During her extensive travels across Australia and abroad, Margaret Preston regularly collected cultural objects and works of art. Among the many pieces she encountered, few speak so directly to enduring artistic practice as the shellwork box depicted in her painting N.S.W. Everlasting flowers, 1929. Nestled beneath a vase of flowers, the intricately decorated box is more than an attractive domestic object. It represents a tradition of shellwork that has been practised continuously in La Perouse, on the northern headland of Botany Bay in Sydney, since the late nineteenth century.
Established as an Aboriginal mission in 1895, La Perouse holds deep cultural and historical significance for the Bidjigal and Gweagal peoples of the Dharawal Nation. It was here First Nations women gathered shells from the shoreline to create ornamental objects. These works became an important source of income while also expressing cultural identity, sustaining family knowledge and reinforcing enduring connections to Country. Women from La Perouse have passed their skills and stories of shellwork down to younger generations, from Queen Emma Timbery through to her great great-granddaughter Marilyn Russell. This essay is dedicated to the memory of Russell who recently passed away, and whose reflections and recent shellwork commission for the Preston retrospective feature in this exhibition.
It remains unclear how Preston acquired the heart-shaped box she painted in N.S.W. Everlasting flowers. However, Preston also produced a now untraced woodblock print depicting La Perouse, indicating that she visited the community sometime during the late 1920s. Like many of the pieces she collected during her extensive travels, the shellwork box too found a place within her visual world.
Nearly a century later, Russell was invited to respond to Preston’s painting. Seeing the shellwork in N.S.W Everlasting flowers immediately reminded her of the women in her own family and the continuity of a practice handed down across generations:
‘When I first saw Margaret Preston’s artwork N.S.W Everlasting flowers, I thought how wonderful and unique it was that the work highlights a La Perouse shellwork jewellery box. It looks like something my mum’s sister would have done. I feel very privileged that an artist like Margaret Preston included shellwork in her painting. It made me think of my grandmother, Queen Emma Timbery, who made slippers and sold them to tourists years ago. It feels lovely seeing a shellworker and a painter coming together, doing what they love.’
Russell’s own practice was inseparable from family and Country. Every shell in her NGV commission was carefully selected and applied by hand using knowledge learned from her mother and aunt, alongside an ethic of respectful gathering that remains central to the tradition:
‘My mum and her sister taught me how to shellwork and how to do it respectfully. Do not take too much and always know your culture, always. I make all my works from scratch, applying every shell, and I am often amazed by the finished product. Everything I know is because my mother taught me. She was, she is, a great teacher.’
Russell created three heart-shaped shellwork boxes, including one that echoes the purple colour of the original depicted in N.S.W. Everlasting flowers. These works reaffirm the vitality of a cultural practice that has endured across more than a century, and remind us that the shellwork represented in Preston’s painting is not simply a historical object, but part of a living artistic practice sustained by First Nations women at La Perouse through generations of knowledge, care and making.
Completed shortly before Russell’s passing in June 2026, these heartshaped boxes stand as a testament to her extraordinary skill and to the enduring legacy of the La Perouse tradition.
Beckett Rozentals is NGV Senior Curator, Australian Art.
Marilyn Russell was a Bidjigal woman from the coastal community of La Perouse in South-Eastern Sydney.
The NGV warmly thanks the Victorian Foundation for Living Australian Artists for the commission and acquisition of Marilyn Russel’s jewellery boxes 2026 for the Collection.
This essay was first published in NGV Magazine | Issue 60 Sep-Oct 2026.