Alison Alexander's talks about the acclaimed Tasmanian artists, Patricia Giles and Max Angus. Born in Hobart in 1932, always loving drawing and painting, Patricia Giles had a term at art school, but had to leave to earn a living as a secretary. In 1961 she was able to give up boring secretarial work and open Hobart’s first commercial art gallery. This opened the world of art and artists to her – especially when Max Angus, already a well-known painter, asked her to join his Sunday painting group. They painted and exhibited together for the next 60 years, becoming famous as Tasmania’s foremost watercolour landscape painters. Patricia particularly loved painting untouched, wild bush with no sign of human activity. Many of her best paintings show the mountains, plains and button grass of the south-west, or the beaches, rocks and waves of the east coast.
While researching and writing Patricia's biography the artists insisted that she should also write a biography of Max Angus. Her companion biography of Angus appeared in 2021.
Dr Alison Alexander is a seventh-generation Australian, with convict ancestors in the first, second and third fleets. She has worked as a freelance historian and as a lecturer and tutor in history at the University of Tasmania. Alison has written some 30 books about Tasmania's history. In 2014 she won the Australian National Biography Award for The Ambitions of Jane Franklin. Alison is editor of THRA's Papers & Proceedings.