Sketcher, and diarist, Lucy Gray was the daughter of Helena (nee Robinson) and Dr John Waters, from Birr, County Offaly, Ireland.
After her marriage to Charles Gray, in 1868, she lived in North Queensland on Hughenden Station and then Glendower. From September 1868 to November 1872 she kept an illustrated journal of her travels and life in the harsh conditions of isolated land. Among numerous small sketches are several of the huts on the Grays’ property and a view of Mount McConnell on the Flinders River. The illustrations are usually incorporated within the text, as in her description of the homestead’s cooking facilities:
The kitchen consists of a gipsy fire under a bough shade. Like this [illustration], which keeps out the sun, while a trench cut around the fire carries away the rain. The baking is done in a camp oven (which you may see in the far front of my sketch).
This particular drawing includes the Grays’ 'general servant’ Nunjita or Jupiter 'calmly smoking his cigarette while his cooking is in progress’. Other illustrations show tribal Aborigines in the district such as an ink sketch of 'an interesting figure in a flowing white dress sailing along the hot sands… a gin arrayed in thin white muslin marching along with a queenly air’. Her evening view of an Aboriginal camp emphasises the fire lit by Aborigines 'in summer as well as winter as they are very much afraid of evil spirits in the darkness’. Another shows a mother wearing a short cotton shirt, with her baby 'slung over her shoulder, strapped up in a piece of bark’ and wrapped in a possum skin.
Mrs Gray obviously intended her journal to be quite widely circulated, even if only within the family, and reworked both illustrations and journal. Occasionally two versions of the same illustration or diary extract survive, one clearly the more polished.
Lucy and her husband Charles moved to Gisborne, New Zealand in 1877 and Lucy died two years later of Tuberculosis.
Her life and work has been documented by biographer, Meg Vivers, in 'Castle to colony: The remarkable life and times of Lucy Sarah Gray (1840-1879’ published by CopyRight Press, Brisbane. (2011)
- Writers:
- Kerr, Joan
Jenna Gray
- Date written:
- 1995
- Last updated:
- 2017
