Emily Carr Read Free

become celebrities who represent Canada in international exhibitions like the Venice Biennale, give interviews to glossy magazines, command high prices for their work, set trends, and define styles. That they are able to do so, women as well as men, in a way that Emily Carr never dreamed of is due in no small part to the example of her courage and determination to be an artist.

CHAPTER THREE
Victoria
    So, let us take a walk with Emily, back and forth through time, starting outside the Carr house in the neighbourhood of James Bay, a quiet residential area on the southern side of Victoria’s Inner Harbour, a short stroll from the city centre.
    The house is now a museum, on a small plot on Government Street, which used to be known as Carr Street, and before that, when the house was first built on its eight acres of land, was just a grassy country lane. Woods stood here, flower and vegetable gardens, an orchard, a barn for cows and pigs. To the left as we go down the street is Beacon Hill Park, now mostly landscaped but still wild and uncultivated in parts, as it was when the young Emily wandered here.
    After a couple of blocks, we reach the Pacific Ocean. A marker on the shoreline denotes Mile Zero of the Trans-Canada Highway. Some say that Canada begins here, others that it ends at this spot.
    Most maps of Canada terminate at this point, but just across the Strait of Juan de Fuca are the Olympic Mountainsof Washington State and a coastline that extends to San Francisco and beyond. Travel west across the Pacific Ocean and the first landfall will be Japan. To the east, across another body of water (the Strait of Georgia), reminding us that Victoria is on an island, lies Vancouver and the vast mainland of Canada. A journey north up the coast will take you to the Queen Charlotte Islands—or to give them their original name, Haida Gwaii—and onward to Alaska.
    On her walk in the 1880s, Emily might have seen some Native canoes pulled up at a campsite on the shore, beached there by people coming from up the coast to either trade or visit. Today we see a line of buses waiting at the dock for the giant cruise ships that bring tourists to Victoria in their thousands each summer. A Coast Guard station sits at the entrance to the harbour now. The float planes that make the trip to Vancouver in a half-hour buzz overhead and then skim into James Bay. A trip across to Vancouver would have taken Emily a full day.
    At Laurel Point, where the shoreline turns into the harbour proper, a meandering walkway lined with flowerbeds passes in front of the deluxe hotels. We can look across the bay to Songhees Point, where tall, luxurious condominiums have spread along the shore. The Songhees First Nation used to live there, part of the Salishan people, and inEmily’s youth the Songhees reserve had some two thousand inhabitants.
    Our walk brings us to the provincial parliament buildings, which were completed in 1896, just a year after Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. At the terminus of the harbour stands the Empress Hotel, another reminder that this was, after all, an outpost of the British Empire.
    In the days of Emily’s youth, Victoria was still something of a frontier town. The sidewalks were wooden and transportation was by horse and coach. But the city was growing rapidly. There were many new buildings of stone and brick, including warehouses, churches, and hotels. Today it has a university, an art gallery, a symphony orchestra, and is Canada’s fifteenth-largest city.
    Near the legislature stands the Royal B.C. Museum and Thunderbird Park, which contains a Native long-house and a number of totem poles. This is probably Victoria’s most popular stop for tourists. If Emily could see the park today, she might view it with some irony. She once offered a collection of her paintings to the museum, but the proposal was rejected. In the years after Emily’s death her paintings would be exhibited here many times, but at