“I’m looking at the shape of the sandbeds with the birds on them,” Samuels says, as she sits on the wooden deck, watching the spoonbills and egrets bobbing and picking their way through the environment.

“It’s a feeling I don’t get anywhere else. It’s a peaceful feeling, watching the birds going around, there’s no agitation.

“It’s a feeling of peace.”

Yet at this moment, it doesn’t sound peaceful. Ruth Uhrig Samuels seems oblivious to the almighty racket reverberating behind her, as builders complete the renovation job inside the visitors’ centre.

To volunteer Mark Kempton, this din is the sound of hope for the Hunter Wetlands Centre.

After a couple of years of financial losses, staff shedding and a precarious looking future for this environmental icon on the fringe of Newcastle, the renovation is aimed at helping put into action the catchphrase of one of the centre’s logos: reset and renewal.

The renovation project has been funded by a state government grant. Mark Kempton, who is the centre’s arts coordinator, hopes the revamped space will “make people more aware of the wetlands environment, but also [for it to be] a source of creative, artistic inspiration, and get people to enjoy it, to come back again”.

As part of the overhaul, reptile display cases have been removed and is being replaced with what Kempton calls a creative arts space. There will also be an interactive information area.

When the first exhibition in the new art space is opened on March 15, the works on show will be those by the 87-year-old woman sitting on the deck, Ruth Uhrig Samuels.

AS a girl living in Hamilton, Ruth Uhrig Samuels loved art. “I was always drawing trees and flowers,” she recalls.

But neither her art nor her everyday life extended to the wetlands of Newcastle.

“When I was a kid, the wetlands didn’t exist, or I wasn’t aware of them until later,” Samuels says. “It was a swamp.”

Ruth Uhrig Samuels became an art teacher and was an exhibiting painter, with her images of birds keenly sought after.

In her 50s, while undertaking post-graduate studies in plant and wildlife illustration, Samuels discovered the artistic riches that lay in the wetlands just down the road from the University of Newcastle.

She had known of this place before it was returned to being wetlands. For many years, it was slowly filled and degraded as a dump, then the land was turned into sports fields. Hamilton Rugby Club had a base here, and Ruth Uhrig Samuels’ boys would play on those fields.

When the club moved off the site, a group of locals was determined to rejuvenate the area and save what wetlands remained. With a mix of government and corporate money, the land was bought in 1985 in the name of a not-for-profit public company, Shortland Wetlands Centre Limited.

The long journey to restoring the site and opening Australia’s first community-owned wetlands centre was underway. Among those there from the outset was retired GP and Australian Plants Society member Dr Paddy Lightfoot.

He had turned up to push for the planting of native species. Before he knew it, Paddy Lightfoot was a board member and on the landscape committee, at the instigation of the wetlands centre’s prime mover, education professor Max Maddock.

Paddy Lightfoot was on the board for the best part of 30 years and is still a volunteer at the centre, and along the way he did help realise his goal of a focus on native plants.

About 350,000 have been planted on the 43-hectare site.

And with that revegetation, all manner of other life has returned, including more than 200 species of birds.   

“I think it’s the first time in the history of the world that a rugby field has been turned into a swamp!,” Dr Lightfoot says.

“People wouldn’t realise what the desolation of the place was like [before]. It’s a miracle really, and it’s due to the volunteers.”   

By the time Ruth Uhrig Samuels returned to the site, the rugby fields were a memory, buried under the wetlands being gradually rejuvenated.

She found “it such a fascinating place, and a beautiful place”, and it featured in the paintings she created for her university degree. 

Samuels has continued to visit the wetlands, drawing inspiration for her art from the environment and the life it contains.

She is not the only one to have seen the artistic beauty of the wetlands.

“I was inspired to paint here, but I didn’t have the time,” Mark Kempton says.

Like Ruth Uhrig Samuels, Kempton has been an an artist and a school teacher. What brought Kempton to the wetlands was not art but a love of frogs.

“I had one frog where I live [at New Lambton Heights] and I wanted to know how to get more frogs,” he recalls. His frog breeding plans didn’t quite work out, but he found a new passion.

After retiring from teaching, Kempton joined the centre about two years ago. He wanted to do his bit for the wetlands.

But the battle recently has been to help save the wetlands centre itself from sinking financially. As part of its belt-tightening, the centre had to lose paid staff. It is run by volunteers, and, in Kempton's words, “on goodwill”. The centre sought government support, including the grant to renovate its main building, and an external review of its business model is underway.

Kempton and his colleagues believe the key to revitalising the centre is to attract more visitors. While the centre may be close to the city, in the minds of many, “it’s out of the way, and it’s off the radar”.

About 25,000 visit annually, and thousands of school students visit the on-site environmental education centre.

In a bid to help boost those numbers and attract a wider range of visitors, the creative arts space has been developed. How Ruth Uhrig Samuels came to be the first exhibiting artist, well, in Newcastle, everyone seems to be connected somehow.

Kempton talked with a former teaching colleague, Kristin Ashley, who put him in touch with another local teacher and artist, Margaret McBride. She recommended Ruth Uhrig Samuels.

McBride and Samuels had known each other for 30 years, having both taught at Newcastle Grammar School. McBride was aware her former workmate was still painting environment- and wildlife-related artworks, but they were being hidden away.

“It was accumulating under her bed, and then this came up, and I thought, ‘She’s a perfect person’,” McBride recalls.

“I don’t think she asked me, quite frankly,” recalls Samuels. “It was an ultimatum!”

Twenty of Samuels' works, under the banner of Reflections of Nature, will be on display at the centre for three weeks.

A new exhibition will be held each month, with the focus on the wetlands.

“The idea is to get people out there,” Kempton says, as he peers at the wetlands. “The plan for this is to have artworks to be an interpretation of the wetlands. The artists will reflect what’s out there.”

Kempton is also keen for the centre to host workshops.

The wetlands already serve as an open-air studio and classroom for the University of Newcastle’s renowned natural history illustration course. Lecturer Prue Sailer says she takes her students to the wetlands once or twice a year to practise what they’re learning.

“The wetlands are really good because they’ve got such diverse wildlife, and also the different habitats in the one area they [the students] can walk around,” she says.

Dr Sailer applauds the idea of the new space, saying it can be used by students and other artists to exhibit their work.

“I think it’s a fantastic idea, because of the involvement of the arts with conservation and preserving habitats,” she says.

The volunteers hope interest in the art exhibitions will help preserve the Hunter Wetlands Centre.

"It's a phenomenal asset for Newcastle, Australia, the world," says Paddy Lightfoot, recalling how he had worried that the centre could have been forced to shut.

If that had happened, Kempton says, “Newcastle would have lost a unique wetlands environment, a unique education facility, an absolute inspiration for creative arts, and a hub for people to meet.”

The volunteers are looking to the future, hoping to build up the funds sufficiently to employ staff, and to attract corporate funding for more upgrades.

But for now, as she waits for her exhibition to open in the new space, Ruth Uhrig Samuels is content to sit on the deck and watch nature moving before her eyes.

“I’m very glad to be back here,” the artist says.

“I just love being here. It has the most wonderful ambience.”