of subject matter pursued with magnificent and profoundly spiritual dedication over that time." (Barry Pearce, 2006)
"[Listing Cossington on the SHR] is a wonderful gesture to a very important Australian artist whose work relates so closely to her own home and its surrounds." (Catherine Speck, 2006) |