painter, illustrator and author, was born on 20 August 1905 on the goldfields at Kalgoorlie WA, her father, an architect and surveyor, and his newly-married wife being among the earliest pioneers in the town. They settled there from Adelaide with four children. The family later returned to Perth and Sheila spent most of an idyllic childhood near the bush. Due to financial insecurity, however, they moved house constantly before settling in Melbourne. After completing her schooling at Toorak College, Sheila studied briefly at the National Gallery School – her only formal art training (graduated from it according to Timms’s obit in AMA )- leaving to become a commercial artist.
She worked in London as a poster artist and illustrator of children’s books, painted at weekends and made children’s friezes and toys, which she exhibited in mixed and solo shows at Melbourne and Sydney in 1930-31. The National Gallery of Victoria purchased a drawing from her first exhibition and Eric Thake invited her to exhibit in a mixed show that included James Flett and Herbert McClintock . In 1931, with Australia in the midst of the Depression, she left for London. While looking for a job and sharing a bedsitter, she illustrated her first children’s book, Margaret Brown’s Black Tuppenny (1932). At a low ebb financially, she became the first woman to be employed by Shell Mex Advertising. But she refused full-time work in order to continue to illustrate her own children’s books.
In 1934, at the invitation of her New Zealand friends, the artist James Cook and his wife, Ruth, she went to Catalonia, shared a primitive apartment with them in Gerona and enjoyed her first chance to paint every day. Back in England, she married and settled in Northumberland where her husband operated an old watermill; her studio was an empty, straw-carpeted hen house. The Bowdens moved to the Cotswolds to escape the northern cold and Sheila primed and painted her canvases in an Elizabethan attic. During 1937 they exchanged places with a friend in London where she joined and exhibited with the Women’s International Club.
While exhibiting, Sheila wrote and illustrated children’s books. Little Gray 'Colo’: The Adventures of a Koala Bear was published in New York in 1939 (NLA copy acquired 1999). Two published by Hamish Hamilton were Pepito (from her Spanish sojourn) and John Appleby (from living in the old mill). Published at the outbreak of World War II, the entire edition of John Appleby was destroyed during a bombing raid over London. At the outbreak of war, Hawkins was employed at RAAF Headquarters. She also painted murals in the New Zealand Forces canteen, drew and painted the long-boats carrying coal (manned by women) and visited Scotland to draw the Australian Forestry Units.
After the war, she refused an offer from Hamish Hamilton to publish all her future books and instead continued as an illustrator of other authors’ texts in order to support herself and her daughter. She was well known for her humorous animal illustrations and worked for various publishers, including Penguin, Faber & Faber, Heinemann and Methuen. Animals of Australia , published under the new Puffin imprint in 1947, sold more than 50,000 copies. Between 1930 and 1960 she illustrated fifty children’s picture books and was the author of ten of them. In 1956 Wish and the Magic Nut , written by Peggy Barnard and illustrated by Hawkins, was chosen as Australian Picture Book of the Year. In 1962 Angus and Robertson published her own hand-lithographed book of cartoons, Australian Animals and Birds .
During the 1950s Hawkins had several solo exhibitions. On a visit to Australia with her daughter in 1954 she exhibited six war works at the Pylon Lookout for (or on behalf of) the NSW Forestry Commission. They were offered to the Australian War Memorial in 1956 but rejected as the Memorial already had two works. In 1969 she exhibited with the Chelsea Artists. During the 1970s she joined the Free Painters and Sculptors and participated in mixed exhibitions and several solo exhibitions at Loggia Gallery, London.
Hawkins continued to live in London and exhibit with a variety of galleries until 1993 when she showed with the Ridley Arts Society. She died in London on 10 January 1999.
- Writers:
- Wilkins, Lola
- Date written:
- 1995
- Last updated:
- 1992
