Image of the Week: 28th September - 4th October
28 September 2015
Image Credit:
MB558, Ursula Bethell papers, Reference code 16138, [Ursulawith cat], Macmillan Brown Library, University of Canterbury.
Macmillan Brown Library holds an extensive archive of Bethell’s papers and a significant collection of her watercolours. One you will hopefully be very familiar with, though possibly without knowing it, is Sun went behind a cloud - which is the image representing our Heritage Collections on the UC Library homepage. You can see more of the multi-talented Bethell’s work by searching her name on Kā Kohika, and limiting the collection type to art or you could read all about her and her work at the nzepc.
Here is one of Bethell’s poems (about her cat):
Garden Lion
O Michael, you are at once the enemy
And the chief ornament of our garden,
Scrambling up rose-posts, nibbling at nepeta,
Making your lair where tender plants should flourish,
Or proudly couchant on a sun-warmed stone.
What do you do all night there,
When we seek our soft beds,
And you go off, old roisterer,
Away into the dark?
I think you play at leopards and panthers;
I think you wander on to foreign properties;
But on winter mornings you are a lost orphan
Pitifully wailing underneath our windows;
And in summer, by the open doorway,
You come in pad, pad, lazily to breakfast,
Plumy tail waving, with a fine swagger,
Like a drum-major, or a parish beadle,
Or a rich rajah, or the Grand Mogul.
From a Garden in the Antipodes (Sidgwick & Jackson, 1929)
