Centre for Art and Travel Workshop: Investigating the Archive
National Maritime Museum
20 October 2006

Going to the Pictures in Australia
Professor Michael Rosenthal, University of Warwick

For the past decade or so I have, when able, been working, through the archives of mainly drawings and watercolours, held in Australian collections. These have been principally at the National Library, the Mitchell Library in Sydney, and the Allport Library and Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery in Hobart, but I've worked in Melbourne, Perth and Adelaide, too. The impetus came from the publications of Bernard Smith. First there was European Vision and the South Pacific, then, in 1988, Yale published four volumes of the art of the Cook voyages, and The Art of the First Fleet. The latter book permitted me to introduce students to the person or persons Bernard dubbed The Port Jackson Painter, and remind them that British art occasionally happened outside Britain. Then, I spent Easter 1993 on a reconnaissance trip, to get an idea of the holdings in Canberra and Sydney, mainly. Treated, as has always been the case, with great kindness by curators who must have thought they had a crazy on their hands, I discovered that the collections were both immense, and pretty much unresearched. A Harold White Fellowship gave me three months at the National Library in 1994, and since then I have, thanks in large part to the generosity of the British Academy and Leverhulme Trust, been going back to the pictures in Australia whenever I have had the chance.
Individual works have been catalogued to a greater or lesser degree by the libraries in which they are. The National Library has a fantastic pictorial database, the Allport hasn't. This is entirely an issue of staffing and resourcing. The Mitchell has been developing its, and now, with such items as the Edward Close sketchbook of around 1820 and much else available on-line, is also proving an incredibly useful long-distance resource. Some of the material on which I have been working has been published. Richard Neville's 1997 Rage for Curiosity is an exemplary survey of some of the holdings at the Mitchell, while monographs on Conrad Martens by Elizabeth Ellis (1995), John Glover by David Hansen (2003) and on Joseph Lycett by John McPhee (2006) are all major contributions to scholarship. But note their preoccupation with the individual artist. I have not been engaged in researching an art history without artists, as we were so often encouraged to do in the 1970s, so much as working through works more concerned with recording, classifying, describing events and phenomena, where the identity of the creator can be a secondary issue, although, thanks to the late, great Joan Kerr for her Dictionary of Australian Artists we can find out what me need to know about them. My main activity however has comprised looking at, taking notes on and recording details of some thousands of watercolours and drawings. These have increasingly begun to reveal themselves as an untapped historical source material.
I shall attempt to demonstrate its scope by running through a few slides, on which I shall offer brief comments designed to highlight the ways in which the pictures can fit into or adjust the received historical narrative. For example even first-encounter works, which we might expect to offer the unmediated view – here George Tobin's In Adventure Bay (1792), or William Westall's Hawkesbury River No.3 (1802) – beg obvious questions.[1] Tobin was a Lieutenant on HMS Providence, commanded by William Bligh, which had stopped in Adventure Bay, Van Diemen's Land, en route for Tahiti. These very statements immediately invite the curious to explore the episode further. As does recognising that his composition acknowledges comparable scenes from the Cook voyages, and, in so doing, declares, as it were, its own context. This is a knowing image. Westall, taught to draw and paint by his brother, the artist Richard, was aged nineteen in 1801, when he joined Flinders's circumnavigation of Australia in the Investigator. So even before we begin to inspect his drawing, we have to understand that it was made under specific circumstances, not the least being that, as we know from Flinders's diaries, he often told Westall what motif to draw. That apart, the drawing is immediately interesting in appearing to cope easily with representing completely unfamiliar terrain and as unfamiliar trees. Moreover, though topographically accurate (my photograph is not meant as an exact match), there is a resonance of the famous composition of the Thames as seen from Richmond Hill here; one strong enough to need to be taken into account in any proper analysis of the drawing, not least because James Thomson had designated that view as embodying nation, 'happy Britannia', in The Seasons. And the ease with which Westall has drawn eucalypts rather tells the lie to the hoary old cliché that the British were so alienated by Australian trees they couldn't draw them. This is backed up by any number of other works, from the Port Jackson Painter's onwards.
To understand the historical consequence of these pictures we must recognise where they connect into and impact on other histories as even these two examples augment, shift the received history. Drawings, watercolours, the occasional oil, recorded most of what was going on. There are settlement pictures. There are representations of catastrophe, as with the three watercolours commemorating the flood on the Hawkesbury in 1808, or Oliver Stanley's recording of the fate of the vessel Pelorus immediately after a Hurricane in 1839. Sophia Campbell produces what, were we to look into it more clearly, would prove to be a highly complex encounter image probably in Port Stephens, north of Newcastle in New South Wales in the later 1810s, while Augustus Earle had a different take of the same region around 1825. Drawings will document, as here, the development of public buildings in Moreton Bay, later Brisbane, by 1832, or the kinds of accident that befell the unwary as they traversed the Blue Mountains. People are constantly intrigued by the flora and fauna.
As Tim McCormick demonstrated with his 1987 book, First View in Australia 1788-1825 we can witness the development and spread of Sydney in great detail over these years. Then, as now, buildings were erected, demolished, replaced. In Sydney in all its Glory (1817), Sophia Campbell represents the place as non-geographically specific – a comparison here would be with the print after a watercolour by the emancipist (that is, former convict) Richard Read, published in The Gentleman's Magazine in 1824 where any local topography is actually absent – but in the way of any thriving British port of the period: the prints published in Sydney by Absolom West in 1813 as Views of New South Wales reveal how omnipresent Aborigines were and how fragile was British settlement, was, to point up the deliberate selectivity of her view. Campbell herself, the spouse of a prosperous merchant, and recently in England, may well have seen landscapes by Turner. That her Sydney appears a thriving provincial port and neither an Aboriginal habitat, nor a prison implicitly endorses the highly controversial reformist regime of Governor Macquarie. Therefore the watercolour, not only gives us one snapshot of the harbour in 1817, but also makes a political point. Major James Taylor's aquatinted panorama, published in London in 1824 from drawings done in the late 1810s, employs a comparable pictorial rhetoric of racial harmony, general benevolence, and architecture as signifier of civic good to make a polemical statement in support of the now disgraced Macquarie's policies and against the far harsher penal regime that had subsequently been instituted. That Richard Read's expansive view of the harbour of 1819 employed the same iconography testified to the emancipist's complete reformation, and assimilation into the establishment fold in conformity with policies now reversed by Government.
Because of these hidden agendas we must be cautious when prospecting these works. Macquarie promoted exploration throughout New South Wales. The impetus had come from the first crossing of the Blue Mountains, the Great Dividing Range, by Blaxland, Lawson and Wentworth in 1813. The surveyor, George William Evans had been sent out to plot a route, and then a party of convicts under the supervision of William Cox laid out a road, and notably, a pass down the western escarpment: this done, Macquarie with an entourage set off on a grand tour over April and May 1815, the highlight of which was the founding of the town of Bathurst. John Lewin recorded this tour in a set of presentation watercolours, designed to ornament the diary kept by Macquarie's Aide-de-Camp, Major Henry Colden Antill. Among other things, Lewin pictures the scenery encountered on the trip, or the moment of the founding of Bathurst with apparent accuracy. However, his view of Cox's pass is a fiction, driven by the need to represent what this feat of engineering was imagined to be. Exploration imagery is particularly interesting in many respects, as when Robert Hoddle will matches poses of explorer and Aboriginal guide to hint at their complex relationship in an 1829 view of the Dividing Range which, by his inscribing it 'Sandstone Rocks resembling Castles and Ruins near the Source of the Clyde' raises real questions about the perceptual processes through which the British were able to accommodate these unfamiliar landscapes. It is likewise with Thomas Scott's Lower Falls on Jones's River VDL of 1823 which combines information-gathering and a classically picturesque view of a waterfall. Even when things appear straightforward, as with drawings made by Major Mitchell in central New South Wales in the early 1830s, they're not, not least because some of these would be translated into engravings and used to illustrate his published accounts of his explorations.
In 1832 Major Mitchell built Victoria Pass to replace Cox's pass down the Blue Mountains. Its construction by convicts was recorded by the convict artist, Charles Rodius. The orthodoxy maintains that convicts are tellingly absent from the artwork, though they're not, not least because they often made the pictures. In the drawing she inscribed 'The costume of the Australians' Sophia Campbell showed them as integral to New South Welsh society. And there is abundant material evidence of what the post-Macquarie policy of reestablishing New South Wales as a place of punishment and retribution actually involved or the convicts themselves. In Tasmania Thomas Bock dispassionately represented bushrangers before and after execution, and revealed how, during the 1820s, racial science was turning its attention to the criminal skull, while at the same time Augustus Earle brought home the pointlessness of keeping men ironed. In W.B. Gould's distant image of Macquarie Harbour, on the north-east coast of Tasmania, and one of the remotest and least hospitable places I have ever experienced, if we look closely, we may discern a convict being flayed at the triangle, while officers stroll past while walking their dog.
These images articulate the conflicted character of the colony. Around 1788 various writers mooted the idea that the invasion of New South Wales represented an opportunity to build something that might aspire to all the ideals of civilisation as then understood. Although this notion was modified under the impact of the French Revolution and subsequent war, it never entirely went away. The surveyor, George William Evans was a highly competent draughtsman – some of his work from Oxley's expeditions of 1817 and 1818 calls into question the Gombrich thesis that we cannot represent something without adapting a pre-existing pictogram – and his work is pretty distinctive. Watercolours of the hut at Cowpastures, or Governor Bligh's farm at Blighton are obviously from the same hand, as we art historians say, and carefully record topography, particular details. Evans's 1804/5 view of Sydney from the South Head comes, therefore, as something of a shock, because it echoes Claudian views across Lake Albano, most recently reiterated in Britain in landscapes by Richard Wilson or Joseph Wright, or physically made at Stourhead, with the Pantheon, like Sydney, viewed across the water.
Because this watercolour, evidently a work of art, rather than a picture of record, it must communicate ethical and philosophical ideals. Its presenting us with an antipodean Arcadia, where the European presence damages neither landscape, nor its rightful owners, is pictorially implicit. In one respect this is just one of numerous pictorial articulations of the horrendously complex histories of British relationships with the Australians. I sometimes wonder, for example, if the repeated picturing of the Aboriginal method of climbing trees, from the Port Jackson Painter around 1789, through to Robert Marsh Wesmacott in 1840, with Joseph Lycett and William Romaine Govett contributing along the way, both betokens a chronic incapacity to comprehend Aboriginal culture, and an attempt, analogous to the way that sets of pictures of the indigenous flora and fauna appeared at regular intervals, to seek understanding through taxonomic ordering. Works concerned with Australians communicate various things. The anthropological concerns of the Port Jackson Painter, William Westall, or articulated in the First Fleet books published in London from 1789 vanishes until the later 1810s when, perhaps inspired by the enlightened ideals of Macquarie, artists such as Lycett depict Aboriginal scenes in ways which we have only recently learned from descendants of the Awakabal people whom he represents, are positively accurate. Later artists such as W.R. Govett also took an anthropological interest, while Charles Rodius made potently sympathetic portraits. But there are negatives. The British were occupying Aboriginal land, and, very occasionally, this is articulated pictorially. Augustus Earle was, I think, remarkable for his inability to censor what he saw. So while he could represent an Australian dubbed (as slaves were renamed) 'Desmond', in a portrait format more commonly reserved for patrician males in Britain, he also showed the actualities of displacement - at Bathurst, or the Wellington Valley - which had been opened up for settlement after 1815. Others were as dispassionate. Colonel E.C. Frome, in South Australia from 1838, made as careful watercolour of an Aboriginal burial as he did of the hanging of two Aborigines.
The great complexity of British-Aboriginal relations is as apparent from pictorial as from literary documentation. Andrew Sayers recuperated the work of Aboriginal artists from later in the nineteenth century. This drawing by a person named Legali offers a precedent. It was made in the late 1830s on Flinders Island, off the coast of Tasmania, where the last remaining Tasmanian Aborigines were despatched from 1835. Despite such revisionist historians as Keith Windschuttle, who claim it never happened, the Tasmanian ethnocide resonates in art, for, in Tasmania we do get art in the paintings and drawings of John Glover. In a drawing travestying the Fall in the Garden of Eden an assertive serpent, draped round a solitary oak in an environment of gums, offers a bottle of grog to two Australians; while The Last Muster of the Aborigines at Risdon of 1835 – the British had first settled at Risdon, across the Derwent from Hobart – Glover represented an impossible pre-settlement imagery. Equally, in her fine lithograph of 1840, or his near-contemporary watercolour Mary Morton Allport and John Skinner Prout paint Aboriginal scenes when no Aborigine remains on the Tasmanian mainland.
Tasmania makes a telling contrast with New South Wales. Although a sublime pictorial vocabulary had developed for representing very particular sites in the Blue Mountains, its scenery generally resisted being presented as landscape until, really, the later 1830s, in the work of Conrad Martens, who was still obliged to work very hard in managing pictorial data to this end. As Glover intimates, this was not the case with Van Diemen's Land. As early as 1808 John Lewin was reworking a picturesque view of Cataract Gorge near Launceston by a G.P. Harris as a souvenir for Colonel William Paterson to take back with him to England. People sailing up the Derwent would often compare its scenes with the Lake District; while, in the 1830s, skilled amateurs such as Thomas Evans Chapman, made fine picturesque landscapes of its terrain. Chapman was anticipated in the later 1820s by colonial auditor, T.G.W.B. Boyes, and here we witness a fascinating phenomenon. Boyes's New South Welsh watercolours reveal pictorial confusion. In Tasmania he paints landscapes. If not a crossing of the rubicon, it is, perhaps crossing the brook, and we need to ask why.
One explanation I tentatively offer emerged from conversations with my friend David Hansen, and it's to do with absences. In Tasmania convicts were not prominently visible en masse but individually assigned to farmers such as John Glover, and therefore potentially less disruptive of the pictorial vision – much as the Tasmanians themselves, in contrast to Australians - were effectively invisible. This is germane to landscape painting back in Britain. The meanings and roles of figures in landscapes have generated a great deal of critical heat since the early 1980s and David Solkin's Wilson. The Landscape of Reaction, and, of course, John Barrell's Dark Side of the Landscape. The curators of the 1991 Constable show at the Tate Gallery weighed in against Barrell's argument that Constable had major problems managing the proletariat both pictorially and in life, by pointing to the recently-discovered Wheatfield of 1816, in which there were a few child gleaners and none of the male reapers had features, as demolishing his thesis. The problem was, in comparison with G.R. Lewis's Hereford from the Haywood Lodge or de Wint's Wheatfield, both exactly contemporary, and both far more densely populated with individualized workers, it didn't. So it could be that this factor also plays when it comes to the representation of Australia. It does raise the important point that we learn as much about the mother country from studying the colony as the other way round.
In addition to those subjects I have touched on, we might note how the imagery of settlement and exploration, of Europeans, tents, wilderness, recurs: in New South Wales, in Western Australia, in South Australia, to suggest, perhaps, that the colonial mindset hardened and grew consistent as the nineteenth century wore on. This is very close to history repeating itself, as the same mistakes get made over the years. Although here it would be remiss not to mention how, by around 1840, South Australia was provoking John Michael Skipper, in this view from Mount Lofty, or George Frederick Angas to paint watercolours extraordinary because they appeared to delight in the representation of a species of terrain alien to any European aesthetic norms. And, resisting the temptation to take this further, it is worth noting further that Angas painted elsewhere in the Empire, notably in South Africa, to point up the necessity to think of the Australian as joining up in varieties of ways with other colonial imageries. We saw a Russian picturing Port Jackson. There are French images of Australia, subtly different in content from the British to take into account. Or there is a figure such as Augustus Earle, fascinated by everything he saw, from landscapes in Australia or New Zealand, to their inhabitants, to scenes of shipboard life, to the barbarities of a slave market in Rio de Janeiro.
I'll close by mentioning that the pictorial archives also throw up quite unexpected things. I was finishing a stint in the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery in, I think, February 1998, when then curator David Hansen suggested I might be interested in the contents of a cardboard box, which had recently come to light in a cupboard. These contents were some 51 watercolour miniatures of the English and Scots poor, named, individuated, and unique. The artist was a John Dempsey. I won't say much about them, save to mention that David has done a great deal of work on them, and that perhaps you too might bombard him with insistent emails that he writes the book that only he has the knowledge to write, because I think they should enter the public realm. They also show what systematically working through the material objects that are works on paper can throw in your way.
[1] Tobin is profusely reproduced in Douglas Oliver Return to Tahiti. Bligh's Second Breadfruit Voyage. Carlton (Melbourne University Press) 1988