Images from Canberra's National Portrait Gallery: August 2014

Irina Baronova (1919-2008), originally from Petrograd, lived for the last eight years of her life near Byron Bay on the east coast of Australia, north of Sydney. In 1914 the Soviet government changed the name of the city of Saint Petersburg to Petrograd, and in 1924 to Leningrad, and in 1991 back to Saint Petersburg. This portrait was taken in 1933. She was a legendary international ballerina, and also worked in Hollywood in the 1940s, before retiring. She served on the Royal Academy of Dance and also taught dancing skills to others.

Sir Robert Gibson (1868-1934) was a businessman and financier, but also a steel designer and manager in Glasgow, Scotland. He established the Austral Manufacturing Company in Melbourne and the Lux Foundry in the 1920s. This bronze bust was made in 1934.

Ambrose Patterson (1877-1967) was a painter and printmaker, who moved to Europe from 1901 to 1910, and lived in Paris with fellow painter Hugh Ramsay. In 1915, Patterson moved to America to live, where he died in 1967. This portrait, by Hugh Ramsay, was painted in 1901.

Bert Flugelman (1923-2013) was a sculptor and painter from Vienna, Austria. He moved to Australia in 1938. This is a self-portrait, made in 1985. Behind Flugelman is a portrait (1996) of Eddie Koiki Mabo (1937-1991), an artist from Torres Strait Island. In 1982 he initiated a legal case for land title against the State of Queensland. Ten years later, in 1992, Justices of the High Court found 6-1 in favour of Mabo, overturning the accepted view that Australia had been “terra nullius” (empty land) before European settlement. He died before the final ruling.

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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international human rights-based consultant in education, healing and wellbeing, peace and stabilization, foreign aid audits and evaluations, and the author of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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