Design and Art Australia Online

sketcher and collector, was a daughter of Sir John (later Lord) Stanley of Alderley, Cheshire, and Lady Maria Josepha, née Holroyd. In October 1826 Isabella married the Arctic explorer William Edward Parry, knighted in April 1829. On his appointment as commissioner for the Australian Agricultural Company in May, Isabella accompanied him to New South Wales on board the William . They landed at Sydney on 23 December 1829 and Sir Edward recorded in his diary: 'Went with Lady Parry to Cummins’ Hotel, the only tolerable accommodation in Sydney’.

Sir Edward, whose principal duties were the readjustment of the company’s land grant and the reorganisation of the coal mines at Newcastle, left on 6 January 1830 for their headquarters at Port Stephens. Isabella, pregnant and too ill to travel, was left in the care of Eliza Darling at Government House where, on 14 January, her twins – Isabella and Edward – were born. The Parry family moved to their new home, Tahlee, at Port Stephens on 31 March 1830, which her husband had described in a letter to Isabella: 'The house, a long, low building with a verandah in front, is on the side of a steep grassy slope, with lemon and orange trees interspersed, reaching down to the water’s edge. The front windows command a beautiful view of the harbour, and of several thickly-wooded islets with which its surface is studded’.

The family stayed in Sydney at the end of 1831 when Isabella was awaiting the birth of their second daughter, Lucy. (She had 'another little Australian baby boy’ on 21 October 1833.) On 19 October she took the twins to have their portraits drawn by Charles Rodius , 'a Prisoner, who had been recommended to us as the best to do it. He has succeeded very tolerably with dear Teddy, but Myttie is a failure.’ Isabella herself had no talent for figure drawing, as she bewailed in a letter home in 1830 when describing the exotic appearance of the Port Stephens Aborigines painted for a corroboree. She did, however, make a collection of local Aboriginal artefacts, which she enclosed inside a large carved New Zealand canoe ('an exact model of the Canoe in the frontispiece of Cook’s Voyages’) sent home to Alderley accompanied by her sketch identifying the objects: _Bo_m_r_ng_ (an 'instrument of amusement … though sometimes turned into a Weapon of War’), Nulla Nulla , Waddie and _Throwing Stick or W_m_r__ . Also included were 'three spears, the one with 4 prongs is called a Mooting and used to spear Fish with at Night, the points are made of Kangaroo bones’, and other objects.

A perfectly conventional gentlewoman, Isabella’s normal artistic activities consisted of drawing watercolour and pencil views from nature. Some of her Australian sketches, dated 1832, are now in the Scott Polar Research Institute, Cambridge. Unsigned copies dated April 1833 were made either by Aunt Kitty or her sister-in-law Matilda Parry, both of whom Isabella urged to indulge in this activity in order to allow wider circulation of her sketches within the family circle. (She expected Aunt Kitty to improve on her work.) An architectural elevation of Tahlee Cottage in the collection was 'kindly made by Mr Armstrong’ (to show the wings the Parrys had added to the house) but several of Isabella’s more picturesque views include this 'long, low building’ and its 'beautiful view of the harbour’. View of Port Stephens from the Verandah at Tahlee House shows the twins’ little pull-along cart: 'the Verandah is delightful for the Piccaninnies to play in, as they can be turned loose in it, without danger’, she noted. View of Port Stephens Harbour from a Seat at the Back of Tahlee House is inscribed, 'a favourite play place of the children’, while another view from the front of the house includes the edge of the New Zealand canoe.

Soon after her arrival Isabella wrote that she longed to paint – ie in oils – for she found the colours of the Australian countryside unexpectedly varied and beautiful. Yet, because of her family commitments, it is doubtful if more than an occasional watercolour wash ever eventuated. When sending home a pencil view of Tahlee house and gardens drawn from a rowing boat 'on our lake’ (the artist, as usual, being accompanied by her 'two darlings’), she complained that it was 'impossible to do justice to the View in pencil’ but had no time to do more. This sketch used the device of adding tiny birds flying above particular features as a key to the annotations added verso. One bird can be seen over 'Hill, where we have made walks; one way to the Garden’. Two identify the Bathing House; there are three over Jones’ and Mrs Ivey’s cottages; four show the 'Way to the Garden’. Two tiny 'Blacks in a canoe’ near the 'Cottage where Mr Ebsworth lives’ provide local colour. Her drawing of the settlement at Carrington, which she mentioned finishing on site on 14 March 1832 while the twins 'visited’ a long-suffering villager, is annotated in the same way. She also sent home a simple architectural elevation and plan of the Agricultural Company’s chapel of St John at nearby Stroud. The Parrys built it in 1833 as a gift to the settlement and it appears to have been designed and drawn up by Lady Parry herself in consultation with her husband. (The bricklayer was a man called Saville who, Isabella complained, was often too drunk to work.) While in Sydney awaiting Lucy’s birth she sketched La Perouse’s Monument at Botany Bay on 11 August 1831, later making a copy for an English friend wanting to have a memento of the place where Sir Joseph Banks had landed. Of all 'Bella’s pretty drawings’, her father preferred Coal Works at Newcastle, New South Wales , it being most closely connected with Sir Edward and the Agricultural Company’s business interests.

Despite her children taking up so much of her time and energy, Lady Parry was also an enthusiastic landscape gardener and animal and plant collector. (She proposed taking a collection of live native animals home when they left, including some of the black swans they had on their 'lake’.) All the Parrys’ artistic, architectural and collecting activities seem to have been her initiatives, but she deferred to her husband’s superiority in these as in all other aspects of her life. On 13 October 1830 she wrote to her mother: 'I have begun to make a collection of dried plants, and hope I shall succeed well with them under the dear Man’s tuition, but they are more difficult than Arctic plants to preserve, being very juicy and the colors soon fly, being so very delicate and bright’. With the help of James, a young English manservant they had brought out, she completed a collection of insects and butterflies to send home a few months after arrival at Port Stephens, but mice got to the box and ate them all. She persevered and the following year was able to send home some flowers, although now having successfully managed their preservation Isabella was having trouble identifying her specimens. Many, she said, were not in Loddige and everyone in the neighbourhood was 'dull about flowers, excepting Dr Stacy, who knows more of flowers I am sorry to say than Medicine '.

When Sir Edward’s commission with the Australian Agricultural Company expired in March 1834, the Parrys all went home to England on board the Persian , leaving in June and arriving in November. Edward became assistant Poor Laws commissioner for a time and, from 1837, comptroller of steam machinery at the Admiralty. They lived in Norfolk and London and attended the coronation of Queen Victoria in Westminster Abbey on 28 June 1838, a major event noted in Isabella’s ever-diminishing diary entries. On 11 May 1839 at Norfolk she gave birth to still-born twin boys, the last of her ten children. She died two days later. The directors of the Agricultural Company erected a tablet to her memory in her church at Stroud.

Writers:

Staff Writer

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

2011