Famous Australian artists showcased in book series from NLA Publishing

Olive Cotton and Wolfgang Sievers in The Artists of the National Library of Australia

Published on 08 Jan 2025

Media release

Two new books in The Artists of the National Library of Australia series will be published in February 2025. The series began with 2 volumes in 2024 and highlights artists represented in the National Library’s collections. Each of the now 4 volumes feature over 60 striking images by the artist, including some of their most iconic works.

July 2024 saw the publication of Ellis Rowan and Harold Cazneaux.

Ellis Rowan (1848–1922) was a painter, naturalist, writer and explorer. For almost 50 years, she travelled to remote parts of Australia, India, Europe, America and New Guinea in pursuit of exotic flowers and wildlife to paint. One of Australia’s most-loved botanical artists, she was a woman who made her mark at a time when scientific illustration was a male domain. The Ellis Rowan collection at the National Library of Australia comprises 919 watercolours and gouaches painted between about 1870 and 1920. This represents less than one third of Rowan’s total output.

The book includes an essay written by Patricia Fullerton, art consultant and foremost expert on Rowan’s artwork and life.

Harold Cazneaux (1878–1953) is widely considered the greatest Australian photographer of the early 20th century. In portraiture, architectural and industrial photography, landscapes and documentary work, he showed versatility, great imagination and technical mastery, and inspired the next generation of Australian photographers. In 1978, Max Dupain penned a thoughtful appreciation of ‘Caz’ and selected the images reproduced in this new edition. The Cazneaux collection at the National Library comprises 272 exhibition prints, 200 working photographs and about 4,300 glass negatives, dating from roughly 1904 to 1940.

The book also includes a biography of Cazneaux written by Alec Bolton.

Book covers side by side for the Artists of the National Library of Australia books about Ellis Rowan and Harold Cazneaux

In February 2025 the series expands with Olive Cotton and Wolfgang Sievers.

Olive Cotton is one of Australia’s most respected photographers, with a career that spanned over 6 decades. In 1995, the National Library of Australia produced a volume collating over 60 works. Olive Cotton reproduces the 1995 edition in a new and affordable format and is a beautifully produced survey of Olive Cotton’s finest photographs dating from the 1930s up to the late 1990s.

Each photograph is accompanied by Cotton’s own commentary where she speaks about her compositions. Helen Ennis’s introduction reveals some of the complex factors that have shaped Cotton’s photographs and photographic career, while a biographical memoir written by Cotton’s daughter, Sally McInerney, provides a personal glimpse into the life of a photographer in country Australia.

The Olive Cotton collection at the National Library comprises 58 photographic prints, most of which are silver gelatin, three interviews with Olive Cotton in the oral history collection, and the Papers of Olive Cotton in the manuscripts collection.

At the outbreak of the Second World War, Wolfgang Sievers (1913–2007) fled Nazi Germany to make a new home in Australia. Through his striking images of the post-war manufacturing boom, he would go on to become one of the country’s eminent photographers. Sievers’s images celebrate the excitement of the modern machine age. The photographer documented the height of Australian industry, recording places such as textile mills, match factories, oil refineries and treatment plants – many of them long since gone. In these places, Sievers found unexpected beauty and virtue, forming an invaluable record of Australia’s industrial past, history, culture and the form of photography.

The images in this book are selected from those curated by Ennis in the 2011 edition, republished in a new and affordable format. The Wolfgang Sievers Photographic Archive consists of about 13,700 prints and 51,700 negatives and transparencies, making it one of the largest photographic collections held in the National Library of Australia.