painter, illustrator and cartoonist, was born at Goodwood West, Adelaide, on 8 September 1896, youngest of the four children of William Irven Dawkins, an accountant, and Annie Eliza, née Roberts. For many years the family lived at 'Karadoc’, 36 Young Street, Parkside (no sale of their home was recorded until 1933-34) and Mabel studied at the South Australian School of Art for five years. During WWI she worked primarily as a commercial artist from a studio in the Hindmarsh Buildings, Grenfell Street, Adelaide. On 14 March 1916 she wrote to the South Australian State War Council with a proposal for a recruitment poster: 'Dear Sir,/ I wish to submit to you a miniature recruiting poster design/ which I would be pleased to/ present to the state on the condition that my name/ appears on each copy issued.’ (Information Samantha Littley)
Her design was accepted and 1,000 copies of the poster ordered from the Government Photolithographer, A. Vaughan, at a cost of £10 (SL). The graphically powerful Enlist!! (colour photolithograph, AWM V1074) understandably presents the most attractive face of World War I – the 'six-bob-a-day tourist’ image that attracted many young men. Seeing Egypt and visiting the Pyramids and the Sphinx in sunny spare moments was a vastly more attractive prospect than the mud of the Somme, although joining 'our boys beside the Nile’ was a far less likely destination. The appeal of the accompanying verse to mateship (where the mate is wounded and needing help – but still smiling) combined with a pleasure trip visiting some of the world’s greatest monuments would never have fooled the family man, the old hand or those critical of the war. Such simple propaganda was aimed at the young men who still believed that war was an adventure, more fun than staying at home.
That it appeared early in the war made the message more believable, probably to the artist as much as to her audience. Thousands of Australian recruits unwittingly colluded in this propaganda exercise by sending home postcards and photographs from Egypt, frequently with themselves and their 'Hale and Hearty’ mates posed with pyramid, Sphinx and camel en route to France. Such symbols of Egypt alone signified duty done. Dawkins does not entirely dispense with the military presence but her line of distant silhouetted marchers are an attractive compositional device, no more realistic or militaristic than comparable pre-war silhouettes by Blamire Young or the influential English 'Beggarstaff Brothers’ (William Nicholson and James Pryde).
As a member of the South Australian Society of Arts (SASA), Dawkins exhibited in the Society’s annual exhibitions in 1916-18, showing (inter alia) Orient in1916, Ballet Costume Designs and Head of Old Man in 1917 and Theatrical Costume in 1918, which suggest she may also have been designing for the theatre at the time. She certainly designed the program (with an allegorical woman on the cover) for a SASA Patriotic Evening held on 3 July 1917, which included banjo duets, recitations, papers, a dramatic sketch and the judging of an Exhibition of Pictures (listed) by Art Club members (the artists are unnamed but presumably included Dawkins).
Dawkins’ illustrative work for the Adelaide magazine Shopping : The Australian Housewife’s Monthly Newspaper , published July-December 1918, includes a page of witty cartoons parodying the current theatrical production of the Bing Boys. She drew art nouveauish illustrations for each segment of the publication, including 'Miss Vanity’s Page’, 'The Garden of Beauty & Usefulness’, 'Poultry Notes’ and 'Who’s Who & What’s Doing’. In 1918 she also designed two covers, a Japonaise image of a woman peeping over her fan with a cherry blossom branch behind her for September and a smart girl-about-town twirling a striped umbrella in her hands for November.
Dawkins moved to Melbourne about 1920. (She disappears from the Adelaide electoral roll in 1919 and is not listed in the SASA annual reports after this date.) In 1925, as a witness to her sister Eva’s marriage, she gave her place of residence as South Yarra, Victoria, her occupation 'home duties’. In the 1930s she married John Francis Williams, later Sir John, chairman and managing director of the Herald and Weekly Times ; they had a son, John Irven. The family lived in Broken Hill and Brisbane before returning to Melbourne, where Mabel studied with George Bell in 1948-54. Bell had considerable influence on her style. According to McCulloch, 'the qualities that give her work identity are lightness and soft colour, combined with firm cubist structure, all carefully considered elements in the pattern of George Bell’s teaching and philosophy’.
She also studied briefly under Iain MacNab at the Warwick Gardens Art School, London (Grosvenor School?). She exhibited with the Melbourne Contemporary Artists and was its president from 1957 [1959 acc. to McCulloch] to 1965, when the society was disbanded. She used her position to promote the cause of art and artists. During the late 1950s, having identified a paucity of exhibition space in Melbourne, she initiated the building of the Argus Gallery. For six years, she was chairman of the Red Cross Picture Library sub-committee (see McCulloch 1984, memorial exhibition catalogue, 1981).
Mabel Williams died on October 24 1980 at Freemasons’ Hospital, East Melbourne. A memorial exhibition was held at the Melbourne Lyceum Club in January 1981. The catalogue lists 85 paintings by Williams (and gives their owners), not all of which were in the exhibition. In his introduction, Alan McCulloch called her 'a woman who loved art and artists, and was herself a painter of great sensitivity’.
- Writers:
- Littley, Samantha
Callaway, Anita
Kerr, Joan
- Date written:
- 1995
- Last updated:
- 1992
