Eva Australian War Memorial archives, Canberra
Eva would like to take her time, but instead she rushes into the lobby of the Australian War Memorial, says her name, signs in and attaches the temporary ID.
There is a comfortable chair where she can sit while she waits but she decides to remain standing.
She does not want the small delay of levering herself up; the chair is low and her knees have begun to ache.
She holds her bag, a carryall she refers to as her office (in the absence of an office), against the front of her body and keeps watch for the curator.
No one has asked Eva to undertake this project and she has had no successful funding applications, though she will keep trying.
Between everything else that must be done, she will keep making arguments for the work she wants to do.
They are old arguments about gaps and biases, and there is less compulsion to listen to them than there once was.
The pendulum swung forward and now it is swinging back.
A necessary correction, she’s been told.
But she disagrees. The arguments are still relevant and she will not be discouraged.
The curator is coming down the stairs. She is young and smiling. They shake hands; the curator is friendly. Eva is enthusiastic and grateful. The curator turns and leads the way up the stairs; she seems to skip up them. Eva follows, her hand on the rail.
Down one hall then another, then through a door into a large room that is filled with shelving that is filled with boxes.
‘Here it is,’ the curator says, reaching. ‘We’ve put the sketches in with her original archive of drawings.’
The sketches, Eva thinks. She heard about them by accident while waiting to see the Dean.
She’d been requested but didn’t know why.
As usual, she’d been on time; as usual, he had not.
His door was ajar and conversation drifted out – his trip to the Australian War Memorial had been a waste of time.
Then he’d mentioned an artist Eva was interested in, and some newly acquired sketches.
She’d leaned towards the voices. ‘Should I know this artist?’ asked his student. ‘Not really,’ the Dean had said.
Now, Eva watches as the curator eases the box from its place on the shelf.
It is sleek and matt black. Big enough to hold the larger sizes of art paper and shallow enough to be held on each side between fingers and thumb.
This is how the curator carries it towards the bench, like a large box of pizza.
Eva takes out her notebook and pencil and puts her carryall on the floor beside a stool. The curator places the box on the bench and opens it. A lid lifted on the past, Eva thinks, and she has to stop herself clapping her hands together. The art is alive even though the artist is long dead.
During World War I, Iso Rae made more than two hundred drawings. The box holds just eighteen of them. Eva wonders where the rest are.
‘We can trace some of them, but not all,’ the curator says.
‘She wasn’t commissioned as a war artist, and when it was over the government wasn’t interested.
She probably gave a lot away or sold them as souvenirs to soldiers passing through étaples.
These were found on top of someone’s wardrobe in the 1970s. ’
‘And the sketches?’ Eva asks.
‘They were sent to us about a year ago, from England. Found in the attic of a house her sister once lived in. The sisters left France in the thirties and Iso Rae died in an asylum in Brighton just a few years later. We’re lucky the sketches weren’t thrown away.’
‘An asylum?’
The curator shrugs. ‘Apparently.’
Blue rubber gloves, the kind a cleaner might wear.
‘It will keep the oils in your skin off the paper,’ the curator says. Then she shows Eva how to handle the art.
‘The original drawings are all mounted on card,’ she says, ‘but the sketches aren’t – probably don’t need to be. They’re mostly false starts and studies. We had one expert look at them. He didn’t think they added anything of value.’
The Dean, Eva thinks. She tries to keep her expression impassive.
He’d kept her waiting. It’s not personal, he’d said when she was finally sitting on the other side of his desk, in fact it’s quite objective.
You haven’t published for a while and you’re not bringing in funding. We can’t justify another contract.
‘You’re at the same university, aren’t you?’
Eva nods but wonders if she can still claim adjunct status. Technically, it has lapsed, but she still has a library card.
The curator is satisfied and retreats to her desk at the back of the room. Eva turns to the box and feels a flip-flop of nerves, a desire to rush in and an instinct to go slow.
Iso Rae’s drawings are laid one on top of the other, each in its own fold of white archival paper with a sheet of tissue to protect the surface of the artwork.
While she worked in oils before 1914, her war art has been made using pencil and charcoal, pastels and gouache, occasionally ink, occasionally watercolour.
It has been more than a hundred years, but they could still smudge under a careless hand.
Eva is not careless; she is in awe, as always, that she has this privilege of reaching through time.
But she wants desperately to remove one of the rubber gloves and feel the texture of the paper, to imagine it between the artist’s fingers – it’s a small detail but she believes it will help her feel closer to Iso Rae.
Some rules, she thinks, then looks around for the curator, hoping she might have stepped out. She hasn’t and they exchange a smile.
Eva turns the first fold of archival paper as she might turn the first page of a book she has longed to read but is reluctant to start, already anticipating its end, or its disappointment.
She closes her eyes and tries to detect a scent.
Perhaps there is something, but she doesn’t know how to describe it.
An image of an old cardboard box at the bottom of her wardrobe comes to mind.
Her memory box, she calls it, full of school exercise books, rhyming poetry and drawings of horses.
Did she ever want to be an artist, people sometimes ask.
No, she says, emphatically and without hesitation, which of course means she did but was discouraged, somehow, and is now ashamed of ever thinking she might have had the talent.
She breathes in Iso Rae’s drawings and the thought of her memory box fades; they do not smell the same.
Later, she will search the internet for descriptions of what old art paper smells like and she will write slightly sweet, with a hint of vanilla in her notebook.
It is not what she can smell but it will sound authentic.
She opens her eyes and lifts the sheet of tissue.
It is a large drawing, on thick grey paper.
It is of the Anzac camp at étaples in June 1916.
There is a field of tents; troops marching down a curving road; a building in the foreground – Gordon Hut, the signage says, one of the many YMCA huts.
There are other huts – longer, with windows down the sides.
Hospitals, perhaps, or barracks. The sky is blue and white, the huts are timber-brown, there is green and yellow around the tents: grass, trod and untrod.
Two Australians stand in the foreground (their hats distinctive); they are loosely sketched but it is clear they are at ease and talking.
Iso Rae was known for her figurative skills.
The drawing is coloured and complete. It all looks so tidy, Eva thinks – the tents, the huts, the marching troops – and the sky is unblemished by anything that might recall the horrors up the line.
It is the newly acquired sketches Eva has come to examine, but these drawings provide context. She realises that, although they are familiar, she has not understood their character before now. She makes a few notes.
The quick lines of charcoal, the smudges of pastel, the wash of watercolour – there is a lightness of touch and I imagine a quick rendering of the scene then the thoughtful application of heavier lines and hue.
The grain of paper is part of the effect and can only be appreciated when the drawings are seen in person; it adds texture.
It is like meeting someone you have heard so much about, Eva thinks.
‘Pleased to meet you, Iso,’ she whispers.