1 minute read
BEAUTY RICH & RARE
We acknowledge AGB Events and the National Library of Australia
FREE - Daily 8:30am - 4pm 11 June - 9 July
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Beauty Rich and Rare is an immersive 15 minute sound and light experience illuminating the natural beauty of Australia by recreating the wonder experienced by Joseph Banks and the botanists, scientists, and illustrators who travelled on the HMB Endeavour.
Beauty Rich and Rare features beautiful original works from 250 years ago, digitally animated and projected onto a 5-panel screen that measure 20 metres by 2.5 metres.
Beauty Rich and Rare has been 2 years in the making involving hundreds of hours of animation. The content combines hand-painted images with other digitally drawn images to create a virtual world of 3D digital animation.
Banks et al made 743 illustrations of plants and other specimens on their journey. The sketches were performed on site and at sea. With small patches of colour added to sketches and extensive notes made to allow the illustrations to be finished in the future. Parkinson, a botanical illustrator on the journey, took extensive notes on the people, language, culture, flora, and fauna of the places they visited. After the deaths of Sporing and Buchan, it fell to Parkinson (who died on the return journey) to complete all of the scientific drawings.
On his return to England, Banks had the sketches made by his team of naturalists turned into copperplate engravings. These engravings included every detail recorded by the botanical illustrators. Thanks to a dispute over copyright, the plates were left untouched in the Museum of Natural History for over two hundred years. In 1979, work to bring the plates to life and produce colour images of the incredible sketches was begun. This would culminate in the Florilegium, published in 34 parts between 1980 and 1990 and a selection of plates was published in 2018.
