Australian Dictionary of Biography

Sheila Hawkins, no date

Courtesy of Anna de Polnay

Sheila Margaret Hawkins (1905–1999), painter, illustrator, and children’s writer, was born on 20 August 1905 at Kalgoorlie, Western Australia, third of four children of Victorian-born Geoffrey Oswald Hawkins, surveyor and architect, and his English-born wife Beatrice Mary, née Edwards. From around age five Sheila grew up in Perth, where an otherwise idyllic childhood was overshadowed by the tragic death of her older brother in 1912. Described by her father as a girl ‘full of originality and character’ (Hawkins 1908), she enjoyed drawing and the outdoors, and was an avid collector of insects and native pets. When her father enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force in 1915, she moved to Melbourne with her mother and sisters, where she attended Toorak College (1916–22). An all-round athlete and twice dux of her form, she passed her Intermediate certificate in 1922.

Hawkins inherited an artistic talent from her father, and in 1923 enrolled at the National Gallery Art School, Melbourne. Her family’s financial circumstances made further study difficult, and she left after one term to work instead, initially for the chief artist at the Melbourne Sun News-Pictorial and then at a leather and fancy goods shop. In 1927 she used her savings to enrol in a course on commercial art at Swinburne Technical College. The following year she accepted a job at a printing firm and joined the Victorian Artists’ Society. Her art increasingly appeared in exhibitions, and in 1930 she was invited to exhibit alongside a group of young Melbourne artists known as the Embryos, with one of her black and white drawings purchased by the National Gallery of Victoria.

In February 1932 Hawkins sailed for England to pursue her art career. She travelled with her friend Margaret Brown, with whom she collaborated on a small children’s book, Black Tuppenny (1932). Recruited by the advertising firm Shell Mex, she worked in its studio part time until 1934, when she left to spend a year painting with two friends in Catalonia, Spain. Though ‘living as simply and cheaply as only Spanish peasants then could’ (Hawkins 1984), she relished the opportunity to dedicate herself to her art.

Soon after returning to England Hawkins married Hugh Max Bowden, an English farmer, on 11 January 1936 at the Hexham Register Office, Northumberland. The couple’s financial circumstances were desperate. They moved from Northumberland to the Cotswolds before settling in London in 1937, where Hawkins, who continued to use her birth name professionally, exhibited with the Women’s International Art Club and established a working relationship with the rising publishing house Hamish Hamilton. In 1938 it published two large and lavish children’s books she wrote and illustrated: Pepito, inspired by a boy she had sketched in Spain, and Appleby John, based on drawings completed while living at her husband’s old mill in Northumberland. The timing of their publication was disastrous, with both books overshadowed by the onset of war. They were reissued by the American publisher Harper & Brothers, with Pepito becoming one of her best-known books.

In 1939 Hawkins earned a reputation as an animal artist after illustrating the first of an eventual four African animal books for the author Geraldine Elliot. Between then and 1942 she also wrote and illustrated five other animal-themed books for children, including Little Grey ‘Colo’ (1939), a story about a young koala, which was her first book to feature an Australian native animal. In the early 1940s she was also invited to produce, by hand lithography, illustrations for the first series of Penguin’s Puffin Picture Books; two of her books, A Book of Fables (1942) and Animals of Australia (1947), were published in the series.

During World War II Hawkins had various commercial jobs, including producing a popular comic advertising strip for Tibs cat food. She was also employed as a civilian at the Royal Australian Air Force Overseas Headquarters in London, where she painted four portraits of distinguished airmen. Though her application to become an official Australian war artist was unsuccessful, she spent a fortnight in Scotland sketching the Australian Forestry Unit at work; two of the resulting paintings were purchased by the Australian War Memorial in 1951. The war years also brought the birth of her daughter, Anna, in 1945, and the end of her marriage after her husband became involved with another woman while serving in occupied Berlin.

Towards the end of the war, Hawkins was commissioned to produce illustrations for Britain’s postwar reconstruction programs. She was an early member of the Hampstead Artists Council (1946), and by the 1950s her art was being exhibited both in Britain and Australia. One of her most popular exhibitions, Pictures for Children (later Animals in Design), was admired by one critic for its stylistic range, from detailed animal studies to ‘gay, mad, happy pictures’ in which ‘she creates a fragile, but genuine world of the imagination’ (Mullaly 1953).

Returning to Australia in 1948, Hawkins settled in Sydney with her daughter. These were difficult but productive years and, despite periods of illness due to chronic asthma, she did a great deal of illustrative work for book publishers and editors, including for the Sydney Morning Herald and the School Paper. She returned to England in early 1952. Over the next ten years she illustrated a number of children’s books, including Peggy Barnard’s Wish and the Magic Nut (1956), which won the Australian Children’s Picture Book of the Year award. She also published Australian Animals and Birds (1962) with Angus & Robertson, an ambitious book with a long and difficult gestation, but which ignited her desire to return to easel painting.

Hawkins published her last children’s book, More Animals, in 1968. She became a member of the Free Painters and Sculptors in 1976 (fellow 1996–98), and held solo exhibitions at the Loggia Gallery, London (1976–80). Throughout the 1980s she remained a practicing artist, and in the mid-1990s began collaborating with the historian of children’s literature Marcie Muir. Although Hawkins increasingly struggled with her memory and osteoarthritis, she maintained an extensive correspondence with Muir that greatly enriched the last years of her life. She died on 10 January 1999 at St Teresa’s Home for the Elderly, London, and was survived by her daughter. Her ashes were scattered at Holland Park, London.

A ‘sparky’ (Times 1999) woman with ‘a passionate enthusiasm for everything’ (de Polnay 1999), Hawkins could be eccentric, chronically honest, and, to those who could cope with that honesty, a deeply loyal friend. Though she never intended to become a children’s illustrator, her lifelong love of the natural world inspired depictions of animals, using differing styles that were widely admired for their crispness and vitality, and led to her being described as the ‘first Australian children’s book illustrator to make an international reputation’ (Muir 1999, 13). A large collection of her work is held by the Mitchell Library in Sydney.