Design and Art Australia Online

painter, photographer and craftworker, was born at Rockhampton, Queensland, on 9 May 1893, only daughter of William Henry Rudd, who had come to Brisbane in 1876 as a twenty-one year old assisted migrant from the north of England. After a stint droving on the Georgina in Western Queensland, he became an outback traveller with the Rockhampton firm of Walter Reid; by the turn of the century he was managing director. In 1887 Rudd had married Christina Amelia, daughter of Robert Ross of Taranganba near Yeppoon whom contemporaries described as 'a mesmeristic salesman’ and 'the owner of the best blood [stock] and worst country in Queensland’. Iris was brought up with the traditional artistic accomplishments of middle-class Australian girls. She produced watercolour and oil copies and more or less original black-and-white sketches, as well as relief wood-carvings and a range of needlework. She was sent to school at the fashionable New England Girls Grammar School, Armidale (NSW) and 'finished’ with a trip 'home’ to England with her parents in 1914, recorded in watercolour views.

As well as inheriting a strong Protestant work ethic and sense of duty, Iris had initiative and curiosity. In the argot of the time she was a 'goer’. More than any of her six brothers she took after her father, and she both admired and fought with him. In 1921 she married an AIF soldier lately returned from France, a grandson of old JS 'Bully’ Kerr, headmaster of the Brisbane Normal School. Before the marriage Iris’s father gave her a compact 25.20 calibre Colt automatic to 'shoot the bastard with should he step out of line’. She never did and died in his arms forty years later.

The year before her marriage Iris made a trip through western Queensland and into the Territory with her brother Bill and his Brabazon in-laws. She took a folding Kodak camera that produced postcard-size negatives. The surviving photographs of that trip are the earliest of a series which left an unplanned record of her life in western and central Queensland over the next quarter century.

Following her marriage, she settled with her husband on Hampden Downs, a property 120 miles north west of Winton. Her life during the 1920s and 1930s was the common lot of most western women: home-making, rearing children, nursing them in sickness and death, surviving through drought and depression, and always offering visitors that hospitality for which the west was famous. Artistic activities were subsumed in making clothes and furnishings, but she continued to fill the ubiquitous autograph books with lively beings inspired by Norman Lindsay’s bears, Louis Wain’s cats, and Aboriginal corroboree groups in the manner of Tommy McRae.

Iris continued to use her Kodak, but formal family portraits were taken by professionals. This one of Iris herself by the Brisbane society photographer Trissie Deazeley can be dated to about 1928, after Deazeley had moved from Toowoomba (where her studio is recorded in 1924) and after she dropped her 1927 Brisbane partner, her sister Elsie Deazeley. She is said to have been still working in the 1930s.

In 1940 Iris settled on the coast, where it rained each year and the grass was green. The Colt re-emerged in 1942 when a Japanese invasion seemed imminent. As her home was on a spur of the Blackall Range overlooking the northern approaches to Brisbane, she became a Volunteer Air Observer reporting on aircraft movements. Following a car accident in 1950 she moved to Brisbane, where she died on 31 January 1961.

Writers:

Kerr, James Semple

Date written:

1995

Last updated:

2011