History saved in sketches

Sketches from the frontline have preserved fragments of history, writes Anna Petersen.

Housed in the Hocken Photographs Collection is an album compiled by a World War 1 soldier from Dunedin, who occupied a short-lived but important place in the long history of the Shellal Mosaic.

Sapper Frances Leddingham McFarlane (1888-1948) of the New Zealand Wireless Troop was serving in Palestine in April 1917, when fellow Anzac soldiers near Shellal stumbled across pieces of this mosaic dating from the Byzantine Empire. The chance discovery was made during the second battle of Gaza on the floor of a captured Turkish machine gun outpost over-looking the Wadi Ghuzze River, east of Khan Yunus and the main road from Egypt to Jerusalem.

The soldiers reported their find to Senior Chaplain, the Rev. W. Maitland Woods, who had a keen interest in archaeology and made a habit of entertaining the troops with stories about the Holy Lands where they were based. The Rev. Maitland sought professional advice from curators at the Cairo Museum and gained permission to organise a group of volunteers to uncover and remove the remains.

Sapper McFarlane was given the job of drawing what they uncovered. The album includes three photographs showing sections of the Shellal Mosaic in situ as well as a photograph of the sketcher at work. A colour lithograph of McFarlane’s drawing was subsequently published in Cairo, a copy of which can also be found at the Hocken in the Ephemera Collection.

The full significance of Sapper McFarlane’s drawing is explained in a booklet, written by A.D. Trendall and published by the Australian War Memorial Museum in 1942, some decades after the mosaic was handed over to the Australian government in 1918. Trendall relates how a second drawing, made by Captain M.S. Briggs six weeks later, reveals that during the interim, portions of the mosaic went missing. Other soldiers probably took away pieces of the peacock and border in the lower right corner in particular as souvenirs and these proved impossible to recover.

Fortunately, 8000 tesserae survived from the inscription at the top written in Greek; enough to learn that the mosaic once decorated a church dating to AD 561-2 and honoured a bishop and a priest called George. The all-over style of design, with its medallions featuring a variety of birds and animals interlinked by a grapevine, was typical of floor mosaics from the sixth century AD.

Although some of the subjects depicted carried symbolic meaning in early Christian art — like the grapevine representing Christ and his followers, and the peacocks telling of immortality and resurrection — the mosaic was intended to serve as a decorative surface to be trodden on rather than meditated upon.

The Shellal Mosaic is a notable example of its type, however, demonstrating great technical skill with all its small, finely worked marble pieces and careful colour gradations.

Frank McFarlane went on to serve as an unofficial war artist in the Middle East and other photographs in the Hocken album help document his time in Mesopotamia (modern day Iraq). These photographs include a view of the Arch of Ctesiphon, a sixth century marvel constructed out of unreinforced brick during the Sasanian Empire near Baghdad, which has somehow survived all the conflicts in the region to this day. One of McFarlane’s watercolours titled With the ANZAC wireless squadron in Persia, c.1918, is held in the National Collection of War Art in Wellington.

Returning to civilian life and working as a postmaster in Lawrence, Frank McFarlane continued to paint and draw places of historic interest, as evidenced by a sketchbook in the Hocken Pictures collection. His two talented daughters, (Lady) Heather Francis (1925-2011) and Shona McFarlane-Highett (1929-2001) would go on to make far more of a name for themselves in the art world but considering Shona’s sketches of Victorian buildings in Dunedin, for example, we can see how they inherited their father’s interest and appreciation of architectural vestiges from the past.

The Shellal Mosaic has been on permanent display at the Australian War Memorial Museum in Canberra since 1941.

Anna Petersen is curator photographs at the Hocken Collections Uare Taoka o Hākena.