A Companion to Australian Art. Группа авторов
commission art expanded significantly during the 1830s and 1840s, so too did the range of locally produced prints and lithographs responding to local events. For many colonists, the local print culture was their principal source of contact with colonial artists. In part prints were an easy way to explain colonial topography and towns to a European audience – reviews of views invariably suggested that they “might form an acceptable present to family and friends at home” – equally many were made for the increasingly urbanized colonists, who rarely saw Aboriginal people, had never gone upcountry or visited a goldfield, or who were keen for a print of a sensational murderer, local dignitary, new church or caricature of a current political situation. Indeed when the Australian Sporting Magazine presented its readers in January 1851 with an engraving of a bush scene, A Squatters Head station, which was “drawn from nature”, it hoped it would “as a delineation of scenery not generally known to our town subscribers, be deemed an acceptable addition to our list of local illustrations.”72
Colonial printmakers took familiar English provincial practices and translated them into local circumstances. The four lithographs of The Five Dock Grand Steeple Chase, produced by Thomas Balcombe and Edward Winstanley in 1844, were modeled on popular English sporting prints, and its composition, although allegedly an eyewitness account, owed more to the English artist Henry Alken’s popular series of four aquatints The First Steeple Chase on Record of 1803, than it did to the actual observation of the race itself.
Printmakers did of course respond to unique local circumstances. Aboriginal people remained a constant interest to Sydneysiders, despite their lack of visibility to most people. The idea of Aboriginal people as emblematic of Australia, and its pre-colonization past, was persistent. There was a sense of widespread curiosity about their customs and culture, and an interest in locating them within a hierarchy of human achievement and considering their capacity to be “civilized”. Most Europeans viewed Aboriginal people with either outright hostility or a sense of obligation to convert them and bring them into the folds of the Church and civilization. Newspapers regularly reported on the issues of frontier conflict, while most books about the colonies included substantial descriptions of Aboriginal lives and customs, of vastly varying degrees of reliability.
But both Charles Rodius, a well-trained and accomplished convict artist, and William Fernyhough, a lithographer and profile artist, saw the marketability of images of Aboriginal people, and published portrait series in the mid-1830s. Rodius’s seven lithographic portraits, issued in 1834, were skilful, sensitive images, and very much counter to prevailing prejudices about the dissoluteness of Aboriginal lives. Neddy Noora’s neat clothing and careful grooming, for instance, was evidence of a capacity for refinement (Figure 4.4). It was said that these views were “much sought for by travellers”.73 William Fernyhough, on the other hand, compiled A series of twelve profile portraits of the Aborigines of New South Wales, which was published in 1836. Fernyhough’s full length portraits were much less sympathetic drawings than Rodius’s, with the subjects dressed in rags, and faces shown in dehumanizing silhouette. Though never explicitly stated, it is likely that Fernyhough’s silhouettes would have been carefully scrutinized by adherents of the pseudo-science of phrenology, who argued that the shape of a person’s skull determined their cognitive and moral capacities. A leading phrenological theorist, George Coombs, declared for example that “New Hollanders, cannot, with their present brains, adopt European civilization.”74 Yet the lithographs were also reviewed positively. The Sydney Times declared them “entitled to praise as being for the most part striking profile likenesses of our sable townsmen and are well executed. They will form a pretty present to friends in England, as characteristic of this country.”75 The number of copies of these publications which have survived suggests that colonists valued them. Their success also reinforces the diversity of colonial visual representations, and the points at which most colonists engaged with colonial artists.
FIGURE 4.4. Port Jackson. N.S.W. view in Double Bay. For details please see Table 4.1.
The arc of colonial art across the first 60 or so years of colonization is a thus complex narrative, reflecting the heterogenous nature of colonial experience. From the discoveries of the first artists, to the emergence of an urban imagery reflecting the rapid growth of British provincial society, visual culture in NSW was shaped as much by the circumstances of the establishment of the colony as by the capacity of its artists. It is, ultimately, the story of how an ancient land became Australia.
Notes
1 1 Elizabeth Macarthur to Bridget Kingdon, 7 March 1791, in Joy Hughes ed., The journals of Elizabeth Macarthur 1789–1798, Historic Houses Trust of NSW, Sydney, 1984, p.24.
2 2 William Charles Wentworth, Australasia. A poem., London, 1823, p. 22.
3 3 Louise Anemaat, Natural Curiosity. Unseen art of the First Fleet, NewSouth Publishing, 2014, pp. 51 & 66.
4 4 David Collins (Brian Fletcher ed.), An account of the English Colony in New South Wales, vol. 1, 1798, AH & AW Reed, Sydney, 1975, p. 416.
5 5 Anonymous, “Cunningham’s New South Wales”, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, November 1827, p. 603.
6 6 Thomas Palmer to Joyce, 15 December 1794, in Historical Records of NSW, vol.1 pt.2, p. 870.
7 7 Keith Vincent Smith, “Tupaia’s sketchbook”, in Electronic British Library Journal, 2005, article 10: http://www.bl.uk/eblj/2005articles/pdf/article10.pdf accessed 17 October 2017.
8 8 James Cook, Journal of Remarkable Occurrences aboard His Majesty’s Bark Endeavour, 6 May 1770.
9 9 James Auchmuty ed.,The voyage of Governor Phillip to Botany Bay, (London, 1789), Angus & Robertson, 1970, p. 26.
10 10 Arthur Bowes Smyth, The journal of Arthur Bowes Smyth: Surgeon Lady Penryhn 1787–1789, Australian Document Library, Sydney, 1979, p. 70.
11 11 In Bowes Smyth – drawings from his journal `A Journal of a Voyage from Portsmouth to New South Wales and China in the Lady Penrhyn . .’, 1787–1789, no. 6, in ML Safe 1/15.
12 12 Bowes Smyth, Journal…, p. 58.
13 13 George MacKaness ed., Thomas Watling. Limner of Dumfries, Australian Historical Monographs 1979 (1945), p. 9.
14 14 Richard Neville, A rage for curiosity, 1997, p. 65.
15 15 Arthur Phillip to Sir Joseph Banks, 13 April 1790, Sir Joseph Banks papers, Mitchell Library, Series 37.11.
16 16 See Bernard Smith, European vision and the South Pacific, 2nd ed., Harper & Row, 1984, pp. 159–163.
17 17 Jane Lennon “Art and science: early Australian natural history drawings and engravings” in Australiana, vol.17, no.3, August 1995, pp.72–77. See also Louise Anemaat, Natural Curiosity: unseen art of the First Fleet, Newsouth Publishing, 2014 for further discussion on the Sydney Bird Painter.
18 18 For an excellent, and full, account of this complex situation see Anemaat, Natural Curiosity, 2014.
19 19 John Latham to AB Lambert, 26 January 1800, ML SAFE/PXD 1098/vol. 1.
20 20 Anemaat, Natural Curiosity, 2014, p.163 & 165. The unknown artist’s Sooty Tern is in the State Library of NSW at PXD 1098 vol. 4 f.5; Watling’s New Holland Tern is in the Natural History Museum, London, at Watling Drawing no. 342.
21 21 For Watling’s plagiarism of John Symth’s A tour in the United States of America (1784), see Louise Anemaat, Natural curiosity, p. 178.
22 22 George Mackaness ed., Letters from an exile at Botany Bay to his Aunt in Dumfries, (1794), 1979.
23 23 Daniel Southwell to his mother 14 April 1790 Historical Records of New South Wales, vol.