TO the untrained eye, Ash Island can look like a regenerating wilderness. In the eyes of Rachel Klyve, this low-lying island in the Hunter River place is a wonderland of artistic possibilities.
"It's beautiful, it's exquisite," says Ms Klyve. "This is the sort of landscape where you turn your head down and sort of narrow in, look at the minutiae and have a look at the little creatures that live in there."
As a third year student in the University of Newcastle's Bachelor of Natural History Illustration course, Ms Klyve has spent a lot of time on Ash Island. But she also loves this place because it was where two sisters lived and blazed trails for women artists more than a century and a half ago.
Harriet and Helena Scott painted their island world during the mid 1800s, illustrating their father's books about butterflies and moths and becoming two of the colony's most prominent natural history artists.
"I recognise how passionate they were from the work they did," says Ms Klyve, who hadn't heard of the Scott sisters before moving to Newcastle from Sydney to study. "Their work would have taken hundreds and hundreds of hours, and you can only do that if you love what you do. And you love the subject."
The Scott sisters were the first paid women painters in the colony working for the Australian Museum, where many of their artworks are stored, and where their names are honoured in a scholarship for students of science illustration.
The 2020 recipient of the Scott Sisters Scholarship is Rachel Klyve.
"I whooped with joy," says Ms Klyve of her reaction to being awarded the scholarship, which includes $5000 and an opportunity to work with the museum's staff and access its collections.
Rachel Klyve's submission included a series of bird illustrations and a "mandala" of insects. Some of those subjects are to be used by Newcastle City Council in an environmental awareness campaign. She also included a shot of a three-dimensional digitally rendered skull, combining traditional skills with state-of-the-art technology.
Australian Museum director and CEO, Kim McKay, said Rachel Klyve's submission recalled the meticulous and beautiful art of the Scott sisters.
Read more: Ash Island's extraordinary past and regeneration
"When we looked at Rachel's work, we saw the same essence, the same attention to detail," Kim McKay said.
"All of the judges were just so impressed by the standard of the work."
Rachel Klyve's journey to recognition as a science illustrator began in the midst of adversity. As she puts it, "Nature saved my life".
When she was a teenager, she was diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome and was bed-bound. She could do little more than stare out the window. One day she saw a pair of parrots, "and they were the most stunning thing I'd ever seen". Young Rachel began studying birds.
"It gave me purpose and meaning to a life that felt purposeless and meaningless," Ms Klyve says.
"That experience of having been ill and having discovered the natural world within that is the defining thing of my life really. And it definitely informs the way I do natural history illustration now, because I learnt so many of the skills required to be an illustrator, which is being still, being able to quieten your mind, and paying intense focus; I learnt all of that when I was sick."
When she recovered, Rachel Klyve travelled extensively, "looking for birds", trained as a nurse, and she became a celebrated long-distance walker, even completing a 780-kilometre trek from Byron Bay to Sydney to raise awareness of chronic fatigue syndrome.
Then a few years ago, Ms Klyve learnt of the natural history illustration course. She had grown up around art on Sydney's Northern Beaches, with her mother a painter, but this course brought together all her passions: "It's the combination of art and science and nature that just works for me".
While she will be able to finish her studies, Rachel Klyve is disappointed the university is discontinuing the degree course, the only one of its type in Australia.
Australian Museum's Kim McKay also considers the decision "a great shame", pointing out the course has provided "a physical link to Newcastle and the Scott sisters ... It's a sad outcome".
Even in an age when everyone has a camera, Rachel Klyve says science illustration is more important than ever, offering a vision that a photograph might miss.
"Illustrations and illustrators can focus in on different aspects of a subject," she explains. "They can minimise things that are less important for the story that's being told or the scientific fact being conveyed."
In the future, Rachel Klyne hopes to be a "scientific visualiser".
"I hope that I will be using my illustration skills to be both telling the stories of the natural world, that I hope will inspire curiosity and love and care in people," she says. "And also to use my skills in collaboration with scientists and other communicators for making discoveries."
For now, as she gazes across Ash Island, the Scott Sisters Scholarship recipient feels gratitude to the museum, and to the women whose art opened the eyes of the world to this place.
"They enabled so many of us to be able to do what we do," she says. "I feel like I'm in their lineage, and I'm the next version, the next generation of women doing this kind of work."
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