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sketcher and collector, elder daughter of Wellington Cochrane Bundock and Mary Ellen Bundock , was born in February 1845 at her maternal grandfather’s property, Merton, on the Hunter River, New South Wales. Mary spent most of her childhood on the family property at Wyangarie on the Richmond River. The family led a very isolated life, but Mary became friendly with the local Aboriginal people and interested in the native flora. Educated by her mother and for a few months by Rev. Arthur Selwyn and his wife, Rose, at Grafton, the women presumably encouraged her interest in sketching. However, Mary’s enthusiasm for watercolour painting was specifically aroused in September 1853, she later wrote, when, aged eight, she went with her mother and Uncle Edward (Ogilvie) to Lismore to attend the marriage of Teresa Wilson, a daughter of family friends, to Oliver Fry, the district commissioner: 'The eldest Miss Wilson (Bessie) painted flowers well and let me have a small box of colours to try and paint flowers myself and from that time on one of my greatest pleasures has been flower painting’.

Mary Bundock later went to boarding school at Parramatta, but she remained only a few months as she developed asthma. For three years from about 1860 she lived with her grandmother at Fairlight, Edgecliff Road, Edgecliff, and attended Miss Moore’s nearby school. In old age she wrote: 'I have a little pencil sketch of Double Bay as seen from the tower windows of Fairlight showing the place as it looked then’. At the age of 17 she returned home to take over the teaching of the five youngest children from her mother: 'I found it no easy job to teach brothers and sisters so little younger than myself and who were very ready to disobey a mere sister’.

Mary’s father took her to Britain and Europe in 1885. In the early 1890s she became the second wife of Thomas Murray-Prior, a member of the Queensland Parliament whose family held land at Wyangarie. He died not long afterwards and Mary took over the management of his various properties for some years. McBryde states that she was known as 'the Florence Nightingale of the Upper Richmond’. Then she moved to Sydney. In the 1920s she went on a second European tour, was taken ill on the return voyage and died at Perth in April 1924.

Mary Bundock and her sister Alice were significant collectors of Aboriginal artefacts from the Wyangarie district. Mary’s collection of dilly-bags was shown at the Sydney International Exhibition in 1879 and subsequently presented to the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew, England. She sent dilly-bags, water vessels and fishing lines to the 1883 Amsterdam International, Colonial and Export Trade Exhibition and subsequently donated boomerangs, water vessels and message sticks to the Rijksmuseum voor Volkunde, Leiden (in 1888 and 1892). She gave boomerangs and water vessels to the Australian Museum in Sydney in 1895. Further collections of dilly-bags and necklets were also presented to the Australian Museum, as well as to Leiden.

McBryde considers these collections exceptional. 'Not only are they larger and more comprehensive than any other group of artefacts from the north coast of New South Wales, but they are also carefully documented. With the items come examples of the raw material used, notes on the technique of manufacture, and on their Aboriginal names. This material was collected not for its curiosity value, but as representing the life and culture of a distinct society, soon to disappear. This awareness of the urgency of the record, and the professional expertise shown in the documentation of her material, mark Miss Bundock as a pioneer in Australian cultural anthropology’.

According to her elder daughter, once established at the pioneer property, Wyangarie, on the Richmond River, Ellen Bundock never saw a woman friend, 'except on the very rare occasions when she went to see Mrs Wilson at Lismore’. She also frequently visited her brother’s modest bachelor home, Yulgilbar, on the Clarence River, the subject of her only known (attributed) painting.

The Bundocks had six more children at Wyangarie. Ellen taught all six boys and two girls until they were old enough to go to boarding school just as she and her brothers had been taught by her mother. Her husband held Latin classes for the boys, and later on Mary, as the elder daughter, assisted in the teaching.

Writers:

Kerr, Joan

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

2011