SAVING OUR FRAGILE BEAUTY

BOOKS with MEG MASON

It is a long time since I have walked, not by mistake, into the parenting aisle of a bookshop. When my daughters were babies, I craved instruction, I wanted experts telling me what to do and how to do it, preferably at what time and in very basic language.

If Gina Ford said blackout blinds, I was at Spotlight in the first sanctioned window of the feed–wake–sleep cycle. If Robin Barker told me scrunched-up newspaper in an onion bag solves boredom for babies eight months and up, dawn found me digging through the recycling, wondering if a damp Domayne catalogue would also work, wishing she had been specific on that score.

But then, the children reach a certain age, or you do, and you’re less inclined towards advice. Feeling you’ve either worked it out or just made your bed, parenting-wise, and if you haven’t been doing Active Listening since the beginning —being more of the Active Shouting Until You Taste Metal school of thought—meaningful nodding can’t be introduced to any effect now.

Even as the teenage years hove into view, I didn’t seek out related texts, not wishing to pay money to be made afraid of these years, not wanting to believe they can only be terrible.

But I have just read one by accident, picking it up as literature, unsure now why My Brilliant Career has not been rejacketed as What To Expect When You’re Expecting a Thirteen-year-old and shifted from Fiction to Parenting Teens.

If you were doing what you were meant to at high school, not rocking on two legs of your chair using liquid paper nail polish for the absolute bulk of it, you have read the 1901 Australian classic already, saving us all a plot summary. Still, then, it would have been in total identification with Sybylla, the 16-year-old protagonist created by a then 16-year-old author. Not as a parent who needs to be reminded of what it feels like to be this age, and advice and assurance that it’s not you and your insistence on breathing that are to blame for the many peaks, troughs, tensions and ecstasies that characterise weekday afternoons.

And it’s not them either. Eye-rolling; the first time a child uses the phrase ‘no offence’; or a sudden inability to put a schoolbag anywhere except right in the doorway are all developmental milestones, akin to rolling over and first steps, just less thrilling when you are the victim of them.

It’s just the two of you in combination. As Sybylla says on behalf of our teenagers, ‘my mother is a good woman—a very good woman—and I am, I think, not quite all criminality,

but we do not pull together. I am a piece of machinery which, not understanding, my mother winds up the wrong way, setting all the wheels of my composition going in creaking discord.’

Her composition is the whole book. Story is neither here nor there compared with the absolute arrest of her rage, and boredom, her insatiable need for attention and simultaneous wish to be left alone, how funny she is, her thrall for celebrity, how convinced she is of being ugly and clever. Her savagery, her sarcasm, which infuses even the title.

Pages in, her mother had a gutful and sent her to live with childless Aunt Helen, who adores Sybylla, despite nding her—these years in a nutshell— ‘very variable, one moment all joy, and the next the reverse.’ And Helen’s methods are very much onion bags full of newspaper: practical, inexpensive, and incredibly e ective solutions for babies, 156 months and up.

An example, in Sybylla’s telling: ‘She sat down beside me.’ Helen has come into her bedroom, hearing into-pillow sobbing from the hall. It’s very late. It always is. And although our acutest wish in a similar moment is to pin this conversation until tomorrow, sitting down is the doing up of onesie poppers in the pitchblack of 15 years ago— a massive task, but also a mandatory one.

‘I impulsively threw my arms around her neck and sobbed forth my troubles in a string. How there was no good in the world, no use for me there, no one loved me or ever could on account of my hideousness’: the running on of that list suggesting Helen overrode her desire to cut in with sense.

‘She never … pretended to sympathise just to make out how nice she was.’ Gosh they can smell it, can’t they, our need to be liked. ‘She was real, and you felt that no matter what wild and awful rubbish you talked to her it would never be retailed for anyone’s amusement.’ It requires our higher selves not to post or text the real or imagined agonies to other people, but Helen knows to be a vault. ‘And better than all, she never lectured.’

‘My featherbrained chatter must often have bored her,.’ You have no idea. I mean, just sometimes, ‘but she apparently was very interested in it.’ Active listening or the appearance of it. Lovely work, Helen, truly.

The only thing Sybylla doesn’t mention is whether that night, or any of the others like it, Aunt Helen came in armed with a bowl of maple crunch. But then there’s no need. If we have been parents for a day or many decades, we know that low blood sugar is the root of all evil. And that we didn’t learn from a book. n

The rediscovery of an ‘extinct’ Australian plant led to Pamela Pauline’s obsession with Australia’s threatened species and her extraordinary art.

Words Megan Holbeck Photography Pamela Pauline, Joe Wigdahl

An early morning drive to the Blue Mountains Botanic Garden felt like a trip to another world. The winding road was lined with burnt gum trees, trunks shaggy with new growth: seen through fog and drizzle, punctuated by shafting light, it felt like swimming, not driving. I ran aground on the hill of the garden, where artist Pamela Pauline was waiting, blonde bob shining, camera slung around her neck.

We followed paths into the grounds as the sun won through, burning off the mist. Pamela crouched and photographed plants, exclaiming over the curls in ferns, the colours and light—her American roots evident in her accent, enthusiasm and her large smile displaying impeccable teeth. This grin wasn’t just on the surface, either—she’s immediately, genuinely warm—and we quickly slipped into the ‘why don’t I pop your keys and phone in my bag so your hands are free?’ shortcut to female friendship.

Since 2019, Pamela has been creating composite artworks made entirely of her own photos of threatened Australian ora and fauna. She describes them as ‘beautiful pieces of work that aren’t necessarily literal, but they are actually real. It is a form of bizarre documentary photography.’ She’s made two different series: the 10 works of ‘Fragile Beauty, Rich and Rare’ pay homage to seventeenth century still lifes, while incorporating ora and fauna from each State and Territory, while ‘On the Brink’ comprises eight lush landscapes. To create these works, Pamela has spent almost two years photographing living collections throughout Australia, becoming well acquainted with the country’s botanic gardens. As she guides us through this one, towards the Wollemi pines, she points out where ames nibbled the edge of the grounds.

The conversation follows the res and the trees deep into the garden’s translocated Wollemi wilderness. One of the world’s oldest and rarest plants, they were thought to be extinct until a remote grove was discovered by bushwalking botanists in 1994. I venture that these trees are the whales of the botanical world: an iconic species with a great mediafriendly story—trees as old as the dinosaurs, their location still secret—designed to pique interest in threatened native plants.

Later, over coffee, we come back to the awarenessraising potential of iconic species, leading to mention of David Attenborough’s A Life on Our Planet, a documentary and book which Pamela believes everyone should read. We agree that much of its strength lies in capturing the beauty and diversity of life on Earth, then making it personal—all this amazingness destroyed in one lifetime—before ending with hope.

Pamela’s work has a similar purpose: to showcase the beauty around us, its interdependence and vulnerability, and the biodiversity crisis affecting the world. Her artworks are lush compositions of hundreds of photographs of Australia’s threatened species, that look gorgeous, precious, magical. As Pamela says, ‘I want people to see these artworks as things of beauty, and then feel inspired into action when they learn that all of the ora and fauna featured are threatened species. I want them to ask, “What can I do to make a difference?”’

Pamela has been documenting life through a lens for as long as she can remember. She set up her photography business in 2003, shooting everything from portraits to landscapes to ne art. She’s won numerous national and international awards, is an Accredited Photographer of the Australian Institute of Professional Photography. As she moves through the garden, she makes her craft look easy.

Her recent works are intricate, involved, complicated and beautiful. Each is made entirely from photos, the layers made up of real images rather than paint, applied digitally to make rich, vibrant scenes, as false as they are genuine. Pamela’s blurb describes them as ‘unconventional, allegorical artworks that sit somewhere within conceptual, >

Surrounded by nature, Pamela uses her camera to capture plants, birds and animals, which she will layer into exquisite photographic collages of impossible bouquets and landscapes.

Critically endangered orange-bellied parrots breed in Tasmania: as part of the ‘Fragile Beauty, Rich and Rare’ series, they are represented here with ora and insects endemic to Tasmania.

staged and documentary photography’. Creating them requires more than just traditional photography skills: also needed are vision and intuition, technical computing skills, research ability, an artistic eye and the patience to pull it all together.

Pamela has made a time-lapse lm showing the creation of her ‘On the Brink’ series, reducing the 50-hour process to 30 seconds. The sky and water appear rst, forming an atmospheric, misty background, rich in lights and re ections, before the plants arrive: a branch here, delicate leaves there. Then birds materialise, endangered cockatoos disappearing and reappearing, along with owers spiky and fuzzy, more leaves and plants, colourful birds and frogs. The nished piece is made up of 56 photographs and 113 layers, containing 11 birds, 35 plants and two frogs. Creating these artworks is meditative for Pamela—which is lucky, given the time it takes—and follows weeks researching, nding, photographing and curating the subjects.

In the way of creative people, all of Pamela’s life —her work, travel, passion and curiosity—has fed into her art. A childhood spent exploring the wilds of Wyoming with her family instilled a love of nature and appreciation of the world. Since leaving America in 1988, she has an impressive travel CV, spending time in France, the Netherlands, South Africa, Japan, Indonesia, India and Australia. Travel opened her eyes, but the research skills so crucial for this work came from her Master of Business Administration degree and 10 years working as a market research consultant, while her technical skills began with a computer science degree and digital photography. She’s always been creative— singing, music, photography—but now that her three children are adults, the caring load has lifted. ‘I feel like I’m really coming into my creativity. I’m passionate about it because I feel like it has taken this long.’

Pamela’s strong focus on Australian natives began with a ock of parrots. Her father died in 2018, the news received from her mum in the States. She went for a bushwalk to process and was surrounded by lorikeets. After assuring me she wasn’t a crazy bird lady, she said, ‘My whole body just knew that that was my dad saying, “I’m okay. We’re all connected.”’ This gave her a new appreciation of the freedom and support she had received from her parents, and she decided to focus on where she was, to ‘Grow Where You Are Planted’ as the resulting series was called.

Not long afterwards Pamela read about the Hibbertia fumana, a small, ordinary-looking plant believed extinct until discovered on a development site in Sydney’s south west. It caught her interest, and she began researching Australia’s vulnerable ora. ‘I became so aware of what we risk losing here. The biodiversity crisis is enormous in Australia. I thought, I really want to document all of this in a way that’s not just a boring photograph of an ugly plant.’

She’s travelled extensively to ensure her work is neither boring nor ugly, beginning in 2019 with weekly visits to the Australian PlantBank at Mount Annan, Australia’s largest native plant conservation seedbank. She’s since visited conservation gardens, zoos and rehabilitation centres around Australia to take photographs of their living collections.

Pamela’s upcoming exhibition in Sydney’s Royal Botanic Garden shows how her art has grown. It began with tiny specimens like those in the garden outside—hanging on despite their vulnerability, easily overlooked—blooming into striking pieces full of wonder and beauty. Each living thing shown is important both for itself and for what it represents: the amazing biodiversity of the world, the interconnection of all things and the importance of doing what we can to save them. n Pamela Pauline’s exhibition runs from 6th to 26th April 2021 at The Calyx in the Royal Botanic Garden, Mrs Macquaries Road, Sydney, New South Wales. Visit Pamela’s website at pamelapauline.com or Instagram @pamelapaulinephotography.