Colonial Works on Paper
Posted: 24 Nov 2011 | By: Trent Walter
This exhibition showcases works made in the first century of European settlement in Australia. Charting the changing use of graphic images, from maps of topography through to commercial publications made for profit, it offers a version of Australian history tinted by the colonial gaze. Separated across both sites at the National Gallery of Victoria, the two themed shows focus on the settlement of the Australian continent and the establishment of the city of Melbourne.
Louis Buvelot’s drawings of Fernshaw, Dromana and Bacchus Marsh must rate as some of the best drawings of Australian landscape in any period; George Alexander Gilbert’s drawings of Pentland Hills also deserve a mention for their technical virtuosity; and the pulsating line work in William Barak’s Figures in possum-skin cloaks (1898) is mesmerising.
Other works in This Wondrous Land require a more rigorous inquiry. The line between ethnography and caricature seems to blur in the watercolours of Richard Browne. Although the body markings and objects carried by his sitters Burgun and Killigrant (both around 1819) are accurate representations, the stick–thin limbs and knobbly knees seem to be rendered to appeal to the souvenir market Browne often sold work to. Of course, there are counterpoints to this trend also. Charles Rodius’s portraits, including Morirang, Shoalhaven Tribe, N.S. Wales (1834), are delicately rendered and appear to have a greater sympathy for the sitter.
While it shouldn’t really be surprising that some images in the exhibition are constructed to include fiction, sometimes the viewer may mistake works of historical significance for historical fact. Robert Havell junior’s epic Panoramic View of King George’s Sound, part of the colony of Swan River (1834), depicts Nyungar and European figures in an idealised landscape and image of harmony which, we learn, was rarely the truth.
Similarly, artists and natural historians in Europe who had never been to Australia constructed pictures of the colonies based on notes and sketches. View in Port Jackson (1789), by Robert Cleveley, which depicts an Aboriginal fishing scene in which each boat has a contained fire in its bow, is one such image. With interest in the colonies high, and the number of artists on the ground few, market demand found its satisfaction.
It is difficult to imagine the reaction to these images at the time of their execution or publication. With the benefit of hindsight they appear as romantic visions of landscape and the development of the new colony, and exotic renderings of the ‘other’. What the colonial gaze obscures, moulding perception to its own ends, developing a tension and an historical unease, is part of what makes these images so engaging.
Click to view image/s from this exhibition:
