natural history painter, was born in Sydney on 3 November 1860, daughter of Richard Birkett and Elizabeth, née Palmer. During the mid-1870s she lived at Wharf Street, Kangaroo Point, Brisbane, in the home of the naturalist, artist and musician , Silvester Diggles . Being a talented musician himself, Diggles encouraged Rowena to develop her musical ability; she was organist at St Mary’s Anglican Church, Kangaroo Point, at the age of thirteen.
Rowena has been credited with assisting Diggles (whose second wife, Albina, was her aunt) with the illustrations and colouring of some of the 600 plates in his 21-part Ornithology of Australia (1865-70). Indeed, in 1925 A.H. Chisholm stated that 'the late Mrs. Cummings, of Brisbane… was chief artist in respect of the six hundred plates for the big work on Australian birds projected, in the seventies, by her uncle, the late Sylvester Diggles’. It is even more likely that she coloured the lithographs in his later two-volume Companion to Gould’s Handbook (1877) and worked with him on an unpublished (and incomplete) volume, Australian Insects and Their Transformations .
Her engagement to marry a member of Ipswich’s prominent Chubb family ended tragically when her fiancé was drowned at sea. She suffered from asthma and a change of climate was indicated. She took a position as governess with the Lethbridge family near Roma – possibly after the death of Silvester Diggles in March 1880 – then moved to Townsville. On 1 June 1882, she married William Hooper Durant Cumming, an employee of the Queensland National Bank, in St James’s Church of England, Townsville.
William Cumming became an accountant and teller in the bank’s branches in North and Central Queensland, and Rowena followed her husband to postings at Port Douglas (1881) and Bundaberg (1883). Her three children – Albert, Beatrice Louise and Miranda Elsie – were born at the latter. She kept up her interest in art by decorating illuminated addresses for presentation to local dignitaries. William Cumming eventually left the bank and the family moved to Eidsvold, where William became an auctioneer.
When the business failed, Rowena started teaching the piano. She was organist at St Andrew’s Church of England, Eidsvold, for many years. She was also postmistress at Glassford, near Eidsvold, and became a leading light in the formation of the town’s Philharmonic Society. In later life she spent some years at Wolfram, a mining township in North Queensland, where her eldest daughter had settled. In July 1915 she became ill and was moved to a nursing home at Sandgate, near Brisbane, where she died on 17 July 1915 at the age of fifty-four. Her photograph, taken by Albert Lomer of Brisbane (c.1875), is in the John Oxley Library.
A book of 126 drawings of butterflies and moths by Birkett-Cummings and Diggles remains with the family, while prints after her work published in Brisbane in 1866-70 are held in the James Hardie and John Oxley libraries, State Library of Queensland.
- Writers:
- Byrne, Dianne
- Date written:
- 1999
- Last updated:
- 2011
