It was over a February lunch of runny cheese, quince paste and bread that Betty Churcher showed me her unexpected find. A forgotten notebook of her drawings, hasty sketches made as she travelled through galleries of the world when director of the National Gallery of Australia.

The delight was multiple. She could rightly take pleasure in her skill as an artist. The sketched works were not favourites or deliberately chosen, they were chanced upon as she made her way to meetings where she was intent on securing loans for a planned exhibition in Australia. The sketches and marginalia record her fresh impressions of an artist or work she might not have instinctively turned to.

And now, with the discovery of this notebook in the middle of 2014 there was a unexpected opportunity: to review these less familiar works, research them more and share her insights with the public by writing a book. Here, in this latest and last project, is what Betty did best: she changed the way we saw art. She took time to look, connect with what artists had created, and tell us of that meaning she found in their work.

A pair of Betty Churcher’s sketches. Photograph: MUP

We talked of pairing a researcher with her as many of the works in her lost notebook were not widley known. But she was driven to start work immediately. Her beloved husband Roy was in failing health and the project seemed a welcome distraction. In six months, she had written about all the chosen sketches in this little blue notebook with its broken binding. In that time Roy died. The book Betty wrote is dedicated to him.

It was the morning of that last lunch I shared with her that Betty talked me through the drawings and artworks she wanted to include. There were, to me, beautiful sketches she drew a determined red line through (relax, this was my copied set). “No,” she would say, “I don’t want to use that one.” Not because the drawings were second rate but because she only wanted to include those she had something to say about.



She would turn the page and her eye would be caught (an expression she loved using) anew by whatever it was that had first drawn her to the artwork. And so would begin her seemingly simple story of a line, a technique, or the personal situation of the artist. Simple, but profound. It was impossible not to gain a richer understanding of the work; to see it a little through Betty’s eyes.

You hear this voice, her emotional connection to art, in her three-volume compendium, Notebooks. The first was drawn in the great international galleries, the second on her herculean tour of Australian mainland galleries in 2013 – a task made possible by painkillers, the wheelchairs she sat in while she sketched and her sheer determination for the project.

It was more than a piece of writing, drawing and observation; it was a culmination of a career – and a life. She found energy in the moment to give a sell-out publicity tour, wearing stylish heels to an unforgettable conversation with Ben Quilty at the Sydney writers’ festival (she wanted to ask the questions) and to an intimate lunch in Melbourne where it seemed everyone had a question for Betty.

She had intended Australian Notebooks to be her last book. But then she found that notebook hidden from the 90s. She drew to commit works to memory, to study in depth what the artists had done – the very least their work deserved, she said, as “it took the artist considerable time to make”.

Betty was a prize-winning art student but stopped painting because, as she wrote, she wanted babies more than anything and was unsure of her ability to be both a good mother and a good painter. “Better, I thought, to be good at one thing.” It turns out she was more talented than she imagined. Teacher. Gallery director. Champion of art.

After our February lunch, Betty suddenly felt unwell. It was the week before the diagnosis of her final illness. She settled in her bed and I told her not to think about the manuscript. I rang when I landed in Melbourne to see how she was feeling. “Much better,” she said, and then started talking about the changes she was marking up on the pages.

Betty rang a week later to let me know she was in hospital, more determined than ever to finish the story of The Forgotten Notebook. That next weekend, her daughter-in-law, Andrea May Churcher flew from Cairns to sit by her bedside, reading out my queries and typing in her responses.

One was about the ending of the introduction she’d written. I suggested a slight change of words, but Betty stood firm. In the paragraph in question, Betty was not talking about the book but about finishing her life’s work and facing death:

I was looking forward to putting the last and definitive full stop to this work, indeed to all my work, until I noticed a drawing I’d made from Camille Corot’s Italian landscape, A View near Volterra (1838). I remember that I drew it because it was such an effective focal point: but I want to use it now instead of that full-stop. It says more eloquently than I could, that this is indeed the end – when that horse and rider reach the crest of the hill, they will disappear over the top, and there will be no more.