An examination of the history of this small but significant artists' grou

Hamilton, Judy

University of Queensland eSpace

UQ LIBRARY16
On the night of 9 April 1941, four people met in the attic rooms of the Royal Queensland Art Society (RQAS) at Harris Court, high 
above George Street in Brisbane.1 Although the 
group began as a breakaway from the RQAS, the 
real purpose was ‘to enlarge and add to the art 
interests of Brisbane’.2 Six artists had expressed 
interest and although Ann Ross and Leonard 
Shillam could not be there, E Lilian Pedersen, 
Mona Elliott, Frank Sherrin, and Rosalie Wilson 
set the aims and objectives for the new group, 
including that its membership would be limited to 
professional artists.  They called themselves the 
Half Dozen Group of Artists (HDG) and adopted 
six seedling oak trees, symbolising strength and 
future growth, as their insignia. Dr JV Duhig, Mrs 
Prudence E Allen and central Queensland grazier, 
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Regal patronage was secured in 1946, a proud 
tradition that is maintained to the present day.
The six artists who formed the HDG were an 
unlikely combination to create an artists’ group. 
Of the founders, Mona Elliott (still life) and Frank 
Sherrin (landscape) were painters; Rosalie 
Wilson was skilled in needlework, creating 
original designs using Aboriginal and wartime 
motifs; Pedersen showed book illuminations, 
but she was also a book binder, hand weaver 
and an accomplished painter; Ann Ross showed 
modernist decorative mural panels; while Leonard 
Shillam exhibited a semi-abstract sculpture.3 This 
eclectic membership mix was soon joined by 
LJ Harvey, a noted woodcarver and potter, as 
well as by painters James Wieneke and Doreen 
Harris. The Queensland National Art Gallery 
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by Lloyd Rees (their guest artist), and Pedersen’s 
illumination of the poem, ‘Black Swans’.4 
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memberships set the HDG resolutely on its way. 
Regular income, it was anticipated, would come 
from memberships, commission on sales, and 
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£235/0/8 and outgoings, including a substantial 
donation of £67/2/9 to the Red Cross, were 
£215/12/8 leaving them with a credit balance at 
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In 1943, with only £55/18/8 in the bank, the HDG 
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schemes for young artists. The ‘Half Dozen 
Group of Artists Junior Art Scholarship’ was 
valued at £25 to provide ‘one year’s tuition with 
a recognised art teacher’ for an art student up 
to the age of twenty.5 A further £10 would be 
added to allow for the purchase of art materials 
required. The scholarship was a very practical 
initiative in encouraging junior artists to follow their 
artistic ambitions at a time when no incentives 
existed. A more substantial scholarship followed 
in 1944 when the HDG was offered the use of the 
remaining Queensland Wattle League scholarship 
funds.6
The new scholarship was known as the 
‘Half Dozen Group of Artists (Incorporating 
the Queensland Wattle League) Travelling 
Scholarship for Landscape’, and was valued at 
£150. The scholarship was of twelve months’ 
duration and aimed to allow recipients to travel 
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4HYNHYL[*PSLU[V^OV^VU[OLÄYZ[ZJOVSHYZOPW
in 1946. Cilento travelled to New York to study 
in the art capital of the world, and in her reports 
back to the group, mentioned that she was 
working with ‘a group of abstract painters’ 
including Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and 
Robert Motherwell; an experience she found 
‘very stimulating’.7 Cilento exhibited engravings 
in the new ‘expressionism’ style at the 1947 
HDG exhibition; later these were gifted to 
the Queensland National Art Gallery, and the 
Teachers’ College Collection at Kelvin Grove.8  
Betty Quelhurst, who won in 1949, chose to 
use the scholarship to extend her study at the 
National Gallery Art School.9 In a cultural climate 
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the provision of these scholarships by the HDG 
made, in the words of Quelhurst, ‘the path of the 
art student easier’ in Queensland. In addition to 
the scholarships, in 1951 the HDG established, 
and funded, a biennial drawing prize: the ‘L. J.  
Harvey Memorial Prize for Drawing’. LJ Harvey 
had been a stalwart member of both the HDG 
Dedicated to Art: 
The Half Dozen Group of Artists
(5,?(405(;0656-;/,/0:;69@6-;/0::4(33)<;:0.50-0*(5;(9;0:;:»
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Below: Letterhead 
paper, showing the 
six seedling oak trees, 
adopted by the Half 
Dozen Group as their 
insignia. UQFL64, 
Box 6, Fryer Library, 
The University of 
Queensland
FRYER FOLIOS | JULY 2013 17
and the RQAS who died in tragic circumstances 
in 1949. The Harvey prize was administered 
by the Queensland Art Gallery until 1987.10 The 
HDG continued to encourage young artists in 
Queensland by awarding travelling scholarships 
and bursaries, such as that for the College of Art, 
until 1974. 
Over its seventy-two-year history, the HDG has 
continued to function as an exhibiting group and 
since it found a permanent home in 1975 in the 
basement studio at St Mary’s Anglican Church 
in Kangaroo Point, it has offered tutored and 
untutored workshops to its members. The studio 
at St Mary’s had been used by artists in Brisbane 
from 1942, when Donald Friend set up a studio. 
Throughout the 1950s, the studio was the centre 
of Brisbane’s alternative art culture, providing 
contemporary artist training as an alternative 
to the academic teaching of the Central 
Technical College. In the 1960s, it became the 
headquarters of the Contemporary Art Society 
(Queensland Branch). The HDG secured the 
lease in 1975, and inaugurated a programme 
of weekly workshops centred on life drawing. 
The group acknowledges that these untutored 
workshops form the thread that has held the 
group together through the years.11 Valerie Waring 
JVU]LULK[OLÄYZ[SPMLKYH^PUN^VYRZOVWZH[[OL
studio in February 1975, and she continues to 
lead life drawing sessions in 2013. 
The basement studio has also provided the group 
with one of its most potent symbols of creativity—
the ‘Paint Tree’. The Paint Tree was an oil-paint-
encrusted support column inside the studio. The 
practice of scraping unused paint from palettes 
at the end of a session had begun in 1951, when 
students offered the paint as a mark of respect 
for themselves as artists, and for their artist-
teachers.12 Over the years, the tradition continued 
and the paint accumulated. When the studio was 
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the removal of the encrustation and transferred 
it to canvas. It is now an icon of Brisbane’s art 
history and the HDG is its guardian. 
The HDG is a group for practising artists and 
for four days each week, the members get on 
with the business of creating art at their studio at 
Montrose Access in Corinda. While the human 
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regular outdoor painting sessions including ‘Paint-
Out’ weekends. The annual members’ exhibition 
is still the focus of the members’ year, but it is 
complemented by a number of ‘Folio Shows’ 
where works are sold mounted, but unframed, 
from the studio. In 2011, another layer was added 
to their activities with the introduction of the Lilian 
Pedersen Lecture to the December programme. 
Emeritus Professor RD Milns AM delivered the 
inaugural lecture titled ‘The Importance of Place’.
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(left) and Mona Elliott 
(right) with items from 
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Group exhibition, 1941. 
UQFL64, Box 6, Fryer 
Library, The University 
of Queensland Library
UQ LIBRARY18
The group began because 
Pedersen felt that Brisbane, 
with a population of around 
350 000, was large enough 
to support another exhibiting 
artists’ group, but in 1972 
she was forced to concede 
that art societies and 
groups were disappearing 
from Brisbane’s cultural 
landscape as a sign of 
the tough cultural times. 
However, the HDG survived. 
6. The Queensland Wattle League was a women’s philanthropic 
organisation founded in 1912. Although the focus of the League 
was not art, it offered travelling scholarships to allow artists to 
do further study. Daphne Mayo won in 1914 and R Cummings, 
^OV^V\SKSH[LYÄSS[OL*OHPYVM(YJOP[LJ[\YLH[;OL<UP]LYZP[`VM
Queensland, won the scholarship in 1924.  
7. Margaret Cilento, letter to Lilian Pedersen, 12 April 1949, HDG 
Archive, UQFL64, Box 2, Folder 3, Fryer Library,  
The University of Queensland Library.
8. ibid. 
9. Quelhurst was studying art as part of the Commonwealth 
Repatriation Scheme for returned servicemen and women. The 
scholarship allowed her to complete the three-year course and 
made her eligible for scholarships offered by the National Gallery 
Art School. Letter to Lilian Pedersen, 18 February 1949, HDG 
Archive, UQFL64, Box 2, Folder 2, Fryer Library, The University 
of Queensland Library.  
10. 49th HDG Exhibition Catalogue, HDG Archive, UQFL64, Box 2, 
Folder 3, Fryer Library, The University of Queensland Library.
11. Newsletter, vol. 17, no. 4, August 2012, p. 2.
12. M Shaw, ‘The Kangaroo Point Mentors and the Paint Tree’ 
[unpublished essay], HDG Archive, UQFL64, Box 6, Fryer 
Library, The University of Queensland Library; Shaw, The 
Kangaroo Point mentors and the Paint Tree: a short history of 
a Brisbane studio at Kangaroo Point in the 50’s and 60’s as 
remembered by some of the students, Half Dozen Group of 
Artists Inc., [Brisbane], 2004. 
13. W Allen, ‘President’s maiden speech’, Newsletter, vol. 15, no. 5, 
October 2010, p. 3. 
JUDY HAMILTON is a PhD candidate in the 
School of English, Media Studies and Art History 
at The University of Queensland, examining the 
role of Brisbane’s artists’ groups in the wider 
context of the Brisbane art world. She has been 
involved in the ‘art world’ all her life as a teacher, 
an artist, a scholar, and a community art worker.
Many of the facilities enjoyed by art lovers in 
Brisbane developed because artists’ groups such 
as the HDG were committed to improving the lot 
of the visual arts in the city. The HDG still sees its 
purpose as providing a stronghold for ‘aspirations 
with a common bond of dedication to the arts’ 
that will strengthen Brisbane’s cultural heritage 
into the future.13 
REFERENCES
1. Minute Book, HDG Archive, UQFL64, Box 5, Fryer Library,  
The University of Queensland Library. 
2. 3PSPHU7LKLYZLU3L[[LY[V,S^`U-SPU[B &D/+.(YJOP]L
UQFL64, Box 6, Fryer Library, The University of Queensland 
Library.
3. ‘Half Dozen Group Art Exhibition’, The Telegraph [Brisbane], 4 
September 1941, HDG Archive, UQFL64, Box 6, Fryer Library, 
The University of Queensland Library. 
4. ‘“Half Dozen Group” Pictures Bought for National Gallery’, 
Courier-Mail, 13 September 1941, p. 7.
5. Minute Book, 15 December 1943, HDG Archive, UQFL64, Box 
5, Fryer Library, The University of Queensland Library.
(IV]L!6WLUPUN
of Half Dozen 
Group exhibition, 
The Telegraph, 5 
September 1941, p. 3. 
UQFL64, Box 6, Fryer 
Library, The University 
of Queensland Library


Dedicated to art: the Half Dozen Group of Artists

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Dedicated to art: the Half Dozen Group of Artists

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