For the Love of Nature

Ebenezer Edward Gostelow (1866–1944) spent much of his 50-year-long teaching career in country schools across New South Wales. A keen naturalist, he would brighten his blackboards with captivating chalk drawings of birds and flowers. Although not a trained artist, he began to paint as many wildflowers as he could find in the different places where he was teaching. Many of his watercolours depict, in minute detail, buds, flowers, leaves and seeds, arranged in exquisite compositions. After retirement, Gostelow gave himself the new challenge of depicting all the recorded species of Australian birds.

In For the Love of Nature, a short biography of Gostelow by award-winning author Christobel Mattingley is followed by beautiful full-colour plates of his bird and flower watercolours, drawn from the National Library of Australia’s collection of some 860 of Gostelow’s works.