At Cheero Point, the kitchen window of Juno Gemes’ home looks out across the Hawkesbury River. Mangroves and mudflats stretch along the bank. Tea is ready the moment I walk in the door.

She leads me through to the library; books line the floor-to-ceiling shelves. “The greatest collection of poetry in the country,” she tells me. This was the room where her late husband, the renowned poet Robert Adamson, devoted his life to poetry. I sit beneath an oil portrait of Adamson by Garry Shead. His presence radiates from the walls, the scattered thoughts on loose pages, the piles of sketches, and from Gemes herself.

Best known for over fifty years of photographic advocacy documenting First Nations peoples’ struggles for recognition and rights, Gemes now turns to a more intimate archive: her life with Adamson on the Hawkesbury.

This month, for the first time since Adamson’s passing in late 2022, their forty-year creative partnership will be celebrated at the Grace Cossington Smith Gallery. “I wanted it to be an exhibition for the river community, for Hornsby Shire, for the local community,” she says.

“I wanted to acknowledge and celebrate our life together, but not in a sentimental way,” Gemes says. “In a searching way. What can I discover that I didn’t know?”

Adamson had loved the river since childhood. After they got together in 1986 and made it their permanent home, Gemes quickly understood that his connection ran deeper than the water itself. “This was his spiritual country,” she recalls. “It didn’t take me long to fall in love with it either.”

Together, they founded and ran the distinguished Paper Bark Press, publishing forty volumes over twenty-five years. Their book The Language of Oysters, a portrait of life on the river, underpins the exhibition. “In the years of being without Bob, I’ve been examining our life,” Gemes reflects.

The day before my visit, Gemes had been clearing out Adamson’s desks. Among the discoveries were sketchbooks dense with writing and bird drawings. “He wanted to be an ornithologist,” she says. “He loved birds all his life.”

In his final months, Adamson spent his days with Spinoza, a satin bowerbird the couple had nursed from three days old. “His greatest comfort,” Gemes says.

Six months after Adamson died, Spinoza flew free. Two bowerbirds were waiting for him by the river.

Every now and again, she says, she still sees him.

Juno Gemes and Robert Adamson on the Hawkesbury River opens Saturday 9 May and runs to 30 May at the Grace Cossington Smith Gallery, Wahroonga. Free entry, Tuesday to Saturday 10am–5pm.

Images from: The Language of Oysters, Poems by Robert Adamson, Photographs by Juno Gemes, Fine Arts Press, 1997.