September–October 2015 25A fishy tale. Ethel King adds the finishing
painterly touches to a large specimen of groper
in preparation for display at an international
exhibition in Dunedin, NZ, in 1926.
I
N MAY 1925, the Fijian government contracted the
Australian Museum in Sydney to prepare a series
of fish specimens. These would be for display at the
New Zealand and South Seas International Exhibition in
Dunedin, NZ, which was to open in November that year.
In mid-October, four fish entombed in blocks of ice
arrived in Sydney aboard the SS Sierra. The largest, a kind
of fish known in Fiji as koakoa and in Australia as a
Queensland groper, weighed in at nearly 160kg and
measured 2m from snout to tail.
Before the process of taxidermy could begin, the
colours and other characteristics of the fish had to be
carefully recorded so that they could be faithfully
rendered once the creatures were stuffed and mounted
on stands. Ethel King was a talented artist and scientific
illustrator who worked for the museum in the 1920s and
’30s. She had trained under the famous Australian artist
Julian Ashton, and she specialised in fish, snakes and,
occasionally, botanical subjects – most notably providing
the 137 colour plates for J.R. Kinghorn’s landmark book
Snakes of Australia, in 1929.
Miss King made detailed pencil and watercolour
sketches of the four specimens after they had thawed. The
fish were then skinned and the skins immersed in spirits
to preserve and prepare them for the next stage. Because
there was no container large enough for the monster fish’s
skin, the museum’s ever-resourceful technicians con-
structed a suitably sized glass tank.
In the meantime, Miss King became ill and, after
surgery, was sent away to her parents’ home in Lismore,
NSW. The museum chiefs, ever anxious to meet their
commitments, tried in vain to find a suitably skilled
replacement artist. Over the next few months, taxidermists,
led by H.S. Grant and assisted by J.H. Wright and
W. Barnes, prepared the groper for exhibition. After
pondering the challenges of tackling such a large fish, Grant
employed a process usually reserved for large mammals.
Using Miss King’s drawings and measurements as
reference, a frame was fashioned from redwood and
covered with wire gauze. A thin coat of papier-mâché was
added on top. Once a coating of shellac was applied to the
whole, the surface was ready to take the preserved fish
skin. The fit was perfect. King was then coaxed from her
country retreat back to Sydney to paint the groper’s true
colours back onto the giant replica, resulting in “an
excellent example of modern taxidermy”, according to the
Australian Museum Magazine of the day.
The four fish finally arrived in NZ on 1 March 1926
and were exhibited during the last two months of the fair.
By the time it closed on 1 May 1926, the exhibition had
attracted 3.2 million visitors – more than double NZ’s
total population at the time.
CHRISSIE GOLDRICKSNAPSHOT
GEORGE C. CLUTTON, COURTESY THE AUSTRALIAN MUSEUM, SYDNEY /Epinephelus laneceolatus