Sasha Grishin review of Niki Francis, ‘My Own Sort of Heaven’: A Life of Rosalie Gascoigne

(ANU Press, 2024), 410 pp., PB $85.00, ISBN 9781760466558

Rosalie Gascoigne (1917–1999) was a high-profile artist in the Australian art scene. Although she came to art late, and only started to exhibit in 1974 at the age of 57, her ascendency in the art world was meteoric, with a major survey of her art at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1978. In 1982, she represented Australia (together with Peter Booth) at the Venice Biennale (the first Australian woman artist to do so) and was the subject of major exhibitions at the National Gallery of Art, Wellington, in 1983 and the National Gallery of Australia in 1996, among others.

Gascoigne’s art and life are also exceptionally well documented by family and other scholars. Her elder son, Martin Gascoigne, published the definitive Rosalie Gascoigne: A Catalogue Raisonné in 2019,¹ and important catalogues and monographs on her art have been published by art historians, including Mary Eagle (1985, 2000), Deborah Edwards (1998), Vici MacDonald (1998), Gregory O’Brien (2004) and Kelly Gellatly (2008).

Niki Francis’s ‘My Own Sort of Heaven’: A Life of Rosalie Gascoigne enters this crowded field of publications with the acknowledgement that the author is not an art historian, and the book is not graced with any illustrations of Gascoigne’s art. This book had its origins as a PhD thesis at the National Centre of Biography, School of History, The Australian National University (ANU), and still carries the scars of very dense documentation and inserted slabs of theory that generally float free of the main narrative. However, the text is largely liberated of some of the heavy armature of thesis writing that deserves its audience of two or three examiners and is delightfully readable and beautifully edited.

Francis narrates a most detailed biography of Rosalie Gascoigne’s family in New Zealand, going back generations, and creates a context for a portrait of the artist as a child growing up in a dysfunctional family that was slipping in its class standing, status and respectability due to her father’s drinking. She writes: ‘All the evidence suggests that Stanley’s drinking destroyed his business and caused trauma and shame to his family’ (p. 42). The child, to some extent, found refuge in nature and in 1929 won a prize at the school fete for flower arrangement. Nevertheless, ‘she thought art was not something people did in her family’ (p. 54). Much of this story is already familiar from Martin Gascoigne’s biography of his mother and her New Zealand years,² although details and emphasis differ in the two accounts. It is not so much a question that Rosalie’s son presents a ‘sanitised account’, but perhaps it is one that he feels is more relevant to an understanding of the artist’s work. There are skeletons in every family’s closet; some may happily remain there.

Rosalie’s undergraduate years at Auckland University College were punctuated by a growing romance with her future husband, Ben Gascoigne. Francis, perhaps rightly, sees the shadow of her childhood experiences cast across their courtship. She writes:

Rosalie’s experience of growing up in the shadow of Stanley and Marion’s [her parents] relationship had probably made her acutely aware of how relationships could go wrong; she wanted to be entirely sure before she committed herself to someone. (p. 107)

After her university studies, teacher training and three years of teaching at a high school, in the midst of World War II, Rosalie, just shy of her twenty-sixth birthday, made up her mind to marry Ben. She proposed to him, he accepted and she flew to Sydney in January 1943, as by then Ben had found employment at the Stromlo Observatory outside Canberra. They married and 10 months later their first child, Martin, was born. This was quickly followed by the birth of their other two children, Thomas in 1945 and Hester in 1949.

Although not focusing on the couple’s intimate life, Francis notes:

Rosalie’s story, however, does suggest she was at times dissatisfied with aspects of the marriage, in particular, with Ben’s focus on his work, which left little time for her. Living in his shadow irked her. (p. 137)

In 1960, the family moved off Mount Stromlo to suburban Deakin in Canberra itself. By that time, Rosalie Gascoigne had established a reputation as a person who could arrange flowers, both for domestic use and for special occasions, such as conferences. She also gave demonstrations on the art of flower arrangement from home.

By 1962, she was taking ikebana classes with Norman Sparnon, who had spent 14 years in Japan studying under Sofu Teshiggahara, the founder of the Sogetsu school. These classes continued for a decade. In 1963, she travelled to Europe for the first time as part of her husband’s sabbatical. Sadly, we are provided very limited information on what she saw in her six months in England other than she ‘actively sought exposure to art’ (p. 208). It is over 200 pages into the book when we first encounter a discussion of Gascoigne’s exploration of sculpture and other art forms. In 1967, the Gascoigne family bought a block of land in the Canberra suburb of Pearce and, by 1969, moved into a house that had been built to their specifications.

Gascoigne’s spectacular art career is somewhat crammed into the last chapters of the book, accompanied by somewhat over-ambitious explorations of the social history of Canberra, the history of Australian art and taste, and the mechanics of the Australian art world. The material is exceptionally dense, spiced with anecdotal detail, and studded with quotations from Gascoigne drawn from numerous published sources. There are interesting gems and numerous contentious statements, for example, that the Australian National Gallery’s location in Fyshwick, prior to its official opening in 1982, was for security reasons known to few; ANU art history students had conducted their classes at the warehouse since 1977.

Francis’s new biography of Rosalie Gascoigne will become an important source for future scholars researching this remarkable artist’s work. While it may not be the most resolved account of the artist and her work, it does contain fresh material that others may build on.

1. 1 Martin Gascoigne, Rosalie Gascoigne: A Catalogue Raisonné (ANU Press, 2019), doi.org/10.22459/RG.2019.

2. 2 Martin Gascoigne, Rosalie Gascoigne: Her New Zealand Origins (Martin Gascoigne, 2012).