Text: ‘Golden splendour: privilege, ceremony and racism in 1920s-1930s Australia’ on the photo album ‘John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell (1892-1960), 1922-1933’ Part 2

January 2023

Warning: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers should be aware that this posting contains images and names of people who may have since passed away.

W Lister Lister (27 Dec 1859 – 06 Nov 1943)
The golden splendour of the bush
c. 1906
Oil on canvas
Frame: 294 x 245.0 x 13.5cm
Art Gallery of New South Wales

Used under fair use condition for the purpose for research or study

Abstract

Discovered in an op shop (charity shop in America), this is the most historically important and exciting Australian photo album that I have ever found.

Belonging to John “Jack” Riverston Faviell, a senior New South Wales public accountant and featuring his photographs, the album ranges across the spectrum of Australian life and culture from the East to the West of the continent in the years 1922-1933. A list of locations and topics can be seen below. I have added additional research text, posters and photographs to help illuminate some of the issues under consideration.

Given its importance in documenting through photographs regional NSW, Indigenous Australians and the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, the album is now in the State Library of New South Wales collection.

Keywords

Australian culture, Australian identity, Australian colonialism, Indigenous Australians, photography, photo album, Australian photography, Australian vernacular photography, racism, Australian racism, racism in Australia, White Australia, Sydney Harbour Bridge, Trans-Australian Railway, State Library of New South Wales, New South Wales, Australia, rural New South Wales, country races, Kalgoorlie Boulder, pearling, gold mining, Year of Mourning, Invasion Day, National Day of mourning, First Nations of Australia, reconciliation, pastoralism

Golden splendour: privilege, ceremony and racism in 1920s-1930s Australia

This text investigates the photographs found in an important Australian album discovered in an op shop (charity shop in America) belonging to John “Jack” Riverston Faviell (see part one of the posting), a senior New South Wales public accountant who associated with important pastoralists and bankers of the time, invested in business, travelled across the continent, went to many functions, married Sydney socialite Melanie Audrey Pickburn in February 1925 (divorced October 1930) and built a house on prestigious Darling Point overlooking Sydney Harbour.

The album features Faviell’s photographs and was probably compiled by him, the photographs ranging across the spectrum of Australian life and culture from the East to the West of the continent in the years 1922-1933. A list of locations and topics can be seen below. The album has been assembled in near chronological order although some later dates precede earlier ones (for example, “Frensham Pastoral Play” of 8th December 1923 precedes “La Perouse” 7 November 1923; “Trip to Canberra” 5/6 Nov 1927 precedes “Jenolan Caves Trip” 10/12th July, 1927; and some images from 1927 sit side by side with photographs from October and November 1932). There are no dates for Faviell’s trip to Western Australia (presumably in early 1924) and the dating starts again with a polo competition for “The Dudley Cup” in 1924 after this trip.

Taken in Scotland and sent by a man named Robert Reid from that country there is only one overseas photograph in the album. The photograph, which was presumably taken on Faviell’s honeymoon, is titled “Ellen’s Isle, Loch Katrine, Scotland (Audrey & me in boat) 1925”, and is inserted unceremoniously into photographs dating from 1927. There is no other reference to his marriage or photographs of it or his honeymoon in the album. The handwriting and grid-like layout of the photographs are consistent from front to back, and the photographs are mostly of the same size and shape (meaning he used the same camera throughout the period), other than photographs that Faviell did not take (including the “honeymoon” photograph from Scotland and the photographs of Jenolan Caves taken by Lady Dorothy Hope-Morley).

Thinking of the order that the photographs have been inserted into the album means to my mind that it was consciously assembled by Faviell probably after the date of the last photograph in the album which is November 1933 – although it is possible that he assembled it as he went along, inserting the “honeymoon” photograph from 1925 into the 1927 pages, and some earlier 1927 photographs next to the ones from 1932. But it just doesn’t feel like the latter to me… everything is too ordered to be done as he went along.

One important element of the album are John Faviell’s photographs which document his life in rural New South Wales as he attends various country race meetings, schools, historic houses, pastoral farms, regatta, and business ventures in the state during the 1920s. A second important element is the documentation of “Aboriginal Types” along the Trans-Australian Railway, gold mining in Kalgoorlie-Boulder, and pearling and Aboriginals in Shark Bay, the latter two in Western Australia. Finally, important unpublished photographs of the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge in 1932 give insight into the pageantry and colonialism of white Australia.

Privilege

A feeling of privilege – defined as a special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group – pervades the photographs in the album. Faviell belonged to a particular social category which had an inherently privileged and advantageous position.

This is evidenced by his friendship with wealthy New South Wales graziers such as O.E. Friend (d. 1942) who was President of the Royal Historical Society and Director of the Commercial Banking Co., and who had a keen interest in pastoral pursuits and business investments; by photographs of large houses and pastoral stations such as “Weroona”, Belmont (demolished 1979), “Doona”, Breeza and “Foxlow”, Bungendore near Canberra which consisted of 7,500 hectares of land; by photographs of country horse races, friends who owned race horses and polo matches; by photographs of new cars; by photographs of his own investment projects such as the Doona Cyprus Pine Venture; by photographs of his travel to Western Australia and five-day cruise on the Cutter “Shark”; by photographs of “Old Boys” from Camden Grammar School, a term redolent of the English public school system; by building a house on one of the most exclusive promontories overlooking Sydney Harbour; by getting married in one of the “biggest social events of the month in Sydney”; and so it goes… the (British) class system alive and well in 1920s Australia, still an extension of the Empire.

What we should remember is that, after the end of the First World War the “1920s saw a higher level of material prosperity for non-Indigenous people than ever before.” Despite the rising affluence of the 1920s the Australian unemployment rate floated between 6% and 11% throughout the decade. Then, in October 1929, the world experienced a stock market crash on Wall Street in New York that plunged the world into the Great Depression (1929-1934). By 1932, one third of all Australians were out of work.

“Australia suffered badly during the period of the Great Depression of the 1930s… As in other nations, Australia suffered years of high unemployment, poverty, low profits, deflation, plunging incomes, and lost opportunities for economic growth and personal advancement. Unemployment reached a record high of around 30% in 1932, and gross domestic product declined by 10% between 1929 and 1931… Many hundreds of thousands of Australians suddenly faced the humiliation of poverty and unemployment. This was still the era of traditional social family structure, where the man was expected to be the sole bread winner. Soup kitchens and charity groups made brave attempts to feed the many starving and destitute. The male suicide rate spiked in 1930 and it became clear that Australia had limits to the resources for dealing with the crisis. The depression’s sudden and widespread unemployment hit the soldiers who had just returned from war the hardest as they were in their mid-thirties and still suffering the trauma of their wartime experiences. At night many slept covered in newspapers at Sydney’s Domain or at Salvation Army refugees.”1

Due to his wealth, his privileged family life and position in society, Faviell obviously felt none of the effects of the Great Depression. Although there are no photographs in the album taken between 1928 and 1931, by November 1932 he was buying a new Chrysler 70 motorcar. You can’t do that without money.

Ceremony

Faviell attended the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge on the 20th March 1932 sitting in the official stands, taking what are up until now previously unknown photographs of the Federal and State Governors arriving and the pageantry of the official opening (see photographs below). The ceremony featured a passing parade of groups, floats and attractions including Naval Guard, Mounted Police, Cobb & Co. Coach, Old King Street Bus, an early Hupmobile car, the first Auto-Gyro, Wool Float, surf girls, Pioneers Float and Aborigines. Also present in the parade at the Bridge’s opening ceremony was a contingent from the Aboriginal community of La Perouse on Sydney’s Botany Bay. According to the series Australia in Colour, “The first Australians are a token inclusion in the celebrations. They are not classed as citizens in their own country and have no voting or legal rights…”2 State and federal governments still saw Indigenous Australians as, “the native problem.” “For most city people, the only contact with Indigenous groups was watching tent boxing at the travelling shows which used to flourish in the ’30s.”3 But things were beginning to change. Indigenous Australians were slowly being politicised in order to get their message across, with pleas for better rights, conditions and representation.

Five years later, on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of European settlement in Australia in 1938 there was a re-enactment of Governor Phillip’s landing in which Aborigines (specially brought in for the occasion) are shown running up the beach as the boats of the First Fleet marines land at Farm Cove (see photograph below). A group of white dignitaries sits in comfortable safety watching the invasion. Elsewhere on that day in 1938 – Wednesday, 26th January – there took place the first Day of Mourning and Protest at the Australian Hall, Sydney. The protest, calling for full citizen status and equality, was led by William Cooper, Pearl Gibbs, Jack Patten and William Ferguson (see photographs and poster below). Cooper and his fellow Aboriginal men Jack Patten and William Ferguson organised a conference to grieve the collective loss of freedom and self-determination of Aboriginal communities as well as those killed during and after European settlement in 1788. “The first Day of Mourning was a culmination of years of work by the Australian Aborigines League (AAL) and the Aborigines Progressive Association (APA). It would became the inspiration for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander activism throughout the remainder of the twentieth century.”4

“In 1938, William Cooper had thrown down a challenge. It was 150 years since the landing of the ragtag British ‘first fleet’ in Sydney Cove on 26 January in 1788. As white Australians were preparing to celebrate, Cooper had branded that landing as the beginning of 150 years of invasion, dispossession and exploitation. Cooper dared white Australia to recognise that their ‘Australia Day’ was no celebration but instead a ‘Day of Mourning’ for invaded Australia. …

A forced reenactment. For the 150th Anniversary, Aboriginal people were forced to participate in a reenactment of the landing of the First Fleet under Captain Arthur Phillip. Aboriginal people living in Sydney had refused to take part so organisers brought in men from Menindee, in western NSW, and kept them locked up at the Redfern Police Barracks stables until the re-enactment took place. On the day itself, they were made to run up the beach away from the British – an inaccurate version of events. It was Cook who was first “threatened and warned off by the Indigenous people on the shore” and he then decided to fire gun shots.”5

Anita Heiss observes of that day in 1938, “The day also saw an appalling contrast. Aboriginal organisations in Sydney refused to participate in the government’s re-enactment of the events of January 1788. In response, the government transported groups of Aboriginal people from western communities in NSW to Sydney to partake in the re-enactments. The visitors were locked up at the Redfern Police Barracks stables and members of the Aborigines Progressive Association were denied access to them. After the re-enactment of the First Fleet landing at Farm Cove (Wuganmagulya), the visiting group of Aboriginal people were featured on a float parading along Macquarie Street.”6

Finally, by 1988, the re-enactments were discontinued. 50 years later to the day, on the occasion of the Australian Bicentenary in 1988 (the same year named a Year of Mourning by and for the Australian Aboriginal people), the protests against British invasion were even more prominent and vigorous, as Aboriginal people and their supporters rallied in Sydney and around the country. “On 26 January that year, up to 40,000 Aboriginal people (including some from as far away as Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory) and their supporters marched from Redfern Park to a public rally at Hyde Park and then on to Sydney Harbour to mark the 200th anniversary of invasion.”7

“On 26 January 1988, more than 40,000 people, including Aborigines from across the country and non-Indigenous supporters, staged what was the largest march in Sydney since the Vietnam moratorium. …

The march was seen as a challenge to the dominant society’s hegemonic construction of Australia day and what it represented. It was a statement of survival, demonstrating that although Australian history had excluded the indigenous voice, Aborigines as the original inhabitants of this place were not going to continue to be beggars in their own country. The march served to draw both national and international attention to Australia’s appalling human rights record. It aimed to educate the public about the poor conditions of Aboriginal health, education and welfare, of the high imprisonment rates and the number of deaths in custody suffered by Indigenous Australians. Activists such as Gary Foley called on Australians to join the Aboriginal protests and to make the point to the rest of Australia that the whole concept of the Bicentennial is based on hypocrisy and lies. …

There had been little emphasis on the need to address indigenous aspirations as a precondition to celebrating the bicentenary. The protest march was both an affirmation of indigenous Australians’ survival and a stark reminder of the falsity on which the celebration was premised. Celebrations focused on the discovery of Australia with a re-enactment of the arrival of the first fleet. However, the Aboriginal protest was a reminder that Australia had been inhabited at least 40,000 years before European arrival.”8

As the editorial in the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper on January 19, 1988 noted, “scarcely a day of the Bicentenary has passed when issues involving Aborigines and their “Year of Mourning” protests have not featured prominently…” which “instigated public debate concerning white and indigenous Australian history, the position of Aborigines in contemporary society and the possibilities of land rights and reconciliation in the future.”9 But despite these protests many Australians, myself included – newly arrived from England and still homesick for the mother country, failing to grasp the enormity of the betrayal – did not understand the protests. “Despite Indigenous people declaring January 26 a National Day of mourning fifty years prior in 1938, many of the non-Indigenous majority still failed to see any disrespect in celebrating an occasion made possible by the murder, massacre, dispossession, slavery and attempted genocide of the Indigenous people of this land.”10

While I could never understand, as an English man, Australia’s treatment of their First Peoples when I first arrived, at the time I had not educated myself or immersed myself in the history of Australia to gain its full import. Now I have. And so have other people.

Importantly, national events happened in the 1990s that led up to the Walk for Reconciliation across Sydney Harbour Bridge on 28 May, 2000 (see photograph below) in which about 250,000 people walked across the Sydney Harbour Bridge to show their support for reconciliation between Australia’s Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples: in 1991 the Australian Parliament passed an Act which created the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation; in the 1992 Mabo decision the High Court of Australia ruled that Australia was not terra nullius (land belonging to nobody) when it was claimed by Britain in 1770. This led to the Native Title Act 1993, which made it possible for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to claim ownership of their traditional lands; and the Bringing Them Home report, published in 1997, showed that thousands of Aboriginal and Torres Strait children had been taken away from their families by governments around Australia. These children have become known as the Stolen Generations. The report said that all Australian governments should apologise to Indigenous people, especially the Stolen Generations.11 So many people participated in the walk that the event took nearly six hours. It was the largest political demonstration ever held in Australia. Finally, eight years after the walk Prime Minister Kevin Rudd made a national apology to Australia’s Indigenous people. “On 13 February 2008, the Parliament of Australia issued a formal apology to Indigenous Australians for forced removals of Australian Indigenous children (often referred to as the Stolen Generations) from their families by Australian federal and state government agencies.”12

Better late than never…

Racism

By the time John Faviell started taking photographs for his album a twentieth-century, Euro- and U.S.-centric middle class had been dazzled by the “Kodakification” of photography. Small portable cameras with roll film and a faster film speed enabled “amateur” photographers,13 people who “simply wanted pictures as mementos of their daily lives but were hardly interested in learning how to do the rest”14 – that is, developing, printing and toning their own photographs – to document their existence and then send the film away to be developed and printed. George Eastman’s slogan for Kodak, “You Press the Button, We Do the Rest,” revolutionised the photography business in the United States and in the world, allowing the great mass of the general public to take photographs and assemble family albums (for example). In these vernacular photographs – “those countless ordinary and utilitarian pictures made for souvenir postcards, government archives, police case files, pin-up posters, networking Web sites, and the pages of magazines, newspapers, or family albums”15 – the focus is on the social contexts in which the photos were originally made and how they document an aspect of social or photo history. These images, including those by John Faviell, ask us to consider “the ways in which photographs function as significant bearers of complex meaning, rather than mere descriptions or reflections of the world, whether they grace the walls of a museum, the pages of a magazine, the files in a cabinet, or a living room mantel.”16 Commenting on photo postcards but equally applicable to vernacular photographs, Leonard A. Lauder observes that, “The new flexibility and mobility of this medium created citizen photographers who captured life on the ground around them… [and] we learn from them both the grand historical narrative and the smaller events that made up the daily lives of those who participated in that history.”17

Even as the freedom to photograph anywhere, anytime led to the ability of humans with access to a camera and the money to develop and pay for film and prints to document their lives – an intimate portrait of a life in the making, constructed by people for themselves – it also, paradoxically, led to the Kodification, codification, of everyday life… into the haves and the have nots, into people who were portrayed existing at the upper echelons of society, to those that existed as policemen, factory workers, or working on construction sites (for example), or those that existed at the margins of society, the disenfranchised, abused and neglected “other”, subject to the gaze of the photographer and the mechanical observation of the camera.

Even as he welcomes his own ambition and sense of self worth there is a sense of conservatism and privilege in the depiction of his social position in Australian society. In his private photographic album, John Faviell places himself at the centre of the story, at the centre of history, as though he is constructing not only his own place in the history of Australia but the history of Australia itself. His photographs portray his life embedded within the “golden splendour” of the Australian landscape even as the photographs reinforce in private the cultural and photographic norms circulating in public in 1920s-1930s Australia,18 its heteropatriarchy, settler coloniality and the racism prevalent in early 20th century Australia. Through the many titled photographs Faviell projects the inherent racism towards Aboriginal people that was present at that time in white society, the notion of white superiority that was implicit in the White Australia Policy.19 In this regard he would not have seen himself as racist (I have no idea whether he was racist or not) for he was merely reflecting the social attitudes of the day, reflecting a collective racism that pervaded all aspects of white Australian society officially sanctioned through the White Australia Policy, an attitude which continues to haunt Australia’s past, present and future.

While now totally offensive Faviell would have thought nothing of captioning his photographs with titles such as Grave in Nigger’s Cemetery, Shark’s Bay, 1923; A Nor’ West Gin and Big Nig, Shark’s Bay, 1923; and Nellie and her litter, 1923, where after colonisation “gin” became a racist, derogatory term for an Aboriginal woman quickly used against female Aborigines to express a mix of lust and racial contempt, becoming a “dehumanising weapon essential to the violence of occupation,” which led to the systematic rape, abduction and murder of Aboriginal girls and women. He would have thought nothing of titling his photograph Nellie and her litter, the text loaded with casual racism which compares Indigenous Australians to dogs. But what is important to note here is how individuals make use of images in shaping their identities, and how Faviell’s images informed the construction of his own identity and the embodying of his own power.

Photographs tend to be indispensable in the construction of identity because of the phenomenal aspect of photography – its status as a spatio-temporal capture – where memory traces and their capture become a visible reality, and where contexts (point of view) and power can be replayed over and over again, made present in absence.20 Faviell’s album of photographs and the use of the art of memory (Latin: ars memoriae: a number of loosely associated mnemonic principles and techniques used to organise memory impressions) would have allowed him to organise his memory impressions and improve the recall of them. Faviell could have used a set of associative values given for images in memory texts (Nigger, gin) as a starting point to initiate a chain of recollection. “Techniques commonly employed in the art [of memory] include the association of emotionally striking memory images within visualized locations, the chaining or association of groups of images, the association of images with schematic graphics or notae (“signs, markings, figures” in Latin), and the association of text with images.”21

Here we must acknowledge that human beings, including Faviell, are not just actors in history, they are enablers. Enablers of racism whose slippery tentacles still enslave this country Australia down to its very roots – at the footy, on social media, in government, on the land – even today. As the artist Octora observes, “A photograph is not merely evidence of the past or a slice of a passing moment, it is performative and still performs to distort actual reality today.”22 But changing how photographs perform realities and memories is not easy, for there are other forces at play to which photographs only reinforce social prejudices: “There is a racism that lurks within the Australian consciousness and is fuelled by an uneasy conscience caused by our treatment of Aborigines in the past and out fear from the future.”23

What we must do is confront this fear and propose a narrative that moves beyond those reflected in our existing histories… for memory is not just a personal remembering (the product and property of individual minds) but a collective remembering, “concerned with remembering and forgetting as socially constituted activities… Individual memories cannot be understood as ‘internal mental processes’ which occur independently of the interpretive and communicative practices which characterise a particular society or culture. Individuals ‘read’, account for and negotiate their memories within the pragmatics of social life.”24 As would John Faviell have done.

We must remember that historical memories help form the social and political identities of groups of people and that in Australia there is a collective amnesia surrounding the White Australia policy, a social amnesia where there is a collective forgetting by a group, or nation, of people about the effects of a certain policy – because they are ignorant of it, because they don’t care, because they agree with the policy, or because they benefit from the policy – and they forget about it. Things remain the same, the status quo is maintained, and mythologies of a white nation remain impervious to change. There is also a collective remembering that this is the policy of the government, that it keeps the country homogenous, and wards of the invasion of non-desirables. People of colour and “others”.

So how can looking at historic photographs, such as those in John Faviell’s photographic album, affect change? According to Mika Elo,

“Photographs are nomadic and relational images. They are scalable and can be inscribed in many kinds of material supports, which means that they carry in themselves references to something beyond their own instantiations. Something similar applies to power. Power can be restrictive or productive, personalized or impersonal, but it is always relational. With regard to visual representation, power is neither entirely inherent to specific images nor entirely reducible to the context. Rather, we might consider it a parergonal [a subordinate activity or work: work undertaken in addition to one’s main employment] phenomenon. As we all know, power relations can effectively be built up and worked against with photographic images. This means that in each individual case the borders between information, propaganda and advertising are necessarily indistinct – even if the face offered by the photograph as an image is distinct. The distinctness of an image is always dissimilarity [its groundlessness of meaning in a ‘network’ of significations]. The way in which a photograph cuts itself off from everything else introduces a mute interval that fosters many kinds of speech, whether banal, creative, humiliating or empowering. In any case, the photographic cut necessarily introduces basic conditions for power relations: it introduces a point of view into relational structures. Its effects can be both imaginary and symbolic. Depending on the point of view, the cut can be transformative or conservative, emancipatory or suppressive, subversive or destructive.”25

In this sense images, rather than being a representation of a palpable materiality at a particular point in time and with a particular interpretation, never cease to present their multiple aspects open to reinterpretation. Collectively and individually photographs can seize us, can hold us in their thrall. But we are not passive observers that approach the present which is absent, a particular floating “reality” that is embedded in a photograph, but an active participant in the encounter with performance and gesture… in the eyes of the observer. As Žarko Paić notes of the observer, “His role has changed significantly. It is no longer a Kantian passive subject to the reflection of a beautiful, nor a Nietzschean active producer who disturbs indifferent senses. The observer does not look at what’s happening in a picture like an idle screen. Violence caused by the rise of the chaotic reality of the twentieth century, wars and revolutions, by the technical acceleration of the cinematic energy of one’s life, becomes the “energy” and “intensity” of the image. The image is always an image of something. It is therefore mimetic in its aspiration to turn life into the objectivity of reality. However, the representation of something does not mean that it is only an empty intentional act of observing objects.”26 As Mika Elo states, “… power is necessarily inscribed in technologies, practices and discourses of photography in many ways. Photographic powers have their past, presence and future. They have their visible and invisible forms.”27

And so this is what we can collectively and individually undertake. We can look at John Faviell’s private photographs and confront the racist societal violence28 against Aboriginal people depicted through image and text, and we can disrupt their historicity, in public, in the here and now. We can acknowledge past determinations of these photographs and delimit that determination and identification in a network of significations… so that we celebrate the life of the disenfranchised because they are not to be seen as such. These are human beings living their life and are as equally as valuable as anybody else, and we can acknowledge this because we approach the photograph to embrace the … the “energy” and “intensity” of the image. And the “presence” and spirit of the people not as subject but as the thing itself.29

The observer actively engages with the photograph to bring these human beings to life in their imagination,30 to inhabit a reality that can in the present be changed. Every look performs this operation because only through this recon/figuration, this transformation, this metamorphosis, can we assess the past with fresh eyes and not be complicit in the racism and socially constituted activities of the past which still affect us today. Only by bringing the visible and invisible forms of racism into the open in the present can we open up new possibilities for the future.
As the photographer Frederick Sommer sagely opines,

The world is a reality,
not because of the way it is,
but because
of the possibilities it presents.

Dr Marcus Bunyan
January 2023

Word count: 4,671

See Part 1 of the posting

Footnotes

1/ “Great Depression in Australia,” on the Wikipedia website [Online] Cited 30/08/2021

2/ Lisa Matthews (director). “Shifting Allegiances,” from Australia in Colour Season One, Episode Two. TV Mini Series. Strange Than Fiction Films, 2019

3/ Ibid.,

4/ Anonymous. “The 1938 Day of Mourning,” on the AIATSIS website Nd [Online] Cited 21/02/2022

5/ Isabella Higgins and Sarah Collard. “Captain James Cook’s landing and the Indigenous first words contested by Aboriginal leaders,” on the ABC News website Wed 29 Apr 2020 quoted in Jens Korff. “Australia Day – Invasion Day,” on the Creative Spirits website 26 July 2021 [Online] Cited 03/05/2022

6/ Anita Heiss. “Significant Aboriginal Events in Sydney,” on the Barani website Nd [Online] Cited 22/07/2021.

7/ Ibid.,

8/ Pose, Melanie. “Indigenous Protest, Australian Bicentenary, 1988,” on the Museums Victoria Collections website 2009 [Online] Cited 03/05/2022 Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International

9/ Ibid.,

10/ Natalie Cromb. “Analysis: The ’88 protests,” on the SBS NTIV website 29 January, 2018 [Online] Cited 03/05/2022. No longer available online

11/ Anonymous. “Walk for reconciliation,” on the National Museum of Australia website 12 May 2021 [Online] Cited 03/05/2022

12/ “Apology to Australia’s Indigenous peoples,” on the Wikipedia website [Online] Cited 03/05/2022

13/ “Vernacular photography is also to be distinguished from amateur photography. While vernacular photography is generally situated outside received art categories (though where the lines are drawn may vary), “amateur photography” contrasts with “professional photography”: “[A]mateur [photography] simply means that you make your living doing something else”.”
Langford, Michael and Bilissi, Efthimia. Langford’s Advanced Photography. Oxford, UK and Burlington, MA: Focal Press. 2011, p. 1 quoted in Anonymous. “Vernacular photography,” on the Wikipedia website Nd [Online] Cited 06/05/2022

14/ Anonymous. “You Press the Button, We Do the Rest,” on the Wikipedia website Nd [Online] Cited 06/05/2022

15/ Anonymous. “In the Vernacular,” on the Art Institute of Chicago website, 2010 [Online] Cited 06/05/2022

16/ Ibid.,

17/ Leonard A. Lauder quoted in the press release for Real Photo Postcards: Pictures from a Changing Nation at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston 17th March – 25th July, 2022 Nd [Online] Cited 06/05/2022

18/ Kris Belden-Adams. “CFP – ‘These Are Our Stories’: Global Expressions of “Other” Histories, Narratives, and Identities in Photographic Albums,” on the Humanities and Social Science Online website January 23, 2020 [Online] Cited 03/05/2022

19/ See Anonymous. “White Australia Policy,” on the Wikipedia website Nd [Online] Cited 25/12/2022; Anonymous. “White Australia Policy,” on the National Museum of Australia website Nd [Online] Cited 25/12/2022; and Anonymous. “The Immigration Restriction Act 1901,” on the National Archives of Australia website Nd [Online] Cited 25/12/2022

20/ Mika Elo. “Introduction: Photography Research Exposed to the Parergonal Phenomenon of “Photographic Powers”,” in Elo, Mika and Karo, Marko (eds.,). Photographic Powers – Helsinki Photomedia 2014. Aalto University publication series, 2015, pp. 7-8.

21/ Anonymous. “Art of Memory,” on the Wikipedia website Nd [Online] Cited 25/12/2022

22/ The artist Octora quoted in James McArdle. “16 July: Writing,” on the On This Date In Photography website 16/07/2021 [Online] Cited 22/07/2021.

23/ The Right Reverend George Hearn quoted in “Birthday hype ‘blurs’ history,” in The Canberra Times Sun 1 May 1988 on the Trove website [Online] Cited 22/07/2021.

24/ David Middleton and Derek Edwards (eds.,). Collective Remembering. Sage Publications, 1990

25/ Mika Elo, Op cit., pp. 7-8

26/ Žarko Paić. “The Dark Core Of Mimesis: Art, Body And Image In The Thought Of Jean-Luc Nancy,” on the TVRDA website August 20, 2022 [Online] Cited 25/12/2022

27/ Mika Elo, Op cit., pp. 7-8

28/ “Racist violence is exemplary. It is the violence that knocks someone in the face, simply because – as the stupid twat might say – it “doesn’t like the look” on his face. The face is denied truth. The truth meanwhile lies in a figure that deduces itself to the blow that it strikes. Here, truth is true because it is violent, and it is true in its violence: it is a destructive truth in the sense in which destruction verifies and makes true.”
Jean-Luc Nancy. The Ground of the Image. Translated by Jeff Fort. Fordham University Press, 2005, p. 17.

29/ Ibid., p. 21.

30/ “The image not only exceeds the form, the aspect, the calm surface of representation, but in order to do so item just draw upon a ground – or a groundlessness – of excessive power. The image must be imagined; that is to say, it must extract from its absence the unity of force that the thing merely at hand does not present. Imagination is not the faculty of representing something in its absence; it is the force that draws the form of presentation out of absence: that is to say, the force of “self-presenting.””
Jean-Luc Nancy. The Ground of the Image. Translated by Jeff Fort. Fordham University Press, 2005, p. 21.

Many thankx to the State Library of New South Wales for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Grateful thankx to Douglas Stewart Fine Books for their research help with this photo album. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

“Shark’s Bay,” 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

Locations

Blue Mountains, NSW (1922)
Leura Falls, NSW (1922)
Weeping Rock, Wentworth Falls, NSW (1922)
Tarana Picnic Races, NSW (1922)
Doona, Breeza, NSW (1922)
Avoca, NSW (1922)
Newcastle Races, NSW (1923)
Belmont / Belmont Regatta, NSW (1923)
Hawkesbury, NSW (1923)
Frenches Forest, NSW (1923)
“Foxlow” Station, Bungedore, NSW (1923)
Sydney, NSW (Customs House, National Art Gallery, Mitchell Library, Darlinghurst Courthouse) (1923)
Muswellbrook Picnic Races, NSW (1923)
Maitland / Maitland Cup Meeting, NSW (1923)
Breeza, NSW (1923)
Wiseman’s Ferry, NSW (1923)
Moss Vale / Sutton Forest Church, NSW (1923)
Frensham, NSW (1923)
La Perouse, NSW (Historical Society Excursion) (1923)
Old Customs Watch Tower, La Perouse (1923)
The Old Illawarra Road, NSW (1923)
Yarcowie, SA (1923)
Trans-Australian Railway (Port Augusta to Kalgoorlie) (1923)
Karonie, WA (1923)
Kalgoorlie, WA (1923)
Boulder City, WA (1923)
Fremantle, WA (1923)
Geraldton, WA (1923)
Shark’s Bay, WA (1923)
Henry Freycinet Estuary, WA (1923)
Tamala Station, WA (1923)
Perth, WA (1923)
Adelaide, SA (Torrens River) (1923)
“Redbank,” Scone, NSW (1924)
Muswellbrook Picnic Races, NSW (1924)
“Craigieburn,” Bowral, NSW (1924)
The Dudley Cup at Kensington, NSW (1924)
Camden Grammar School, NSW (1924)
Liverpool Church, NSW (1924)
Landsdowne Bridge, NSW (1924)
Jenolan Caves, NSW (1924)
Avon Dam, NSW (1924)
Herald Office, Pitt Street, NSW (1924)
Camping, Cronulla, NSW (1925)
Roseville, NSW (1926)
Whale Beach, NSW (1927)
Visit of the Duke and Duchess of York, Macquarie Street, NSW (1927)
20, Yarranabbe Rd., Darling Point, NSW (1926)
Canberra, ACT (1927)
Jenolan Caves, NSW (Lady Dorothy Hope-Morley) (1927)
Ellen’s Isle, Loch Katrine, Scotland (1925)
Sydney Harbour Bridge, NSW (1931-32)
“Springfield,” Byng, Near Orange, NSW (1932)
Lucknow, near Orange, NSW (1933)
Hawkesbury, NSW (1933)
Bathurst, NSW (1933)
“Millambri, ” Canowindra, NSW (1933)
Melbourne, VIC (1933)

Topics

Men
Pastoralism and grazing
Horses / country horse racing
Sheep and shearing
Cows
Mill / logging
Pine plantation
Bush
Bores and dams
Cathedral / churches
Tennis
Golf
Cars (Ford, Pan-American, Essex, Oldsmobile, early Hupmobile, Chrysler 70)
Buses
Bank, post office
Pastoral Play
Monuments
Rock carvings
Houses
Cemetery / tombstones
John Dunn, executed 1866
South Australian Railways / locomotives
S.A. constable and Adelaide cop
Indigenous Australians (Aboriginal types, along the Trans-Australian Railway)
Australian Desert Blacks
Gold mine / gold panning
Mining (Boulder and Perseverance Mines)
Convict gaol
Oldest inhabitant (Henry Desmond)
Hotels
Beach and sea, surf girls
Mother of pearl
Dates
Afghan / camels
Yachting, sailing / boats
Guano
Fred Adams, Boss-Pearler
Stations and station hands
Rowing
Dredging
Polo
Rugby
Caves
Guns
Nobility and royalty
Camping, picnics
Tennis
House building / old houses
Parliament House
Prime Ministers residence
Bridges and bridge building
Federal and state governors
The world’s first auto-gyro plane (1909-1912)
The Southern Cross
Pioneers
Mounted police
First house in Byng
Rabbiting
Glamour
Social status / socialite
Family
Women and children
Sydney Harbour Bridge opening
Carillon (bells)
Myers and Bourke Street, Melbourne

“An Afghan’s turnout,” 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Shark’s Bay, Lloyd’s Camels (Bred on Dirk Hartog Island),” 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“A five-days cruise on the Cutter “Shark”,” 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Amongst the Islands of Henri Freycinet Estuary,” 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

Henri Freycinet Harbour, also known as Freycinet Estuary, is one of the inner gulfs of Shark Bay, Western Australia, a World Heritage Site that lies to the west of the Peron Peninsula. It has a significantly larger number of islands than Hamelin Pool, and has a number of smaller peninsulas known as “prongs” on its northern area. It has also been identified as a critical dugong habitat area. It is situated within the Shark Bay Marine Park.

“Fred Adams, Boss-Pearler, Shark’s Bay, W.A.,” 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

Pearling in Western Australia was an important part of the European colonisation of the North West. Although it was never considered a permanent part of the state economy, pearling, with its immediate returns, allowed pastoralists to establish stations and contributed to the foundation of several towns. Some of these towns evolved into centres for agriculture and tourism and some developed their port facilities. Others did not outlive the availability of and market for pearlshell. Uniquely, Shark Bay not only survived the demise of the industry, but developed into the state’s commercial fishing centre. The pearling boats were simply refitted to become fishing boats (OH 2266/8) and the Bay life continued…

Wilyah Miah. An Archaeological Study of the History of the Shark Bay Pearling Industry 1850-1930. University of Western Australia, 1999, p. 7.

“”Natty” Black & Adams,” in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Sharks Bay,” 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“J.F.” 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Boss-pearler Henfrey, and his “missus”, opening shell,” 1923in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

The first labour employed in the industry was that of the local Aboriginal people. Little is known of the pre-European Aboriginal people of the Bay. It is not clear whether it was the territory of the Nanda or the Mulgana people (Bowdler 1992:5) although current consensus among the people of Shark Bay is that they are Mulgana (Bowdler pers. comm. 1999). They were easily accessible and there were no expectations that they should be paid the wages of other labourers. Willingness on the part of the Aboriginal people to participate in the industry was often an issue irrelevant to the interests of the pearlers. Goods such as alcohol may have been an inducement, but, according to Anderson (1978) in her study of the North West industry, coercion was necessary and practices such as blackbirding were employed to acquire labour. The introduction of pastoralism, by its appropriation of land, ensured the destruction of the traditional Aboriginal economy and forced them to provide for the market the only commodity available to them, their labour (Hartwig 1975:32).

Wilyah Miah. An Archaeological Study of the History of the Shark Bay Pearling Industry 1850-1930. University of Western Australia, 1999, p. 18.

“Tamala Station, Shark’s Bay, W.A.,” 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

This pastoral station is in the southern part of Shark Bay World Heritage Area on limestone-dominated landscapes. The main attraction of Tamala Station is the low lying coastline and waters of Henri Freycinet Harbour. Many visitors only cross this property on their way to Steep Point but some spend time here camping, fishing and exploring the prongs and peninsulas. Tamala Station allows access to the general public but you must first contact the station managers for bookings.

Text from the Shark Bay World Heritage website

“Tamala Station Hands,” 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Well Ziffed Stockman,” in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

Ziff, Australian for beard. The Oxford English Dictionary says this slang term originated around 1919, but otherwise the origin is unknown. To be ziffed means to be bearded.

“Untitled,” 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Nellie and her litter,” 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Western Australia,” 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Perth,” 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Returning from the West,” 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Redbank”, Scone, N.S.W.,” 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

W.T. Badgery, horsebreeder, at Scone, Hunter Valley (Information from Douglas Stewart Fine Books)

Scone /ˈskoʊn/ is a town in the Upper Hunter Shire in the Hunter Region of New South Wales, Australia. It is on the New England Highway north of Muswellbrook about 270 kilometres north of Sydney, and is part of the New England (federal) and New England (state) electorates. Scone is in a farming area and is also noted for breeding Thoroughbred racehorses. It is known as the ‘Horse capital of Australia’.

Text from the Wikipedia website

“Muswellbrook Picnic Races,” 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Polo, Scone v Muswellbrook,” 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Craigieburn”, Bowral, N.S.W.,” 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

Craigieburn, Bowral is a house of historical significance as it was built in about 1885. It was originally the mountain retreat for a wealthy Sydney merchant and was owned by him for over twenty years. It was then the home of several other prominent people until about 1918 when it was converted into a hotel. Today it still provides hotel accommodation and is a venue for special events particularly weddings and conferences.

Text from the Wikipedia website

“Bryden Brown and Jack Whitehouse,” 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“The Dudley Cup at Kensington,” 1924 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“C.G.S Football, School v Old Boys,” 1924 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

Camden Grammar School

“At the close of the last century the school was moved to the present situation at Studley Park, Narellan, formerly the residence of A. Payne Esq., a magnificent residence standing on the brow of a hill over looking the Nepean Valley and surrounded by 200 acres of rich country.” (Trove) The school was at Studley Park House 1902-1933.

“Half-time,” 1924 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Untitled,” 1924 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Trip to Jenolan Caves,” October, 1924 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

Audrey Pickburn

Audrey Pickburn was a Sydney socialite. Her mother who was obviously playing chaperone on this trip to Jenolan Caves (Information from Douglas Stewart Fine Books) (Information from Douglas Stewart Fine Books)

Audrey Pickburn and John Faviell were married on Tuesday 24 February 1925.

AT ST. JAMES’
LAST NIGHT’S WEDDING
FAVIELL – PICKBURN

ST. JAMES Church, Kings Street was crowded last night for the wedding or Miss Audrey Pickburn, only child of the late Judge Pickburn, and Mrs. Pickburn of Springfield, Darllnghurst and Mr John Favlell, of “Collinroobie”. The church was decorated by girl friends of the bride and the ceremony was performed by Rev. T. L—-.

A lovely bridal gown of gleaming white was hand embroidered with pearls and diamente, and made with a long train, which was encrusted with pearls and lined with shell pink georgette. Silver thread embroideries also appeared on the train, which was finished with true-lovers knots. A plain tulle veil, held with a coronet of orange blossom, and a bouquet of orchids completed the ensemble.

Miss Gretel Bullmore was chief bridesmaid wearing a gown of golden lame, flared at the hem. Miss Eileen Wiley and Miss Joyce Russell were also In attendance. Their frocks of lame were made —– effect. All three wore golden crin. hats, trimmed with —- and floating blue scarves, with gold thread embroideries, and they carried bouquets of orchids.

Mr. Claude Pain was in attendance as best man. Mr. Guy Little and Mr Keith Hardie acted as groomsmen. The reception was held at the Queen’s Club where the bride & mother received a big number of guests.

The Labor Daily, Tuesday, 24 February 1925, Page 7 on the Trove website [Online] Cited 05/11/2019

(The Queen’s Club, 137 Elizabeth Street, Sydney established in 1912, is a private Club. The Club was founded for social purposes for country and city women.)

PICKBURN – FAVIELL

The biggest social event of the month was the wedding on Tuesday night of Miss Mclanie Audrey Pickburn, only daughter of the late Judge Pickburn and Mrs. Pickburn, of ‘Springfield,’ Darlinghurst, to Mr. Jack “Riverstone” Faviell, of Sydney, son of the late Mr. A. Faviell, Colinroobie, Narandera, and Mrs. Faviell, Kiribilli, which was celebrated at St. James’s Church, King-street, Sydney, by the Rev. E. C. Lucas, of St. John’s, Darlinghurst. The church was beautifully decorated in white and gold.

Narandera Argus and Riverina Advertiser, Friday, 27 February 1925, Page 6 on the Trove website [Online] Cited 05/11/2019

Jenolan Caves

The Jenolan Caves (Tharawal: Binoomea, Bindo, Binda) are limestone caves located within the Jenolan Karst Conservation Reserve in the Central Tablelands region, west of the Blue Mountains, in Jenolan, Oberon Council, New South Wales, in eastern Australia. The caves and 3,083-hectare (7,620-acre) reserve are situated approximately 175 kilometres (109 mi) west of Sydney, 20 kilometres (12 mi) east of Oberon and 30 kilometres (19 mi) west of Katoomba.

The caves are the most visited of several similar groups in the limestone caves of the country, and the most ancient discovered open caves in the world.

Text from the Wikipedia website

“Caves Service Car,” 1924 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“My Pan American,” 1924 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Audrey Pickburn,” 1924 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Jenolan Caves,” October, 1924 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Audrey,” 1924 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Untitled,” in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

Admiral Sir Dudley Rawson Stratford de Chair, KCB, KCMG, MVO (30 August 1864 – 17 August 1958) was a senior Royal Navy officer and later Governor of New South Wales. …

Governor of New South Wales

De Chair had been interested in serving in a viceregal role as early as 1922, when he put his name forward to the Colonial Office for the position of Governor of South Australia. This position however, went to Sir Tom Bridges instead and the First Lord of the Admiralty, Leo Amery, put de Chair’s name forward for the Governor of New South Wales. This position, which had been vacant since the death of Sir Walter Davidson in September 1923, was the same one his uncle, Sir Harry Rawson, had held twenty years earlier, and to which he was appointed on 8 November 1923.

Arriving in Sydney on 28 February 1924, de Chair became governor in relatively calm political times and was warmly received in the city with great fanfare. On de Chair’s appointment, the President of the Royal Australian Historical Society, Aubrey Halloran, compared Admiral de Chair to the first Governor, Captain Arthur Phillip: “Our new Governor’s reputation as an intrepid sailor and ruler of men evokes from us a hearty welcome and inspires us to place in him the same confidence that [Arthur] Phillip received from his gallant band of fellow-sailors and the English statesmen who sent him.”

The political makeup of the state changed not long after his arrival however, when the conservative Nationalist/Progressive coalition government of Sir George Fuller, whom de Chair had got on well with, was defeated at the May 1925 state election by the Labor Party under Jack Lang. De Chair noted to himself that Lang and his party’s position comprised “radical and far-reaching legislation, which had not been foreshadowed in their election speeches”. He also later wrote that Lang’s “lack of scruple gave me a great and unpleasant surprise”.

With the Labor Government only holding a single seat majority in the Legislative Assembly and only a handful of members in the upper Legislative Council, one of Lang’s main targets was electoral reform. The Legislative Council, comprising members appointed by the Governor for life terms, had long been seen by Lang and the Labor Party as an outdated bastion of conservative privilege holding back their reform agenda. Although previous Labor premiers had managed to work with the status quo, such as requesting appointments from the Governor sufficient to pass certain bills, Lang’s more radical political agenda required more drastic action to ensure its passage. Consequently, Lang and his government sought to abolish the council, along the same lines that their Queensland Labor colleagues had done in 1922 to their Legislative Council, by requesting from de Chair enough appointments to establish a Labor majority in the council that would then vote for abolition.

While Lang’s attempts ultimately failed, de Chair failed to gain the support of an indifferent Dominions Office. With Lang’s departure in 1927, the Nationalist Government of Thomas Bavin invited him in 1929 to stay on as Governor for a further term. De Chair agreed only to a year’s extension and retired on 8 April 1930.

Text from the Wikipedia website

“Old Herald Office – Pitt St.,’ 1924 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Aboard the Orvieto,” September, 1925 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Curtis (Captain Arthur Curtis),” 1925 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Roseville,” 1926 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Picnics – Whale Beach / Visit of the Duke & Duchess of York,” 1927 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Visit of the Duke & Duchess of York,” 1927 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“A house is nearly built – 20 Yarranabbe Road, Darling Point,” 1926 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Buying the land,” 1926 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Three harbour views taken from upstairs,” 1926 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Harbour view,” 1926 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

Audrey Pickburn and Jack Faviell divorced in October 1930. Audrey re-married in 1934 and so did Jack (Information from Douglas Stewart Fine Books)

IN DIVORCE

(Before Mr. Justice Pike)

FAVIELL v FAVIELL

Jack Riverstone Faviell sued for divorce from Melanie Audrey Faviell (formerly Pickburn) on the ground of non compliance with a decree for restitution of conjugal rights. The parties were married at Sydney in February, 1925, according to the rites of the Church of England. A decree nisi, returnable in six months, was granted. Mr. Toose (instructed by Messrs. Allen, Allen, and Hemsley) appeared for the petitioner.

The Sydney Morning Herald, Saturday, 11 October 1930. Page 8 on the Trove website [Online] Cited 05/11/2019

The party below is for Jack with his second wife whom he married in 1934; Miss Rosenthal from Melbourne (Information from Douglas Stewart Fine Books)

“Party at Darling Point”

MRS. JOHN FAVIELL, looking very cool in a pink and grey floral sheer frock and shady natural straw hat, was hurrying about town in yesterday’s heat to complete arrangements for the Christmas party and dance at her home, 20 Yarranabbe Road, Darling Point, on Friday.

The party will be held from Ave till ten p.m., and the proceeds will be in aid of the Blind Institution. A Christmas tree will be among the attractions.

The Daily Telegraph, Wednesday, 15 December 1937. Page 12 on the Trove website [Online] Cited 05/11/2019

“Trip to Canberra,” 5/6 November, 1927 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Prime Minister’s Residence,” 1927 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Trip to Canberra,” 5/6 November, 1927 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

The prophetic tombstone of Sarah, George and Betsy Webb. The inscription is prophetic “For here we have no continuing city but seek one to come” St John’s Churchyard, Constitution Avenue, Reid.

“Taken by Lady Dorothy Hope-Morley, Jenolan Caves Trip,’ 10/12th July, 1927 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

Dorothy Edith Isabel Hope-Morley (Hobart-Hampden)
Birthdate: April 11, 1891
Death: December 15, 1972
Daughter of Sidney, 7th Earl of Buckinghamshire, OBE and Georgiana Wilhelmina, Countess of Buckinghamshire
Wife of Hon. Claude Hope-Morley
Mother of Gordon Hope Hope-Morley, 3rd Baron Hollenden and Hon Ann Rosemary Hope Newman
Sister of John Hobart-Hampden-Mercer-Henderson, 8th Earl of Buckinghamshire and Lady Sidney Mary Catherine Anne Hobart-Hampden

“Taken by Lady Dorothy Hope-Morley, Jenolan Caves Trip,’ 10/12th July, 1927 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Ellen’s Isle, Loch Katrine, Scotland (Audrey & me in boat),” 1925 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

This photograph, the only one from overseas (Scotland), must be from Audrey and Jack’s honeymoon (1925). It is interesting that there are no other photographs from either the wedding or the honeymoon in the album. Of course, the marriage photographs could have been housed in a purpose built wedding album, but the haphazard nature of the construction of this album, with the photographs out of date order, and this the only one from the honeymoon, make me think that this album was assembled in the 1930s. Marcus

“Untitled,” c. 1927-30 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Sydney Harbour Bridge As It Grew,” 1929-1930 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

Sydney Harbour Bridge construction

Arch construction itself began on 26 October 1928. The southern end of the bridge was worked on ahead of the northern end, to detect any errors and to help with alignment. The cranes would “creep” along the arches as they were constructed, eventually meeting up in the middle. In less than two years, on Tuesday, 19 August 1930, the two halves of the arch touched for the first time. Workers riveted both top and bottom sections of the arch together, and the arch became self-supporting, allowing the support cables to be removed. On 20 August 1930 the joining of the arches was celebrated by flying the flags of Australia and the United Kingdom from the jibs of the creeper cranes.

Text from the Wikipedia website [Online] Cited 31/10/2019

“Sydney Harbour Bridge As It Grew,” 1929-1930 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Bridge Opening, 20th March, 1932,” in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Showing anchor cables,” March, 1932 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Federal and State Govenors arriving,” March, 1932 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Pageantry at Official Opening of Harbour Bridge – 20th March, 1932,” in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Mounted Police,” March, 1932 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Aborigines,” March, 1932 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Old King Street Bus,” March, 1932 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“An early Hupmobile car,” March, 1932 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

Hupmobile was an automobile built from 1909 through 1939 by the Hupp Motor Car Company.

“First Auto-Gyro (The World’s First Auto-Gyro Plane, 1909-12),” March, 1932 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Pageantry at Official Opening of Harbour Bridge – 20th March, 1932,” in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Surf girls drawing Float,” in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“The Southern Cross,” March, 1932 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Pioneers Float,” March, 1932 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

Australian National Travel Association
Smith and Julius Studios (Sydney, N.S.W.) (printer)
Australia’s 150th Anniversary Sydney 1938: Pageantry and carnival January 26th – April 25th
Sydney: The Association, 1938
Poster
101.2 x 62.4cm
© National Library of Australia

Used under fair use condition for the purpose for research or study

‘The 26th of January, 1938, is not a day of rejoicing for Australia’s Aborigines; it is a day of mourning. This festival of 150 years’ so-called “progress” in Australia commemorates also 150 years of misery and degradation imposed upon the original native inhabitants by the white invaders of this country.

‘We, representing the Aborigines, now ask you, the reader of this appeal, to pause in the midst of your sesqui-centenary rejoicings and ask yourself honestly whether your “conscience” is clear in regard to the treatment of the Australian blacks by the Australian whites during the period of 150 years’ history which you celebrate?’

‘You are the New Australians, but we are the Old Australians. We have in our arteries the blood of the Original Australians, who have lived in this land for many thousands of years.’

‘You came here only recently, and you took our land away from us by force. You have almost exterminated our people, but there are enough of us remaining to expose the humbug of your claim, as white Australians, to be a civilised, progressive, kindly and humane nation.’

‘Aborigines Claim Citizen Rights!: A Statement of the Case for the Aborigines Progressive Association’, the Publicist, 1938, p. 3 quoted in Anonymous. “The 1938 Day of Mourning,” on the AIATSIS website Nd [Online] Cited 21/02/2022

Charles Meere (Australian, 1890-1961)
1788-1938, 150 years of progress: Australia celebrates January 26 – April 25, 1938
1938
Poster
101.5 x 63.5cm
© National Library of Australia

Used under fair use condition for the purpose for research or study

Poster advertising the Day of Mourning
1938
AIATSIS Collection

Used under fair use condition for the purpose for research or study

In 1938, a poster invited “Aborigines and persons of Aboriginal blood” to attend the Day of Mourning and Protest at the Australian Hall, Sydney. It was to be held on 26 January, the 150th anniversary of European colonisation. The protest, calling for full citizen status and equality, was led by William Cooper, Pearl Gibbs, Jack Patten and William Ferguson.

Keith Munro, MCA Curator Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Programs, says, “The Day of Mourning event is seen as the first Aboriginal civil rights protest in Australian history. The actions that took place on this day later resulted in the establishment of a national day of celebration and achievement, which turned into a longer event now known as NAIDOC Week.”

Anonymous. “Marking 80 years since the Day of Mourning,” on the Museum of Contemporary Art website 17 May 2018 [Online] Cited 21/02/2022

Unknown photographer (Australian)
The first Day of Mourning. From the left is William Ferguson, Jack Kinchela, Isaac Ingram, Doris Williams, Esther Ingram, Arthur Williams, Phillip Ingram, Louisa Agnes Ingram OAM holding daughter Olive Ingram, and Jack Patten. The name of the person in the background to the right is not known at this stage.
AIATSIS Collection

Used under fair use condition for the purpose for research or study

The first Day of Mourning was a culmination of years of work by the Australian Aborigines League (AAL) and the Aborigines Progressive Association (APA). It would became the inspiration for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander activism throughout the remainder of the twentieth century. In the early 1960s, both organisations would reform and reshape and become the driving force calling for a constitutional referendum that would take place in 1967.

The AAL was able to persuade many religious denominations to declare the Sunday before Australia Day as ‘Aboriginal Sunday’. This was to serve as a reminder of the unjust treatment of Indigenous people. The first of these took place in 1940 and continued until 1955, when it moved to the first Sunday in July.

In 1957, with support and cooperation from federal and state governments, the churches and major Indigenous organisations, a National Aborigines Day Observance Committee (NADOC) was formed, which continues to this day as NAIDOC.

Anonymous. “The 1938 Day of Mourning,” on the AIATSIS website Nd [Online] Cited 21/02/2022

Unknown photographer (Australian)
Jack Patten reads the resolution at the Day of Mourning Conference on 26 January 1938
Mar. 1938 (publication date), Sydney, N.S.W.: Man magazine
12 x 17cm
© Collections of the State Library of New South Wales

Used under fair use condition for the purpose for research or study

Unknown photographer (Australian)
In this 1938 re-enactment of Governor Phillip’s landing, Aborigines (specially brought in for the occasion) are shown running up the beach as the boats of the First Fleet marines land at Farm Cove. A group of white dignitaries sits in comfortable safety watching the invasion
1938
© Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW – Home and Away

Used under fair use condition for the purpose for research or study

Unknown photographer (Australian)
Aboriginal protests on Sydney Harbour, Australia Day, 1988
1988

Used under fair use condition for the purpose for research or study

National Film and Sound Archive of Australia (NFSA)
Pat Fiske (director)
Australia Daze (film still)
1988

National Film and Sound Archive of Australia (NFSA)
Pat Fiske (director)
Australia Daze (film clip)
1988

The production of Australia Daze involved dozens of camera crews across the nation, filming from midnight to midnight on 26 January 1988, in order to capture the many facets of the bicentenary of European settlement in Australia. From First Fleet re-enactments to Indigenous protests, backyard barbeques to royal visits, Australia Daze chronicles a broad array of events on that historic day and diverse voices and perspectives from across Australian society.

Australia Daze is a snapshot of one day in the millennia-long history of the country. The film is an opportunity for Australians to remember where they were, or to catch a glimpse of Australia’s past before they were born or arrived here. It is a chance to reflect on how much things have changed in 33 years – and also how little has changed.

Anonymous media release from the NFSA website Nd [Online] Cited 21/02/2022

Loui Seselja (Australian, b. 1948)
Sydney Harbour Bridge during the Walk for Reconciliation, Corroboree 2000, with the Aboriginal flag flying beside the Australian flag
2000
22.5 x 30.7cm
© National Museum of Australia

Used under fair use condition for the purpose for research or study

“Untitled,” c. 1932-33 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Untitled,” October/November, 1932 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Chrysler 70, bought Nov., 1932,” in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Springfield”, Byng, Near Orange, October 1932″ in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

Byng

… an area of scattered houses in green valleys (when there is no drought) dates back to before 1856.

It was originally named ‘Cornish Village’ after the original Cornish settlers who brought the first fruit trees from Cornwall and gave birth to the Orange district’s fruit industry on the ‘Pendarvis’ property. Apples were produced in Byng for over 100 years but now there are mainly cattle, sheep and a little cropping.

Driving through the winding lanes with hawthorn hedgerows on either side you will see in the distance an old homestead (Springfield) which has an old Celtic custom – on the porch there are three welcome stones. The host stands on one, the guest on another – then they greet each other on the centre stone.

Text from the Orange website [Online] Cited 01/11/2019. No longer available online

“Springfield”, Byng, Near Orange, October 1932″ in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Remains of the first house built in Byng,” October, 1932 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“At Springfield,” 1932 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“J.F. and Woodward,” 1932 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“At Springfield,” 1932 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Untitled (Rabbiting),” 1932 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Hawksbury River,’ 1932-33 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Betty Broad,” 16th October, 1932 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Lucknow, Near Orange,” November, 1933 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

Lucknow

1929-1935: Prospecting rarely ever ceases on a once lucrative gold-field and in 1928-9 companies such as St. Algnan’s (New Guinea) Gold Lodes N.L. and Lucknow Gold Options Co. were quite busy. In particular St. Aignan’s found a rich ‘brown vein’ away from ‘that portion already riddled with holes’, at a depth of only 38 feet. …

The village has a large potential to attract tourists. The iron head-frames at Wentworth Main and at Reform, right beside the highway in the village area with their accompanying equipment, are the most strikingly accessible of gold mining memorials. At Wentworth Main moreover, the largest of the iron sheds still contains a great deal of equipment, including the stamper battery and various engines. In the paddock to the west of the highway there is isolated equipment- a boiler, a winding engine. The winding house for Reform still stands.

Anonymous. “Gold mining at Lucknow,” on the Orange website [Online] Cited 01/11/2019

“Washing for gold on Springfield,” November, 1933 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“St. Aignan Gold Mine,” November, 1933 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Springfield,” November, 1933 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Old Bill on the binder,” November, 1933 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Woodward : McColville ; J.F., filling the ensilage pit,” November, 1933 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

Silage is a type of fodder made from green foliage crops which have been preserved by acidification, achieved through fermentation. It can be fed to cattle, sheep and other such ruminants (cud-chewing animals). The fermentation and storage process is called ensilage, ensiling or silaging, and is usually made from grass crops, including maize, sorghum or other cereals, using the entire green plant (not just the grain).

“At “Millambri”, Canowindra,” 1933 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Bathurst,” November 1933 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Untitled (Victoria),” November, 1933 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Myers, Melbourne,” November 1933 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Bourke St., Melbourne,” November 1933 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album back cover

State Library of New South Wales website

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Text/Exhibition: ‘Mervyn Bishop: Australian Photojournalist’ at the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia, Acton, Canberra ACT

Exhibition dates: 5th March – 4th October 2021

Warning: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers should be aware that this posting contains images and names of people who may have since passed away.

Mervyn Bishop (Australian, b. 1945)
Girl pours tea, Burnt Bridge
1988
Gelatin silver photograph
30.1 x 40.4cm
Art Gallery of New South Wales
Hallmark Cards Australian Photography Collection Fund 1991
© Mervyn Bishop
Photo: AGNSW

In our sight, in our mind

Can you imagine, please, being the first person to step foot on the moon. Or the first person to discover radium. Now imagine being the first Indigenous Australian photojournalist, for the very first time taking photographs of your culture from the inside, photographs that picture the ongoing suffering of Indigenous people but also, as importantly, their strength and joy. Such was the calling of that legend of Australian photography, Mervyn Bishop.

Bishop was the first in a long line of Indigenous photographers who unearth, investigate, picture and honour their community, although interestingly none of the later photographers are photojournalists. Artists such as Tracey Moffatt, Michael Riley, Ricky Maynard, Lisa Bellear, R e a (rea saunders), Michael Cook, Brook Andrew, Bindi Cole and Christian Thompson) follow in his footsteps. Indeed in this posting, there is a photograph by Bishop presumably of the father of the photographer Ricky Maynard, Eric Maynard cleaning a mutton bird, Great Dog Island, Tasmania (1975, below), followed by a photograph by Maynard himself of muttonbirding on Dog Island from his series Portrait of a Distant Land. The songlines of place and ancestors are strong in Aboriginal culture, and “show the connectedness between places and the Creation events and ceremonies associated with those places. People born in that country are forever tied to the creation history of their birthplace and have custodial obligations to that place.”

The stories Bishop shares through his images are different from the colonial ones of yesteryear because they come from within the spirit and soul of the communities he is photographing. Less than 20 years before Bishop’s first photographs things were very different. The Australian journalist and writer Stan Grant observes that, “…there are images in our history, of Aboriginal people in chains. Aboriginal people tied together, with armed police standing either side of them.” In an article on The Guardian website we learn that “Neck chains were still being used on Aboriginal people in Western Australia in 1958. Witnesses at Halls Creek in the Kimberley reported seeing Aboriginal prisoners chained to a veranda post of the police station for weeks at a time… At peak periods, from the 1880s to the 1940s, hundreds of Aboriginal people were chained for alleged cattle theft, and marched out of their country, some for up to 400km. Each neck piece weighed 2.4kg.”1 Even in Dawn – A Magazine for the Aboriginal People of N.S.W. created by the New South Wales Aboriginal Welfare Board and aimed at Aboriginal Australians (running monthly from January 1952 until December 1968) – in which there was an article in February 1965 on a young Mervyn Bishop training to become a photographer (see below) – the forces of colonial assimilation were hard at work, as can be seen on the back cover of the Dawn October 1965 issue, where Leslie Ryan makes his debut at a “Deb” Ball for kindergarten children, where he “seems to be getting a better deal out of life now that he has love and attention.” Now that he has love and attention. Just let that sink in. Today, the dripping irony and sadness of this photograph in relation to what is now known as “The Stolen Generation”2 is apparent, the two young children taken from their families, taken from their culture, dressed to the nines in formal Western attire at such a young age. Remember, this is less than 60 years ago.

As much as Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) was a working photographer making “Documents pour artistes,” declaring his modest ambition to create images for other artists to use as source material, so Bishop was a working photographer who created “Documents for people” at the Department of Aboriginal Affairs in Canberra from 1974 onwards, where he covered the major developments in Aboriginal communities throughout Australia. As Mervyn himself says, “Photography has been my life, my passion for 60 years: the art and technique, the stories I’ve witnessed and captured. I’m glad to be able to share my life’s work with the public.” There it is in a nutshell… an intimate understanding of the the art and technique of photography (the construction the image plane, lighting, point of view, scale, printing, etc… ) and the stories he wanted to tell. And he tells those stories straight down the line, with no bullshit. When asked in an audio recording in this posting about why his award winning photograph Life and death dash (1971, below) was misunderstood, he says “it has nothing to do with blackfellas, put it that way… people say it’s a nun running away with a little black kid, the Stolen Generation – nothing to do with it! Not a bloody thing! … people interpret their own way. Who would know that I was black? People still go on about it but people are talking through their … whatever… so, you don’t know what your talking about.” There you have it.

Like his personality, Bishop’s wonderful photographs are strong and direct, informed and understanding of the work of Walker Evans or Dorothea Lange. In Girl pours tea, Burnt Bridge (1988, above), an Aboriginal mother sits at a kitchen table in a corrugated iron shack and pours tea from a large battered teapot into enamel mugs, one for herself and one presumably for the photographer. Light pours through a hole in the roof. The table is covered in a floral probably plastic table cloth. There are plastic flowers set upon it. The chairs are vinyl. Behind her is an old kitchen unit from the 1950s with a wire screen at eye level, used to keep flies out. To the right are boxes and detritus while to the left a plastic bucket sits on the battered sink. Her child plays next to her oblivious of the camera flash while she stares directly at the camera. Much as Lange’s Migrant Mother, this women possesses her own inner dignity which Bishop captures so well: an unexpected intimacy with the subject in which we confront uncomfortable truths.

Other photographs, such as Children playing in river, Mumeka (1975, below) capture the pure joy of Aboriginal life, or the resoluteness of a people having to survive the trauma of cultures and societies and their complex histories (Couple on veranda, Coffs Harbour 1988, below). But let us be clear… this is not a vanishing race, nor an assimilated race but a proud, creative and intelligent race now picturing its own history and future. As Ricky Maynard states, “The contest remains over who will image and own this history. We must define history, define whose history it is, and define its purpose, as well as the tools used for the telling of this.” Bishop was at the very beginning of this imaging and ownership of Aboriginal history, not by colonial photographers of the past, but from within the community itself, in the present. His photographs are about speaking up about injustice and making sure that Indigenous perspectives were heard and not railroaded by non-indigenous people – Bishop was at the beginning of this – and about how the image speaks truth to power (a non-violent political tactic, employed by dissidents against the received wisdom or propaganda of governments they regard as oppressive, authoritarian or an ideocracy),

Towards the end of the documentary “The Bowraville Murders”, Stan Grant observes that Aboriginal people are kicked every day… [and this remains] out of sight, out of mind. He reminds us that between 1991 and 2021 there have been more than 470 Aboriginal deaths in custody… and not a single conviction. Out of sight, out of mind. Indeed, “fluidity of memory and a capacity to forget is perhaps the most haunting trait of our species. As history confirms, it allows us to come to terms with any degree of social, moral, or environmental degradation.”3 And this is what we all do. That is, until a photographer and artist like Mervyn Bishop comes along and reminds us through his photographs of the integrity, vitality and presence of Aboriginal people, spirit that stretches back thousands of years – despite our capacity to forget the trauma that Indigenous Australians have endured. This is the purpose of Bishop’s photographs … they bring to the forefront of our knowledge and imagination an understanding of the history and future of Aboriginal people. They remain, in our sight, in our mind.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Footnotes

1/ Chris Owen. “How Western Australia’s ‘unofficial’ use of neck chains on Indigenous people lasted 80 years,” on The Guardian website Sun 7 March 2201 [Online] Cited 03/10/2021.

2/ The Stolen Generations refers to a period in Australia’s history where Aboriginal children were removed from their families through government policies. This happened from the mid-1800s to the 1970s.In the 1860s, Victoria became the first state to pass laws authorising Aboriginal children to be removed from their parents. Similar policies were later adopted by other states and territories – and by the federal government when it was established in the 1900s. For about a century, thousands of Aboriginal children were systematically taken from their families, communities and culture, many never to be returned. These children are known as the Stolen Generations survivors, or Stolen Children.These children were taken by the police; from their homes; on their way to or from school. They were placed in over 480 institutions, adopted or fostered by non-Indigenous people and often subjected to abuse. The children were denied all access to their culture, they were not allowed to speak their language and they were punished if they did. The impacts of this are still being felt today.There are currently more than 17,000 Stolen Generations survivors in Australia. Over one third of all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are their descendants. In Western Australia almost half of the population have Stolen Generation links.
Anonymous. “Who are the Stolen Generations?” on the Healing Foundation website [Online] Cited 03/10/2021.

3/ Wade Davis. “The Unraveling of America,” on the Rolling Stone website August 6, 2020 [Online] Cited 03/10/2021.

Many thankx to the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

“The contest remains over who will image and own this history. We must define history, define whose history it is, and define its purpose, as well as the tools used for the telling of this.”

Ricky Maynard, 2007

“Australia in many ways is a crime scene. And the first crime is Captain Cook ordering his men to shoot at Aboriginal people. That’s the shot that we still hear all around Australia. And of course, there are images in our history, of Aboriginal people in chains. Aboriginal people tied together, with armed police standing either side of them. This is what has happened in our country, so it isn’t a great step to go from frontier attitudes of violence to deaths of three children in Bowraville. Because for us, it’s the same thing. It’s a killing that never stops.”

Stan Grant quoted in the documentary “The Bowraville Murders” directed by Allan Clarke on SBS on Demand, Australia, 2021

The National Film and Sound Archive of Australia will celebrates Mervyn Bishop, one of Australia’s most prolific and influential photographers, with a new exhibition 5 March – 4 October 2021.

Mr Bishop’s images of culture, politics and people have significantly influenced our collective understanding of Australia’s history. This exhibition is drawn from the Art Gallery of New South Wales collection, the artist’s private archive, and enriched by sound and moving image from the NFSA.

Mervyn Bishop features iconic photographs that derive from his career as a photojournalist, alongside personal images of family and friends and intimate portraits of members of the Aboriginal community. Spanning the past 60 years, the exhibition provides a fascinating insight into Bishop’s life and work.

Bishop went on to work at the Department of Aboriginal Affairs in Canberra in 1974 where he covered the major developments in Aboriginal communities throughout Australia. This included his iconic image from 1975 when the (then) Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam, poured a handful of earth back into the hand of Vincent Lingiari, Gurindji elder and traditional landowner.

Unknown photographer
Untitled [Australian Aborigines in chains]
Nd

Indigenous Australians in neck chains. Historical records say they had been chained after killing an animal. Neck chains were used by police across Western Australia from the 1880s to the late 1950s. Photograph: State Library of Western Australia

Mervyn Bishop (Australian, b. 1945)
Prime Minister Gough Whitlam pours soil into the hands of traditional land owner Vincent Lingiari, Northern Territory
1975, printed 1999
Type R3 photograph
30.5 x 30.5cm
Art Gallery of New South Wales
Hallmark Cards Australian Photography Collection Fund 1991
© Mervyn Bishop/ Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet
Photo: AGNSW

Gurindji strike (or Wave Hill Walk-Off) led by Vincent Lingiari

On 23 August 1966 200 Gurindji stockmen, domestic workers and their families walked off Wave Hill station in the Northern Territory and refused to keep working for the station owners. The disagreement over wages and land ownership lasted for seven years. In 1974 some of the Gurindji people’s homelands were returned to them. This influenced the first legislation, passed in 1976, that allowed Aboriginal people to claim land title. In September 2020 the Gurindji claim for native title to Wave Hill station was granted, 54 years after the walk-off that helped to spark Australia’s Indigenous land rights movement.

Why did the Gurindji people strike?

In the 1960s Wave Hill station was owned by an international company called Vestey Brothers. Vestey Brothers paid the Gurindji people working on the station very low wages. On 23 August 1966 the Gurindji people stopped working and walked off Wave Hill station in protest. They were led by elder Vincent Lingiari.

In 1967 the Gurindji set up a camp at Daguragu (also known as Wattie Creek). It soon became clear that the Gurindji did not simply want fair wages. More importantly they wanted the government to return some of their land. For seven years the Gurindji stayed at Daguragu and sent letters and petitions to the Northern Territory Government and the Australian Government asking that their land be returned to them.

How was the dispute resolved?

In 1972 the Labor Party led by Gough Whitlam came to power. The Whitlam government was interested in establishing Aboriginal land rights. Around the same time, Vestey Brothers finally agreed to hand over a small section of Wave Hill station around Daguragu to the Gurindji people.

In 1975 Prime Minister Whitlam visited Daguragu and in a ceremony he returned the land to the Gurindji people. Whitlam famously poured a handful of soil through Vincent Lingiari’s hand and said, ‘Vincent Lingiari, I solemnly hand to you these deeds as proof, in Australian law, that these lands belong to the Gurindji people’. …

The Gurindji strike helped to make the Australian public aware of Aboriginal land ownership claims. It also influenced the first legislation in Australia that allowed Aboriginal people to apply for ownership of their traditional lands, the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976.

Text from the National Museum of Australia website [Online] Cited 14/09/2021

“I bin thinkin’ this bin Gurindji country. We bin here longa time before them Vestey mob.”

Vincent Lingiari, 1966

“We originally took the picture under the shade of a bough shed and it didn’t have a nice look about it.”

Mervyn Bishop

What’s the backstory to your famous land rights photograph?

Conversation between Guardian Australia picture editor Jonny Weeks and the photographer Mervyn Bishop in the article by Jonny Weeks and Miles Martignoni. “Great Australian photographs: Mervyn Bishop’s symbolic shot – an audio essay,” on the Guardian Australia website Mon 5 Jun 2017 [Online] Cited 14/9/2021.

An historic handful of dirt: Whitlam and the legacy of the Wave Hill Walk-Off

On the prime ministerial jet that morning, public servant turned Aboriginal affairs adviser H.C. ‘Nugget’ Coombs urged Whitlam to keep his speech short and invest the day with a sense of ceremony.

Coombs recounted a story told by anthropologist Bill Stanner: how Wurundjeri elders had formalised their people’s 1835 land treaty with encroaching settlers at Port Phillip by placing soil into the hand of explorer John Batman. Hearing Coombs’ suggestion that the PM might reverse the gesture with Lingiari, Whitlam revised his performance plan for Daguragu on the spot.

When it came to his turn to speak, Whitlam congratulated the Gurindji and their supporters on their victory after a nine-year “fight for justice”. Promising that the Australian government would “help you in your plans to use this land fruitfully”, his speech concluded with the words:

Vincent Lingiari, I solemnly hand to you these deeds as proof, in Australian law, that these lands belong to the Gurindji people, and I put into your hands this piece of the earth itself as a sign that we restore them to you and your children forever.

In finishing, Whitlam handed Lingiari the new deeds to the Gurindji’s land, now officially dubbed NT Pastoral Lease 805. Then, to the joy of assembled photographers, he stooped down, grabbed a handful of red earth, and poured it into Lingiari’s open palm. …

Lingiari – who according to one reporter was struck with a case of nerves – responded to Whitlam and the crowd in his own language:

The important white men are giving us this land ceremonially… It belonged to the whites, but today it is in the hands of us Aboriginals all around here. Let us live happily as mates, let us not make it hard for each other… They will give us cattle, they will give us horses, and we will be happy… These important white men have come here to our ceremonial ground and they are welcome…

You (Gurindji) must keep this land safe for yourselves, it does not belong to any different Welfare man. They took our country away from us, now they have bought it back ceremonially.

After Whitlam gave the old man even more dirt for the benefit of the press, photographer Mervyn Bishop’s images of the “handover” became some of the most recognised in Australian political history. The power of the photos rested in the symbolism of Whitlam’s gesture, made on behalf of millions concerned by Aboriginal dispossession.

The handover implicitly acknowledged the moral rightfuness of the Gurindji’s stand, and the historical injustices done to them by the Europeans on their country. It was by dint of the Gurindji’s hard slog at Wattie Creek that they had successfully brought all this to the nation’s attention. The handover day was the old Gurindji men’s finest hour, and their victory.

Charlie Ward. “An historic handful of dirt: Whitlam and the legacy of the Wave Hill Walk-Off,” on The Conversation website August 21, 2016 [Online] Cited 14/09/2021

Mervyn Bishop: pioneer, artist, and source of inspiration

Hear from National Film and Sound Archive of Australia curator Tara Marynowsky as she describes the ‘insider’s knowledge’ visitors to the Mervyn Bishop exhibition will receive, and how his story brings together those of the famous faces he captured.

In this excerpt from ABC series art+soul curator Hetti Perkins talks with artist photographer Mervyn Bishop

Mervyn Bishop exhibition at the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia (NFSA), Canberra
Courtesy NFSA

Mervyn Bishop exhibition at the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia (NFSA), Canberra
Photo by Madeleine Stevens, Courtesy NFSA

Mervyn Bishop exhibition entrance
Courtesy NFSA

Mervyn Bishop at NFSA
Photo by Madeleine Stevens, Courtesy NFSA

Mervyn Bishop exhibition at the NFSA, featuring images and footage of boxer Lionel Rose. See Bishop’s photograph Lionel Rose at his press conference (1968, below)
Photographs by Grace Costa

Mervyn Bishop (Australian, b. 1945)
Lionel Rose at his press conference
1968
Gelatin silver photograph
30.1 x 30.1cm
Art Gallery of New South Wales
Hallmark Cards Australian Photography Collection Fund 1991
© Mervyn Bishop
Photo: AGNSW

Mervyn Bishop exhibition at the NFSA showing some of his cameras
Courtesy NFSA

Mervyn Bishop with camera
Courtesy NFSA

Teenage Mervyn had already in a sense begun his career in the mid 1950s. He started to take documentary family snaps on his mother’s Kodak 620, followed by a more expensive fifteen pound Japanese 35mm of his own in 1957. He was encouraged by with the help of a Church of England Bush Brother [priest] Brother Richard and Vic King a local photographer who had a dark room that Merv frequented. He then began to hold backyard slide nights of his family and neighbourhood snaps.

By the beginning of the 1960s the search for the exotic authentic had shifted from the south-east to northern Australia. Although Australian painters such as Russell Drysdale and Arthur Boyd had created images from their trips to western NSW post WWII, photographer Axel Poignant and US Life magazine photographer Fritz Gorro both visited Arnhem Land in the 1950s to document and ‘compose’ their subject matter. …

‘Merv Bishop Graduates from Photographers’ Course’, Dawn magazine’s headline said. After leaving Dubbo High in 1962 he spent a year as a clerk with the ABC before starting as a cadet photographer at the Sydney Morning Herald in 1963, (the first Aboriginal photographer ever hired by the paper) and entered the first photographic course at the Sydney Technical College, Broadway Sydney, graduating in 1966, Next year was the important year of the referendum concerning Aboriginal people and ‘the state’…

Djon Mundine. “Brewarrina Boy,” on the Australian Museum website 12/07/2021 [Online] Cited 14/09/2021

Mervyn Bishop media call 4 March 2021 – Curator Coby Edgar and Mervyn Bishop
Courtesy NFSA

Mervyn Bishop in a recreation of his darkroom at the exhibition media call
Courtesy NFSA

Mervyn Bishop at NFSA
Photo by Madeleine Stevens, Courtesy NFSA

Mervyn Bishop exhibition at the NFSA showing at left, Pool game, Burnt Bridge (1988, below); at second left, Save the children pre-school, Nambucca Heads (1974, below); at centre Woman standing near electric power cord in water, Burnt Bridge (1988, below); and at right, Couple on veranda, Coffs Harbour (1988, below)
Courtesy NFSA

Mervyn Bishop (Australian, b. 1945)
Pool game, Burnt Bridge
1988
Gelatin silver photograph
40 x 30cm
Art Gallery of New South Wales
Purchased under the terms of the Florence Turner Blake Bequest 2008
© Mervyn Bishop
Photo: AGNSW

Mervyn Bishop (Australian, b. 1945)
Save the children pre-school, Nambucca Heads
1974
Gelatin silver photograph
40 x 30cm
Art Gallery of New South Wales
Purchased under the terms of the Florence Turner Blake Bequest 2008
© Mervyn Bishop
Photo: AGNSW

“I don’t think there were even Indigenous journos in those days. As my friend said: ‘You were the lone ranger'”

Mervyn Bishop

How diverse was your photographic subject matter?

Mervyn Bishop (Australian, b. 1945)
Woman standing near electric power cord in water, Burnt Bridge
1988, printed 2008
Gelatin silver print
40.0 x 30.0cm
Art Gallery of New South Wales
Purchased under the terms of the Florence Turner Blake Bequest 2008
© Mervyn Bishop
Photo: AGNSW

Mervyn Bishop (Australian, b. 1945)
Couple on veranda, Coffs Harbour
1988
Gelatin silver photograph
40 x 30cm
Art Gallery of New South Wales
Purchased under the terms of the Florence Turner Blake Bequest 2008
© Mervyn Bishop
Photo: AGNSW

Mervyn Bishop exhibition at the NFSA showing at middle, Elders, Amata (1977, below); and at right, ‘Bob’s catch’ Shoalhaven Heads (1974, below)
Courtesy NFSA

Mervyn Bishop (Australian, b. 1945)
Elders, Amata
1977, printed 1991
Gelatin silver print
29.9 x 40.5cm
Art Gallery of New South Wales
Hallmark Cards Australian Photography Collection Fund 1991
© Mervyn Bishop
Photo: AGNSW

Mervyn Bishop (Australian, b. 1945)
‘Bob’s catch’ Shoalhaven Heads
1974, printed 1991
Gelatin silver print
30.2 x 30.1cm
Art Gallery of New South Wales
Hallmark Cards Australian Photography Collection Fund 1991
© Mervyn Bishop
Photo: AGNSW

Mervyn Bishop exhibition at the NFSA showing his photograph, Life and death dash (1971, below)
Courtesy NFSA

“People say it’s about the stolen generations, but it’s got nothing to do with that – not a bloody thing.”

Mervyn Bishop

Why is ‘Life-and-death dash’ misunderstood?

Mervyn Bishop (Australian, b. 1945)
Life and death dash
1971
Gelatin silver photograph
40.4 x 30.1cm
Art Gallery of New South Wales
Hallmark Cards Australian Photography Collection Fund 1991
© Mervyn Bishop
Photo: AGNSW

Mervyn Bishop (Australian, b. 1945)
Far West Children’s health clinic, Manly
1968
Gelatin silver photograph
40 x 30cm
Art Gallery of New South Wales
Purchased under the terms of the Florence Turner Blake Bequest 2008
© Mervyn Bishop
Photo: AGNSW

Mervyn Bishop (Australian, b. 1945)
Alan Judd, ABC trainee radio announcer, Sydney
1968
Gelatin silver photograph
40 x 30cm
Art Gallery of New South Wales
Purchased under the terms of the Florence Turner Blake Bequest 2008
© Mervyn Bishop
Photo: AGNSW

Mervyn Bishop (Australian, b. 1945)
Lois O’Donoghue CBA, AM, and Oodgeroo Noonuccal
1974
Gelatin silver photograph
30 x 30.4cm
Art Gallery of New South Wales
Purchased under the terms of the Florence Turner Blake Bequest 2008
© Mervyn Bishop
Photo: AGNSW

Lowitja Lois O’Donoghue Smart, AC, CBE, DSG (born Lois O’Donoghue; 1 August 1932) is an Aboriginal Australian retired public administrator. In 1990-1996 she was the inaugural chairperson of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) (dismantled in 2004). She is patron of the Lowitja Institute, a research institute for Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander health and wellbeing.

Oodgeroo Noonuccal (/ˈʊdɡəruː ˈnuːnəkəl/ UUD-gə-roo NOO-nə-kəl; born Kathleen Jean Mary Ruska, later Kath Walker (3 November 1920 – 16 September 1993) was an Aboriginal Australian political activist, artist and educator, who campaigned for Aboriginal rights. Noonuccal was best known for her poetry, and was the first Aboriginal Australian to publish a book of verse.

Mervyn Bishop (Australian, b. 1945)
Photography cadets with model, Sydney Morning Herald
1967
Gelatin silver photograph
29.8 x 40.4cm
Art Gallery of New South Wales
Hallmark Cards Australian Photography Collection Fund 1991
© Mervyn Bishop
Photo: AGNSW

Mervyn Bishop (Australian, b. 1945)
Cousins, Ralph and Jim, Brewarrina
1966
Gelatin silver photograph
30 x 40cm
Art Gallery of New South Wales
Purchased under the terms of the Florence Turner Blake Bequest 2008
© Mervyn Bishop
Photo: AGNSW

Mervyn Bishop (Australian, b. 1945)
Roslyn Watson
1973
Gelatin silver photograph
40 x 30cm
Art Gallery of New South Wales
Purchased under the terms of the Florence Turner Blake Bequest 2008
© Mervyn Bishop
Photo: AGNSW

Mervyn Bishop (Australian, b. 1945)
Children playing in river, Mumeka
1975
Gelatin silver photograph
30.1 x 29.9cm
Art Gallery of New South Wales
Hallmark Cards Australian Photography Collection Fund 1991
© Mervyn Bishop
Photo: AGNSW

Mervyn Bishop (Australian, b. 1945)
Children playing in river, Mumeka (detail)
1975
Gelatin silver photograph
30.1 x 29.9cm
Art Gallery of New South Wales
Hallmark Cards Australian Photography Collection Fund 1991
© Mervyn Bishop
Photo: AGNSW

Mervyn Bishop (Australian, b. 1945)
Untitled. 2 Boys posing, Tony Mundine’s gym, Redfern
Nd
35mm black and white slide
2.5 x 3.5cm
Mervyn Bishop Archive, Art Gallery of New South Wales Archive
© Mervyn Bishop
Photo: AGNSW

Mervyn Bishop (Australian, b. 1945)
H Thomas, C Dixon, K Smith ACT
1976
35mm colour slide
2.5 x 3.5cm
Mervyn Bishop Archive, Art Gallery of New South Wales Archive
© Mervyn Bishop
Photo: AGNSW

Mervyn Bishop (Australian, b. 1945)
Murray Island
1977
35mm colour slide
3.5 x 2.5cm
Mervyn Bishop archive, Art Gallery of New South Wales Archive
© Mervyn Bishop
Photo: AGNSW

Exhibition dedicated to photographer Mervyn Bishop opens in Canberra

National Film and Sound Archive of Australia (NFSA) to showcase work of award-winning artist from 5 March – 1 August 2021.

The National Film and Sound Archive of Australia (NFSA) is celebrating Mervyn Bishop, one of Australia’s most prolific and influential photographers, with a new exhibition opening in Canberra tomorrow Friday 5 March. Mr Bishop himself will present a floor talk on opening day, at 12pm.

Mr Bishop’s images of culture, politics and people have significantly influenced our collective understanding of Australia’s history. This exhibition is drawn from the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) collection, the artist’s private archive, and enriched by sound and moving image from the NFSA.

NFSA Acting CEO Nancy Eyers said: ‘We are pleased to bring the work of Mervyn Bishop to Canberra and share his story with our audiences. Mr Bishop’s photographs present us with a wonderful combination of history, artistic excellence, and self-representation. In addition to the striking prints from the AGNSW, the NFSA’s audiovisual collection will bring a new dimension to the exhibition.’

‘This comprehensive exhibition was developed by the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), but there are new additions from the NFSA collection for Canberra audiences. It’s been fantastic working with them; there are not many exhibitions that combine photography with mixed media, and I think visitors will be amazed by this combination.’

AGNSW Curator Coby Edgar added: ‘Working with Mervyn Bishop and the NFSA to build this show has been a truly collaborative process with the aim to present Australia through Mervyn’s eyes. He has captured many of our country’s most pivotal moments politically and socially, and this exhibition is a celebration of his life and practice and the Australian peoples and cultures that he has documented.’

In 1963 Mervyn Bishop left his hometown of Brewarrina, venturing to Sydney, where he successfully applied for a cadetship at The Sydney Morning Herald. He became Australia’s first Aboriginal press photographer and in 1971 won the News Photographer of the Year Award with his front-page photograph Life and Death Dash 1971. Bishop went on to work at the Department of Aboriginal Affairs in Canberra in 1974 where he covered the major developments in Aboriginal communities throughout Australia. This included his iconic image from 1975 when the (then) Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam, poured a handful of earth back into the hand of Vincent Lingiari, Gurindji elder and traditional landowner. Bishop’s childhood, his life experiences and career will be explored by former Reuters journalist Tim Dobbyn in an upcoming biography tentatively titled A Handful of Sand.

Mervyn Bishop said: ‘Photography has been my life, my passion for 60 years: the art and technique, the stories I’ve witnessed and captured. I’m glad to be able to share my life’s work with the public.’

An AGNSW touring exhibition, presented in collaboration with NFSA.

About Mervyn Bishop

Born and raised in Brewarrina, New South Wales, Mervyn Bishop was encouraged by his mother to take his first photograph. After witnessing the ‘magic’ of the developing process, he became passionate about photography. In 1963 he successfully applied for a four-year cadetship at The Sydney Morning Herald and completed a Photography Certificate Course at Sydney Technical College during these years. Bishop continued to work for The Sydney Morning Herald and was Australia’s first Aboriginal press photographer. In 1971 he won the News Photographer of the Year Award with his front-page photograph, Life and Death Dash, 1971.

Bishop started work at the Department of Aboriginal Affairs in Canberra in 1974, in the early years of an important era in Indigenous self-determination. Here he covered the major developments in Aboriginal communities throughout Australia, including the historical moment in 1975 when the (then) Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam, poured a handful of earth back into the hand of Vincent Lingiari, Gurindji elder and traditional landowner. This image – representing the Australian government’s recognition of Aboriginal land rights – became an icon of the land rights movement and Australian photography. In 1989 Bishop received his Associate Diploma in Adult Education at Sydney College of Advanced Education and went on to teach photography at Tranby Aboriginal College in Glebe, Sydney and the Eora Centre TAFE (Technical and Further Education) in Redfern, Sydney.

Bishop’s diverse career, combining journalistic and art photography, was celebrated in 1991 in his solo exhibition and accompanying monograph, ‘In Dreams: Mervyn Bishop Thirty Years of Photography 1960-1990’. This important exhibition was curated by Tracey Moffatt and opened at the Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney, before touring nationally and internationally. The timely and intimate photographs celebrate Bishop’s contribution to Australian art and photojournalism. In 2000, Bishop was presented with the Red Ochre Award from the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Board of the Australia Council, in recognition of his pioneering work and ongoing influence.

Biography by Jonathan Jones, first published in ‘Tradition today: Indigenous art in Australia’, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2014.

Mervyn Bishop’s journey to be one of Australia’s best-known photographers is paved with triumphs, setbacks and tragedy. Bishop left Canberra in 1979 to return to The Sydney Morning Herald in a career choice that ended with his departure in 1986. While looking for work he was befriended by people from the Sydney arts scene, leading to his first solo exhibition in 1991, the In Dreams show. But this victory is forever linked to the death of his wife Elizabeth on the same day as the exhibition’s opening. His later work is dominated by portraiture that demonstrates his ability to put people at ease and a sympathetic appreciation for the human condition.

Synopsis from the upcoming biography A Handful of Sand, by author Tim Dobbyn.

Press release from the NFSA

Mervyn Bishop (Australian, b. 1945)
Fisherman Charlie Ardler, Wreck Bay
1975, printed 2008
Gelatin silver print
30.0 x 30.4cm
Art Gallery of New South Wales
Purchased under the terms of the Florence Turner Blake Bequest 2008
© Mervyn Bishop
Photo: AGNSW

Mervyn Bishop (Australian, b. 1945)
Womenfolk, Bowraville
1974, printed 2008
Gelatin silver print
30.0 x 30.4cm
Art Gallery of New South Wales
Purchased under the terms of the Florence Turner Blake Bequest 2008
© Mervyn Bishop
Photo: AGNSW

What is your legacy? And whose work do you admire?

Additional images not in exhibition

Aboriginal Protection Board (1952-1969) (publisher)
Department of Child Welfare and Social Welfare (1970-1975)
Aborigine Trains as News Photographer
Dawn magazine, February 1965

Aboriginal Protection Board (1952-1969) (publisher)
Department of Child Welfare and Social Welfare (1970-1975)
Your Career – Photography
Dawn magazine, October 1965

Aboriginal Protection Board (1952-1969) (publisher)
Department of Child Welfare and Social Welfare (1970-1975)
Untitled [Deb Ball]
Dawn magazine, October 1965 back cover

Dawn – A Magazine for the Aboriginal People of N.S.W.

Dawn was an Australian magazine created by the New South Wales Aboriginal Welfare Board and aimed at Aboriginal Australians. It ran monthly from January 1952 until December 1968. Two issues were published in 1969 before the disbanding of the Aboriginal Welfare Board led to the publication ceasing. The magazine was relaunched in April 1970 under the title New Dawn, published by the New South Wales Department of Child Welfare and Social Welfare. It continued to be produced on a monthly basis; production slowed in 1974 and a final issue was published in July 1975.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Mervyn Bishop (Australian, b. 1945)
Aboriginal children, cousin Helen Bishop, Gibbs children, Brewarrina, New South Wales
1965, reproduction 2014
Gelatin silver print
27 x 40cm
National Library of Australia
© Mervyn Bishop

Mervyn Bishop (Australian, b. 1945)
Bishop Town picnic, Brewarrina
1966, printed 2008
Gelatin silver print
30.0 x 40.0cm
Art Gallery of New South Wales
Purchased under the terms of the Florence Turner Blake Bequest 2008
© Mervyn Bishop
Photo: AGNSW

Mervyn Bishop (Australian, b. 1945)
Lil and Larry Cargill at the rocks, Brewarrina, New South Wales
1967, reproduction 2014
Gelatin silver print
27 x 40cm
National Library of Australia
© Mervyn Bishop

Mervyn Bishop (Australian, b. 1945)
A woman drinks a pint of beer in a Glebe pub on the eve of its closing
1967
Gelatin silver print
30.2 x 30.3cm
National Library of Australia
© Mervyn Bishop

Mervyn Bishop (Australian, b. 1945)
Patrons drinking at a pub on the eve of its closure, Glebe, New South Wales
1967, reproduction 2014
Gelatin silver print
30.2 x 30.3cm
National Library of Australia
© Mervyn Bishop

‘YES’ for Aborigines pamphlet
1967
Donated by Janelle Marshall, the child pictured on the pamphlet
National Museum of Australia

It is 1967.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are citizens, can vote and are as entitled to government pensions as all other Australians.

But they are not formally counted in census returns, and the Australian Government does not have the power to make laws for their benefit.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians are subject to individual state controls and laws, rather than uniform national ones, and in several cases the states are not legislating for the benefit of their Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander inhabitants.

To change this situation there needs to be a change to the Constitution, by a referendum, a national vote.

Text from the National Museum of Australia website

Mervyn Bishop (Australian, b. 1945)
The Murai tree at the Rocks, Brewarrina, New South Wales
1969, reproduction 2014
Gelatin silver print
30.3 x 30.3cm
National Library of Australia
© Mervyn Bishop

Mervyn Bishop (Australian, b. 1945)
Guests at Lorraine Taylor’s wedding at Terrigal, New South Wales
1973, reproduction 2014
Gelatin silver print
27 x 40cm
National Library of Australia
© Mervyn Bishop

Mervyn Bishop (Australian, b. 1945)
Warning sign 30 kilometres from Maningrida, Arnhem Land, Northern Territory
1974, reproduction 2014
Gelatin silver print
27.3 x 40.2cm
National Library of Australia
© Mervyn Bishop

“Do not take picture with camer. If someone take it? The law said, please, when coming in here, take only the park painting, no money, but someone else body is ten dollars and countrie is eleven dollars. This is going all over the world to white men and blacks.”

Mervyn Bishop (Australian, b. 1945)
School bus, Yarrabah
1974, printed 2008
Gelatin silver print
30.0 x 40.0cm
Art Gallery of New South Wales
Purchased under the terms of the Florence Turner Blake Bequest 2008
© Mervyn Bishop
Photo: AGNSW

Mervyn Bishop (Australian, b. 1945)
The bus stop, Yalambie Reserve, Mt Isa
1974, printed 2008
Gelatin silver print
30.0 x 40.0cm
Art Gallery of New South Wales
Purchased under the terms of the Florence Turner Blake Bequest 2008
© Mervyn Bishop
Photo: AGNSW

Mervyn Bishop (Australian, b. 1945)
Sawmill workers, Cherbourg
1974, reproduction 2014
Gelatin silver print
27 x 40cm
National Library of Australia
© Mervyn Bishop

Mervyn Bishop (Australian, b. 1945)
Pay day, Hooker Creek, Northern Territory
1974, reproduction 2014
Gelatin silver print
27.3 x 40.2cm
National Library of Australia
© Mervyn Bishop

Mervyn Bishop (Australian, b. 1945)
Aboriginal man beside humpy, Yuendumu, Northern Territory
1974, reproduction 2014
Gelatin silver print
27 x 40cm
National Library of Australia
© Mervyn Bishop

Mervyn Bishop (Australian, b. 1945)
Woman attend home management course at Yuendumu
1974, printed 2008
Gelatin silver print
30.0 x 40.0cm
Art Gallery of New South Wales
Purchased under the terms of the Florence Turner Blake Bequest 2008
© Mervyn Bishop
Photo: AGNSW

Yuendumu is a town in the Northern Territory of Australia, 293 kilometres northwest of Alice Springs on the Tanami Road, within the Central Desert Region local government area. It ranks as one of the larger remote communities in central Australia, and has a thriving community of Aboriginal artists.

Mervyn Bishop (Australian, b. 1945)
Melba Saunders surrounded by stuffed koalas at an Aboriginal craft shop, Brisbane
1974, reproduction 2014
Gelatin silver print
40.2 x 27cm
National Library of Australia
© Mervyn Bishop

Mervyn Bishop (Australian, b. 1945)
John Nykamula treating patient Gurrumuru Mala, Arnhemland, Northern Territory
1975, reproduction 2014
Gelatin silver print
40.2 x 30cm
National Library of Australia
© Mervyn Bishop

Mervyn Bishop (Australian, b. 1945)
Bishop and Gurindji men outside the Murramulla Social Club
1975, reproduction 2014
Gelatin silver print
National Library of Australia
© Mervyn Bishop

Mervyn Bishop (Australian, b. 1945)
An Aboriginal school teacher and two children, Maningrida community, Arnhem Land, Northern Territory
1975, reproduction 2014
Gelatin silver print
30 x 29.8cm
National Library of Australia
© Mervyn Bishop

Mervyn Bishop (Australian, b. 1945)
Eric Maynard cleaning a mutton bird, Great Dog Island, Tasmania
1975, reproduction 2014
Gelatin silver print
30.2 x 30cm
National Library of Australia
© Mervyn Bishop

Ricky Maynard (Australian, b. 1953; Trawlwoolway)
Coming Home
2005
From the series Portrait of a Distant Land
Gelatin silver print
33.8 x 52.0cm
© Ricky Maynard

Shearwaters, a type of muttonbird, also called yolla or moonbird, are harvested for food (the meat tastes like mutton), feathers for mattress fill, and the omega-3 rich oil, which is squeezed out of the birds’ guts, for medicinal use. Harvesting is a confronting job to outsiders: chicks are pulled from their burrows and their necks are quickly snapped. …

Indigenous people have been catching muttonbirds for thousands of years. “Millennia,” Maynard emphasises. “It’s just evolved. Our old fellas used to go to the rookeries, and get these birds when they were there because they were a great food source; a seasonal tucker.”

Dog Island, where the muttonbirds are harvested in Maynard’s play, is named for Great Dog or Big Dog Island: a 354-hectare granite isle filled with tussock grassland, off the south coast of Flinders Island in Bass Strait, where commercial birding operations have existed for more than 200 years. Maynard’s father didn’t take him muttonbirding on Big Dog, his family’s “spiritual home”, until he was 15, because birding season, which runs late March through late April, clashed with the school term. Maynard, though, takes his eight-year-old son each year.

Maynard is a Trawlwoolway man and descendant of Mannalargenna, a leader of the north-east Tasmanian Indigenous peoples, who led resistance against British soldiers in the early 19th century.

In 1995 the Tasmanian government handed back several sites, including Great Dog and Babel islands, to Indigenous people in an acknowledgement of Aboriginal dispossession.

Steve Dow. “‘I wanted something to celebrate’: Indigenous playwright tackles tradition in ‘The Season’,” on The Guardian website Wed 14 Dec 2016 [Online] Cited 14/09/2021

Mervyn Bishop (Australian, b. 1945)
Three Aboriginal women holding cakes, Mungundi, New South Wales
1976, reproduction 2014
Gelatin silver print
30 x 30cm
National Library of Australia
© Mervyn Bishop

Mervyn Bishop (Australian, b. 1945)
Charles Perkins shaking hands with members of the National Aboriginal Congress, Canberra
1978, reproduction 2014
Gelatin silver print
30 x 30cm
National Library of Australia
© Mervyn Bishop

Charles Perkins (Australian, 1936-2000; Arrernte; Kalkadoon)

Charles Nelson Perkins AO, commonly known as Charlie Perkins (16 June 1936 – 19 October 2000), was an Australian Aboriginal activist, soccer player and administrator. He was the first Indigenous Australian man to graduate tertiary education, and is known for his instigation and organisation of the 1965 Freedom Ride and his key role in advocating for a “yes” vote in the Australian referendum, 1967 (Aboriginals). He had a long career as a public servant.

Mervyn Bishop (Australian, b. 1945)
Untitled (Bellbrook NSW, man leaning on fence)
4 May 1988
Art Gallery of New South Wales
© Mervyn Bishop
Photo: AGNSW

Mervyn Bishop (Australian, b. 1945)
Children floating on board, Yirrkala, Northern Territory
1989, reproduction 2014
Gelatin silver print
27 x 40cm
National Library of Australia
© Mervyn Bishop

Mervyn Bishop (Australian, b. 1945)
Aboriginal Australian Gerard Rice at the Rally, Sydney
1989, reproduction 2014
Gelatin silver print
40 x 27cm
National Library of Australia
© Mervyn Bishop

National Film and Sound Archive of Australia
McCoy Circuit, Acton ACT 2601

Opening hours:
Daily 10am – 4pm

National Film and Sound Archive of Australia website

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Photo album: ‘John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell (1892-1960), 1922-1933’ Part 1

July 2021

Warning: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers should be aware that this posting contains images and names of people who may have since passed away.

John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album front cover

Discovered in an op shop (charity shop in America), this is the most historically important and exciting Australian photo album that I have ever found.

I undertake a fuller analysis of the album in Part 2 of the posting in an essay titled Golden splendour: privilege, ceremony and racism in 1920s-1930s Australia (2023), the second part of the posting containing previously unpublished photographs of the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

In this posting there are some important photographs of “Aboriginal Types, along the Trans-Australian Railway” and “Australian Desert Blacks.” The Indigenous Australians had come to trade boomerangs and spears in return for money and clothing. According to the excellent book Bitter Fruit: Australian photographs to 1963 by Michael Graham-Stewart and Francis McWhannell, after the completion of the continental railway in 1917,

“The Railway provided a source of income for Aboriginal people, much to the ire of the Chief Protector of Aborigines in Western Australia, A. O. Neville, to whom the slightest hint of autonomy was anathema. There was some begging (Neville was convinced that children were being ‘bred’ for the purpose), but also a system of charging for photographs. Boomerang and spear demonstrations were given, and artefacts were souvenired.

The most important stop on the line was Ooldea. This was situated six kilometres south of Ooldea Soak, one of the few places in the region with permanent water. The site had long been of great ceremonial and social significance for Aboriginal people, a fact attested by the profusion of stone artefacts in the area… It was a junction of migratory routes, a centre for exchange, and a refuge in times of drought.”1

As Episode 1 of the series ‘Australia in Colour’ states of similar home movie images, “these photographs offer an unfiltered glimpse into a world seldom seen.”2

Other fascinating images in this posting include the grave of bushranger John Dunn; the Macquarie Watchtower in La Perouse; the goldfields and mines of Kalgoorlie and “Boulder City” in Western Australia; the oldest inhabitant of Geraldton, W.A.; Fremantle prison; and pearling in Shark’s Bay, W.A. including two photographs – one of the dilapidated “White’s Cemetery” with single cross and bones and the other a “Grave in the Niggers Cemetery” with nothing but a mound of earth and some dead branches. Other photographs offer casual racism as a matter of course in their titles.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

PS. This album is now in the State Library of New South Wales collection, given its importance in documenting through photographs regional NSW, Indigenous Australians and the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. See Part 2 of the posting for these previously unseen images of the opening of the bridge.

Footnotes

1/ Michael Graham-Stewart and Francis McWhannell. Bitter Fruit: Australian photographs to 1963. Michael Graham-Stewart, 2017, p. 66.

2/ Episode 1 Season 1: “Outpost Of Empire”: This episode charts the story of the nation from 1897 to 1929 as agriculture transforms the land. ‘Australia in Colour’ is the history of Australia told via a unique collection of cinematic moments brought to life for the first time in stunning colour. It tells the story of how Australia came to be the nation it is today. Narrated by Hugo Weaving, it’s a reflection on our nation’s character, its attitudes, its politics, and its struggle to value its Indigenous and multicultural past. ‘Australia in Colour’ gives us a chance to relive history from a fresh perspective.

Grateful thankx to Douglas Stewart Fine Books for their research help with this photo album. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

“Biscuits and cake and fruit were thrown to them from the train windows, while their boomerangs and native weapons, and their importance in the landscape as subjects for photography, brought many a shilling and sixpence for them to spend.”

Daisy Bates, The Passing of the Aborigines quoted in Bitter Fruit: Australian photographs to 1963.1

“John “Jack” Riverston Faviell, was a senior NSW public accountant. Originally from Colinroobie, near Narrandera in NSW, he married Melanie Audrey Pickburn (daughter of Judge Pickburn) in a society wedding at St James’ Church, Sydney, in February 1925. He built no. 20 Yarranabbe Rd, Darling Point as their first married home but he divorced Audrey in October 1930. He would later remarry in 1934, as would Audrey.”

Jon Dickson. Douglas Stewart Fine Books

Locations

Blue Mountains, NSW (1922)
Leura Falls, NSW (1922)
Weeping Rock, Wentworth Falls, NSW (1922)
Tarana Picnic Races, NSW (1922)
Doona, Breeza, NSW (1922)
Avoca, NSW (1922)
Newcastle Races, NSW (1923)
Belmont / Belmont Regatta, NSW (1923)
Hawkesbury, NSW (1923)
Frenches Forest, NSW (1923)
“Foxlow” Station, Bungedore, NSW (1923)
Sydney, NSW (Customs House, National Art Gallery, Mitchell Library, Darlinghurst Courthouse) (1923)
Muswellbrook Picnic Races, NSW (1923)
Maitland / Maitland Cup Meeting, NSW (1923)
Breeza, NSW (1923)
Wiseman’s Ferry, NSW (1923)
Moss Vale / Sutton Forest Church, NSW (1923)
Frensham, NSW (1923)
La Perouse, NSW (Historical Society Excursion) (1923)
Old Customs Watch Tower, La Perouse (1923)
The Old Illawarra Road, NSW (1923)
Yarcowie, SA (1923)
Trans-Australian Railway (Port Augusta to Kalgoorlie) (1923)
Karonie, WA (1923)
Kalgoorlie, WA (1923)
Boulder City, WA (1923)
Fremantle, WA (1923)
Geraldton, WA (1923)
Shark’s Bay, WA (1923)
Henry Freycinet Estuary, WA (1923)
Tamala Station, WA (1923)
Perth, WA (1923)
Adelaide, SA (Torrens River) (1923)
“Redbank,” Scone, NSW (1924)
Muswellbrook Picnic Races, NSW (1924)
“Craigieburn,” Bowral, NSW (1924)
The Dudley Cup at Kensington, NSW (1924)
Camden Grammar School, NSW (1924)
Liverpool Church, NSW (1924)
Landsdowne Bridge, NSW (1924)
Jenolan Caves, NSW (1924)
Avon Dam, NSW (1924)Herald Office, Pitt Street, NSW (1924)
Camping, Cronulla, NSW (1925)
Roseville, NSW (1926)
Whale Beach, NSW (1927)
Visit of the Duke and Duchess of York, Macquarie Street, NSW (1927)
20, Yarranabbe Rd., Darling Point, NSW (1926)
Canberra, ACT (1927)
Jenolan Caves, NSW (Lady Dorothy Hope-Morley) (1927)
Ellen’s Isle, Loch Katrine, Scotland (1925)
Sydney Harbour Bridge, NSW (1931-32)
“Springfield,” Byng, Near Orange, NSW (1932)
Lucknow, near Orange, NSW (1933)
Hawkesbury, NSW (1933)
Bathurst, NSW (1933)
“Millambri, ” Canowindra, NSW (1933)
Melbourne, VIC (1933)

Topics

“Blue Mountains, N.S.W,” January, 1922 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

Blue Mountains

The Blue Mountains are a mountainous region and a mountain range located in New South Wales, Australia. The region borders on Sydney’s metropolitan area, its foothills starting about 50 kilometres (31 mi) west of centre of the state capital, close to the major suburb of Penrith. The public’s understanding of the extent of the Blue Mountains is varied, as it forms only part of an extensive mountainous area associated with the Great Dividing Range. Officially the Blue Mountains region is bounded by the Nepean and Hawkesbury rivers in the east, the Coxs River and Lake Burragorang to the west and south, and the Wolgan and Colo rivers to the north. Geologically, it is situated in the central parts of the Sydney Basin. …

The Blue Mountains have been inhabited for millennia by the Gundungurra people, now represented by the Gundungurra Tribal Council Aboriginal Corporation based in Katoomba, and, in the lower Blue Mountains, by the Darug people, now represented by the Darug Tribal Aboriginal Corporation…

Examples of Aboriginal habitation can be found in many places. In the Red Hands Cave, a rock shelter near Glenbrook, the walls contain hand stencils from adults and children. On the southern side of Queen Elizabeth Drive, at Wentworth Falls, a rocky knoll has a large number of grinding grooves created by rubbing stone implements on the rock to shape and sharpen them. There are also carved images of animal tracks and an occupation cave. The site is known as Kings Tableland Aboriginal Site and dates back 22,000 years.

Text from the Wikipedia website

You’ll find the locality of Kanimbla Valley in New South Wales about 90km west-northwest of Sydney. At about 677m above sea level, Kanimbla Valley is one of the higher localities in New South Wales.

“Tarana Picnic Races,” January, 1922 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

Tarana

Tarana is a small town in the Central West of New South Wales, Australia in the City of Lithgow.

“Doona, Breeza,” October, 1922 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

J. Pickering – John Pickering, grazier of Breeza, Upper Hunter Valley, killed by a log he was loading onto a wagon in February 1924.
B.B. Capper – Capper family of Rossmer Homestead at Breeza, Upper Hunter Valley.
Doona Station and Breeza Station owned by the Clift family.

Information from Douglas Stewart Fine Books

“Doona, Breeza,” October, 1922 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

Breeza

Breeza is a small village located about 45 kilometres south east of Gunnedah on the Kamilaroi Highway. The aboriginal name for Breeza means “one hill”.

The village overlooks the rich fertile Liverpool Plains and this diverse farming area produces many and varied crops throughout the year. When in season, the fields of sunflowers, sorghum, canola, wheat and cotton provide a picturesque vista across the sweeping plains.

Breeza was settled in 1848 by Andrew Lang. Old folk say that Bushranger Ben Hall was born at Breeza, he was in fact born near Maitland, but his father, Ben Hall Snr worked on Breeza Station at one time. A mural ‘Ben Hall’s Wall’ stands in the heart of Breeza to commemorate Ben Hall’s final years set against “those wild colonial days” of yesteryear.

Text from the australias.guide website [Online] Cited 18/10/2019

“Avoca,” Xmas, 1922 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

Avoca Beach

Avoca Beach is a coastal suburb of the Central Coast region of New South Wales, Australia, about 95 kilometres (59 mi) north of Sydney. Avoca Beach is primarily a residential suburb but also a popular tourist destination. Terrigal is a major coastal suburb of the Central Coast region of New South Wales, Australia, located 12 kilometres (7 mi) east of Gosford on the Pacific Ocean. (Text from the Wikipedia website)

“Newcastle Races,” New Year, 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

Located in the heart of Newcastle on the picturesque Hunter Coast only two hours drive north of Sydney is Newcastle Racecourse. In operation for over 100 years, the Newcastle Racecourse is the largest provincial club in NSW.

“Belmont,” New Year, 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

Belmont, on Lake Macquarie near Newcastle, NSW.

“Saddington’s Ford,” New Year, 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Belmont,” 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

John C Reid and Mark C Reid

The Reid brothers John C Reid and Mark C Reid were nephews of Sir George Houstoun Reid, 4th Prime Minister of Australia and former Premier of New South Wales prior to Federation. On Friday 14 January, 1898 the Reid boys were at the train station to welcome their uncle the Premier to Newcastle.

Roger Steel, Historian, Belmont

O.E. Friend (died 1942)

O.E. Friend was a very wealthy man and was Director of the Commercial Banking Company of Sydney with a keen interest in pastoral pursuits, investments, etc., Perhaps Faviell worked for Friend or was a close confidante, which would explain all the shots of pastoral locations (Friend’s interests).

Information from Douglas Stewart Fine Books

Obituary

MR. O. E. FRIEND DIES IN SYDNEY

Mr O. E. Friend, 60, died today. He was a director of the Permanent Trustee Company, the Commercial Banking Company of Sydney, Pitt, Son, and Badgery, the United Insurance, and Howard Smith companies, and several other business organisations. Mr. Friend was keenly interested in pastoral pursuits. He was chairman of directors of Retreat Station Ltd., Queensland, and was formerly president of the Royal Historical Society.

The Courier-Mail, Brisbane, Qld., Tue 26 May, 1942, Page 4 on the Trove website [Online] Cited 05/11/2019

“Belmont Regatta,” 1.1.23 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

Belmont Regatta

I am researching the local history of Belmont, NSW and in particular the history of the Belmont Sailing Club. The Belmont Sailing Club was formed at a meeting on 13th May 1922 and it held its first race on 7th October 1922.

Whilst an annual regatta had been held on Belmont Bay for some decades, the Belmont Regatta held on 1st January 1923 is the first run under the auspices of the newly formed Belmont Sailing Club. The photo in the album would be the earliest photograph of 16ft skiffs sailing on Belmont Bay.

Interestingly, John C. Reid, living in Weeroona on the shores of Lake Macquarie was the sailing club’s first patron, having been involved previously with the Belmont regattas as well as the regattas held on Newcastle Harbour. He was also a benefactor providing trophies for the club and had a high profile having formerly been the Mayor of Newcastle and the French Consul for Newcastle, there to assist French sailors. He played a significant role following the wreck of the ship Adolphe (1904, see below) in Newcastle Harbour. His younger brother Mark Christian Reid was the sailing club’s first President. Both of these men lived truly amazing lives.

Is there any possibility of getting a high resolution scan of a few of these photographs? In particular the photo of the 1923 Belmont Regatta is priceless.

The skiffs in the club then used numbers on their sails instead of ensigns like other 16ft skiff clubs. Its hard to see, but it looks like the leading skiff has the number one on the sail, making it the skiff named ‘Clift’ (No numbers are visible on the sails just splotches – Marcus). That name Clift is significant in Belmont as you can see from your photo album. The Clifts were wealthy graziers from Breeza who would holiday at Belmont in their 17 room home.

Roger Steel, Historian, Belmont

Email to Marcus Bunyan 07/07/2021

This slide depicts the wreck of the Adolphe as photographed on 30 September 1904. You can also see the mast of the shipwreck Regent Murray in this photo.
University of Newcastle Library’s Cultural Collections

Adolphe

The Adolphe was a sailing ship that was wrecked at the mouth of the Hunter River in New South Wales, Australia, in 1904. The ship is now the most prominent of several wrecks on what is now the Stockton breakwall, which protects Newcastle harbour. The rescue of the ship’s crew has gone down in local maritime history as one of the most remarkable in local waters.

On 30 September 1904, the Adolphe was being towed through the entrance of Newcastle harbour by the tugs Hero and Victoria after an 85-day voyage in ballast from Antwerp under the command of Captain Lucas. Heavy seas prevented the tugs from holding her, and after the tug hawser parted she was swept first on to the wreck of the Colonist, then battered by waves that forced her on top of other submerged wrecks on what was then called the Oyster Bank. The lifeboat hurried to the scene and within two hours all 32 of the crew had been taken off. The northern breakwater of the entrance to the port of Newcastle was extended after the loss of the Adolphe. The French consul made an official visit to Newcastle to recognise the efforts of the lifeboat crew.

Text from the Wikipedia website

“Fun at The Lake,” 17/19 February, 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“O.E.F. (O.E. Friend) & B.B.C. (Basil Cappers),” 17/19 February, 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“The Basil Cappers’ departure for England,” 9 March, 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Untitled,” 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Pan-American, 6666,” 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“The Hawkesbury from the train,” 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Foxlow,” 3/5 March, 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Foxlow,” March, 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Foxlow,” 3/5 March, 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Foxlow Station, Bungendore,” 3/5 March, 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Foxlow,” 3/5 March, 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

Foxlow

Bungendore property “Foxlow” has more than 7500 hectares of land. It was purchased by F.B.S Falkiner (the son of F.S. Falkiner) in 1920.

Before the Falkiner family ownership, “Foxlow” had been in the hands of the Osborne family, and previously the Rutledge family; they had a short ownership of two years after purchasing it from John Hosking, in the 1860s. Hosking himself was the first mayor of Sydney, and had given the property its name, after his wife, Martha Foxlow Terry.

Mr Falkiner said “Foxlow” was one of the first farms to be taken up in the Molonglo Valley.

The property was profiled in The Land‘s country homes series in 1976, which detailed the property’s history extending back to an original grant in 1839 to Thomas Wood.

It is not known exactly when Hosking himself purchased the property, but his ownership lasted until 1868 when it was purchased by Thomas Rutledge, and then later George Osborne, who had owned the property for 50 years before the Falkiner family ownership.

Nick Heydon. “Historic ‘Foxlow’ offering,” on The Land website 26 April 2014 [Online] Cited 28/10/2019

Foxlow sold for $15 million in 2015.

“Mr Friend examining the old bell,” March, 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Sydney,” 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Customs House,” Sydney, 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

Customs House, Sydney

Customs House, Sydney is a heritage-listed museum space, visitor attraction, commercial building and performance space located in the Circular Quay area at 45 Alfred Street, in the Sydney central business district, in the City of Sydney local government area of New South Wales, Australia. The building served as a customs house prior to Federation and then as the head office of New South Wales operations of the Government of Australia agency Department of Trade and Customs (and its successors) until 1988. The customs function relocated to a new site in 1990. The initial designs were by Mortimer Lewis and it was built during 1845 by under the administration of Governor Sir George Gipps.

Text from the Wikipedia website

“National Art Gallery,” Sydney, 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Upper Hunter Amateur Race Club Meeting… (Muswellbrook Picnic Races)” 15/16 May, 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

Muswellbrook

Muswellbrook is a town in the Upper Hunter Region of New South Wales, Australia, about 243 km (151 mi) north of Sydney and 127 km (79 mi) north-west of Newcastle. Geologically, Muswellbrook is situated in the northern parts of the Sydney basin, bordering the New England region. The area is predominantly known for coal mining and horse breeding, but has also developed a reputation for gourmet food and wine production.

Text from the Wikipedia website

“Upper Hunter Amateur Race Club Meeting… (Muswellbrook Picnic Races)” 15/16 May, 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“The Button’s Essex,” May, 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Muswellbrook Picnic Races,” 15/16 May, 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Belmont,” 23/25 June, 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

Three women standing in front of Belmont Soldier’s Memorial Hall (middle) and Belmont School of Arts (right) in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

Belmont Soldier’s Memorial Hall and Belmont School of Arts

My interest in the photo of the women in front of the Belmont Soldier’s Memorial Hall (opened 1921) (above) is also in the hope of seeing what is written on the building beside it (it says Belmont Literary Institute – more commonly known as the Belmont School of Arts, opened 1914). If it is the School of Arts, this suggests the building may have been moved at some stage. I’m very curious as I believed the School of Arts was close by in an adjoining street.

Roger Steel, Historian, Belmont

Belmont

Belmont is a suburb in the Hunter Region of New South Wales, Australia, located 20 kilometres (12 mi) from Newcastle’s central business district on the eastern side of Lake Macquarie and is part of the City of Lake Macquarie. Belmont is situated on a sandy peninsula formed by the Tasman Sea on the east and Lake Macquarie.

“”Weroona”, Belmont,” 23/25 June, 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

3 women at Weeroona in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

Weeroona and the Reid’s

If we look carefully at the photograph of the 3 women at Weeroona with the lake in the back ground (above), you can see the old stone ferry jetty. It was in a state of disrepair in 1923 and Mark C Reid, having been a former Alderman on Newcastle Council and a very prominent business man, was lobbying Lake Macquarie Shire Council to have the jetty repaired. Note this jetty became the club house of Lake Macquarie Yacht Club in the early 1930’s, built at the end of the pier, and still in the same location to this day. I’ve attached an old postcard (below) which shows a view of the yacht club from the Weeroona boatshed.

Some of the information from the Wikipedia page is not correct (below). John C Reid didn’t live in Weeroona during his retirement as he died relatively young and Mark C Reid took over his brother’s position as manager of John Reid Limited and as French Consul following his brother’s unexpected death. The Crippled Children’s Association did purchase Weeroona in about 1950 following Mark C Reid’s death however based on my memory, Weeroona would have been demolished much later than 1979.

Roger Steel, Historian, Belmont

John Christian Reid

John Christian Reid, JP (1873 – 20 March 1932) was a New South Wales businessman, yachtsman and alderman, who served several terms as Mayor of Newcastle… In retirement, Reid lived with his family at his residence, “Weroona”, in Belmont, which later became the holiday home for the NSW Crippled Children’s Association and was demolished in 1979.

Text from the Wikipedia website

The Reid’s water-front, Lake Macquarie in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

Belmont, Near Newcastle
1950s?
Postcard
Colour lithograph

“Maitland,” 25 August, 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

Maitland

Maitland is a city in the Lower Hunter Valley of New South Wales, Australia and the seat of Maitland City Council, situated on the Hunter River approximately 166 kilometres (103 mi) by road north of Sydney and 35 km (22 mi) north-west of Newcastle. It is on the New England Highway about 17 km (11 mi) from its start at Hexham.

“Dr Kennedy’s house, East Maitland,” August, 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Maitland Cup Meeting,” Spring, 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Finish of The Cup,” Spring, 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Breeza (Doona Cyprus Pine Venture),” 13th September, 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“”Karua” household,” September, 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Breeza,” 13th September, 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

John Pickering was killed by a log, 1924. Cyprus Pine venture was an investment project that Friend and Faviell were working on with Pickering and Capper?

Information from Douglas Stewart Fine Books

Breeza

Breeza is a locality in New South Wales, Australia. It is about 43 kilometres south of Gunnedah, in the Liverpool Plains agricultural region. The area around Breeza in particular is called the “Breeza Plains”. The name “Breeza” may be derived from an Aboriginal word meaning “one hill”.

“The team in the bush,” Breeza, September 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Breeza,” 13th September, 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Wiseman’s Ferry,” 25 November, 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

Wisemans Ferry

Wisemans Ferry is a town in the state of New South Wales, Australia, located 75 kilometres north north-west of the Sydney central business district in the local government areas of Hornsby Shire, The Hills Shire, City of Hawkesbury and Central Coast Council. The town is a tourist spot with picnic and barbecue facilities. As well as a rich convict and colonial heritage in the area, the Dharug National Park and Yengo National Park are close by.

The town was originally called Lower Portland Headland, but the name was eventually changed to Wisemans Ferry, named after Solomon Wiseman, a former convict (1778-1838), who received a land grant in the area from Governor Macquarie in 1817. Wiseman established a ferry service on the Hawkesbury River in 1827 for the transport of produce and provisions to the convicts building the Great North Road and was known to many as King of the Hawkesbury.

Text from the Wikipedia website

“Moss Vale,” 8/9 December, 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

Moss Vale

Moss Vale is a town in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales, Australia, in the Wingecarribee Shire. At the 2016 census, it has a population of 8,579 and is sited on the Illawarra Highway, which connects to Wollongong and the Illawarra coast via Macquarie Pass.

“Frensham Pastoral Play,” 8th December 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

Frensham School

Frensham School is an independent non-denominational comprehensive single-sex early learning, primary, and secondary day and boarding school for girls, located at Mittagong, south of Sydney, in the Southern Highlands region of New South Wales, Australia.

“La Perouse (Historical Society Excursion),” 17 November, 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

Captain J. H. Watson, Royal Historical Society

O.E. Friend was President of the Royal Historical Society. Faviell was evidently also a member and visited La Perouse on a RHS excursion, with O.E. Friend. Friend disappears from the album after this time. Did Friend and Faviell part ways?

Information from Douglas Stewart Fine Books

La Perouse

La Perouse is a suburb in south-eastern Sydney, in the state of New South Wales, Australia. The suburb of La Perouse is located about 14 kilometres southeast of the Sydney central business district, in the City of Randwick.

“La Perouse (Historical Society Excursion),” 17 November, 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“John Dunn. Executed, 19.3.1866,” 17 November, 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

John Dunn

John Dunn (14 December 1846 – 19 March 1866) was an Australian bushranger. He was born at Murrumburrah near Yass in New South Wales. He was 19 years old when he was hanged in Darlinghurst Gaol. He was buried in the former Devonshire Street Cemetery in Sydney.

“Old Customs Watch Tower, La Perouse,” 17 November, 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

Macquarie Watchtower

The Macquarie Watchtower is the earliest known surviving, sandstone tower building in Australia, the oldest surviving building on Botany Bay, and has long been recognised as a picturesque landmark on the headland, particularly popular for wedding photographs. The c. 1820 Macquarie Watchtower is thought to have been commissioned by Governor Macquarie. Not only is it the oldest surviving watchtower in Australia but it is the only known tower specifically constructed for colonial border protection and the prevention of smuggling.

“The old Illawarra Road,” 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Vera Capper and the children,” 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“South Australian Railways,” 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

South Australian Railways

South Australian Railways (SAR) was the statutory corporation through which the Government of South Australia built and operated railways in South Australia from 1854 until March 1978, when its non-urban railways were incorporated into Australian National, and its Adelaide urban lines were transferred to the State Transport Authority.

“Terowie to Pt. Augusta, 120 ml.,” 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“S.A. Constable,” 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Trans-Australian Railway (Port August to Kalgoorlie, 1051 miles),” 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

Trans-Australian Railway

The Trans-Australian Railway crosses the Nullarbor Plain of Australia from Port Augusta in South Australia to Kalgoorlie in Western Australia. It includes a 478-kilometre (297 mi) stretch of dead-straight track, the world’s longest, between the 797 km (495 mi) post west of Ooldea and the 1,275 km (792 mi) post west of Loongana.

The line forms an important freight route between Western Australia and the eastern states. Currently two passenger services also use the line, the Indian Pacific for its entire length and The Ghan between Port Augusta and Tarcoola. Earlier passenger services on the route were known as the Great Western Express.

Text from the Wikipedia website

“Aboriginal Types, along the Trans-Australian Railway,” 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“At Ooldea, S.A.,” 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“At Barton, S.A.,” 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Ooldea,” 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

Ooldea

Ooldea is a tiny settlement in South Australia. It is on the eastern edge of the Nullarbor Plain, 863 km (536 mi) west of Port Augusta on the Trans-Australian Railway. Ooldea is 143 km (89 mi) from the bitumen Eyre Highway.

“At Ooldea,” 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Australian Desert Blacks,” 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Untitled,” 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Kalgoorlie,” 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

Kalgoorlie-Boulder

Kalgoorlie-Boulder, known colloquially as just Kalgoorlie, is a city in the Goldfields-Esperance region of Western Australia, located 595 km (370 mi) east-northeast of Perth at the end of the Great Eastern Highway. The city was founded in 1889 by the amalgamation of the towns of Kalgoorlie and Boulder, which developed in 1893 during the Coolgardie gold rush, on Western Australia’s “Golden Mile”. It is also the ultimate destination of the Goldfields Water Supply Scheme and the Golden Pipeline Heritage Trail.

Text from the Wikipedia website

“Where gold was first found, by Hannan. 15 Jan., 1893,” 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Boulder City,” 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

Boulder

Boulder is a suburb in the Western Australian Goldfields 595 kilometres (370 mi) east of Perth and bordering onto the town of Kalgoorlie in the Eastern Goldfields region.

“Perseverence Mine,” 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

Perseverance Gold Mine, Golden Mile Mines, Kalgoorlie-Boulder, Kalgoorlie-Boulder Shire, Western Australia, Australia

The lease was spoken as the richest 24 acre block on the Golden Mile in 1901. Ten shafts were on the lease, but the two most important was Main Shaft (700feet 1901) in the centre of the block accessing the Perseverance Lode, and No6 Shaft (600 feet 1901) near the southern boundary on the Consols Lode. Measurements are in imperial in keeping with the historic references. Lake View Consols was to its north, South Kalgurli to its south, Associated to its east, and Great Boulder Proprietary to its west.

The general manager of the mine was Ralph Nicholls who arrived in July 1899, about three years after the mine opened. He was in for a torrid time later. A new mill was constructed shortly after to process the sulphide ore, while remaining oxidised ore was taken to Hannan’s Public Crushing Company, which the mine owned. All ore was processed at a new mill constructed on the lease in 1910.

Around 1900 a series of scandals hit the Golden Mile mines. From 1896-1900 they had mined incredibly rich ore loads, but as these became exhausted, lower (but still very profitable) gold grades became the norm. Several of the mines had over estimated the potential gold which could be extracted, leading to wild fluctuations in share prices. Employees of the companies were accused of what we would now call insider trading of shares they owned.

Around 1903, the Boulder Perseverance Mine was the latest to be caught in the scandal. The outcry finally forced the Government’s hand which launched a Royal Commission. Delivering its report in 1904, it was scathing of the company.

Text from “Perseverance Gold Mine (Boulder Perseverance Mine),” on the mindat.org website [Online] Cited 29/10/2019

“Boulder Mine,” 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

Great Boulder Gold Mine, Golden Mile Mines, Kalgoorlie-Boulder, Kalgoorlie-Boulder Shire, Western Australia, Australia

The Great Boulder Mine was the first large scale mine on the Golden Mile, and considered the largest and richest on the field.

The town of Boulder (as in Kalgoorlie-Boulder) was named after the mine.

Visitors to the underground workings in the early part of the Twentieth Century wrote in amazement at seeing ore shoots loaded with fine grained gold. One writer wrote the battery was barely keeping up with gold being processed from the access tunnels, let alone the ore shoots. In 1929 the mine had extracted the most gold of any location in Western Australia. In 1940 it was noted as the second largest producer to that point in Australia.

The discovery of gold at Hannans, just north of the Golden Mile, led to the greatest gold-rush in Australia’s history. After only a couple of years of frenzied activity, by thousands of individual miners, the alluvial gold had been exhausted.

British speculators successfully floated the Great Boulder and Lakeview Mines in 1895 to access the rich underground reefs. The Great Boulder Gold Mines Limited was formed at this time, until it ceased as a company in 1972. …

Between 1895-1931 over four million tonnes of ore was processed for almost the same amount in ounces of gold. Dividends amounted to 3524% of the initial capital invested. The company had produced 15 million pounds of gold monetary wise, and 7.5 million pounds in profits.

Text from “Great Boulder Gold Mine,” on the mindat.org website [Online] Cited 29/10/2019

“Fremantle,” 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Interior Courtyard, Old Gaol,” Fremantle, 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

Fremantle Prison

Fremantle Prison, sometimes referred to as Fremantle Gaol or Fremantle Jail, is a former Australian prison and World Heritage Site in Fremantle, Western Australia. The six-hectare (15-acre) site includes the prison cellblocks, gatehouse, perimeter walls, cottages, and tunnels. It was initially used for convicts transported from Britain, but was transferred to the colonial government in 1886 for use for locally-sentenced prisoners. Royal Commissions were held in 1898 and 1911, and instigated some reform to the prison system, but significant changes did not begin until the 1960s.

Text from the Wikipedia website

“Geraldton, W.A.,” in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

Geraldton

Geraldton is a coastal city in the Mid West region of the Australian state of Western Australia, 424 kilometres (263 mi) north of the state capital, Perth.

“Oldest Inhabitant (Henry Desmond.),” Geraldton, W.A. 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Shark’s Bay, W.A.,” 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

Pearling interests? Investments? in Western Australia (Information from Douglas Stewart Fine Books)

Shark Bay

Shark Bay is a World Heritage Site in the Gascoyne region of Western Australia. The 23,000-square-kilometre (8,900 sq mi) area is located approximately 800 kilometres (500 mi) north of Perth, on the westernmost point of the Australian continent.

“The only street (Entirely paved of Mother of Pearl),” 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Shark’s Bay,” 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“White’s Cemetery,” Shark’s Bay, 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Grave in Nigger’s Cemetery,” Shark’s Bay, 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“Shark’s Bay,” 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

Gin

Gin is the term for an Aboriginal woman. It is racist, the derogatory saying most people would be familiar with is “looks like a gin’s camp”, meaning they think the place is dirty/untidy.

“Shark’s Bay,” 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

“All Mother-of-Pearl,” 1923 in John “Jack” Riverstone Faviell 1922-1933 photo album

State Library of New South Wales website

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Photographs: ‘Australia’ Part 1

December 2018

Warning: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers should be aware that this posting contains images and names of people who may have since passed away.

Anonymous photographer
Parlour, Broken Hill, New South Wales
1895
Gelatin silver print

A German Rönisch piano with a copy of “A Country Girl” above the keyboard (I can’t find any reference online to this song?). To the right, a two-panel screen with Christmas cards, one with the words “Hearty Greetings” and another with the date “1895”.

The last posting for 2018 features a selection of Australian black and white photographs that belong to a friend of mine, who has kindly allowed me to scan and publish them. The images have been digitally cleaned after scanning. The titles of the photographs are annotated on the back of the images.

The photographs are mainly of pastoral, colonial, outback, station, homestead and mining life, and picture the remoteness of these properties and towns c. 1910s-1950s. They also evidence the nature of white, colonial, patriarchal society much in evidence on pastoral stations during this time period. Hardly a women appears in these photographs, and Indigenous Australians usually only appear as stockmen or trackers.

Of most interest to me are the photographs of Poolamacca Station, c. 1910.

In the first photograph, Christmas Day, Poolamacca Station, north of Broken Hill, New South Wales (below) what is going on in the photograph remains a bit of a mystery. A man lies, apparently comatose, on a mattress outside, on the ground, in the strong midday sun (note the short length of the shadows). The man to the right reaches forward to clasp his hand, while other men around clasp each other’s hands to form a circle around the body. Some men look down at the body on the mattress, others stare straight at the camera, smoking cigars. A handsome man with a moustache, on bended knee and wearing a waistcoat, third from left, smiles broadly at the camera. A man at the back of the group rests his head against the stone of the building, eyes closed, as though he is drunk. The length of the exposure can be judged by the several blurred figures, particularly of the man standing and the head of the man at right rear.

Several scenarios are possible: is the man lying on the mattress really ill? Is it some kind of religious play being performed on Christmas Day? Are they all drunk and mucking about? And/or is it some kind of game, a charade? The circle of hands suggests to me it is a type of friendship game for the person lying on the mattress, a bond between them all, a supposition reinforced by the handsome man smiling at the camera. If the situation were serious, he would not be smiling. The second photograph, taken at the same time (before or afterwards?), features the men now accompanied by women, piled high on a cart pulled by four horses. At left behind the front horses can be seen what I believe is the same corrugated iron and building that appears at left in the first image. We can only guess the narrative in the first photograph because we do not have enough clues. Nevertheless, the photograph and its story remain a fascinating mystery.

The third and fourth photographs also tell an enigmatic story. Again, they have both been taken at the same time, as can be seen by the same riveted water tank behind each group in the photographs. The same fair-haired child also appears at right in the first photograph and sitting in his mother’s lap in the second photograph. From the length of his white apron, the white man in the photograph is possibly a cook or butcher at Poolamacca Station. The photographs also put lie to George Dutton’s claim that “in 1910 there was only two boys left” at Poolamacca Station (see extract from The Mutawintji research project report below).

What we have here is, possibly, an interracial marriage or partnership, a frontier marriage? whose Australian

“… boundary-crossing lovers are still omitted from the historical memory of the nation. Despite their long-term, cross-generational legacies, these unions virtually became a secret of state. …

These lovers generated families at the core of the cultural and historical interface that became the Australian nation. However, the young coloniser state did not like it.

From the coming of Federation until the 1960s, love affairs between Aboriginal people and others were severely restricted across all of northern Australia. Queensland moved rapidly to curb courtship and marriage between white Australian men and Aboriginal women. Western Australia and the Northern Territory followed. That didn’t mean that relationships stopped. Love often prevailed. …

Police and missionary enforcers placed white working class men living with Aboriginal women under sexual surveillance, forcing them to either apply for permits or be arrested. Many were fined or jailed. The Chief Protectors, who had the power to decide who could marry whom, regularly refused their written requests to marry.

Although largely untouched by the new laws, magistrates, pastoralists, police and missionaries also fell in love with Aboriginal women. It was not uncommon for cattle station owners and managers to practice a form of cross-frontier polygamy, sustaining relationships with both a white wife and an Aboriginal woman. …

Australian lovers who were willing to cross these punitive marriage bars showed an uncommon courage. Out of this “illicit love” came new generations who carry on the battles for their ancestors and their communities. Some are the very same people who are required today to justify their Aboriginality because of mixed descent. They have to keep explaining who they are and why they are speaking out.”1

What these rare photographs speak of is a love, an intimacy, and affection within a family unit. Just look at the gentleness as the man holds the child’s hands and the smile on the mother’s face. It is just a gorgeous photograph of love and happiness between white and black, of a smiling women with her children. Passed down through time, it is a privilege to be able to look, to understand, to feel the power of this relationship all of these years later.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

All of these photographs have been digitally cleaned. Many thankx to my friend Daniel for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

1/ Professor Ann McGrath. “Celebrating white men and their black lovers,” on The Sydney Morning Herald website [Online] Cited 30/12/2018

1910s Australia

Anonymous photographer
Christmas Day, Poolamacca Station, north of Broken Hill, New South Wales
c. 1910
Gelatin silver print

Anonymous photographer
Christmas Day, Poolamacca Station, north of Broken Hill, New South Wales (detail)
c. 1910
Gelatin silver print

Anonymous photographer
Christmas guests, Poolamacca Station, north of Broken Hill, New South Wales
c. 1910
Gelatin silver print

Poolamacca Station

It is situated about 50 kilometres (31 mi) north of Broken Hill and 174 kilometres (108 mi) north east of Mannahill at the eastern end of the Barrier Range adjoining Sturts Meadows. The station currently occupies an area of 40,000 acres (16,187 ha). The abandoned township of Tarrawingee is situated within the boundaries of the station.

The property was established in the 1860s with the first owners of the run being Messrs Jones and Goode. In 1867 a shepherd staged a hoax with a white quartz gold find that lead to an aborted gold rush to the area. The first property in the area was Mount Gipps Station In 1865 with Corona, Mundi Mundi and Poolamacca being established shortly afterward. Sidney Kidman worked at Poolamacca during the 1870s as a boundary rider and stockman.

In 1877 the property was put up for auction by the trustees of the estate of Messrs E. M. Bagot and G. Bennett. At this stage the property was approximately 900 square miles (2,331 km2) in size along with a flock of 34,906 sheep. The property comprised ten separate runs including the 64,000 acre Bijerkerno run to the 25,000 acre Torrowangee run.

John Brougham acquired a half share in Poolamacca in 1889 and later secured the lease outright. Brougham remained at Poolamacca until 1915 when he moved to Adelaide. In 1892 approximately 50 Aboriginal people, were moved to Poolamacca station which under the regime of the late owner, Mr J. Brougham, constituted a sanctuary for the last remaining Aboriginal inhabitants of the Barrier Ranges and adjacent areas.

The lease was later split into two properties: Poolamacca and Wilangee in the 1920s. Moss Smith sold the property in 1927 to the Pastoral company of Adelaide following the death of his daughter whose body was found buried in a warren in Poolamacca late the year before after she had gone missing for four months.

In 2002 the property was acquired by the Indigenous Land Corporation with the title holders being the Wilyakali Aboriginal Corporation when the property occupied an area of 507 square kilometres (196 sq mi).

Text from the Wikipedia website

Sydney to Poolamacca map, New South Wales, Australia

Anonymous photographer
Poolamacca Station, north of Broken Hill, New South Wales
c. 1910
Gelatin silver print

Anonymous photographer
Poolamacca Station, north of Broken Hill, New South Wales (detail)
c. 1910
Gelatin silver print

Anonymous photographer
Poolamacca Station, north of Broken Hill, New South Wales
c. 1910
Gelatin silver print

Anonymous photographer
Poolamacca Station, north of Broken Hill, New South Wales (detail)
c. 1910
Gelatin silver print

Extracts from The Mutawintji research project

Keith Brougham, the son of John Brougham, the owner of Poolamacca (and brother of John Brougham Jnr of Gnalta station, now part of Mutawintji National Park), describes how the first pastoralists mapped out their original station boundaries by including the best waterholes:

“The wild aborigines were a help by following their tracks, as they knew of any existing water away from the river… One old aborigine who claims to be from one of the wild tribes told me the walkabout was a good sign to watch for – at that time a mob were having a hunt for a new hunting ground and had camped about midday. While they were stopped a pregnant woman had a baby there. Next day they were off again, mother and child and went straight to a waterhole, which the white people found by following their tracks” (Brougham, K.W.C. 1920, West of the Darling, MS, State Library of South Australia, p. 14)

… In 1862, the area north-west of Mt Murchison on the Darling River near present day Wilcannia was still frontier country. Mt Gipps station7, set up in 1865 (Kearns 1982), was the first station in the Broken Hill area. It included the country to the north of Broken Hill and the hill that was to become the Broken Hill mine and city. Mt Gipps was followed soon after by Poolamacca, Corona and Mundi Mundi.

No actual descriptions of the annexation of Mutawintji by pastoralists have been found so far, but as permanent waterholes are few to the north-west of the Darling River, descriptions of the annexure of other important water sources such as Yancannia in the mid 1860s suggest that there was likely to have been conflict. Yancannia station, to the north of Mutawintji, had been established by 1865 and contemporary accounts describe conflict with the local Aboriginal people. By 1872 the Aboriginal people of Yancannia gave the owners “very little trouble” and “a few of them [were] very useful” (Reid in Shaw, M.T. 1987, Yancannia Creek, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, p. 104).

Dr Jeremy Beckett, Dr Luise Hercus, Dr Sarah Martin (edited by Claire Colyer). The Mutawintji research project report. MUTAWINTJI: Aboriginal Cultural Association with Mutawintji National Park. Published in 2008 by the Office of the Registrar, Aboriginal Land Rights Act 1983 (NSW), pp. 9-10.

It is clear from the Bonney records that people moved backwards and forwards between Yancannia, Momba, Tarella, Wonnaminta, Poolamacca and Gnalta/Mootwingee stations from the 1860s and through the 1880s. Bonney lists about 44 people as living at Momba and Tarella around 1881; some of the people from Momba have been traced and the descendents of some of the people Bonney described are Aboriginal owners of Mutawintji National Park. …

In 1892 about 50 Aboriginal people, including Outalpa George, were camped near Olary. At about this time they moved to Poolamacca station which “under the regime of the late owner, Mr J. Brougham, constituted a sanctuary for the last remaining Aboriginal inhabitants of the Barrier Ranges and adjacent areas” (Mawson, D. and Hossfeld, P.S. 1926, ‘Relics of Aboriginal Occupation in the Olary District’, Transactions of the Royal Society of South Australia, 50, pp. 17-25).

Keith Brougham, the son of John Brougham, writes about the 1890s:

“[in] 1892 [at] Poolamacca … we were amazed by the number of Aboriginals that were there… I had a boy mate staying with me and about two hundred blacks were camped in a sort of inlet in the hills of Silverton Hill, as it was called west of the homestead … The Aboriginals were practically in their wild state and did not speak our language” (Brougham MS n.d, p.1)

“… cotton dresses, high coloured and a great favourite of the [women] went as soon as they were landed, and olive oil for the [women’s] hair, always in demand” (Brougham MS n.d, p.2).

“[the Aboriginal people] were very handy in the woolshed at shearing time. The [women] did all the piece picking and men on the tables and picking up. The pickers were excellent at their job and all had a good eye, male and female” (Brougham MS n.d, p.3)

“… At Poolamacca my mother … employed a … girl who was neat and tidy, an extra good worker, and in 1896 she was really good” (Brougham MS n.d, p.12)

“… [at] Euriowie we had a lot of aboriginals working in the creeks surrounding this country picking up slugs of pure tin and bagging it” (Brougham MS n.d, p.23).

The APB [Aboriginal Protection Board] minutes recorded between 1890 and 1901 seldom mention the Mutawintji area. The only stations in the far north-west that received help from the APB were Poolamacca, occasionally Sturts Meadows, and the fringe camps at Milparinka, Tibooburra, Wanaaring and Wilcannia. The only station that consistently received rations throughout 1890-1901 was Poolamacca. Sturts Meadows (just to the west of Mutawintji) received rations in 1893, 1897 and 1898. Most stations either managed to fully employ the Aboriginal people living there or provided food and clothing of some sort without asking for compensation. …

During John Brougham’s time at Poolamacca during the 1890s and early 1900s, the station was something of a sanctuary for Aboriginal people but many had moved on by the time the Brougham family left. Some followed the Broughams to Gnalta station (now part of Mutawintji National Park) while others went to stations like Yancannia, where a large number of Aboriginal people lived and worked (Shaw, M.T. 1987, Yancannia Creek, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne). …

According to George Dutton, who was born on Yancannia station, there was a sizeable Aboriginal population at Poolamacca until about 1910, but almost none thereafter. George Dutton told Jeremy Beckett:

“At Poolamacca in 1901 there was a big mob of blackfellas, two hundred men without the women and kids. When I went back in 1910 there was only two boys left and graves all round” (Beckett, J. 1978, ‘George Dutton’s Country: Portrait of an Aboriginal Drover’, Aboriginal History, vol. 2 (1), pp. 19).

Anonymous photographer
Banjo playing in the garden, Broken Hill, far west of outback New South Wales
c. 1910-1920
Gelatin silver print

Anonymous photographer
Banjo playing in the garden, Broken Hill, far west of outback New South Wales (detail)
c. 1910-1920
Gelatin silver print

Anonymous photographer
Dr Tham?, Wagga Wagga, New South Wales
c. 1900-1910
Gelatin silver print

Anonymous photographer
Dr Tham?, Wagga Wagga, New South Wales (detail)
c. 1900-1910
Gelatin silver print

Anonymous photographer
Horse and trap, Wagga Wagga, New South Wales
c. 1910
Gelatin silver print

Anonymous photographer
Largs Pier Hotel, North-western suburb of Adelaide, South Australia
c. 1910
Gelatin silver print

Largs Pier Hotel

Largs Pier Hotel is located on the corner of The Esplanade and Jetty Road in Largs Bay, South Australia.

The Largs Pier Hotel opened in 1882 on the same day as the Largs Bay Railway and Pier. Believed to be 23rd of December according to The Port Adelaide Historical Society. From 1882 till around 1892 the Largs Pier was the primary port of call for New Australians travelling from Europe. Many of these immigrants spent their first nights in Australia at the hotel.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Largs Pier Hotel, South Australia today

1930s Australia

Anonymous photographer
Alice Springs
c. 1930
Gelatin silver print

Anonymous photographer
Alice Springs (detail)
c. 1930
Gelatin silver print

Anonymous photographer
Police camels
c. 1930
Gelatin silver print

Anonymous photographer
Police camels (detail)
c. 1930
Gelatin silver print

Note the Aboriginal police tracker second from left. This could be in the Northern Territory.

Anonymous photographer
At the Granites
c. 1930
Gelatin silver print

This photograph is possibly from around the Granites gold mine in the Tanami Desert of the Northern Territory of Australia. You can make out the word “gold” on the truck behind the men.

Gold was discovered in the Tanami Desert by Alan Davidson. He arrived in the area in 1898 prospecting until 1901. He took the name Tanami for the region from local Aboriginal people who visited his camp. “On inquiry [he] learned that the native name of the rockholes (from [which the party obtained water] was Tanami, and that they “never died,” he said. Davidson showed the gold specimens to these Aboriginal people, who recognised it and described “mobs of similar stone to the east, together with a large creek containing plenty of water and fish. This they said was “two days’ sleep to the south of east”.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Anonymous photographer
At the Granites (detail)
c. 1930
Gelatin silver print

Note the man crouching at left holding a Kodak box camera, and the folding camera (most probably a Kodak as well) at the feet of the man third from right.

Anonymous photographer
At the Granites (detail)
c. 1930
Gelatin silver print

1950s Australia

Anonymous photographer
Roy Hill Homestead, Pilbara region of Western Australia
c. 1950
Gelatin silver print

Anonymous photographer
Roy Hill Homestead, Pilbara region of Western Australia (detail)
c. 1950
Gelatin silver print

Roy Hill Homestead

Statement of significance

Roy Hill Station has strong heritage significance as it has aesthetic, historical, scientific, and social values. It represents more than a hundred years of life on a Pilbara station, and its buildings and structures, reflect an evolutionary pattern of development. Roy Hill Station was the home of Alexander Langdon (Alex) Spring who made an enormous contribution to local government in the region between 1940-1970. He was a Councillor for 31 years, and was the first President of the East Pilbara Shire in 1972. He was made a Freeman of the Shire of East Pilbara in 1973. becoming the 13th Freeman in Western Australia.

Roy Hill continues to have significance as a large pastoral station, representing some of the other stations which owners did not want included in the Shire of East Pilbara Heritage Inventory.

History

Physical description

Roy Hill Homestead is situated 1km off the main road halfway between Newman and Nullagine. Roy Hill Station consists of a large number of buildings which demonstrate the dynamic process of running a pastoral station over a period of more than a century. There are a number of corrugated iron sheds built at different times for mechanical work and storage of station equipment. Close by is the aircraft directional beacon available for the nearby airstrip if a plane was lost. The original airstrip was approx. 6 miles from the homestead. Part of the very old cattle stockyards still stand next to a disused cattle killing hoist, reflecting a time when pastoralists regularly butchered cattle for their home consumption. The yards were the main trucking yards and general handling yards.

The large main house is one of a number of buildings that have been erected on the station since the turn of the century. It has cement block walls with a corrugated iron roof. Surrounding the large and once gracious home is a wide verandah. The house originally consisted of three bedrooms, a living room, guest room, dining room and school room. Nearby the house is a cluster of older buildings including a ‘Nissan hut’ shaped kitchen and dining room for workers and the old Post Office. Office and General Store.

The Post Office, Office and General Store has corrugated iron walls and a gabled tin roof. Inside the Post Office are the pigeon holes and other associated post office fittings. The service hatch for the Post Office is still visible from the outside. The General Store (to the rear of the Post Office) still has its shelves in place and much of the old equipment that has been collected there over the years gives a feeling of stepping back into another time. In the immediate vicinity of the homestead property are other remnants from the past.

Concrete pads found amongst the grass are the remains of Aboriginal stockmens quarters and the many rainwater tanks are reminders of the need to collect and store all water needed for consumption. A light aircraft parked near the airstrip is an important vehicle for transport and for mustering.
Today the house stands unoccupied and the owner and any employees live in transportable homes near the old house.

Shire of East Pilbara. “Roy Hill Homestead and former Post Office,” on the the State Heritage Office, Government of Western Australia website Nd [Online] Cited 15/03/2022

Anonymous photographer
Mundiwindi Station, Pilbara region of Western Australia
c. 1950
Gelatin silver print

Mundiwindi

Mundiwindi just off the Jigalong Mission Road in Western Australia is a locality about 1000km north-northeast of Perth. Mundiwindi is at an altitude of about 575m above sea level. The nearest ocean is the Indian Ocean about 410km north-northwest of Mundiwindi. The nearest more populous place is the town of Newman which is 71km away with a population of around 3,500.

Mundiwindi is a ghost town in the Pilbara region of Western Australia. The town is around 1,150 kilometres (710 mi) north east of Perth and 124 kilometres (77 mi) south east of Newman, along the Jigalong Mission road. The town was established in 1914 as a telegraph station. The station was closed in 1977. The telegraph station was a link on the Australian Overland Telegraph Line linking the settled regions of Australia to the submarine cable at Broome. A weather station operated at the site between 1915 and 1981.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Anonymous photographer
Mundiwindi Station, Pilbara region of Western Australia (detail)
c. 1950
Gelatin silver print

Anonymous photographer
Cardawan Station, central Western Australia
c. 1950
Gelatin silver print

Stockman (Australia)

In Australia a stockman (plural stockmen) is a person who looks after the livestock on a large property known as a station, which is owned by a grazier or a grazing company. A stockman may also be employed at an abattoir, feedlot, on a livestock export ship, or with a stock and station agency. …

History

The role of the mounted stockmen came into being early in the 19th century, when in 1813 the Blue Mountains separating the coastal plain of the Sydney region from the interior of the continent was crossed. The town of Bathurst was founded shortly after, and potential farmers moved westward, and settled on the land, many of them as squatters. The rolling country, ideal for sheep and the large, often unfenced, properties necessitated the role of the shepherd to tend the flocks.

Early stockmen were specially selected, highly regarded men owing to the high value and importance of early livestock. All stockmen need to be interested in animals, able to handle them with confidence and patience, able to make accurate observations about them and enjoy working outdoors.

Australian Aborigines were good stockmen who played a large part in the successful running of many stations. With their intimate bonds to their tribal places, and local knowledge they also took considerable pride in their work. After the gold rushes white labour was expensive and difficult to retain. Aboriginal women also worked with cattle on the northern stations after this practice developed in northern Queensland during the 1880s. A Native administration Act later stopped the employment of women in the cattle camps. Aborigines and their families received the regular provision of food and clothing to retain their labour, but were paid only a small wage.

Text from the Wikipedia website

For more information on the role and conditions of Aboriginal stockmen, please see the book Aborigines in the Northern Territory Cattle Industry by Dr Frank Stevens, Australian National University Press, 1974.

“Perhaps nowhere in Australia have working and living conditions for Aborigines been so bad as on Northern Territory cattle stations. Though the Aborigines’ skill in handling cattle is acknowledged by their white employers, rarely have they gained recognition in any material way. None were paid full wages, many were fortunate if they received any cash wages at all, almost all lived in appalling conditions, and many were subjected to physical violence.

These facts emerge clearly from Dr Stevens’s thorough research into the conditions obtaining on Territory pastoral properties in the 1960s. During surveys in 1965 followed up in 1967, Dr Stevens questioned employers and both black and white workers in the industry, eliciting some revealing replies. It was apparent that the Aboriginal workers were fully aware of their degraded position and the way in which they were exploited.

Where possible Dr Stevens visited the Aboriginal station ‘camps’, though he met with opposition from some station owners, reluctant to allow him free access. In almost all of them the living conditions were primitive, the best of accommodation being little more than a corrugated iron hut. Few camps had running water or cooking facilities.

In the growing awareness of the Aborigines’ plight in Australia, this book is an important testimony of the conditions in which many lived and worked, conditions that must no longer be allowed to exist.”

Book jacket

Anonymous photographer
Cardawan Station, central Western Australia (detail)
c. 1950
Gelatin silver print

Anonymous photographer
Railway Hotel, Lake Austin township, Murchison region of Western Australia
c. 1950
Gelatin silver print

Austin, Western Australia

Austin is an abandoned town in the Murchison region of Western Australia. The town is located south of Cue on an island in Lake Austin and for this reason was also known as Lake Austin and The Island Lake Austin.

The lake and the town are both named after surveyor Robert Austin, who was the first European to explore and chart the area. Austin initially named the lake the Great Inland Marsh but the name was later changed to Lake Austin. The townsite was gazetted in 1895. When Austin travelled through the area he described it as very indifferent but also added the geological features indicate rich goldfields.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Anonymous photographer
Railway Hotel, Lake Austin township, Murchison region of Western Australia (detail)
c. 1950
Gelatin silver print

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Exhibition: ‘Colony: Australia 1770-1861’ at NGV Australia at Federation Square, Melbourne Part 1

Exhibition dates: 15th March – 15th July 2018

Presented in conjunction with the exhibition Colony: Frontier Wars (15 March – 2 September 2018) which presents a powerful response to colonisation through a range of historical and contemporary works by Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists dating from pre-contact times to present day.

Warning: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers should be aware that this posting contains images and names of people who may have since passed away.

Installation views of the entrance to the exhibition Colony: Australia 1770-1861 at NGV Australia at Federation Square, Melbourne featuring 19th century Aboriginal shields from the NGV Collection
Photos: © Dr Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria

This is an ambitious double exhibition from the National Gallery of Victoria: historical with a contemporary response. I didn’t have time to take installation photographs of the contemporary exhibition on Level 3 during the media call, concentrating instead on Colony: Australia 1770-1861, the historical exhibition on the ground floor of NGV Australia at Federation Square, Melbourne.

A review, along with the installation photographs of the many early photographs present in the exhibition, will be presented in Part 2 of the posting.

Suffice to say that his exhibition should not be missed by any Australian.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to the National Gallery of Victoria for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. All installation photographs © Dr Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria.

Colonial Frontier Massacres in Eastern Australia 1788-1872

Colonial Frontier Massacres in Eastern Australia 1788-1872 from The Centre for 21st Century Humanities, The University of Newcastle

Unknown
Broad shield (early 19th century-mid 19th century) (installation view)
earth pigments on wood, cane, pipeclay
91.3 x 19.5 x 9.5cm irreg.
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Felton Bequest, 2011
Photo: © Dr Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria

Shields

Aboriginal people have occupied the Australian continent for more than 65,000 years. The arrival and settlement of Europeans, from 1788, affected them profoundly. This proud massing of nineteenth-century shields at the entrance to this exhibition serves as both a reminder of the resilience of Aboriginal people in the face of colonisation, and a representation of the first chapter in Australian art.

The painted and incised designs on the shields are signifiers of the identities and places of these artists whose names, language groups and precise locations were not recorded by European collectors.

There are two kinds of shields traditional to south-east Australia. The first type is narrow and fashioned from a single piece of hardwood, designed to block the forceful blows of clubs, usually in individual combat, and is called a parrying shield. The second is broad and thin with a convex outer face and concave under-surface, and is fashioned from the outer bark or cambium. It is known as a broad or spear shield. This type of shield deflects sharply barbed spears thrown in general fights and also has a ceremonial purpose. These precious cultural objects are of inestimable value to Aboriginal people today.

Text from the NGV website

Melchisédec Thévenot (cartographer, French c. 1620-1692)
New Holland, revealed 1644: Terra Australis, discovered 1644 (Hollandia Nova detecta 1644: Terre Australe decouverte l’an 1644)
1644
Ink on paper
50 x 37cm
Published in De l’imprimerie de Iaqves Langlois, 1663
National Library of Australia, Canberra
Photo: National Library of Australia

Included in Melchisédec Thévenot’s travel account of 1663, this is the first published large-scale map of Australia. It shows how much of the continent’s coastline was known to Europeans 100 years before James Cook’s Pacific voyages, which would substantially complete European cartographic knowledge about both Australia and New Zealand. Thévenot’s map was published when French colonial aspirations were expanding and it divides the continent along the 135-degree meridian, which marked the western limit of Spain’s imperial claim in the South Pacific. Designating the eastern, undescribed expanse in French (‘Terre Australe’), the map signals French interest in the land east of New Holland.

Exhibition text

European exploration before 1770

The notion that James Cook ‘discovered’ Australia denies the presence of Aboriginal people for 65,000 years and overlooks other European and regional visitors to the Australian coast. The existence of a great southern land, Terra Australis, had long exercised Europeans’ imaginings about the world and began to take a more realistic shape on maps in the early seventeenth century because of maritime exploration. The earliest documented European contact was that of Willem Janszoon and his crew aboard the Dutch ship Duyken, which landed on the west coast of Cape York Peninsula in 1606.

Subsequently, a number of navigators on Dutch and English ships charted the west coast of the continent. Dutch explorer and trader Abel Tasman mapped the west and southern coasts of Van Diemen’s Land in 1642. Two years later, on his second voyage, he reached the north and west coast of Australia, which he named New Holland. The British privateer William Dampier reached the west coast in 1688, and trade between Aboriginal people and the Makassans (from modern-day Indonesia) is documented from around 1720. The Dutch charts of the western coast of Australia were known to the British for more than a century before Cook set sail on his first Pacific voyage.

Text from the NGV website

Unknown
Beardman jug, from the wreck site of Vergulde Draeck (installation view)
before 1656
Earthenware Australian National Maritime Museum, Sydney
Transferred from Australian Netherlands Committee on Old Dutch Shipwrecks, 1991
Photo: © Dr Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria

Thirty years after the Batavia was wrecked off the Australian west coast, the VOC ship Vergulde Draeck was destroyed on a reef 100 kilometres north of current-day Perth. More than 300 years later, in 1963, the submerged wreck was discovered by fisherman, and a large quantity of gold and silver bullion and German beardman or bellarmine jugs retrieved from within. The latter name is popularly associated with late sixteenth- to early seventeenth-century cardinal Robert Bellarmine, an opponent of Protestantism who was known for his fierce anti-alcohol stance. These potbellied, anthropomorphic jugs were certainly intended to ridicule him; they were regularly used to store wine.

Exhibition text

Isaac Gilsemans (cartographer) (Dutch, 1606-1646)
Coastal profiles of Van Diemen’s Land, 4-5 December 1642
1642
Bound into Extract from the Journal of the Skipper Commander Abel Janssen Tasman kept by himself in discovering the unknown Southland 1642-43, compiled c. 1643-1647
Pen and ink
23.5 x 37.6cm
State Library of New South Wales, Sydney
Acquired from Martinus Nijhoff, 1926

Victor Victorszoon (draughtsman) (Dutch, b. 1653)
Johannes van Keulen II
Amsterdam Island, St Paul Island, Black swans near Rottnest Island
c. 1724-1726
Plate from Oud en Nieuw Oost-Indien (The Old and New East Indies) by François Valentijn, vol. 3, part 2, published by Johannes von Braam and Gerard Onder de Linden, Dordrect and Amsterdam, 1724-1726
Engraving
30.4 x 18.5cm (plate)
34.7 x 22.1cm (sheet)
Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide
J.C. Earl Bequest Fund 2011

William Ellis (England 1751 – Belgium 1785, Australia 1777)
View of Adventure Bay, Van Diemen’s Land, New Holland
1777
Watercolour and brush and ink
20.0 x 47.3cm
National Library of Australia, Canberra

William Ellis served as surgeon’s mate on Cook’s Third Voyage and doubled his duties as unofficial natural history draughtsman, producing numerous sketches and watercolours. In these two watercolours he documents the Discovery and the Resolution harboured in the calm waters of Adventure Bay on Bruny Island, and the distinctive geological features of Fluted Cape at the southern end of the bay.

Exhibition text

William Bradley (England c. 1757 – France 1833, Australia 1788-1791)
Botany Bay. Sirius & Convoy going in: Supply & Agents Division in the Bay. 21 Janry 1788
opposite p. 56 in his A Voyage to New South Wales 1786-92, compiled 1802
Watercolour and pen and ink
19.0 x 24.3cm (sheet)
Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney

William Bradley sailed with the First Fleet as first lieutenant on board HMS Sirius and remained in the colony until 1792. Like many officers he kept a journal, illustrating key events. This work shows the First Fleet’s second contingent of ships sailing in to Botany Bay to join the advance party already anchored there. Signed and dated 21 January 1788, this and other Bradley images are significant eyewitness accounts of history in the making. Bradley compiled this journal after 1802, and may have made copies of earlier drawings.

Exhibition text

Landing and settlement at Sydney Cove 1788

Although Botany Bay had been chosen as the site for the establishment of the new penal colony, within days of arriving in January 1788, Governor Arthur Phillip relocated the First Fleet north to Sydney Cove in Port Jackson. Here the ships could be safely anchored and a freshwater stream provided a crucial water supply around which the first rudimentary settlement of tents, huts and the governor’s residence was established. The early years were extremely difficult and the colony faced starvation as the crops failed due to the lack of skilled farmers, unfamiliar climate and poor soil. But as farming pushed into more arable lands during the 1790s, settlement expanded and new townships were laid out, competing for resources with the Aboriginal inhabitants and dispossessing them of their lands.

No official artists accompanied the First Fleet and the colony’s earliest works of art were drawings made by officers trained in draughtsmanship and convicts with artistic skills. These drawings largely comprised ethnographic records of local people, natural history images of flora and fauna, charts and coastal views of the harbour’s topography. By the early years of the nineteenth century views of Sydney emphasised its growth, as urban development symbolised for the colonists the progress of Empire.

Text from the NGV website

Installation views of the exhibition Colony: Australia 1770-1861 at NGV Australia at Federation Square, Melbourne with in the bottom image at right, Sketch and description of the settlement at Sydney Cove, Port Jackson in the County of Cumberland 1788; and second right top, View of the entrance into Port Jackson taken from a boat lying under the North Head c. 1790
Photos: © Dr Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria

Francis Fowkes (draughtsman) (active c. 1788 – c. 1800)
Samuel John Neele (etcher)
Sketch and description of the settlement at Sydney Cove Port Jackson in the County of Cumberland
1788
Hand-coloured etching and engraving published by R. Cribb, London, 24 July 1789
19.6 x 31.7cm (image)
26.8 x 38.7cm (sheet)
National Library of Australia, Canberra

Dated 16 April 1788, this extremely rare map (there are only three known copies) was drawn by former navy midshipman and convict, Francis Fowkes, some three months after the First Fleet arrived in New South Wales. Published in London in July 1789, it presents a schematised view of the infant settlement with buildings, tents, sawpits, workshops, storehouses, quarries and gardens identified in the key. The eleven ships of the First Fleet are shown at anchor and the Governor’s ‘mansion’ is clearly identified on the eastern side of the cove.

Exhibition text

Port Jackson Painter
View of the entrance into Port Jackson taken from a boat lying under the North Head
c. 1790
Watercolour
11.7 x 24.2cm
Rex Nan Kivell Collection: National Library of Australia and National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Installation view of the exhibition Colony: Australia 1770-1861 at NGV Australia at Federation Square, Melbourne with at left lower, George Tobin’s Native Hut (or Wigwam) of Adventure Bay, Van Diemans (Diemen’s) Land 1792 folio 16 in his Sketches on H.M.S. Providence; including some sketches from later voyages on Thetis and Princess Charlotte album 1791-1831 watercolour. State Library of New South Wales, Sydney Acquired from Truslove and Hanson, in 1915 – in the image below at bottom left.
Photo: © Dr Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria

Installation view of the exhibition Colony: Australia 1770-1861 at NGV Australia at Federation Square, Melbourne with at bottom centre, Sarah Stone’s Shells 1781
Photo: © Dr Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria

Sarah Stone (British, c. 1760 – 1844)
Shells
1781
Watercolour over black pencil
43 x 58cm
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Purchased 2016

Sarah Stone (c. 1760 – 1844), later known as Sarah Smith, was a British natural history illustrator and painter. Her works included many studies of specimens brought back to England from expeditions in Australia and the Pacific. Her illustrations are amongst the first studies of many species and are as scientifically significant.

Stone was the daughter of a fan painter. She worked as a draftsman, natural history and scientific illustrator, and painter between 1777 and 1820. She was commissioned by Sir Ashton Lever in the 1770s to sketch and paint images of objects in his Leverian Museum, which included specimens brought back by British expeditions to Australia, the Americas, Africa and the Far East in the 1780s and 1790s. She exhibited as an “Honorary Exhibitor” at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1781, 1785 and 1786. Stone created numerous watercolour paintings of specimens sent by John White, the First Surgeon General of the Australian colony, between 1789 and 1790. These paintings were used to produce engravings for White’s A Journal of a Voyage to New South Wales (1790). Although beautiful and skilfully drawn the drawings were sometimes compromised by the fact that she was working from skins collected in Australia and reconstructed by a taxidermist in London to reproduce an animal or bird that had never been seen. Her collection of more than a thousand water colours based on specimens from the Leverian Museum were dispersed along with the museum items auctioned in 1806. Some of her paintings were acquired by the Natural History Museum, London while others went into private collections. They may be valuable in resolving some species described by J.F. Gmelin, the specimens of which are now untraceable.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Installation view of the exhibition Colony: Australia 1770-1861 at NGV Australia at Federation Square, Melbourne with at left, View of the town of Sydney in the colony of New South Wales c. 1799; and second left of the row of four, Juan Ravenet’s Convicts in New Holland (Convictos en la Nueva Olanda) and English in New Holland (Ingleses en la Nueva Olanda) 1789-1794 (see below)
Photo: © Dr Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria

Unknown artist (England)
Thomas Watling (after) (British, 1762-1814?)
View of the town of Sydney in the colony of New South Wales
c. 1799
Oil on canvas
65 x 133cm
Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide
Gift of M.J.M. Carter AO through the Art Gallery of South Australia Foundation in recognition of the abilities of James Bennett to promote public awareness and appreciation of Asian art and culture 2015
Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program

Transportation to New South Wales

The favourable accounts of New South Wales by James Cook and Joseph Banks were influential in the government’s selection of Botany Bay as the site for a new penal colony. Britain’s loss of the American colonies in 1783 ended convict transportation across the Atlantic and increased the pressure for new solutions to the rising rates of crime and incarceration experienced in late eighteenth-century Britain. The founding of a penal settlement in New South Wales was perceived not only as providing a solution to domestic, social and political problems but also as holding the key to territorial expansion in the South Pacific and the promotion of imperial trade.

The lengthy preparation for the First Fleet raised huge public interest. For most people at that time it was a journey of unimaginable length to a place as remote and unknown as the moon. The eleven ships comprising the First Fleet left Portsmouth in May 1787 with more than 1300 men, women and children on board. Although most were British, there were also African, American and French convicts. After a voyage of eight months the First Fleet arrived in Botany Bay in January 1788.

Text from the NGV website

Unknown artist
Transported for sedition (installation view)
1793
Woodcut on linen
Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney
Photo: © Dr Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria

This printed linen handkerchief shows five men popularly known as the ‘Scottish martyrs’. In 1794 they were sentenced to transportation to New South Wales for terms of up to fourteen years for the crime of sedition – inciting rebellion against the government of Britain. When published, or printed on paper, images such as this were also considered seditious and censored. Printed handkerchiefs, however, were not subjected to the same sanctions. They had the added advantage of being easily concealed and, when safe to do so, were displayed to show the owner’s political affiliation.

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Juan Ravenet (Italy 1766 – Spain c. 1821)
Convicts in New Holland (Convictos en la Nueva Olanda)
1789-1794
From an album of drawings made on the Spanish Scientific Expedition to Australia and the Pacific in the ships Descubierta and Atrevida under the command of Alessandro Malaspina, 1789-1794
Brush and ink and wash
19.5 x 12.5cm
Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney

Juan Ravenet (Italy 1766 – Spain c. 1821)
English in New Holland (Ingleses en la Nueva Olanda)
1789-1794
From an album of drawings made on the Spanish Scientific Expedition to Australia and the Pacific in the ships Descubierta and Atrevida under the command of Alessandro Malaspina, 1789-1794
Brush and ink and wash
19.5 x 12.5cm
Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney

Extremely few realistic depictions of convicts in Australia are known. These rare portraits, showing garments worn by male and female convicts and by officials, were painted by one of two artists on board the Spanish expedition (1789-1794), led by Alessandro Malaspina, that visited Sydney in 1793. A major scientific expedition, like Cook’s and La Pérouse’s, the visit also had political implications, as Sydney formed a strategic British base in the Pacific that could threaten Spanish interests in the Americas and Philippines.

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Installation view of the exhibition Colony: Australia 1770-1861 at NGV Australia at Federation Square, Melbourne with at left, Half-length portrait of Gna-na-gna-na c. 1790
Photo: © Dr Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria

Port Jackson Painter
Half-length portrait of Gna-na-gna-na
c. 1790
Gouache
29.4 x 24.0cm
National Library of Australia, Canberra
Rex Nan Kivell Collection

Indigenous representation

In the early years of settlement there was little contact with the Eora, the Traditional Owners of the area around Sydney Cove, who actively avoided the new arrivals, but as the colony grew, communication, and occasionally friendships, developed. The English had little understanding of the deep relationship between the Eora and their lands, and their careful management of resources, which were soon overstretched by the colonists. Famine and introduced diseases also devastated numerous communities. As the nineteenth century progressed, traditional life along the east coast of Australia was irrevocably changed.

Early images of Aboriginal people reflect the curiosity of the early colonists. Studies of the material culture of Indigenous people, and attempts to record everyday activities ranging from ceremonial gatherings to fishing and hunting, reveal the Europeans’ desire to understand Aboriginal people and culture through ethnographic documentation. Importantly, a number of these portraits include the names of the people depicted – they are not generic representations. The European artists who made these images were fascinated by the appearance of the individuals they encountered, sometimes producing finely detailed drawings and watercolours showing the particulars of hairstyles, ornamentation and scarification.

Text from the NGV website

Jean Piron (draughtsman, Belgium 1767/1771 – south-east Asia after 1795)
Jacques Louis Copia (engraver, Germany 1764-1799)
Natives of Cape Diemen fishing (Pêche des sauvages du Cap de Diemen)
1800
Plate 4 from the Atlas pour servir à relation du Voyage à la Recherche de La Pérouse (Atlas of the voyage in search of La Pérouse), by J-J. H. de Labillardière, published by Chez Dabo, Paris 1817
Etching and engraving
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased NGV Foundation, 2017

Jean Piron was an artist trained in the Neoclassical tradition who accompanied the expedition led by Admiral Joseph-Antoine Raymond Bruni D’Entrecasteaux during 1791-1794. His drawings from this expedition are the earliest surviving visual observations of the Aboriginal people of Tasmania by French explorers. Prints, engraved after his death, show Piron’s idealised vision of Tasmanian Aboriginal people living in tranquil harmony with their surroundings. However, apart from the spear-throwing man and the accurately depicted fibre and kelp baskets, there is little to indicate Tasmania in the classicised representation of the landscape and its people.

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Unknown artist (draughtsman, active in England early 19th century)
Samuel John Neele (etcher, England 1758-1825)
Pimbloy [Pemuluwuy], native of New Holland in a canoe of that country
1804
Following p. 170 in The Narrative of a Voyage of Discovery in his Majesty’s vessel the Lady Nelson by James Grant, published by Thomas Egerton, London, 1803
Etching
Special Collections, Deakin University, Melbourne

Pemuluwuy was an important man and warrior of the Eora nation. In December 1790 he gained notoriety after spearing, and killing, Governor Phillip’s gamekeeper. He then went on to lead raids on many of the settlements in the Sydney area, including Parramatta. David Collins, the lieutenant-governor, acknowledged that he was ‘a most active enemy’; however, he also noted that Pemuluwuy’s attacks were precipitated by the vicious ‘misconduct’ of the colonisers. In 1801 Governor King issued a proclamation that Indigenous people could be shot on sight, and placed a bounty on Pemuluwuy. He was murdered by a settler in 1802 and his body was subsequently desecrated.

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John Heaviside Clark (draughtsman Scotland 1770-1863, England 1801-1832)
Matthew Dubourg (engraver active in England 1786-1838)
Climbing trees (installation view)
Plate 4 from Field Sports &c. &c. of the Native Inhabitants of New South Wales, published by Edward Orme, London
1813
Hand-coloured aquatint
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Gurnett-Smith Bequest, 1999
Photo: © Dr Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria

Field Sports &c. &c. of the Native Inhabitants of New South Wales was the first publication to focus on the representation of Indigenous Australian life. The set of ten colour aquatints was part of a much larger series called Foreign Field Sports, which depicted sporting and hunting pursuits from around the world. These prints contain accurate details, such as the spear thrower, however, the plants and animals are inaccurate and were clearly unfamiliar to the London artists who made them, neither of whom came to Australia.

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John Heaviside Clark (draughtsman Scotland 1770-1863, England 1801-1832)
Matthew Dubourg (engraver active in England 1786-1838)
Warriors of New S. Wales (installation view)
Plate 6 from Field Sports &c. &c. of the Native Inhabitants of New South Wales, published by Edward Orme, London
1813
Hand-coloured aquatint
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Gurnett-Smith Bequest, 1999
Photo: © Dr Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria

The Flinders and Baudin expeditions

Between 1801 and 1804, skilled British navigator Matthew Flinders and his crew aboard the Investigator circumnavigated Australia, funded by the Royal Society and its president Sir Joseph Banks. Their directive was to chart the final stretch of southern coastline that remained unknown on European maps, and learn more about the continent’s extraordinary natural history. A similar French expedition led by Nicolas Baudin on the Géographe and the Naturaliste had already commenced (1800-1804). Sent by the Marine Ministry and Napoleon Bonaparte, the expedition sought to map and explore the unfamiliar land and its inhabitants; however, the British feared that it was a reconnaissance mission with a view to founding a French base in New Holland or Van Diemen’s Land.

The most dazzling record of both voyages’ scientific achievement was produced by the artists on board. Travelling with Baudin on the Géographe was Charles-Alexandre Lesueur, who delineated thousands of animal specimens, and Nicolas-Martin Petit, who represented the Aboriginal people encountered on the voyage. Their drawings were the basis for the engravings published in the official account of the expedition, Voyage of Discovery to the Southern Lands (1807-1811). Aboard the Investigator was the mature natural history artist Ferdinand Bauer and the talented young landscape painter William Westall.

Text from the NGV website

Charles-Alexandre Lesueur (draughtsman, France 1778-1846)
Victor Pillement (engraver, France 1767-1814)
Marie-Alexandre Duparc (engraver, active in France 18th century – 19th century)
New Holland: New South Wales. View of the southern part of the town of Sydney (Nouvelle-Hollande: Nouvelle Galles du Sud. Vue de la partie meridionale de la Ville de Sydney)
Plate 38 from Voyage de Découvertes aux Terres Australes (Voyage of Discovery to the Southern Lands) atlas, by François Peron and Louis de Freycinet, published by L’Imprimerie Impèriale, Paris, 1807-1816
Etching and engraving
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Presented through the NGV Foundation by John Baird, Member, 2005

Following their lengthy voyage and exploration of the south-east coastline of Australia, the Géographe and Naturaliste struggled into Port Jackson in June 1802. The French crew remained there for five months to recover and repair their ships. The surveying and scientific parties continued with their work, to some British suspicion, and Charles-Alexandre Lesueur drew scenes of Sydney and its surrounds, as well as exquisite natural history records. Taken from their camp on Bennelong Point (where the Sydney Opera House now stands) this view looks across Sydney Cove to where The Rocks and the southern end of the Harbour Bridge are now.

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Ferdinand Bauer (Austria 1760-1826, England 1787-1801, 1805-1814, Australia 1801-1805)
Gymea Lily (installation view)
1806-1813, published 1813
Plate 13 from Illustrationes florae Novae Hollandiae, sive icones generum quae in Prodromo Novae Hollandiae et insulae van Diemen decripsit Robertus Brown, published London 1813
Colour engraving with hand-colouring
36.2 x 24.3cm irreg. (image)
39 x 25.2cm (plate)
51 x 34cm (sheet)
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 2004
Photo: © Dr Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria

Ferdinand Bauer (Austria 1760-1826, England 1787-1801, 1805-1814, Australia 1801-1805)
Banksia coccinea
1806-1813, published 1813
Plate 3 from Illustrationes florae Novae Hollandiae, sive icones generum quae in Prodromo Novae Hollandiae et insulae van Diemen decripsit Robertus Brown, published London 1813
Colour engraving with hand-colouring
36.2 x 24.3cm irreg. (image)
39 x 25.2cm (plate)
51 x 34cm (sheet)
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 2004

Austrian-born Ferdinand Bauer is recognised as one of the most accomplished natural history artists who did much of his art while travelling, both in the Mediterranean and then as an official artist on Matthew Flinders’ circumnavigation of Australia (1801-1803). Working closely with botanist Robert Brown, Bauer produced over 2000 drawings and watercolours, and continued with his meticulous work upon his return to London. This engraving exemplifies his skill: it is engraved, printed in colour and then carefully hand-painted, all by Bauer himself. Regrettably his intended botanical publication ran to only fifteen plates.

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Barthélemy Roger (engraver, France 1767-1841)
Nicolas-Martin Petit (after) (draughtsman, France 1777-1804)
Y-erran-gou-la-ga, a native of the environs of Port Jackson (Y-erran-gou-la-ga, suavage des environs du port Jackson)
1824
Plate 24 in the Voyage de Découvertes aux Terres Australes (Voyage of Discovery to the Southern Lands) atlas
Arthus Bertrand, Paris, 1824, 2nd edition
Hand-coloured engraving, etching and stipple engraving printed in black and brown ink
31.5 x 24.1cm (plate)
36.5 x 27.6cm (sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Joe White Bequest, 2010

William Westall (England 1781-1850, Australia 1801-1803)
Chasm Island, native cave painting
1803
Watercolour
26.7 x 36.6cm
National Library of Australia, Canberra

William Westall (England 1781-1850, Australia 1801-1803)
A view of King George’s Sound
1802
Watercolour and pen and brown ink
27.9 x 42.9cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1978

William Westall was one of two artists who accompanied Matthew Flinders on the Investigator as it circumnavigated Australia between 1801 and 1803. This highly finished watercolour of King George’s Sound in south-western Australia is not a topographical study, but a romantic vision of a vast, silent and forbidding land. Two generic Aboriginal people figures are included in the foreground in the guise of the noble savage. Their classicised robes and the lack of a European presence, particularly the explorers encountering them, shows Westall casting the scene in an Arcadian period prior to British encounter.

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Installation view of the exhibition Colony: Australia 1770-1861 at NGV Australia at Federation Square, Melbourne showing the Bowman flag 1806
Photos: © Dr Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria

Mary Bowman (attributed to) (active in Australia early 19th century)
Bowman flag
1806
Oil on silk
State Library of New South Wales, Sydney
Presented by John Bowman’s great grandchildren to Richmond Superior Public School, 1905; transferred to the Mitchell Library by the Dept. of Public Instruction, 1916

Made to commemorate Lord Nelson’s naval victory at Trafalgar, this remarkable flag was flown at Scottish free settler John Bowman’s farm in 1806. The first Australian-made flag, it features the earliest recorded image of a kangaroo and emu supporting a shield, one hundred years prior to the implementation of the current coat of arms. According to family members, the Bowman flag was made from the silk of Honor Bowman’s wedding dress and sewn by her daughter Mary Bowman; however, more recent analysis suggests the design was most likely commissioned from a professional sign painter.

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John Lewin (England 1770 – Australia 1819, Australia from 1800)
Koala and young (installation view)
1803
Watercolour and gouache
Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney
Purchased from a descendant of Governor King, 1983
Photo: © Dr Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria

Surprisingly, koalas were not captured by colonists until 1803, although their existence had been known of for several years, and they were described as cullawine or colo, the names used by Aboriginal hunters. In August 1803 a female and two joeys were taken to Sydney, where they were reported in the recently founded Sydney Gazette. After one joey died, the mother and surviving joey were painted, proficiently by the Sydney-based artist John Lewin, and exquisitely by expedition artist Ferdinand Bauer. Bauer was unable to complete his watercolour in time to be sent on a departing ship, and thus Lewin’s was the first visual record of this animal to reach England.

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John Lewin (England 1770 – Australia 1819, Australia from 1800)
The gigantic lyllie of New South Wales
1810
Watercolour
54.1x 43.6cm
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney Purchased 1968

Natural history

In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the world was being studied and described by Europeans on a scale never seen before. Exploration in the Pacific revealed unanticipated communities and environments and the vast quantities of material brought back – objects, artefacts, specimens, maps, records, descriptions – were regarded with awe and astonishment. Enlightenment ambitions to understand the world through empirical observation led to intense scientific scrutiny, as people sought to comprehend and to classify this exciting, bemusing abundance. In this period, visual imagery became increasingly important, far exceeding a written description and surpassing dried or dead specimens in its ability to depict form, texture, colour, oddity and beauty.

From the time of the British landing in 1770, the people of Britain and Europe were astounded by what they saw in the colony. Captain (later Governor) John Hunter wrote ‘it would require the pencil of an able limner [artist] to give a stranger an idea of [the colourful birds], for it is impossible by words to describe them’. John Lewin was the first professional artist to arrive in New South Wales. Trained in natural history illustration and printmaking, Lewin promptly began drawing and making etchings of local moths and birds perched on Australian plants.

Text from the NGV website

George Stubbs after (England 1724-1806)
Unknown (etcher active in England 1770s)
The kanguroo, an animal found on the coast of New Holland
1773
Plate in An Account of the Voyages undertaken … for making Discoveries in the Southern Hemisphere by John Hawkesworth, printed for W. Strahan and T. Cadell, London, 1773
Etching
Rare Books Collection, State Library Victoria, Melbourne

Of all the ‘discoveries’ made in Australia by the crew of the Endeavour, one completely unexpected creature captured European imaginations; an animal, Cook wrote, like a greyhound except that ‘it jump’d like a Hare or Deer’. Several of these were caught in northern Queensland where they were called gangurru by the local Guugu Yimithirr. In London, Banks commissioned leading animal painter George Stubbs to paint the kangaroo, although he had only skins, skulls and sketches by Parkinson as his guide. This painting was reproduced in the official account of the voyage, published in 1773, two years after the Endeavour returned home.

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Installation views of the exhibition Colony: Australia 1770-1861 at NGV Australia at Federation Square, Melbourne with at second right top in the bottom image, James Sowerby’s Embothrium speciosissimum (now Telopea speciosissima) 1793
Photos: © Dr Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria

James Sowerby (England 1757 – France 1822)
Embothrium speciosissimum (now Telopea speciosissima)
1793
Plate 7 from A Specimen of the Botany of New Holland, part 2, by James Edward Smith, published by James Sowerby, London 1793
Hand-coloured etching and gum arabic
23.6 x 16cm (image and plate)
30 x 23.2cm (sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Joe White Bequest, 2015

A Specimen of the Botany of New Holland by the preeminent English botanist James Edward Smith was the first book dedicated to the study of Australia’s flora. The publication was illustrated by one of England’s leading botanical artists, James Sowerby, who was working from drawings made by John White, surgeon-general of New South Wales, as well as from dried specimens. The detailed illustrations and use of proper Latin names in Smith and Sowerby’s publication follows the authors’ intention to publish a scientific book that also reached a lay audience.

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Richard Browne (illustrator, Ireland 1776 – Australia 1824, Australia from 1811)
Insects
1813
Page 52 in Select Specimens from Nature of the Birds Animals &c &c of New South Wales collected and arranged by Thomas Skottowe 1813
Watercolour
18.7 x 30.0cm (page)
Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney
Bequeathed by D.S. Mitchell, 1907

Convicts with artistic talent were often put to work by their overseers. This was the case for convict Richard Browne who was assigned to Newcastle commandant Thomas Skottowe. Browne hand-painted the illustrations in Skottowe’s 1813 book, Select Specimens from Nature. Upon his release, Browne returned to Sydney, where he continued to paint stylised images of emus, lyrebirds and other animals. He also made portraits of Awabakal and Eora individuals, with the intention of selling these drawings to the developing local market, or as souvenirs to people aboard visiting ships.

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Installation views of the exhibition Colony: Australia 1770-1861 at NGV Australia at Federation Square, Melbourne with in the bottom image at right, John Lewin’s Fish catch and Dawes Point, Sydney Harbour c. 1813; and second right, John Lewin’s Platypus 1810
Photos: © Dr Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria

John Lewin (English-Australian, 1770-1819)
Fish catch and Dawes Point, Sydney Harbour (installation detail)
c. 1813
Oil on canvas
86.5 x 113cm
Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide
Gift of the Art Gallery of South Australia Foundation and South Australian Brewing Holdings Limited 1989
Given to mark the occasion of the Company’s 1988 Centenary
Photo: © Dr Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria

John Lewin (England 1770 – Australia 1819, Australia from 1800)
Fish catch and Dawes Point, Sydney Harbour
c. 1813
Oil on canvas
86.5 x 113cm
Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide
Gift of the Art Gallery of South Australia Foundation and South Australian Brewing Holdings Limited 1989
Given to mark the occasion of the Company’s 1988 Centenary

In 1812, John Lewin wrote to a friend that he had two oil paintings underway, one of which is believed to be this unusual composition of a haul of fish caught in Sydney Harbour set against the background of Dawes Point (now The Rocks, Sydney). It is thus the earliest oil painting known to have been produced in Australia. Pictured in the composition are various identifiable fish varieties, including a crimson squirrelfish, estuary perch, rainbow wrasse, sea mullet and hammerhead shark, later named the Zygaena lewini (now Sphyrna lewini) after the artist.

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John Lewin (England 1770 – Australia 1819, Australia from 1800)
Platypus (installation view)
1810
Watercolour and gouache
Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney
Bequeathed to the Trustees of the National Art Gallery of N.S.W. by Helen Banning; transferred to the Mitchell Library 1913
Photo: © Dr Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria

Sydney Bird Painter
Black Swan
c. 1790
Watercolour and ink
48.1 x 29.2cm
Kerry Stokes Collection, Perth

Images of the black swan, as well as living birds and skins, were sent back to a fascinated Europe. One depiction became the pose de rigueur – a swan afloat, shown in profile like a heraldic symbol, with wings raised to show the white flight feathers. Like the Stubbs kangaroo, this black swan appeared in numerous forms. This beautiful watercolour was painted by an unidentified artist, possibly a member of the First Fleet, whose hand has also been identified in a volume of watercolours depicting birds held in the Mitchell Library, Sydney. Two or three artists made these drawings, and they are now collectively referred to as the Sydney Bird Painter.

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Peter Brown (active in England 1758-1799)
Blue-bellied parrot
1776
Plate VII in New Illustrations of Zoology: Containing Fifty Coloured Plates of New, Curious, and Non-Descript Birds, with a Few Quadrupeds, Reptiles and Insects, published by B. White, London 1776
Hand coloured etching
19 x 24.6cm (image and plate)
24 x 30.5cm (sheet)
Special Collections, Deakin University, Melbourne

It is unusual to know about an individual bird but this rainbow lorikeet (as it is now known) was captured at Botany Bay by Tupaia, the skilled Polynesian navigator and arioi (priest) who joined the Endeavour in Tahiti. The bird was taken back alive to London, and presented by Joseph Banks to the wealthy collector Marmaduke Tunstall. A watercolour of it was painted in 1772, and this print was published in 1776, carefully hand-coloured to show the bird’s distinctive plumage.

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Installation view of the exhibition Colony: Australia 1770-1861 at NGV Australia at Federation Square, Melbourne with at centre, Joseph Lycett’s Inner view of Newcastle c. 1818
Photo: © Dr Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria

Joseph Lycett (England c. 1775-1828, Australia 1814-1822)
Inner view of Newcastle
c. 1818
Oil on canvas
59.6 x 90cm
Newcastle Art Gallery, Newcastle
Purchased with assistance from the National Art Collections Fund, London UK 1961

Forger Joseph Lycett was sent to the secondary penal settlement in Newcastle in 1815 after reoffending. His artistic skills soon attracted the patronage of Commandant Captain James Wallis, and under his direction he produced several paintings and drawings for etchings of birds and the landscape, as well as keenly observed watercolours of the local Awabakal people. This view shows the unmistakable profile of Newcastle’s Nobby’s Island, a site which is, according to the Awabakal people, the home of a giant kangaroo that was banished from its kin. The crashing of his great tail against the ground is said to be the cause of earthquakes and tremors in the area.

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Newcastle 1804

A penal settlement was established in Newcastle in 1804 as a place of secondary punishment for convicts. The area was rich in natural resources, including timber in the hinterland, large deposits of coal in the cliffs at the entrance to the harbour and shell middens for lime burning. Reoffenders sent to Newcastle experienced gruelling physical labour extracting these materials and desertion occurred frequently.

Yet, from this brutal setting, a rich body of work was born which represents the first local art movement by settlers within the Australian colonies. Over a decade, two commandants overseeing the settlement, Lieutenant Thomas Skottowe (1811-1818) and Captain James Wallis (1816-1822), both of whom were appointed by Governor Lachlan Macquarie, used convicts with artistic skills on a range of projects and capital works programs. They set artists to work documenting the Newcastle region and the local flora and fauna in drawings, paintings and prints. Others interacted with the local Awabakal people and produced important visual documents recording specific individuals and their way of life. Convicted forger Joseph Lycett was sent to Newcastle in 1815, and was the most significant artist involved in these projects, executing a group of major oil paintings, numerous watercolours, and drawings for subsequent etchings.

Text from the NGV website

James Wallis (Ireland c. 1785 – England 1858, Australia 1814-1819)
View of Awabakal Aboriginal people, with beach and river inlet, and distant Aboriginal group in background (installation view)
c. 1818
in his Album of original drawings by Captain James Wallis and Joseph Lycett, bound with An Historical Account of the Colony of New South Wales by James Wallis, published by R. Ackerman, London, 1821 (c. 1817-1821)
Watercolour and collaged watercolour
Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney
Purchased 2011
Photo: © Dr Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria

This image is one of a number of watercolours painted by Captain James Wallis that were bound into his personal copy of this publication. This naive image shows Awabakal people from the Newcastle region, whose figures have been cut out and collaged over the coastal scene behind. This presents a harmonious relationship between the Awabakal, colonisers and the military. Such a suggestion is at odds with earlier events of April 1816 when Wallis, under the direction of Governor Macquarie, led an armed regiment against Dharawal and Gandangara people south of Sydney, in what is now acknowledged as the first officially sanctioned massacre of Indigenous people in Australia.

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Installation view of the exhibition Colony: Australia 1770-1861 at NGV Australia at Federation Square, Melbourne showing the Dixson collector’s chest c. 1818-1820
Photo: © Dr Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria

William Temple (cabinetmaker) (Australian born England, 1779-1839)
Patrick Riley (cabinetmaker) (Australian born Ireland, 1786-1841)
John Webster (cabinetmaker)
Joseph Lycett (attributed to) (decorator) (British active Australia, c. 1774 – 1828)
James Wallis (after)
William Westall (after)
Dixson collector’s chest
c. 1818-1820
Australian Rose Mahogany (Dysoxylum fraserianum), Red Cedar (Toona ciliata), brass, oil, natural history specimens
56 x 71.3 x 46.5cm (closed)
Dixson Galleries, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney
Presented by Sir William Dixson, 1937

The Dixson collector’s chest

The Dixson collector’s chest, c. 1818-1820, and its close relation, the Macquarie collector’s chest, c. 1818, are rare examples of colonial ‘cabinets of curiosity’ and among the most fascinating and complex objects of the colonial period. The Macquarie collector’s chest was commissioned and likely designed by Captain James Wallis, commandant of Newcastle, to present to Governor Lachlan Macquarie. It is debated whether the Dixson collector’s chest, on display here, was produced as its prototype or subsequently as a second version.

Crafted by expert convict cabinet-makers from local Australian timbers, the cabinet opens to reveal painted panels by convict artist Joseph Lycett. Several show the Newcastle region, while others are painted after views by exploration artist William Westall. The drawers contain shells and originally would have also held other natural history specimens including birds, insects, coral and seaweed, tagged and arranged fastidiously by shape, colour and/or type. It is believed these specimens were collected with the assistance of the local Awabakal people, as Wallis had an amicable relationship with their kinsman Burigon.

Both of these chests were only discovered in the twentieth century; the example owned by Macquarie was found in a Scottish castle in the late 1970s, while the Dixson collector’s chest was acquired by Sir William Dixson, benefactor of the State Library of New South Wales, from a London dealer in 1937.

Text from the NGV website

Installation views of the exhibition Colony: Australia 1770-1861 at NGV Australia at Federation Square, Melbourne with in foreground, showing Dress uniform worn by Sir Edward Deas Thomson, Colonial Secretary of New South Wales 1832-1842; and in the background, Augustus Earle’s Captain John Piper c. 1826 and Mary Ann Piper and her children c. 1826
Photos: © Dr Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria

In the three years he spent in the colonies, Augustus Earle established himself as one of its leading artists, specialising in portraiture. He was commissioned to produce several portraits of prominent officials including surveyor George Evans, also on display; the departing governor, Sir Thomas Brisbane; and this pair of canvases depicting Captain John Piper and his family. Dressed in a uniform of his own design, Piper is portrayed as a man at the height of his power. The accompanying portrait of Mary Ann with four of their thirteen children depicts the family at home. Her gentility is emphasised by her fashionable dress, banishing all trace of her origins as the daughter of First Fleet convicts.

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Installation view of the exhibition Colony: Australia 1770-1861 at NGV Australia at Federation Square, Melbourne showing Dress uniform worn by Sir Edward Deas Thomson, Colonial Secretary of New South Wales (detail) 1832-1842
Photo: © Dr Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria

Unknown, England / Australia (maker)
Firmin & Sons, London (button maker England est. 1677)
Dress uniform worn by Sir Edward Deas Thomson, Colonial Secretary of New South Wales
1832-1842
Wool, silver brocade (appliqué), metal (buttons)
Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, Sydney Purchased 1966

Worn by Sir Edward Deas Thomson, Colonial Secretary of New South Wales between 1837 and 1856, this dress coat and trousers formed part of Thomson’s official livery. Loosely based on the Windsor uniform, introduced by King George III, the outfit’s striking red collar and cuffs with oak leaf and acorn hand embroidery impart splendour. In the nascent colony, uniforms were a way to differentiate status, easing anxieties about social mobility and instilling discipline and obedience.

Exhibition text

Augustus Earle (England 1793-1838, Brazil 1820-1824, Australia 1825-1828)
Wentworth Falls
c. 1830
Oil on canvas
Rex Nan Kivell Collection: National Library of Australia and National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Photo: © Dr Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria

The intrepid artist and adventurer Augustus Earle arrived in Australia in January 1825 at a time when the economic and social hierarchies of the new colony were still in flux. An accidental émigré, rescued from the tiny island of Tristan da Cunha, where he had been marooned, Earle’s enterprising nature and versatile talents saw him build up a rich visual record of the colonial encounter for local and international audiences. These large oils were produced in England, several years after his return from the colony, and are among the first to evoke the scale and grandeur of the Australian wilderness.

Exhibition text

Augustus Earle (England 1793-1838, Brazil 1820-1824, Australia 1825-1828)
A bivouac of travellers in Australia in a cabbage-tree forest, day break (see installation photograph below at left)
c. 1838
Oil on canvas
118 x 82cm
Rex Nan Kivell Collection: National Library of Australia and National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Installation views of the exhibition Colony: Australia 1770-1861 at NGV Australia at Federation Square, Melbourne showing in the bottom image at centre, Augustus Earle’s Portrait of Bungaree, a native of New South Wales c. 1826
Photos: © Dr Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria

Bungaree (Australian / Kuringgai, 1775-1830)

Bungaree, or Boongaree, (1775 – 24 November 1830) was an Aboriginal Australian from the Kuringgai people of the Broken Bay area, who was known as an explorer, entertainer, and Aboriginal community leader. He is significant in that he was the first person to be recorded in print as an Australian.

By the end of his life, he had become a familiar sight in colonial Sydney, dressed in a succession of military and naval uniforms that had been given to him. His distinctive outfits and notoriety within colonial society, as well as his gift for humour and mimicry, especially his impressions of past and present governors, made him a popular subject for portrait painters.

Bungaree first came to prominence in 1798, when he accompanied Matthew Flinders on a coastal survey as an interpreter, guide and negotiator with local indigenous groups. He later accompanied Flinders on his circumnavigation of Australia between 1801 and 1803 in the Investigator. Flinders was the cartographer of the first complete map of Australia, filling in the gaps from previous cartographic expeditions, and was the most prominent advocate for naming the continent “Australia”. Flinders noted that Bungaree was “a worthy and brave fellow” who, on multiple occasions, saved the expedition. Bungaree continued his association with exploratory voyages when he accompanied Phillip Parker King to north-western Australia in 1817 in the Mermaid.

In 1815, Governor Lachlan Macquarie dubbed Bungaree “Chief of the Broken Bay Tribe” and presented him with 15 acres (61,000 m2) of land on George’s Head. He also received a breastplate inscribed “BOONGAREE – Chief of the Broken Bay Tribe – 1815”. Bungaree was also known by the titles “King of Port Jackson” and “King of the Blacks”. Bungaree spent the rest of his life ceremonially welcoming visitors to Australia, educating people about Aboriginal culture (especially boomerang throwing), and soliciting tribute, especially from ships visiting Sydney. In 1828, he and his clan moved to the Governor’s Domain, and were given rations, with Bungaree described as ‘in the last stages of human infirmity’. He died at Garden Island on 24 November 1830 and was buried in Rose Bay. Obituaries of him were carried in the Sydney Gazette and The Australian.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Augustus Earle (England 1793-1838, Brazil 1820-1824, Australia 1825-1828)
Portrait of Bungaree, a native of New South Wales
c. 1826
Oil on canvas
68.5 x 50.5cm
Rex Nan Kivell Collection: National Library of Australia and National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Sydney 1810s-1850s

The 1810s through to the 1850s was an era of expansion for the colonists who had settled in New South Wales and a time of continuing dispossession for Aboriginal people. Transportation ended in 1840, but convict labour continued to be assigned to assist with building roads and clearing land for pastoralists. The settler population grew and continued to occupy land further inland, north and south of Sydney. Emigration commissioners in London, and advocates within the colony, worked to encourage the arrival of free settlers, particularly women.

Throughout this period Sydney was the local centre of political power, and social and cultural sophistication. Artistic patronage was fostered. This is reflected in the proliferation of images in which nature and civilisation are pleasantly unified; the newly tamed wilderness placed against views of newly constructed Georgian buildings, demonstrating the colony’s ability to create order and flourish. Portraits were also in demand, and not only reflected the material success of prominent families but were commissioned by the expanding middle class. A print industry was established and expanded as the demand for locally produced prints increased. Images of colonial subjects, including portraits of Aboriginal people, account for a significant proportion of the art market at this time.

Text from the NGV website

Edward Charles Close (Bengal (Bangladesh) 1790 – Australia 1866, Australia from 1817)
The costume of the Australasians
c. 1817
In his New South Wales Sketchbook: Sea Voyage, Sydney, Illawarra, Newcastle, Morpeth c. 1817-1840
Watercolour
Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney
Purchased 2009

Installation view of the exhibition Colony: Australia 1770-1861 at NGV Australia at Federation Square, Melbourne showing Elizabeth Macquarie, Governor Lachlan Macquarie and Lachlan Macquarie junior
Photo: © Dr Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria

Unknown artist
Elizabeth Macquarie
c. 1819
Watercolour on ivory
State Library of New South Wales, Sydney
Presented by F. W. Lawson, 1928

Unknown artist
Governor Lachlan Macquarie
c. 1819
Watercolour on ivory
State Library of New South Wales, Sydney
Presented by Miss M. Bather Moore and Mr T. C. Bather Moore, 1965

Unknown artist
Lachlan Macquarie junior
c. 1817-1818
Watercolour on ivory State Library of New South Wales, Sydney
Presented by Miss M. Bather Moore and Mr T. C. Bather Moore, 1965

Portrait miniatures were produced in England from the sixteenth century, with the first example on ivory painted in 1707. They remained a popular form of portraiture, as they were both intimate and easy to carry, until photography gradually took over all but the high end of the market. In Australia miniatures were similarly popular with the more affluent colonists. Lachlan Macquarie was the governor of New South Wales from 1810 to 1821. This suite of miniatures, painted in Australia by a skilled but now unknown artist, show Macquarie, his wife Elizabeth and their young son. They were presented to Captain John Cliffe Watts, Macquarie’s aide-de-camp, as a gift and memento of friendship, prior to Cliffe’s return to England in April 1819.

Exhibition text

Installation view of the exhibition Colony: Australia 1770-1861 at NGV Australia at Federation Square, Melbourne showing Henry Gritten’s oil on canvas Hobart, Tasmania 1856 National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Felton Bequest, 1975
Photo: © Dr Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria

Hobart’s Mount Wellington was a landmark of such majestic beauty that for many it rivalled the magnificent natural harbour of Sydney. The site naturally attracted the pen and brush of many colonial artists including John Glover, Knud Bull and Eugene von Guérard. Henry Gritten, who lived in Hobart from 1856 until at least 1858, painted it many times, and it is almost as common in his oeuvre as his views of Melbourne from the Botanic Gardens of the 1860s. Most artists painted the view from the same vantage point adopted by Gritten, looking across the Derwent River towards the settlement nestled at the foot of the rising mountain.

Exhibition text

Van Diemen’s Land 1803

In 1803, 160 years after the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman named and charted Van Diemen’s Land, the British laid claim to the island by relocating convicts and officers from New South Wales to forestall any incursion by the French. Convict transports continued to arrive intermittently in Van Diemen’s Land, mostly bringing prisoners from Britain and Ireland, until 1856, by which time more than 72,000 convicts had been sent there. There were several penal settlements established in Van Diemen’s Land, the most notorious of which were at Macquarie Harbour and Port Arthur.

In 1804, a year after the arrival of the first transports of convicts, Hobart Town was founded on the banks of the Derwent River and it quickly became an important southern trading port.

Over the next twenty years the settlement developed into a cultured, albeit provincial, Georgian township. Local sandstone was widely used to build fine buildings, including places of worship and civic and commercial buildings, and in turn the cultural life of the colony developed. In 1822 fifty-eight per cent of the population of Van Diemen’s Land were convicts, and consequently the majority of artists and artisans came from their ranks.

Text from the NGV website

Unknown, Tasmania
Waistcoat (installation view)
Mid 19th century
Wool, cotton, bone
Collection of Port Arthur Historic Site Management Authority, Hobart
Photo: © Dr Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria

Unknown, Tasmania
Jacket (installation view)
Mid 19th century
Wool, linen, cotton, bone
Collection of Port Arthur Historic Site Management Authority, Hobart
Photo: © Dr Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria

Installation view of the exhibition Colony: Australia 1770-1861 at NGV Australia at Federation Square, Melbourne showing Unknown, Tasmania Jacket and Indoor cap mid 19th century, wool, linen, cotton, bone
Photo: © Dr Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria

Unknown
Tasmania Jacket
Mid 19th century
Wool, linen, cotton, bone
Collection of Port Arthur Historic Site Management Authority, Hobart

Unknown, Tasmania
Indoor cap
Mid 19th century
Wool
Collection of Port Arthur Historic Site Management Authority, Hobart

All convicts transported to Australia were issued with a set of clothing designed to differentiate between them and to facilitate identification should they attempt to escape. Although most convicts wore what became known as ‘slops’ in plain greys, dark browns and blues – like this jacket – the lowest class of convicts, particularly those with life sentences, were made to wear yellow. Colloquial terms soon emerged to describe these uniforms: a partly coloured black and buff uniform that demarcated reoffenders became known as a ‘magpie’, while the yellow-suited convicts were called ‘canaries’.

Exhibition text

Installation view of the exhibition Colony: Australia 1770-1861 at NGV Australia at Federation Square, Melbourne showing Lion’s head, Book-shaped puzzle box, Bell and Fork mid 19th century
Photo: © Dr Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria

Unknown, Tasmania
Lion’s head
Mid 19th century
Iron
Collection of Port Arthur Historic Site Management Authority, Port Arthur

Unknown, Tasmania
Book-shaped puzzle box
Mid 19th century wood
Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Launceston Beattie Collection

Unknown, Tasmania
Bell
Mid 19th century
Wood, brass, iron, bronze
Collection of Port Arthur Historic Site Management Authority, Hobart

Unknown, Tasmania
Fork
Mid 19th century
Wood
Collection of Port Arthur Historic Site Management Authority, Port Arthur

NGV Australia will host two complementary exhibitions that explore Australia’s complex colonial history and the art that emerged during and in response to this period. Presented concurrently, these two ambitious and large-scale exhibitions, Colony: Australia 1770-1861 and Colony: Frontier Wars, offer differing perspectives on the colonisation of Australia.

Featuring an unprecedented assemblage of loans from major public institutions around Australia, Colony: Australia 1770-1861 is the most comprehensive survey of Australian colonial art to date. The exhibition explores the rich diversity of art, craft and design produced between 1770, the arrival of Lieutenant James Cook and the Endeavour, and 1861, the year the NGV was established.

The counterpoint to Colony: Australia 1770-1861, Colony: Frontier Wars presents a powerful response to colonisation through a range of historical and contemporary works by Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists dating from pre-contact times to present day. From nineteenth-century drawings by esteemed Wurundjeri artist and leader, William Barak, to the iridescent LED light boxes of Jonathan Jones, this exhibition reveals how Aboriginal people have responded to the arrival of Europeans with art that is diverse, powerful and compelling.

Tony Ellwood, Director, NGV said: ‘Cook’s landing marks the beginning of a history that still has repercussions today. This two-part exhibition presents different perspectives of a shared history with unprecedented depth and scope, featuring a breadth of works never-before-seen in Victoria. In order to realise this ambitious project, we have drawn upon the expertise and scholarship of many individuals from both within and outside the NGV. We are extremely grateful to the Aboriginal Elders and advisory groups who have offered their guidance, expertise and support,’ said Ellwood.

Joy Murphy-Wandin, Senior Wurundjeri Elder, said: ‘I am overwhelmed at the magnitude and integrity of this display: such work and vision is a credit to the curatorial team. The NGV is to be congratulated for providing a visual truth that will enable the public to see, and hopefully understand, First Peoples’ heartache, pain and anger. Colony: Australia 1770-1861 / Frontier Wars is a must see for all if we are to realise and action true reconciliation.’

Charting key moments of history, life and culture in the colonies, Colony: Australia 1770-1861 includes over 600 diverse and significant works, including examples of historical Aboriginal cultural objects, early watercolours, illustrated books, drawings, prints, paintings, sculpture and photographs, to a selection of furniture, fashion, textiles, decorative arts, and even taxidermy specimens.

Highlights from the exhibition include a wondrous ‘cabinet of curiosities’ showcasing the earliest European images of Australian flowers and animals, including the first Western image of a kangaroo and illustrations by the talented young water colourist Sarah Stone. Examples of early colonial cabinetmaking also feature, including the convict made and decorated Dixson chest containing shells and natural history specimens, as well as a rarely seen panorama of Melbourne in 1841 will also be on display.

Following the development of Western art and culture, the exhibition includes early drawings and paintings by convict artists such as convicted forgers Thomas Watling and Joseph Lycett; the first oil painting produced in the colonies by professional artist John Lewin; work by the earliest professional female artists, Mary Morton Allport, Martha Berkeley and Theresa Walker; landscapes by John Glover and Eugene von Guérard; photographs by the first professional photographer in Australia, George Goodman, and a set of Douglas Kilburn’s silver-plated daguerreotypes, which are the earliest extant photographs of Indigenous peoples.

Colony: Frontier Wars attests to the resilience of culture and Community, and addresses difficult aspects of Australia’s shared history, including dispossession and the stolen generation, through the works of Julie Gough, Brook Andrew, Maree Clarke, Ricky Maynard, Marlene Gilson, Julie Dowling, S. T. Gill, J. W. Lindt, Gordon Bennett, Arthur Boyd, Tommy McRae, Christian Thompson, and many more.

Giving presence to the countless makers whose identities have been lost as a consequence of colonialism, Colony: Frontier Wars also includes a collection of anonymous photographic portraits and historical cultural objects, including shields, clubs, spear throwers and spears, by makers whose names, language groups and Countries were not recorded at the time of collection. Challenging global museum conventions, the exhibition will credit the subjects and makers of these cultural objects as ‘once known’ rather than ‘unknown’.

Press release from the National Gallery of Victoria

Installation view of the exhibition Colony: Australia 1770-1861 at NGV Australia at Federation Square, Melbourne showing William Francis Emery’s (active in Australia c. 1850-1865) oil on canvas View of Ipswich from Limestone Hill c. 1861 Ipswich Art Gallery Collection, Ipswich
Photo: © Dr Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria

Installation view of the exhibition Colony: Australia 1770-1861 at NGV Australia at Federation Square, Melbourne featuring 19th century earthenware and stoneware
Photo: © Dr Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria

Left

Andreas Fritsch (Germany 1808 – Australia 1896, Australia from 1849)
Teapot
c. 1850
Earthenware
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Gift of W. G. Tuck, 1972

Middle

Andreas Fritsch (Germany 1808 – Australia 1896, Australia from 1849)
Coffee pot
c. 1850
Earthenware
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Gift of W. G. Tuck, 1972

Right

Trewenack, Magill, South Australia (pottery 1853-1928)
John Henry Trewenack (potter England 1853 – Australia 1883, Australia from 1849)
Lidded storage jar
c. 1855
Stoneware
National Museum of Australian Pottery, Holbrook, New South Wales

This sharply waisted coffee pot, with its flat lid and nipped-in knob, is of a traditional German type. Fritsch arrived in Melbourne from Schwarzenbek in northern Germany in 1849, accompanied by his wife and four children. He showed eight earthenware objects (which may have included this coffee pot and teapot) at the Victoria Industrial Society exhibition in Melbourne in 1851. The Argus commented on 30 January that Fritsch’s exhibits, which earned him a large silver medal, ‘shewed [sic] how little necessity there is for Victoria being dependent in this article on any other portion of the globe’.

Exhibition text

Edward Robert Mickleburgh (England 1814 – late 19th century, Australia from c. 1841-1870s)
The barque Terror commencing after Sperm Whales (installation view)
1840s
Panbone and pigment
Australian National Maritime Museum, Sydney
Purchased, 2004
Photo: © Dr Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria

Edward Robert Mickleburgh was navigator on the whaling vessel Terror, and like many sailors practised the art of scrimshaw. Scrimshaw entails engraving or incising into bone, teeth or ivory and rubbing ink, or other pigments, into the lines to reveal the image. This particularly fine example illustrates both the art of the whaler and the industry of whaling. Mickleburgh has use the pantone, or lower jawbone of the sperm whale, to incise an image of the ship under full sail during the chase, lookouts atop its masts, boiling-down furnace fired up.

Exhibition label text

Installation view of the exhibition Colony: Australia 1770-1861 at NGV Australia at Federation Square, Melbourne showing Panoramic view of King George’s Sound, part of the colony of Swan River 1834
Photos: © Dr Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria

Lieutenant Robert Dale (draughtsman England 1810-1853, Australia 1829-1833)
Robert Havell junior (engraver England 1793-1878, United States 1839-1878)
Panoramic view of King George’s Sound, part of the colony of Swan River
1834
Engraving, colour aquatint and watercolour on 3 joined sheets
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1958

This lengthy and detailed print shows the distinctive coastline viewed from the rocky summit of Mount Clarence, with the recently established government farm at Strawberry Hill and what later became Albany below. Drawn by surveyor Lieutenant Robert Dale and translated into print by Robert Havell in London, it depicts Nyungar and European figures in friendly contact, surrounded by native vegetation and animals. The spectacular view may have enticed prospective investors or settlers, promoting an idyllic vision with its abundance of fertile land and peaceful relations with the Traditional Owners.

Exhibition text

Installation view of the exhibition Colony: Australia 1770-1861 at NGV Australia at Federation Square, Melbourne showing at bottom, John Glover’s oil on canvas The Island of Madeira 1831-1839 National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Photos: © Dr Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria

John Glover (England 1767 – Australia 1849, Australia from 1831)
Moulting Lagoon and Great Oyster Bay, from Pine Hill (installation view)
c. 1838
Oil on canvas
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased with assistance of an anonymous donor and the M. G. Chapman Bequest, 2011
Photo: © Dr Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria

John Glover (England 1767 – Australia 1849, Australia from 1831)
View of Mills Plains, Van Diemen’s Land
1833
Oil on canvas
76.2 x 114.6cm
Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide
Morgan Thomas Bequest Fund 1951

John Glover was a mature and well-established artist by the time he immigrated to Van Diemen’s Land in 1831. He had enjoyed a long and mostly successful career as a painter in England and had exhibited at London’s Royal Academy on several occasions. He took to the bright light and colour of Van Diemen’s Land easily, depicting the distinctive terrain and vegetation with unerring naturalism and the selective, idealising eye of the picturesque painter. He established a farm named Patterdale in Deddington, outside of Launceston, with his sons. The property and surrounding Mills Plains countryside often feature as a subject in his paintings.

Exhibition text

Van Diemen’s Land 1820s-1850s

The increased arrival of free settlers from the 1820s onwards saw the colony of Van Diemen’s Land evolve from a brutal penal settlement into an economically sound and vibrant cultural centre. With its pleasant climate, few droughts and floods, and open grassland, which seemed pre-prepared for aspiring pastoralists, Van Diemen’s Land became the preferred destination for immigrants. By 1830, almost a third of the arrivals to Australia settled in the south, and the small island experienced economic prosperity.

Colonial society was increasingly able to support a vibrant artistic community, composed of amateurs and professionals, free settlers, highly skilled convicts and emancipists who found patronage despite their unsavoury backgrounds. In August 1837 the colony asserted its cultural superiority when Hobart hosted the first exhibition of art to be held in Australia, under the patronage of Lieutenant-Governor John Franklin and his wife, Jane. The Franklins had arrived in Hobart earlier that year, and during their tenure (1837-43) enthusiastically fostered the development of intellectual life, regarding the visual arts as an outward signifier of culture in the colony. The Vandemonian art, decorative arts and design produced from the 1830s to the early 1850s are among the most sophisticated and diverse of the colonial era.

Text from the NGV website

Installation view of the exhibition Colony: Australia 1770-1861 at NGV Australia at Federation Square, Melbourne with at left, John Glover’s The River Nile, Van Diemen’s Land, from Mr Glover’s farm 1837; at centre, Hamilton Inn Sofa c. 1825; and in cabinet Necklace late 19th century
Photo: © Dr Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria

John Glover (England 1767 – Australia 1849, Australia from 1831)
The River Nile, Van Diemen’s Land, from Mr Glover’s farm
1837
Oil on canvas
76.4 x 114.6cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Felton Bequest, 1956

John Glover’s colonial landscapes can be divided into two groups: pastoral scenes of the land surrounding his own property, and pre-contact Aboriginal Arcadias. Although the Aboriginal figures are at times generic, they are shown as active participants in the landscape. Such scenes were, however, entirely imagined, as Glover encountered very few Tasmanian Aboriginal people while in the colony. Glover had not experienced the conflict or witnessed the violence between Tasmanian Aboriginal resistance fighters and white settlers during the 1820s. By the time of his arrival in 1831, the Tasmanian Aboriginal survivors had been forced to leave Country and relocate to Flinders Island.

Exhibition text

Installation view of the exhibition Colony: Australia 1770-1861 at NGV Australia at Federation Square, Melbourne with at front left, Necklace late 19th century
Photo: © Dr Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria

Unknown (Tasmanian Aboriginal active late 19th century)
Necklace
Late 19th century
Maireener shells (Phasianotrochus sp.)
Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart

Shell necklace-making represents the most significant cultural tradition of Tasmanian Aboriginal women, one of few customary practices that has continued without interruption from long before British colonisation of Van Diemen’s Land in 1803. This necklace is strung from the rarest and most highly prized of shells, the maireneer (Phasianotrochus sp.). Seasonally gathered directly from the sea, maireneer shells are painstakingly processed to remove the outer brown casing and reveal their pearlescent lustre before being pierced and strung. Eighteenth-century French explorers remarked on the iridescent beauty of maireneer shell necklaces, and the esteem in which they were held by their skilled makers.

Exhibition text

Installation views of the exhibition Colony: Australia 1770-1861 at NGV Australia at Federation Square, Melbourne showing Thomas Bock’s paintings John Robertson 1850 (top left); Mrs William Robertson mid 1830s (bottom left); Jessie Robertson 1850 (top right); and Captain William Robertson 1830s (bottom right) all oil on canvas, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide Mrs Mary Overton Gift Fund 1996
Photos: © Dr Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria

Sentenced to transportation for fourteen years, Thomas Bock arrived in Hobart in 1824. He was already successful as an engraver in Birmingham so was put to work by government officials, engraving bank notes for the Bank of Van Diemen’s Land, stationery and illustrations for locally printed publications. Following his pardon, he was kept busy with painting commissions. His elegant and flattering portraits, executed in the grand Georgian manner fashionable in England, were greatly prized by colonists. In addition to painting these likenesses, Bock is believed to have photographed Captain Robertson, his wife and their son William junior in the early 1850s.

Exhibition text

Installation view of the exhibition Colony: Australia 1770-1861 at NGV Australia at Federation Square, Melbourne with at centre, Hamilton Inn Sofa c. 1825
Photo: © Dr Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria

Unknown, (Tasmania)
Hamilton Inn Sofa
c. 1825
Red Cedar (Toona ciliata), Eucalyptus (Eucalyptus sp.), pearwood, Mahogany, metal (steel and brass fittings), horsehair, wool, cotton
Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart
Purchased for the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery by Federal Group with the assistance of the Art Foundation of Tasmania, 2005

This sofa is believed to be one of the earliest pieces of Tasmanian-made furniture. It is characteristically austere and reflects the Greek Revival taste popular in Britain during the Regency period, relying on the discipline of its refined line and silhouette for effect with ornamentation restricted to geometric motifs. Significantly, it has only been subject to repairs to stabilise the upholstery and framework, meaning it is in near original condition, rare for colonial furniture of this type. Usually, upholstery of this age has been replaced multiple times due to daily wear and tear and changing tastes in home furnishings.

Exhibition text

Little is known of the sofa’s provenance before the late 19th century, when it entered the Sonners family of Hamilton – residents of the original Hamilton Inn from 1912 until the 1990s. Its earliest confirmed owner was Albert Sonners (1860-1935). The sofa’s maker, their client and the circumstances of production – including the date of manufacture – remain the subject of ongoing research.

However, it appears likely that the sofa was made during the 1820s, when wealthy colonists started to build large houses of the kind implied by the scale of the Hamilton Inn sofa. The sofa’s ambitious design would have been the height of fashion in the first decade of the 19th century, and is typical of the then fashionable, Greek-revival style. Pattern books became increasingly important as sources of ideas and promulgators of fashions from the late eighteenth century.

Thomas Hope’s (1769-1831) Household Furniture and Interior Decoration, published in 1807, was the first to promote the Greek-revival style and may have indirectly influenced the design of the Hamilton Inn sofa. The double-ended sofa – with scrolled arms and ‘sabre’ legs – displays an aesthetic that is restrained and geometric, consisting of shaped and relieved panels, reeding and tablets of decorative veneers.

The apparent simplicity emphasises the sofa’s elegant, curved and sweeping profile. Structural components made in Tasmanian hardwoods are disguised by either the upholstery or by cedar panels that also serve to disguise the attaching points for the upholstery. Ultimately, the design and scale of the sofa records the rapid transmission of British fashions to the new island colony, as well as the early presence of highly skilled furniture makers in Tasmania.

Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery. “Hamilton Inn sofa: c. 1825,” on the ABC website 15 February, 2013 [Online] Cited 16/02/2022

In November 2005, an unrestored red cedar couch discovered in a Tasmanian shed came up for auction in Hobart. The owner of the couch only wanted to make enough money to mend a fence. Instead, the couch sold at a drama-fuelled auction for more than $310,000.

At the auction, the couch was initially knocked down for $48,000 but a bidder protested and the auctioneer was forced to reopen the bidding. When the new round of bidding finally ceased, the sale was one of the highest prices ever paid for a piece of Australian furniture.

The couch was purchased by the Federal Group, a local Tasmanian hospitality and tourism group, with the assistance of the Art Foundation of Tasmania. It donated it to Hobart’s Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery. …

When the gallery received the couch it faced a dilemma. The timber finish and upholstery were in poor condition and there was discussion over whether it should be restored or left untouched. After much consultation with experts, it was decided to improve the appearance without compromising the historical significance.

“It has the original upholstery, which is very unusual for this age,” says Hughes. “The finish and the wood are also pretty much original. So this makes it an extremely rare historical document, as well as a fantastic object.

“It has survived with more information than almost any other piece of colonial furniture. It has much to tell us about craftsmanship, materials and design in the early years of the Australian colonies.”

Bronwyn Watson. “Public works: Hamilton Inn couch,” on The Australian website 15/7/2011 [Online] Cited 16/02/2022

Mary Morton Allport (England 1806 – Australia 1895, Australia from 1830)
John Glover
c. 1832
Watercolour on ivory, Huon Pine veneer, gilt
11.8 x 9.3cm
Allport Library and Museum of Fine Arts, Hobart

Frederick Woodhouse Senior (England 1820 – Australia 1909, Australia from 1858)
Owner, trainer, horse and jockey (installation view)
1858
Oil on canvas
Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide
Elder Bequest Fund 1980
Photo: © Dr Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria

Installation views of the exhibition Colony: Australia 1770-1861 at NGV Australia at Federation Square, Melbourne with in the bottom image at right, Benjamin Duterrau’s (England 1761 – Australia 1851, Australia from 1832) oil on canvas Tasmanian Aboriginal 1837; and at bottom third from left, Thomas Bock’s Woureddy (Wurati): Native of Bruné Island, Van Diemen’s Land c. 1837
Photos: © Dr Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria

Tasmanian Aboriginal People

Between the establishment of the settlement of Hobart in 1804 and the early 1820s the British government granted to settlers just over 100,000 acres of land already occupied by Tasmanian Aboriginal people. By the beginning of the 1830s more than fourteen times this acreage had been taken over by Europeans. During these decades, Tasmanian Aboriginal communities were ravaged by introduced diseases and famine as their hunting grounds disappeared, and were involved in violent clashes with the settler population. These conflicts escalated during the 1820s and came to be known as the Black War.

In 1830, George Augustus Robinson was engaged in the so-called Friendly Mission, which sought to make peaceful contact with the Tasmanian Aboriginal people remaining on Country. With the assistance of groups of Aboriginal individuals, he persuaded those still living freely on the land to relocate to the Wybalenna settlement on Flinders Island. By 1835, many of the Tasmanian Aboriginal population lived permanently on Flinders Island, waiting to return to Country as they had been promised. Their numbers dwindled rapidly and in 1847 the remaining forty-seven individuals were forced to move to a former penal settlement at Oyster Cove, until the site was closed in 1874. Their traditions have lived on through Tasmanian Aboriginal people living outside of the official Wybalenna settlement in other coloniser and fishing communities.

Text from the NGV website

Benjamin Duterrau (England 1761 – Australia 1851, Australia from 1832)
Tasmanian Aboriginal
1837
Oil on canvas on composition board
National Library of Australia, Canberra
Presented by Mrs A. M. Barker 1936
Photo: © Dr Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria

Benjamin Duterrau arrived in Van Diemen’s Land at the age of sixty-five as a free settler. He had planned to take up the position of drawing and music master at Ellinthrop Hall in Hobart, a fashionable school for ladies; however, this post was instead taken up by Henry Mundy. He lectured often on the importance of the fine arts in the developing colony after his arrival. Working predominantly in portraiture and occasionally in landscape, he is best known for producing the first Australian history paintings, which recorded the so-called ‘conciliation’ between Chief Protector of the Aborigines George Augustus Robinson and the Tasmanian Aboriginal people.

Exhibition text

Thomas Bock (England 1790 – Australia 1855, Australia from 1824)
Woureddy (Wurati): Native of Bruné Island, Van Diemen’s Land
c. 1837
From the album Sketches in New South Wales and Tasmania by John Thompson, 1827-1832
watercolour
28.3 x 21cm
Dixson Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney
Bequeathed by Sir William Dixson, 1952

Between 1830 and 1834 Thomas Bock completed several watercolour portraits of Tasmanian Aboriginal people, many of whom were associated with George Augustus Robinson’s so-called ‘friendly mission’. Commissioned by Robinson himself, these sensitively rendered images were so admired for their accuracy that Bock was asked to make several duplicate copies by patrons Lady Jane Franklin and Reverend Henry Dowling. This group derives from one of these subsequent sets. The subject, Wurati of Bruny Island, was the husband of Trukanini and accompanied Robinson throughout Van Diemen’s Land in the early 1830s, and through Port Phillip between 1839 and 1842. He died just prior to returning to Flinders Island in 1842.

Exhibition text

Installation view of the exhibition Colony: Australia 1770-1861 at NGV Australia at Federation Square, Melbourne showing Ludwig Becker’s Aborigines of Tasmania 1852
Photo: © Dr Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria

Ludwig Becker (Germany 1808 – Australia 1861, Australia from 1851)
Aborigines of Tasmania: Woannadie, young woman
1852
Watercolour
Pictures Collection, State Library Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased 1960

Ludwig Becker (Germany 1808 – Australia 1861, Australia from 1851)
Aborigines of Tasmania: Naplomata, grandmother
1852
Watercolour
Pictures Collection, State Library Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased 1960

Ludwig Becker arrived in Launceston in 1851 and remained in Van Diemen’s Land for a year before relocating to Melbourne. During this time he produced small but poignant portraits of Tasmanian Aboriginal women living at Oyster Cove, south of Hobart. In 1847, the survivors of Wybalenna had returned to the mainland. Of the some 200 who were removed to Bass Strait, only forty-seven returned. By the time of Becker’s visit, close to a third of their population had died, and by the end of the decade approximately twelve people remained.

Exhibition text

Douglas T. Kilburn (English-Australian, 1811-1871)
No title (Group of Koori men)
c. 1847
Daguerreotype; leather, wood, velvet, brass
7.5 x 6.5cm (image)
9.2 x 7.9 x 1.7cm (case)(closed)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased from Admission Funds, 1983

Douglas T. Kilburn (English-Australian, 1811-1871)
No title (Group of Koori men) (detail)
c. 1847
Daguerreotype; leather, wood, velvet, brass
7.5 x 6.5 cm (image)
9.2 x 7.9 x 1.7 cm (case)(closed)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased from Admission Funds, 1983

As a way of attracting attention to his newly opened business Douglas Kilburn took at least eight daguerreotypes of Aboriginal people in the lands of the Kulin nation. As a result of the nineteenth-century belief that the Aboriginal people were doomed to annihilation, Kilburn intended the images as ethnographic studies rather than individual portraits; nevertheless, his unnamed sitters project a proud and dignified presence. His photographs were popular with local artists such as Eugene von Guérard and John Skinner Prout, who copied them, and they also reached an international audience when they were used as the basis for wood engravings in William Westgarth’s Australia Felix in 1848, Nordisk Penning-Magazin in 1849 and the Illustrated London News in 1850.

Exhibition text

The Port Phillip District

In 1835, Melbourne was established on the Country of the Kulin nation on the northern bank of Birrarung, the ‘river of mists and shadows’. Contact between Indigenous peoples and European explorers and raiding groups of sealers had begun prior to the arrival of hopeful colonists from Van Diemen’s Land. They were soon followed by John Pascoe Fawkner and John Batman, each leading separate parties of settlers keen to secure acreage on the fertile lands found in what was soon to be known as the Port Phillip District.

In the early years Melbourne went through a period of rapid development, quickly becoming a progressive provincial town. In 1839 a visitor noted: ‘When I was here three years ago there were but two houses of any note whatever … Now I find a town occupying an area of nearly a mile square, on which are some hundreds of houses, and many of them spacious and well-built edifices’. In tandem with the settlement of Melbourne, pastoral expansion devastated Aboriginal communities already severely affected by disease. Dispossessed of their traditional lands and forced from Country and the food sources that had long sustained them, the remaining populations faced starvation.

Text from the NGV website

Unknown (New South Wales / Victorian Aboriginal active 19th century)
Club
19th century
Wood
Koorie Heritage Trust, Melbourne
Photo: © Dr Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria

Douglas T. Kilburn (English-Australian, 1811-1871)
No title (Group of Koori women)
1847
Daguerreotype; glass, brass, gold
6.6 x 5.4cm (image)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1999

Douglas T. Kilburn (English-Australian, 1811-1871)
No title (Group of Koori women) (detail)
1847
Daguerreotype; glass, brass, gold
6.6 x 5.4 cm (image)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1999

Henry Gritten (England 1818 – Australia 1873, Australia from 1853)
Melbourne from the south bank of the Yarra
1856
Watercolour over traces of pencil
(25.6 x 35.8cm) (image)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Gift of John H. Connell, 1914

Ludwig Becker (Germany 1808 – Australia 1861, Australia from 1851)
Melbourne from across the Yarra
1854
Tempera and watercolour on gesso on cardboard
Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide
V. K. Burmeister Bequest Fund and South Australian Government Grant 1990

Robert Dowling (England 1827-1886, Australia 1834-1857, 1884-1886)
Jane Sceales with daughters, Mary Jane and Hilda (installation view)
c. 1856
Oil on canvas
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Purchased 2016. Acquired through family of Ella Lewis (nee Hood), granddaughter of Jane Hood (nee Sceales)
Photo: © Dr Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria

Jane Sceales and her daughters lived at Merrang, the pastoral run next to Minjah, owned by Joseph Ware. This is one of two known mourning portraits commissioned by Jane after the death of her husband Adolphus Sceales in 1855, produced while Robert Dowling was staying and working at Minjah. Scottish-born Jane is depicted in mourning dress, a teal and black tartan bow knotted elegantly at her collar. The skirt of her elder daughter, Mary Jane, is trimmed in the same fabric. By the close of 1856, Jane had remarried Robin Hood, becoming the matriarch of one of the most prominent families of the Western District.

Exhibition text

Robert Dowling (England 1827-1886, Australia 1834-1857, 1884-1886)
Masters George, William and Miss Harriet Ware with the Aborigine Jamie Ware (installation view)
1856
Oil on canvas
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Eleanor M. Borrow Bequest, 2007
Photo: © Dr Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria

Robert Dowling (England 1827-1886, Australia 1834-1857, 1884-1886)
Masters George, William and Miss Harriet Ware with the Aborigine Jamie Ware
1856
Oil on canvas
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Eleanor M. Borrow Bequest, 2007

In the late 1830s the young brothers Jeremiah, Joseph and John Ware, the eldest just twenty years of age, had played a major role in the settlement of the Western District in Victoria. By 1856 they were established and notable figures in the colony and had become significant patrons of the fine arts.

Robert Dowling’s family portrait Masters George, William, and Miss Harriet Ware and the Aborigine Jamie Ware is set in the grounds of pastoralist Joseph Ware’s property, Minjah. The group is headed by the eldest son, George, who bears a staff, the Biblical symbol of leadership often associated with Moses. To the right sits his younger brother, William, on the left is their sister Harriet and the Mopor youth from Spring Creek who took the family name, Jamie Ware. The portrait has remained with the descendants of the Ware family since its commission and is a poignant depiction of interracial accord.

There is an obvious affection between Jamie and Harriet: he reclines comfortably while the young girl drapes her arm casually over his leg. The absence of Jamie’s employers – the children’s parents, John and Barbara Ware, gives added resonance to the work, revealing the trust and intimate position Jamie held in the family. The depiction of the youth in European dress rather than as an anthropological study expresses the family’s concern for harmonious relations with Indigenous people.

Jamie’s inclusion is also symbolic of the Ware family’s awareness of the traumatic post-contact history experienced by Indigenous Australians, an understanding that was not generally shared in mid-nineteenth-century Victoria. By the 1850s it was reported that Tasmania’s Indigenous population had been decimated, which would have been a significant issue for Dowling and the Wares who had all migrated from the southern-most colony. Dowling painted a number of works that were intended as memorials, such as the NGV’s Tasmanian Aborigines, 1856, and Warrnambool Art Gallery’s Minjah in the old time, 1856. While these works look to the past and convey a sense of mourning, the Ware family portrait looks positively towards a more harmonious future and therefore is a transformative work to enter the NGV’s nineteenth-century Australian collection.

Masters George, William, and Miss Harriet Ware and the Aborigine Jamie Ware joins a number of works in the NGV collection that share a Ware family provenance. Joseph Ware commissioned six works from Dowling between 1855 and 1856, and the NGV collection contains works acquired by his younger brother, John Ware, that were donated in 2004 as part of the Joseph Brown Collection. These include Eugène von Guérard’s Spring in the valley of the Mitta Mitta with the Bogong Ranges in the distance, 1863, and the homestead portrait of John Ware’s Yalla-y-Poora, 1864.

Dowling continued to receive Ware family patronage after he left Australia in 1857; his portrait Miss Annie Ware, 1882, the daughter of John Ware, being commissioned during the sitter’s European travels.

Humphrey Clegg, Assistant Curator, Australian Art, NGV (in 2007)

Installation view of the exhibition Colony: Australia 1770-1861 at NGV Australia at Federation Square, Melbourne with at centre middle, Martha Berkeley’s oil on metal Georgina, Emily and Augusta Rose c. 1848
Photo: © Dr Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria

The Province of South Australia 1836

As early as 1829 the development of a convict‑free colony, home to settlers and migrants from Britain, was mooted. Seven years later, with regal approval, the Province of South Australia was officially proclaimed. Nine ships carrying free settlers to the colony set sail from England in 1836. They landed at Kangaroo Island and Holdfast Bay and finally settled on the banks of the Torrens River, where the township of Adelaide was established. With a number of trained artists among the early colonists, South Australia rapidly secured a position comparable to that of Hobart as a sophisticated centre for the visual arts.

These artists documented the earliest years of the colony and the first settlers. In 1845, Australia’s first solo exhibition was held by George French Angas, and two years later Adelaide artists held a group exhibition in the new colony. The discovery of gold in Victoria led to an exodus to the eastern colonies, slowing but not halting activity in South Australia.

The Province of South Australia was established on the land of the Kaurna people; the South Australia Act of 1834 included a guarantee of the rights of ‘any Aboriginal Natives’ and their descendants to lands they ‘now actually enjoy’. Despite these worthy ambitions, colonial expansion did ultimately dispossess and marginalise Aboriginal people.

Text from the NGV website

Alexander Schramm (Germany 1813 – Australia 1864, Australia from 1849)
A scene in South Australia (installation view)
c. 1850
Oil on canvas
Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide
South Australian Government Grant 1982
Photo: © Dr Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria

Martha Berkeley (England 1813 – Australia 1899, Australia from 1837)
Georgina, Emily and Augusta Rose
c. 1848
Oil on metal
36.4 x 39.5cm
Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide
M.J.M. Carter AO Collection 2007
Given in memory of Di Townsend, Betty McIlwham and fellow Gallery Guides’ education programs for children

Martha Berkeley’s painting practice encompassed landscapes and views of the infant settlement, flower studies and portraiture. She depicted her family on several occasions and her portraits of her husband Charles, sister Theresa, brother-in-law and children are among her finest paintings. This charming group portrait presents her three daughters against the backdrop of their home in Adelaide. Berkeley adopts a format typical of Regency depictions of children; the youthful trio are happily engaged in the wholesome activity of posy-making, with the eldest, Augusta Rose, looking towards the viewer, as though appealing to them to join in.

Exhibition text

S.T. Gill (England 1819 – Australia 1880, Australia from 1839)
Port Adelaide looking north along Commercial Road
1847
Watercolour
20.3 x 32cm
Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide
Morgan Thomas Bequest Fund 1923

S.T. Gill (England 1819 – Australia 1880, Australia from 1839)
Country NW of tableland, Aug. 22 1846
1846
Watercolour
19 x 30.7cm
National Library of Australia, Canberra
Gift of her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II to the Australian Government, 1956

Along with government-supported expeditions, individuals also sought to discover new stock routes and pastures. In 1846 John Ainsworth Horrocks organised one such venture to explore beyond Lake Torrens, and S. T. Gill volunteered to accompany the party, with goats for food and a pack camel, named Harry. The trip ended abruptly when Horrocks accidentally shot himself at a desolate salt lake – he died later at his property in the Clare Valley. Gill subsequently painted a series of ‘faithful scenic representations’ documenting their tragic journey and exhibited them in Adelaide in 1847, providing the public with an accurate indication of South Australia’s dry interior.

Exhibition text

George French Angas (England 1822-1886, Australia 1844-1845, 1850-1863)
Encounter Bay looking south
1844
Watercolour
26.2 x 35.9cm
Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide
Bequest of J. Angas Johnson 1902

George French Angas was the eldest son of one of the founding members of the South Australian Land Company, formed to develop a settlement in South Australia, and came to Australia as an experienced naturalist, artist and author. He travelled widely throughout South Australia, to the Murray River and down to Lake Coorong, sketching the countryside, and the customs and dwellings of the Aboriginal people he met, as well as spending time in New Zealand. Angas exhibited his watercolours in Adelaide and Sydney and upon his return to London, where his book South Australia Illustrated, with impressive full-page coloured lithographs, was published.

Exhibition text

Melbourne 1851-1861

The township of Melbourne grew steadily as migrants from Britain and other European countries sought economic opportunities and political and religious freedom. In 1851, the Port Phillip District became an independent colony and was named Victoria in honour of the Queen. The town’s fortunes were further transformed that year when gold was discovered. Victoria was the richest source of gold in Australia, and consequently experienced the greatest levels of growth and change. The population exploded as enthusiastic and optimistic prospectors poured in from around the world with the hope of making their fortunes. Despite enormous social turmoil and environmental destruction, gold propelled Melbourne into an unprecedented phase of expansion and prosperity.

This had a profound impact on the arts and cultural life in colonial Australia. The desire to replicate the cultural institutions of European capitals reached new heights and wealth from gold enabled these aspirations to be realised, with the establishment of a university, library and museum. In 1861, in a moment of great significance and pride, the Museum of Art – Australia’s first art museum, later known as the National Gallery of Victoria – opened at the Melbourne Public Library on Swanston Street.

Text from the NGV website

Installation views of the exhibition Colony: Australia 1770-1861 at NGV Australia at Federation Square, Melbourne with to the left in the bottom image, George Cavenagh’s Glorious News! Separation at last! 1850; and at centre top in the same image, Henry Burn’s oil on canvas Swanston Street from the Bridge 1861
Photos: © Dr Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria

George Cavenagh (editor and publisher) (India 1808 – Australia 1869, Australia from 1825)
Glorious News! Separation at last! (installation view)
Issued with the Melbourne Morning Herald
11 November 1850
Letterpress on buff paper
Pictures Collection, State Library Victoria, Melbourne
Photo: © Dr Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria

From the establishment of Melbourne in 1835, its colonial inhabitants campaigned for it to be a separate colony, rather than a distant district within New South Wales, controlled by the Sydney-based governor and legislative council. A public campaign began in 1839 and petitions were repeatedly sent to London. After many delays, on 11 November 1850 news was received that independence was to be granted. A jubilant population celebrated with fireworks, parades, balls and a three-day public holiday. Further festivities were held when the colony was formally proclaimed on 1 July 1851, and the first parliament sat in November of that year.

Exhibition text

Henry Burn (England c. 1807 – Australia 1884, Australia from 1853, died 1884)
Swanston Street from the Bridge
1861
Oil on canvas
71.8 x 92.2cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Gift of John H. Connell, 1914

Painted just twenty-six years after foundation, Henry Burn’s view of young Melbourne looks north from the Yarra towards the centre of the city. It reveals a number of identifiable landmarks including the original St Paul’s Church; the coroner’s office and Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages, at what is now Federation Square; and Johnson’s Bridge Hotel, now the Young & Jackson Hotel.

Exhibition text

Unknown, Australia
Dress (see installation photo below right)
c. 1855
Cotton, silk, metal, mother-of-pearl, baleen
152.0cm (centre back)
34.5cm (waist, flat)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Gift of Mrs Michael Parker, 1983

Installation views of the exhibition Colony: Australia 1770-1861 at NGV Australia at Federation Square, Melbourne with at centre right, Eugene von Guérard’s oil on canvas Ferntree Gully in the Dandenong Ranges 1857
Photos: © Dr Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria

Eugene von Guérard (Austria 1811 – England 1901, Italy 1830-1838, Australia 1852-1882, Germany 1838-1852, 1882-1891, England from 1891)
Ferntree Gully in the Dandenong Ranges
1857
Oil on canvas
92 x 138cm
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Gift of Dr Joseph Brown AO OBE 1975

Within five years of arriving in Victoria to try his luck on the Ballarat goldfields, Eugene von Guérard had undertaken several trips to sketch remote wilderness regions of Victoria, Tasmania and South Australia. These meticulous studies were translated into sublime panoramic vistas of volcanic plains and mountain ranges, and primordial bushland views, which melded his romantic European sensibility with scientific intensity. In early 1857 he returned a second time to the Dandenong Ranges east of Melbourne and later completed this scene in his studio. This celebration of nature was an immediate local success and became an important image that was reproduced in subsequent drawings and engravings. (Exhibition text)

Daniel Thomas discusses Eugene Von Guérard’s Ferntree Gully in the Dandenong Ranges

Installation view of the exhibition Colony: Australia 1770-1861 at NGV Australia at Federation Square, Melbourne with at centre Sofa 1840s
Photo: © Dr Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria

Unknown (Victoria / South Australia)
Sofa
1840s
Red Cedar (Toona ciliata), upholstery, (other materials)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Gift of Michael and Traudl Moon, 1996

The success of German immigrants in South Australia saw the establishment of the German Immigration Committee in Melbourne in 1849 to encourage their settlement in Victoria. By the close of the decade, German immigrants had settled near Geelong, establishing Germantown, now the suburb of Grovedale, and by the 1850s were expanding into the Western District. It is likely this sofa was produced by German makers in either of these South Australian or Victorian communities. Its sweeping curves recall the architectural forms of the German Biedermeier style, but its lines and elaborate carved ornamentation reveal more Classical influences.

Exhibition text

Further images

Tommy McRae (Kwat Kwat/Wiradjuri) (c. 1836-1901)
Ceremony; hunting and fishing
1860
Pen and ink on blue paper
Pictures Collection, State Library Victoria, Melbourne
Accessioned c. 1931

As a consequence of colonisation Tommy McRae created cross-cultural pen and ink drawings on paper as a dialogue with the colonisers and a means of recording a culture often subjected to change and silencing. On a single sheet, McRae creates a holistic picture of his rich culture, which includes two distinct corroborees, a eucalypt with bird perched atop its foliage and a hunting story of four emus being stalked by men in camouflage while another spears a large fish. Two lines of male dancers are freely sketched in silhouette upon Country, indicated by a light tangle of lines.

Exhibition text

Tommy McRae (Kwat Kwat/Wiradjuri) (c. 1836-1901)
Pages from Sketchbook
c. 1891
Sketchbook: pen and blue ink, 26 pages, paper and cardboard cover, stitched binding
24.4 x 31.2cm (image and sheet)
24.4 x 31.2cm (page)
24.4 x 31.2 x 1cm (closed)
24.4 x 62.4 x 0.5cm (open)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 2001
Purchased with the assistance of Ian Hicks AM, John Higgins and two anonymous donors, 2008

The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia

Federation Square
Corner of Russell and  Flinders Streets, Melbourne

Opening hours:
Daily 10am – 5pm

National Gallery of Victoria website

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Photographs: Historical Australia Part 1

December 2017

WARNING: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are warned that the following posting may contain images of deceased persons.

Unknown photographer
George St. from King St., Sydney
Nd

The last posting of the year, because I am feeling rather exhausted!

Down the rabbit hole we go… into the world of Australian historical photography.

In photographs that were taken around the same time, the contrast could not be more evident: horse and trap travelling down fashionable George Street, Sydney while donkey and cart in Outback Australia fetch water; Nicholas Caire’s King Billy’s camp in McCree’s Paddock, Maloga, Victoria – King Billy ‘The Last of His Tribe’, the final remnant of a dying race and J. W. Lindt’s Untitled (Two men in rural Victoria), old men with beards and hats, swag and billy, possibly itinerant travelling workers.

And so I have sequenced these images as best I could.

The white men stand implacably outside the courthouses while the Indigenous feet touch the earth. They fight for their country, win the Military Medal and can’t even vote. The courthouses of the colonial white, those massive edifices of the law, jurisdiction and punishment tied with Australian Aborigines in chains and Aboriginal youth Dylan Voller, 17, shackled to a metal chair by his hands, feet and neck and wearing a spithood at Don Dale Youth Detention Centre in 2015. And so it goes…

Although there can be many contexts and interpretations within the photographic labyrinthine abyss, and even though these photographs were taken by colonial masters, the materiality of photography (as act of creation and as final printed product) and its relationship to the real is what is important here. These are beautiful photographs of peoples from the First Nations, peoples that all have their own specific names, and in many instances, speak / spoke their own specific language.

You only have to look at the boy standing at the back of the photograph Aboriginal family group to recognise how his direct looking transcends the fixed gaze of the camera, the male gaze, the white gaze and the colonial gaze. His gaze, his return of serve if you like, speaks to us through time – of an individual, valuable and empowered human being assured in his own self. No colour, jurisdiction nor race is necessary for us recognise him as such.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to Dennis Joachim for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

“Think carefully: there can be no redundancy in photography, for a photograph, whatever it is, already speaks twice of time, once to seize it and another to say that it has passed; And there can be no trompe-l’oeil in it either; it is and will always be the mise en abyme par excellence; It is the mind that looks at the abyss, it is a piece of the abyss cut clear, with four right angles cut terribly sharp.”

Denis Roche

Trompe-l’oeil

Trompe-l’œil (French for “deceive the eye”) is an art technique that uses realistic imagery to create the optical illusion that the depicted objects exist in three dimensions. It refers to perspectival illusionism.

Mise en abyme

Mise en abyme is a French term derived from heraldry, and literally means “placed into abyss”. A common sense of the phrase is the visual experience of standing between two mirrors, then seeing as a result an infinite reproduction of one’s image. Another is the Droste effect, in which a picture appears within itself, in a place where a similar picture would realistically be expected to appear… In Western art history, “mise en abyme” is a formal technique in which an image contains a smaller copy of itself, in a sequence appearing to recur infinitely; “recursive” is another term for this.

Unknown photographer
Richmond Courthouse, Courthouses of New South Wales
c. 1870-1880s
Date built: 1877

Richmond is a town in New South Wales, in the local government area of the City of Hawkesbury. It is located on the alluvial Hawkesbury River flats, at the foot of the Blue Mountains. It is about 65 km by road from Sydney.

Richmond Court House and Police Station is located at 288 Windsor Street, Richmond NSW. The present building was designed by Colonial Architect, James Barnet in 1877 as a court house with associated police station. The front entrance is via an attractive arched colonnade with feature brickwork and the roof is supported by bracketed eaves. The raised roof of the court room may be seen in the centre of the structure. Note the similarity in style with the adjacent former post office, also the work of James Barnet. It replaced the watch-house built by William Cox in 1827. The watch-house was a four roomed structure with a detached kitchen. One of the rooms was barred and secure for the custody of prisoners. The other rooms were for the policeman on duty. The rear of the site was set aside for the first stock pound in the town. The court house is still in use but the Police Local Area Command is located in the nearby town of Windsor.

Text from the Hawkesbury.org website Nd [Online] Cited 19/12/2017

Alphonse Chargois (French, 1860-1936)
Cumjam Murdered Ferguson at Mentana March 1894
1894
Albumen print
16 x 10 inches

Chargois, Alphonse. (father of Herbert Chargois. died Nov 1936)
Townsville, Qld 1879
Croydon, Qld 1892-1896
Normanton, Qld 1896-1897
Townsville, Qld 1897
McArthur St, Croydon Qld (base) 1898-1913
Georgetown, Qld (trav) 1900
Torres Strait Islands, Qld (trav) Oct 1913
“Touring the South” 1913-1915
(owned Bicycle Business, Warwick, Qld, 1915, advertised for sale Feb 1915)
“Royal Studio”
“late Lyne Brown, McTaggart and Dobson”
Lake St, Cairns, Qld July 1915-1936
(bought McTaggart & Dobson’s studio, July 1915)
Mareeba, Qld (trav) Oct 1915
(estate publicly Auctioned up Oct 1947)

Cumjam standing in front of a government issue tent. Cumjam was arrested for the murder of Mr Ferguson (aged 60) who worked for Donald Mclntyre at Mentana Station. Ferguson’s murder and the capture of Cumjam were reported widely in the Norman Chronicle, The North Queensland Register and The Brisbane Courier between 1894-1895. Records detailing the outcome of his arrest have not been located.

“An Aboriginal Desperado”

The “Norman Chronicle” says: “By the last mail we received from Mr. Chargois, who is at present at Delta, two photos of the blackboy “Cumjam.” who is supposed to have murdered Ferguson at Mentana in March, 1894. The details of the capture as given by Mr. Chargois are as follows: ‘Mr Jack Adford, who has been managing Loch-na-gar for Mr. McInytre, had received instructions to move cattle to Daigonally, and wishing to bring over with him some of the native curios, he told the blacks, ‘Me go away by-and-by take away altogether bullock, you fetch ’em up spear, shell, boomerang, me give you tumbac. Me come back one moon.’ One moon goes by and the blacks were there to the number of about 50, eager to exchange their native gear for tobacco. All were up at the station except one, who stayed at the camp, and Jack Alford, wishing to know why he do so, asked the others, ‘What name boy sit down longa camp?’ ‘That fellow name ‘Cumjam’; he sick long a cobra.’ Alford at once recognised the murdered of Ferguson, although he gave no sign of his discovery, but said to the other, ‘Poor fellow, you go fetch em up, me give him medicine make him alright.’ ‘Cumjam’ was accordingly conducted up. ‘What name belongs you?’ said Alford. ‘Cumjam,’ replied the black. Alford decided at once upon his plan of action, told the other blacks to step back and site down, then taking Cumjam aside he seized him and with the help of his own boys bound him up. The other blacks, not liking the look of things, began to get uneasy, and slipped away one by one down to the creek, leaving Cumjam captured. It was no easy task to bring him along. He ate through one strap, and when that was replaced by a chain and padlock he managed somehow to pick the latter to pieces.’ The photo which we have on view shows the prisoner to be securely bound.”

The North Queensland Register 16 October 1895

Text from the Thagaalbi: History of Australia’s Indigenous people Facebook page [Online] Cited 19/12/2017

The presence of Europeans along the gulf coast and south-western areas of the Peninsula was met with Aboriginal resistance. When J.T. Embley surveyed the Mitchell River in 1886-1887 he counted “skirmishes with the blacks” to have been the cause of delays in the completion of his work.136 The death of Ferguson, an elderly white stockman, in March 1894 followed his spearing on Mentana station by the Aboriginal, Cumjam.137 Only a few months before Ferguson’s death one party of survivors of the steamship, Kanahooka, after its capsize off the Mitchell River in January 1894, were able to make their way through the Kokobera country through to safety at Mentana station.138 This was despite popular fears that they would be exposed to the “hostility of the blacks”.139

Philip L. Freier. Living with the ‘Munpitch’: The history of Mitchell River Mission, 1905-1967. James Cook University, Doctor of Philosophy Thesis, 1999, pp. 86-87 [Online] Cited 19/12/2017

Unknown photographer
Windsor Courthouse, Courthouses of New South Wales
c. 1870-1880s
Date built: 1821

Windsor is a town lying North-West of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. Windsor is located in the local government area of the City of Hawkesbury. It sits on the Hawkesbury River, on the north-western outskirts of the Sydney metropolitan area.

Windsor Courthouse is a rare surviving Colonial Georgian public building that originally dates from the early nineteenth century. The building has a fine and impressive form which uses an adapted Palladian plan to suit the Australian climate. It is of considerable historical, social and aesthetic significance as one of the earliest surviving courthouse buildings in Australia. The courthouse now [1967] ranks as Greenway’s best preserved building. The Building and Maintenance Branch of the NSW Department of Public Works carried out restoration work in 1961 to remove unsympathetic rendering of the external brickwork which was an attempt to reduce the problem of damp. The building now stands in its original and unspoiled form in Windsor, the most prosperous and successful of the towns then founded by Governor Macquarie. The courthouse was insisted upon by Governor Macquarie, designed by Greenway (himself originally a convict) and built for A₤1,800 by William Cox, using convict labour. It is a combination and the result of all the forces directly at play during the Australia’s early development. The oldest existing local court in New South Wales. Cox later served at Windsor as a magistrate.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Unknown photographer
Pitt St. looking S. from Bridge St., Sydney
1895
Albumen print

Unknown photographer
Getting Water
1892
Albumen prints

Unknown photographer
“At the well” Station Hands
1892
Albumen print

Unknown photographer
Untitled [Aboriginal ceremony]
c. 1892
Albumen print

Unknown photographer
Court House Bathurst N S Wales, Courthouses of New South Wales
c. 1870-1880s
Date built: 1880

Bathurst is a regional city in the Central Tablelands of New South Wales, Australia. It is about 200 kilometres north-west of Sydney.

Bathurst Courthouse is one of the finest Victorian Court House buildings in New South Wales. Built as part of a precinct of Victorian public buildings, it is a landmark building prominently sited in the town centre of Bathurst. The building has a lengthy association with the provision of justice in the district. The wings, built as the postal and telegraph offices, were opened in 1877. The entire structure is 81 metres (266 ft) long and 45 metres (148 ft) wide. The west wing is now occupied by the Central Western Music Centre. The east wing is now the Historical Society Museum.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Nicholas Caire (Australian, 1837-1918)
King Billy Maloga (King Billy’s camp in McCree’s Paddock, Maloga, Victoria)
1891

Photograph of four Aboriginal Australians, two men and two women, seated on ground in front of a shelter. Older man on left holds wooden sticks or spears, and a dog sits next to him. The three main local tribes were named after their “country” (or district), being “Burrumbeet” from Lakes Burrumbeet and Learmonth, “Keyeet” from Mt Buninyong and “Tooloora” from Mt Warrenheip and Lal Lal Creek. The last well recognised leader of the district, was “King Billy” from Burrumbeet, whose death surprisingly made the newspapers in mining areas and big cities right round the country.

Ballarat’s Mullawallah (also known as King Billy or Frank Wilson), was buried in 1896 to considerable civic interest as a result of being nominated as ‘The Last of His Tribe’.

J. W. Lindt (John William, Australian 1845-1926, Melbourne, photographer)
Untitled [Two men in rural Victoria]
c. 1880s
Cabinet card
Albumen print

John William Lindt (1845-1926), photographer, was born at Frankfurt on Main, Germany, son of Peter Joseph Lindt, excise officer, and his wife Justine, née Rambach. At 17 he ran away to sea and joined a Dutch sailing ship. He deserted at Brisbane; by 1863 he was at Grafton as a piano-tuner and then worked in a photographic studio. He visited Germany in 1867 and on his return bought the business. Using the wet-plate process he photographed the Clarence River district and its Aboriginals, producing albums in 1875 and 1876. He then sold out and went to Melbourne where he opened a studio in Collins Street. He soon won repute for his society, theatre and landscape photographs. In 1880 he photographed the capture of the Kelly gang at Glenrowan. When the first commercial dry plates arrived in Melbourne he went to Europe to seek agencies for the latest photographic equipment. On his return he worked in the studio and the Victorian countryside; many of his photographs were used in the railways. He also designed and modified cameras as well as ‘advising in matters photographic’.

Read the full biography on the Australian Dictionary of Biography website

Unknown photographer
Darlinghurst Gaol & Court House, Sydney Oct. 1870
1870
Date built: 1844

The Darlinghurst Court House and residence is the finest, and only erudite Old Colonial Grecian public building complex surviving in Australia. Commenced in the 1830s, it has a long and continual association with the provision of law and order along with the neighbouring Darlinghurst Gaol complex. The imposing sandstone building is prominently sited at Taylor Square. The Court House, designed by Lewis and built between 1837 and 1844, is the first purpose designed court house to be built in NSW. The pavilions on either side were designed by Barnet around 1886. The extension facing Victoria Street was designed by the Government Architect’s Office and completed c. 1963. The central block was adapted from an 1823 design in Peter Nicholson’s ‘The New Practical Builder’.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Unknown photographer
Untitled [Australian Aborigines in chains]
Nd
Albumen print

Aboriginal youth Dylan Voller, 17, shackled to a metal chair by his hands, feet and neck and wearing a spithood at Don Dale Youth Detention Centre in 2015

Unknown photographer
Unknown Courthouse, Courthouses of New South Wales
c. 1870-1880s

Unknown photographer
Untitled [Aboriginal man smoking a pipe]
Nd

Unknown photographer
Untitled [Aboriginal making fire]
Nd

Anonymous photographer
Untitled [Aboriginal with spear]
Nd

Edwards & Errington (Adelaide, South Australia)
Studio portrait of 2597 Private (Pte) Frederick Prentice, 12th Battalion, and later 1st Australian Pioneer Battalion (detail)
c. 1914-1918
Gelatin silver print on postcard

Northern Territory born WWI veteran Frederick Prentice, an Indigenous serviceman who won the Military Medal. On the verso of the photograph is an original message “Just a little card to remember the good times at Paratoo.” This postcard was sent to a friend, Gertrude Fitzgerald, who he knew at Paratoo, SA. Born in Powells Creek, Northern, NT, on 18 January 1894, Frederick Prentice was educated at Kyre College (later part of Scotch College), Adelaide, from 1905 to 1908. Following schooling, Prentice worked as a station hand and was employed at Manunda Station, South Australia at the time of his enlistment on 7 May 1915 in Keswick. Pte Prentice won a Military Medal for his actions on 19 July 1916 at Pozieres, France, where he showed great courage, resource and ability in bringing machine guns and ammunition through the enemy barrage in the dark and across broken ground. Frederick Prentice returned to Australia as a Corporal on 12 May 1919.

Text from the Australian War Memorial website

Anonymous photographer
Untitled [Aboriginal with scars]
Nd

Kerry & Co., (Sydney)
Aboriginal chief
c. 1900-1917
Collotype
13.7 × 8.5cm (image and sheet)

Portrait of Aboriginal chief, Barron River, Queensland, with body paint and head decorations, in ceremonial dress.

Unknown photographer
Court House Orange N.S.W., Courthouses of New South Wales
c. 1870-1880s
Date built: 1883

“On a site where local Wiradjuri people are said to have once held corroborees stands the Orange court House. A slab and bark watch-house was erected in 1849 and used as a court house from 1851. Early church services and the first council meetings were held. A larger sandstone Court House was erected in 1860-62 by Kennard and Snow. Bushranger Ben Hall was tried here in the early 1860s. This building made way for the present Neo-classical building designed by James Barnet in 1883. A new wing was constructed a the rear of the site in 2001.”

~ Orange Heritage Trail, a pamphlet produced by Ross Maroney in conjunction with the Orange City Council, the Orange Visitor Information Centre.

.
The current Orange Courthouse building was designed by the Colonial Government Architect James Barnet. Construction was completed in 1883. Previous buildings existed on the site, the first being erected in 1847, around the time of the town’s settlement, and operated as a Court of Petty Sessions, being the usual arrangements in those times. Orange was proclaimed a municipality in 1860, the first meeting being held in the Courthouse, located on the same site as today, but a different structure.

Text from the Willshub website 2 Jan 2015 [Online] Cited 20th November 2017

Anonymous photographer
Untitled [Aboriginal group]
Nd

Anonymous photographer
Untitled [Aboriginal family group]
Nd

Alphonse Chargois (French, 1860-1936)
Daisy Belle, Jack Kinmont Moir and Rose-Marie, Delta Downs
Nd
14 x 10.5cm

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Review: ‘Under the sun: Reimagining Max Dupain’s Sunbaker’ at the Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 6th May – 6th August 2017

“A GREAT review Marcus. As always. A master piece.” ~ Peter Barker, artist

Installation view of the entrance to the exhibition Under the sun: Reimagining Max Dupain’s Sunbaker at Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

The misery of too much sun

Simply put (where the work in this exhibition is anything but), this is one of the most depressing Australian group photography exhibitions that I have seen in a very long time. I left the exhibition feeling like I wanted to slit my wrists.

“Reimagining” an image is always going to be problematic, especially such an iconic photograph as Max Dupain’s no-face, monolithic, Uluru-shaped, low depth of field, wet, British male tourist lying on Culburra Beach, New South Wales in the 1930s – an image that “supposedly conveys a quintessential Australian identity,” a “casual holiday snap that came to symbolise leisure and freedom in the 1970s [which] was taken in the uncertain economic times before the Second World War.”

The scope for such a contemporary conceptual exercise is vast and the artists in this exhibition don’t waste the opportunity. Variously but not exclusively we have:

~ Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the Breakfast Club (1985), a movie in which five teenagers navigate identity issues
~ Indigenous massacres in Australia … positions of the planets between 1789 and 1928, when 63 massacres of Indigenous peoples took place
~ Samoan culture – malu – the female-Samoan tattoo (tatau)
~ The lifeless body of three-year-old refugee Aylan Kurdi, lying face down on a beach in Turkey which now haunts the figure of the Sunbaker
~ Sufi-inspired choreography, the dancers wearing a hammam cloth
~ 1920s swimwear based on wartime camouflage schemes
~ Reclaiming of the feminist body both as a medium of deliberate submission and active resistance through women’s strength, endurance and resilience by undertaking physical and psychological experiments that test the limits of her body, playfully and painfully
~ Denunciating the violence of the sand mining industry on the ecosystem, the land and its peoples
~ Grandfather opal-mine worker in South Australia excluded from Aboriginal rights until 1967
~ Paradox of a nation seen as a sun-blessed paradise while its shores have been a place of contestation and misery
~ Memories of childhood landscapes and research into the Massacre Map published by the Koorie Heritage Trust, which identified sites where Indigenous massacres occurred between 1836 and 1853
~ Digitally animated Sunbaker to make it resonate as a symbol of the 229 years since colonisation

How you get from a holiday snap of a tourist visiting Australia, having a swim, flopping down on the beach and all the joy that this entails to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the Breakfast Club, female-Samoan tattoos, camouflage schemes, reclaiming the feminist body and more contestation and misery than you can poke a stick at – massacres, more massacres, symbol of 229 years of colonisation and a body of a three-year-old refugee which now supposedly haunts the figure of Sunbaker – is mind boggling. And no, the powerful image of that small body does not haunt Sunbaker. It never will. Only in the titular imagination of the artist!

Some of these reconceptualisations draw such a long bow that the arrow fell out of the sky long before the art work was finished. The trajectory of most of this work is so cerebral that you wonder whether the artists actually thought about visual and associative outcomes, something that the viewer would make connection to and with, before they started making the work. Is this really a good idea? Does the image, Sunbaker, actually evoke any of these relationships? For example, what have positions of the planets between 1789 and 1928 and identified sites where Indigenous massacres occurred between 1836 and 1853 have to do with a sun baker… other than to assuage white guilt over the invasion of Aboriginal land? That is the crux of the matter: it’s all about white guilt.

There is such a thing as acknowledging the past and letting it go, while taking responsibility for the present and the future. As a black American friend of mine said to me recently, he doesn’t blame white people for slavery, and neither do most black Americans… it’s history, acknowledge it and move on; take responsibility for present injustices. Of course, past, present and future time are linked; memory and history influence culture, narrative and identity. But to constantly conceptualise, as much contemporary Australian photography does, the past AS the present through existential angst ridden explorations that produce forgettable images simply beggars belief. Let’s have more contestation and misery; let’s perpetuate the cycle of guilt, shame, misery and despair that we acknowledge was totally wrong. Let’s invert Sunbaker into a demon – a fractured, negative identity – both literally and metaphysically. Two artists literally do this, as though by inverting an image using this trope, you give the negative image profound power.

Other than Anne Zahalka’s wonderful feminist re-imag(in)ing of Sunbaker, the most evocative excavation of relationship to the original image comes from that gorgeous photographer William Yang. Just a celebration of sun, sand, sea, and male identity through beautiful, intimate images of the male body – “At Bondi Beach, people were sunbathing. There was an attractive openness in the atmosphere…” An atmosphere and a generosity of spirit sorely lacking in the rest of the work.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

PS. And it’s Sunbaker not The Sunbaker!

Many thankx to Monash Gallery of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. All installation images © Marcus Bunyan and the Monash Gallery of Art. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992)
Sunbaker
c. 1937
Gelatin silver print
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection acquired 1980

Anne Zahalka (Australian, b. 1957)
The sunbather #2
1989
From the series Bondi: playground of the Pacific
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection acquired 1997

Installation views of Sara Oscar’s Pleasant Island (The Pacific Solution) (2017) from the exhibition Under the sun: Reimagining Max Dupain’s Sunbaker at Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Sara Oscar (Australian born 1975, Sydney, NSW)
Pleasant Island (The Pacific Solution)
2017
Inkjet print on Hahnemuehle paper
Courtesy the artist

Sara Oscar draws connections between the present and the past. Interested in how time changes the meaning of images, her practice is drawn to allegory and metaphor.

In late 2015, photographs circulated widely of the lifeless body of three-year-old refugee Aylan Kurdi, lying face down on a beach in Turkey. The pose has come to symbolise the plight of all refugees and now haunts the figure of the Sunbaker. Nauru – a picturesque island in Micronesia that imprisons refugees to Australia under the Pacific Solution – is the subject of this series that draws connections between the themes of colonialism, beach culture and immigration.

Nasim Nasr (born 1964, Tehran, Iran; lives and works Sydney, NSW)
Still for Eighty Years
2017
Courtesy the artist and Greenaway Art Gallery, Adelaide
Video: © Dr Marcus Bunyan, Monash Gallery of Art and Nasim Nasr

Nasim Nasr’s multimedia practice explores the cultural differences between East and West, looking at the complex identities that exist at their nexus.

Shot on Culburra Beach, NSW – where Dupain photographed the Sunbaker – Still for Eighty Years juxtaposes traditional motifs from the Middle East with the Australian beach landscape. Here, the beach becomes a place for cross-cultural dialogue. Inviting us to contemplate their mesmerising Sufi-inspired choreography, the dancers wear a hammam cloth specifically woven for the performance. Nasr’s work is a meditation on the transient nature of identity.

Installation views of Nasim Nasr’s Still for Eighty Years (2017) from the exhibition Under the sun: Reimagining Max Dupain’s Sunbaker at Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Nasim Nasr (born 1964, Tehran, Iran; lives and works Sydney, NSW)
Still for Eighty Years
2017
Production stills from video
Courtesy the artist and Greenaway Art Gallery, Adelaide

Installation view of Justene Williams’ Home security: out of the sun (2017) from the exhibition Under the sun: Reimagining Max Dupain’s Sunbaker at Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Justene Williams (Australian, b. 1970, Sydney, NSW)
Home security: out of the sun
2017
Dye sublimation print on chromaluxe metal
Courtesy of the artist and Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney

Home security is inspired by Dupain’s involvement in the Department of Home Security during the Second World War as part of the Sydney Camouflage Group. Working for the Australian Government, the group deployed visual illusions inspired by surrealism, cubism and abstraction to conceal military equipment. With his astute photographic eye for shadows, exposure and patterns, Dupain contributed to The Art of Camouflage, a manual that described techniques he later taught to soldiers in Darwin and Papua-new Guinea.

Inspired by the sheltering trees of the Sydney College of the Arts Callan Park Campus and 1920s swimwear based on wartime camouflage schemes, this work continues Williams exploration of the poetics and politics of camouflage.

Installation view of Daniel von Sturmer’s Sunbaker (MGA replica) (2017) from the exhibition Under the sun: Reimagining Max Dupain’s Sunbaker at Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Continuing his After Images series (begun in 2013), Daniel von Sturmer has photographed the shadow cast by the replica of Dupain’s Sunbaker held in the Monash Gallery of Art collection. Using a specially constructed ‘set’, the resulting work – a 1:1 image of the Sunbaker shadow – questions the aura held by the original, iconic image. How relevant is the original when multiple reproductions exist?

Examining the ability of photography to accurately capture the real world, this abstract black square draws connections between an image’s meaning and how significance is transferred from the original to the shadow.

Daniel von Sturmer (Born 1972, Auckland, Aotearoa, New Zealand Lives and works in Melbourne, Vic)
Sunbaker (MGA replica)
2017
Unique archival pigment print
Courtesy the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne / Sydney

Under the sun: Reimagining Max Dupain’s Sunbaker is a large-scale exhibition of new works commissioned from 15 artists responding to Australian photographer Max Dupain’s iconic ‘Sunbaker’ image. Artists include Peta Clancy, Christopher Day, Destiny Deacon, Michaela Gleave, Nasim Nasr, Sara Oscar, Julie Rrap, Khaled Sabsabi, Yhonnie Scarce, Christian Thompson, Angela Tiatia. Kawita Vatanajyankur, Daniel Von Sturmer, Justene Williams and William Yang. Under the sun is a travelling exhibition produced by the Australian Centre for Photography (ACP).

MGA Curator Stella Loftus-Hills said, “MGA is delighted to be hosting Under the sun and to be revisiting Max Dupain’s Sunbaker (1937) 80 years after its creation. Dupain’s iconic photograph entered MGA’s collection in 1980 and this exhibition is a wonderful opportunity for our audiences to view the work in the context of contemporary art and to reflect upon its relationship to current ideas around national identity.”

Under the sun explores views of our culture, our identity and our nationhood through works that surprise, challenge and enthuse audiences. Commissioned by ACP, the mix of artists reflects Australia’s multi-cultural, multi-ethnic and multi-faith nature, enabling a creative and often very personal exploration of the question ‘is there something new under the sun?’ These artists contemplate, challenge and interpret the representation of Max Dupain’s photograph – which became an icon of a particular time and a particular vision of Australian culture – while offering unique perspectives on what it could possibly signify in our current society.

ACP Curator, Claire Monneraye said: “Max Dupain’s ‘Sunbaker’, remains an iconic representation of the Australian way of life and a milestone in the history of Australian photography. In this exhibition, the 15 artists have interrogated the social and political implications embedded within this image but also challenged the status of this photograph in our visual culture. Pushing the boundaries of the photographic medium, their works expose the aesthetical complexities at play in discussions around collective identity.

Examining the legacy of the past and questioning the relevance that this image might retain in the future, the exhibition draws on a range of diverse practitioners and creative forms to consider questions of representation and cultural pluralism while also reflecting on the depiction of the idealised body, discussing gender issues, cultural and political ideas relating to immigration and colonisation, and our relationship with the land.”

Press release from the Monash Gallery of Art

Kawita Vatanajyankur (Born 1987, Bangkok, Thailand Lives and works Bangkok and Sydney, NSW)
Carrier (extract)
2017
Video, duration: approx. 5 mins
Courtesy the artist and Stills Gallery, Sydney
Video: © Dr Marcus Bunyan, Monash Gallery of Art and Kawita Vatanajyankur

In this video work, Kawita Vatanajyankur reflects on her experience of migrating to Australia, exploring the resulting shift of identity. Celebrating women’s strength, endurance and resilience, Vatanajyankur’s captivating, seductive – and yet disquieting – video work critiques the challenges faced by migrant Asian women in relation to everyday labour.

Referring to her performances as ‘meditation postures’, the artist undertakes physical and psychological experiments that test the limits of her body, playfully and painfully. The artist’s self-objectification is part of a feminist art tradition that reclaims the female body, both as a medium of deliberate submission and active resistance.

Installation views of Kawita Vatanajyankur’s Carrier (2017) from the exhibition Under the sun: Reimagining Max Dupain’s Sunbaker at Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Kawita Vatanajyankur (Born 1987, Bangkok, Thailand Lives and works Bangkok and Sydney, NSW)
Carrier
2017
Video stills
Courtesy the artist and Stills Gallery, Sydney

Installation views of Destiny Deacon’s Sand minding and Sand grabs (2017) from the exhibition Under the sun: Reimagining Max Dupain’s Sunbaker at Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Destiny Deacon (Born 1957, Maryborough, Qld Lives and works Melbourne, Vic KuKu (Cape York) and Erub/Mer (Torres Strait) peoples)
Sand minding
2017
Archival inkjet pigment print
Sand grabs
2017
Archival inkjet pigment prints
Courtesy the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

Throughout her career Destiny Deacon has orchestrated a personal and political theatre of kitsch and poignant ‘Aboriginalia’ to expose and deconstruct Indigenous issues. Deacon’s anti-art aesthetic confronts us with the cruelty of racism and the sombre reality of Australia’s colonial history.

Acknowledging the sand as central to Dupain’s photograph, Destiny Deacon denunciates the violence of the sand mining industry on the ecosystem, the land and its peoples. While hands are performing a destructive soil surgery, two uncanny dolls emerge from the sand. Both whistleblowers and guardians of the land, they invite us to consider a topical issue and its consequences.

Installation view of Christopher Day’s Untitled (2017) from the exhibition Under the sun: Reimagining Max Dupain’s Sunbaker at Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Christopher Day (Born 1978, Melbourne, Vic, 1978 Lives and works Melbourne, Vic)
Untitled
2017
Pigment print

After processing, developing and scanning the photographs shot on his 35 mm camera, Christopher Day assembles, crops, combines and rearranges his images, again and again. Blending personal and historical narratives, Day’s complex imagery is ambiguous, humorous and allegorical, challenging simplistic definitions of identity and gender.

In this work a shiny round apple bearing visible teeth marks alludes to the story of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs – each character embodying a set of clichés including Snow White herself, whose beauty and feminine charm become her undoing. The artist also refers to The Breakfast Club (1985), a movie in which five teenagers navigate identity issues.

Installation view of Michaela Gleave’s Under One Sun (2017) from the exhibition Under the sun: Reimagining Max Dupain’s Sunbaker at Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Michaela Gleave (Born 1980, Alice Springs, NT Lives and works Sydney, NSW)
Under One Sun (detail)
2017
Silver gelatin prints
Courtesy the artist and Anna Pappas Gallery, Melbourne

Under One Sun highlights the complexity of colonial history and the ambivalence of representing identity. Using Wikipedia‘s listing of Indigenous massacres in Australia, Michaela Gleave highlights the lack of the associated verified historical data. Her zoomed out installation documents the positions of the planets between 1789 and 1928, when 63 massacres of Indigenous peoples took place.

James Cook’s first Pacific voyage, to document the 1769 Transit of Venus and investigate the existence of Terra Australis Incognita, opened the way for the European settlement of Australia. Drawing parallels between the development of photography, science and colonisation, the artist reminds us that technological advances in astronomy and navigation helped expand the British Empire, with science often justifying the atrocities committed.

Installation views of Yhonnie Scarce’s Working Class Man (Andamooka Opal Fields) (2017) from the exhibition Under the sun: Reimagining Max Dupain’s Sunbaker at Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Yhonnie Scarce (Born 1973, Woomera, SA Lives and works Melbourne, Vic and Adelaide, SA Kokatha and Nukunu peoples)
Working Class Man (Andamooka Opal Fields)
2017
Inkjet print on cotton rag paper, vintage metal bucket, blown glass
Courtesy the artist and This Is No Fantasy + Dianne Tanzer Gallery, Melbourne

In this deeply personal work, Yhonnie Scarce pays tribute to her grandfather, who endured many hardships during his life as an opal-mine worker in South Australia. Looking at this family photograph, Scarce felt compelled to tell the story of a man who provided for his family and contributed to society, yet remained excluded from the rights of Australian citizenship until 1967.

Beyond the nostalgic, Scarce includes vernacular photographs in her installations not only to control her personal narrative but also to reaffirm the presence of unsung heroes. ‘Politically motivated and emotionally driven’, Working Class Man (Andamooka Opal Fields) epitomises the experience of many Indigenous Australians while interrogating the effects of colonisation on future generations.

Installation views of Angela Tiatia’s Dark Light (2017) from the exhibition Under the sun: Reimagining Max Dupain’s Sunbaker at Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Angela Tiatia (Born 1973, Auckland, Aotearoa, New Zealand Lives and works in Sydney, NSW)
Dark Light
2017
Video, duration: 4 min, self-adhesive inkjet pigment print
Courtesy the artist and Alcaston Gallery, Melbourne

With Dark Light, Angela Tiatia deconstructs every element of the Sunbaker to reconfigure its exact opposite. The sensual tension created by this process forces us to re-examine the familiar.

Tiatia also reveals deeper contradictions. A chandelier symbolising opulence and power is hung over the artist’s body which is baring the malu – the female-Samoan tattoo (tatau). In pre-Christian times, the malu signified protection and shelter as young women entered womanhood. However, it was condemned by missionaries alongside their male equivalent (pe’a) and some Samoan communities still forbid women to publicly expose the malu. Dark Light sees Tiatia resisting the forces of colonialism embedded within Samoan culture.

Christian Thompson (Born 1978, Gawler, SA Lives and works in London, England Bidjara people)
This Brutal World
2017
Inkjet pigment print
Courtesy the artist and Michael Reid, Sydney / Berlin

With This Brutal World, Christian Thompson focuses on portraiture and its ability to trouble the relationship between past and present.

Where Dupain’s Sunbaker supposedly conveys a quintessential Australian identity, Thompson reminds us of assimilation policies first outlined at the Aboriginal Welfare Initial Conference of Commonwealth and State Aboriginal Authorities in 1937. Here the artist wears a costume borrowed from London’s National Theatre. His eyes are covered with dried roses and his body is superimposed on the glittering shallow creek beds – images captured during trips to his traditional homelands in outback Queensland. Thompson employs references to the natural world to evoke spirituality.

Installation views of Julie Rrap’s Speechless (2017) from the exhibition Under the sun: Reimagining Max Dupain’s Sunbaker at Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Julie Rrap (Born 1950, Lismore, NSW Lives and works Sydney, NSW)
Speechless
2017
Bronze and steel
Courtesy the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

Julie Rrap’s long interest in the politics of the human body informed her investigation of the Sunbaker pose. A casual holiday snap that came to symbolise leisure and freedom in the 1970s, Dupain’s photograph was taken in the uncertain economic times before the Second World War.

Exploring the ambivalence of the pose and transposing this contradiction to now, Rrap draws attention to the paradox of a nation seen as a sun-blessed paradise while its shores have been a place of contestation and misery. Speechless places the viewer in two positions, showing the viewpoint of both the person who speaks out and the one who keeps their head down.

Installation views of Peta Clancy’s Fissures in time (2017) from the exhibition Under the sun: Reimagining Max Dupain’s Sunbaker at Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Peta Clancy (Born 1970, Melbourne, Vic, Lives and works Melbourne, Vic)
Fissures in time (L to R) #3 #1 #2 #4
2017
Archival pigment prints
Courtesy the artist

Drawing on memories of childhood landscapes, Peta Clancy repeatedly visited several locations in Victoria, taking photographs with her large-format camera. Informed by her research into the Massacre Map published by the Koorie Heritage Trust, which identified sites where Indigenous massacres occurred between 1836 and 1853, the artist has produced placeless images that question our relationship to landscapes of trauma and how we perceive reality.

After photographing a site, Clancy returned to install a large print on a custom-designed frame in front of the same landscape; slicing through the paper, then revealing sections of the scene behind before re-photographing it. The resulting images challenge you to see with fresh eyes.

Installation views of William Yang’s SUMMER, A suite of images and My Time at South Bondi (2017) from the exhibition Under the sun: Reimagining Max Dupain’s Sunbaker at Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

William Yang (Born 1943, Mareeba, Qld Lives and works Sydney, NSW)
SUMMER, A suite of images
2017
Digital pigment prints
Courtesy the artist and Stills Gallery, Sydney

My Time at South Bondi
2017
Video with music by Daniel Holdsworth
Duration: 4 min
Courtesy the artist and Stills Gallery, Sydney

A prolific documentary photographer, storyteller and performer, William Yang creates works that tell an intimate, autobiographical story.

For this installation, William Yang draws on his extensive archive of images, memories and sensual experiences, showing the unique atmosphere of freedom that prevailed on Sydney beaches in the 70s, 80s and 90s. Taken around Bondi and Tamarama, Yang has captured the joy of an era and the beauty of the elements with humour and generosity. More than reminiscence or exposé, Yang’s images reveal sensitive connections and insightful reflections about cultural identity.

William Yang (Born 1943, Mareeba, Qld Lives and works Sydney, NSW)
Golden Summer
1987/2016
Digital print with gold foil
Courtesy the artist and Stills Gallery, Sydney

William Yang (Born 1943, Mareeba, Qld Lives and works Sydney, NSW)
Lifesaver Double
1987/2017
Digital print
Courtesy the artist and Stills Gallery, Sydney

William Yang (Born 1943, Mareeba, Qld Lives and works Sydney, NSW)
Lifesavers #3
1987/2017
Digital print
Courtesy the artist and Stills Gallery, Sydney

William Yang (Born 1943, Mareeba, Qld Lives and works Sydney, NSW)
Splashproof #1
1994/2017
Digital print with digital text
Courtesy the artist and Stills Gallery, Sydney

William Yang (Born 1943, Mareeba, Qld Lives and works Sydney, NSW)
Splashproof #2
1994/2017
Digital print
Courtesy the artist and Stills Gallery, Sydney

William Yang (Born 1943, Mareeba, Qld Lives and works Sydney, NSW)
Splashproof #3
1994/2017
Digital print
Courtesy the artist and Stills Gallery, Sydney

William Yang (Born 1943, Mareeba, Qld Lives and works Sydney, NSW)
Bondi Beach (1970s)
1970s/2017
Digital print with text
Courtesy the artist and Stills Gallery, Sydney

William Yang (Born 1943, Mareeba, Qld Lives and works Sydney, NSW)
Tamarama Lifesavers
1981/2017
Digital print
Courtesy the artist and Stills Gallery, Sydney

William Yang (Born 1943, Mareeba, Qld Lives and works Sydney, NSW)
Checking Out Bondi
1981/2017
Digital print
Courtesy the artist and Stills Gallery, Sydney

William Yang (Born 1943, Mareeba, Qld Lives and works Sydney, NSW)
Childhood of Icarus
1975/2017
Digital print
Courtesy the artist and Stills Gallery, Sydney

Khaled Sabsabi (Born 1965, Tripoli, Lebanon Lives and works Sydney, NSW)
229 (extract)
2017
Three-channel video with sound
Duration: 3 min 49 sec
Hand-painted laser prints on transparencies
C-type prints
Courtesy the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane
Video: © Dr Marcus Bunyan, Monash Gallery of Art and Khaled Sabsabi

Khaled Sabsabi has recreated the negative of the Sunbaker by reframing the image and playing with the essential codes of the photographic medium. Sabsabi has multiplied, handpainted and digitally animated the photograph to make it resonate as a symbol of the 229 years since colonisation.

229 challenges the representation of race by inverting black and white, forcing us to question the almost imperceptible alterations, and examine notions of copyright and origin. Ultimately, 229 asks the viewer to be actively engaged and socially responsible.

Installation views of Khaled Sabsabi’s 229 (2017) from the exhibition Under the sun: Reimagining Max Dupain’s Sunbaker at Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Khaled Sabsabi (Born 1965, Tripoli, Lebanon Lives and works Sydney, NSW)
229
2017
Production stills from video
Courtesy the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane

Monash Gallery of Art
860 Ferntree Gully Road, Wheelers Hill
Victoria 3150 Australia
Phone: + 61 3 8544 0500

Opening hours:
Tue – Fri: 10am – 5pm
Sat – Sun: 10pm – 4pm
Mon/public holidays: closed

Monash Gallery of Art website

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Cabinet card: William Bardwell, photographer – Alfred William Howitt, William Barak and unidentified man

April 2016

Caution: Art Blart advises that the subject of this posting may include images and names of deceased people that may cause distress to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

William Bardwell (Australian, active 1858-1895)
Untitled (Alfred William Howitt, William Barak and unidentified man)
Melbourne, 1866-1870(?)
Albumen photograph
Cabinet card

This cabinet card (above) was offered for sale recently and went for a large sum of money. I have never seen this photograph before and, although I have searched for it on the National Library of Australia Trove website and online, I cannot find it anywhere. But I thought I recognised the figure in the middle of the photograph. Some research ensued…

Firstly, according to Alan Davis’ seminal 1985 book The mechanical eye in Australia: photography 1841-1900 William Bardwell, photographer, operated from 21 Collins Street East, Melbourne between 1880-88. But Bardwell was at 21 Collins Street from at least 1877, and may well have been there earlier, as he was listed as insolvent there in 1879 before reopening his business. It could have been the case that Bardwell took the photograph in the early 1870s and that he only issued it as a cabinet photograph after he recovered from bankruptcy.

Secondly – and I might be mistaken – I thought I recognised the distinctive countenance and piercing stare of that inspirational Indigenous leader, William Barak (c. 1824 – 15 August 1903) in the centre of the image. We can see he is wearing a roughly hewn jacket with waistcoat, stripped shirt and zigzag patterned necktie. His presence dominates the photograph – central, frontal, tallest and flanked by two sitting people, all placed idyllically against a lush backdrop of trees and an Arcadian stone fence. “Those who knew Barak described him unanimously as wise and dignified, with penetrating eyes and firm principles.”

If it is Barak, dating the photograph is something of a conundrum since Bardwell was known to be at 21 Collins Street officially from 1877 onwards but he could have taken this photograph much earlier. If we compare this cabinet card to other images of Barak from 1866 and 1875 and 1876 (see below), Barak’s hair and beard colour, with tinges or grey in the 1866 image and our cabinet card – compared to the grey bearded man in the 1875 images – leads us to the supposition that this image was taken between approximately 1866-1870(?). Florence Ada Fuller’s oil painting of Barak dated 1885 (LaTrobe Picture Collection) also shows his hair as being slightly grizzled but his beard as being fully white. What also supports the dating of the cabinet card to the mid-late 1860s is a comparison of the hair and beard of the other person we definitely know is in the photograph, that of Alfred William Howitt. If you compare Batchelder & O’Neill’s portrait of Alfred William Howitt (below) with the cabinet card, we can see that the hair and beard in both are very similar. Barak did travel to Gippsland in 1882 and 1884 to meet up with Howitt, so it is possible they knew each other much earlier.

My initial identification that the Indigenous Australian in the cabinet card was Barak was made on a comparison of the shape of the beard; the strong flared nose; the fact that the beard comes down over his cheek bones in both the 1866 and cabinet card images; the furrowed shape of the brow which to me is very distinctive; and those penetrating eyes. Admittedly the hair is slightly different and we also cannot see the scar on the right hand cheek of Barak which is present in the 1866 image, because of the size of the enlargement of the cabinet card. But I still stand by my recognition of Barak until we can prove substantially otherwise.

At the time this photograph was taken, Barak would have been anywhere between 42-46 years old, depending on the exact year it was taken.

Ahead in Barak’s life would be leadership, creativity … and heartache. From 1874 onwards, Barak would have been the sole ngurungaeta (clan-head) of the Wurundjeri-balluk clan of Woi wurrung,2 and would lead his people living on the Coranderrk Station, near Healesville. But there were unsettling times ahead. In 1866, sixty people were evicted from the station and the station lost half its land in 1893. So much for the Aboriginal Protection Board, what a misnomer the title of that organisation turned out to be. As Barak famously said, “Me no leave it, Yarra, my country. There’s no mountains for me on the Murray.”

All of this was happening when Barak was going through the most tremendous personal hardship as well. In 1882, his son David (see photograph by Fred Kruger below) fell ill from tuberculosis and arrangements were made to admit him to hospital in Melbourne. These were thwarted by Captain Page, secretary of the Aboriginal Protection Board, and Barak had to carry his sick child all the way from Coranderrk to Melbourne and the home of his supporter Anne Bon. David was admitted to hospital but died soon after, with his father not even allowed to be by his bedside. After David’s death there is a heavy sadness noticeable in Barak’s eyes (see the book First Australians by Rachel Perkins, Marcia Langton, p. 104).

I have much admiration for this man, for the hardships he personally endured and which his people went through, and continue to go through to this day.

And thirdly, the pith helmet was the give away to the identity of the person sitting at left in the photograph: Alfred William Howitt (1830-1908), explorer, natural scientist and pioneer authority on Aboriginal culture and social organisation. As an explorer, Howitt led the relief exhibition (June 1861) to rescue Robert O’Hara Burke, William Wills, John King and Charley Gray, to find only King alive and bring him back to Melbourne. He then returned a second time to Cooper’s Creek to repatriate the bodies of Burke and Wills (December 1861).

In 1863 he began a distinguished career of thirty-eight years as a public official, twenty-six of them as magistrate. In 1889 he became acting secretary of mines and water supply and in 1895 commissioner of audit and a member of the Public Service Board. But his real passion was as an anthropologist, his work stretching through fours phases between 1861-1907 (see the full biography for details).

“On his expedition to the Barcoo Howitt had met members of the Yantruwanta, Dieri and other tribes while they were uninfluenced by Europeans. He learned, though inexpertly, something of their ecology, languages, beliefs and customs. The experience confirmed in him a dissociation between the Aboriginals as an object of scientific interest and as a challenge to social policy. Family letters show that he went to central Australia sharing the racial and social prejudices of the day. His attitudes softened later but nothing in his writings suggests that he ever agreed with the condemnation of Europeans for their treatment of native peoples expressed in his father’s polemical Colonization and Christianity (1838). Even in official roles – he was for a time a local guardian of Aboriginals in Gippsland and in 1877 sat on the royal commission which inquired into their whole situation – his attitude appears always to have been that of the dispassionate scientist. His view of their problems did not extend beyond charitable paternalism and segregated training in institutions. His dealings with Aboriginals were cordial and appreciative if somewhat calculated, and he had no difficulty in finding long-serving helpers among them in all his inquiries. But he saw them as a people doomed to extinction by an extraordinary primitivity, and this quality aroused his scientific interest…

“More appreciative eyes … now recognise that Howitt greatly widened the base, improved the methods and deepened the insights of a nascent science. He wrote in a careful, informed way on a wealth of empirical topics – boomerangs, canoes, name-giving, cannibalism, migrations, wizardry, songs, message-sticks, sign-language – but most valuably on the kinship structures and intergroup relations of social life.”2

This is a fascinating cabinet card for its cultural implications… and for what it leaves unsaid of the attitudes and history of the men pictured in this bucolic scene. William Barak was a man, a leader and an elder who kept the flame of his people and his culture alive. Who after all of his travails, turned to creativity and painting to record his culture for future generations. Culture and creativity in any language is a powerful healing force in what is an ongoing story of injustice and persecution. I would have very much liked to have meet this wise man.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

1/ Box 1053/2 (b/c), ‘Notes by Howitt on the Kulin nation from information provided by William Barak’ c. 1882 quoted in Ian D. Clark. “The A.W. How Papers,” in La Trobe Journal No 43, Autumn 1989, p. 30 on the La Trobe Journal website [Online] Cited 06/10/2021.

2/ W. E. H. Stanner. “Howitt, Alfred William (1830-1908),” on the Australian Dictionary of Biography website Volume 4, (MUP), 1972 [Online] Cited 09/04/2016.

Carl Walter (Australian, 1831-1907)
William Barak – age 42 – Yarra Yarra Tribe
1866
Albumen silver photograph
Approx. 10.0 x 6.7cm
State Library of Victoria

Carl Walter (c. 1831 – 7 October 1907), also known as Charles Walter, was a German-born botanist and photographer who worked in Australia. Walter was born in Mecklenburg, Germany in about 1831 and arrived in Victoria in the 1850s.

Walter set up a photographic studio in Melbourne, promoting himself as a “Country Photographic Artist” or “Landscape Photographic Artist”. For a twenty-year period starting from about 1862, he would periodically travel to eastern and alpine regions of Victoria with camera equipment and camping gear in a backpack.

In 1866 Walter took 106 photographs of Aboriginal people at Coranderrk east of Melbourne, which were exhibited at the Intercolonial Exhibition of Australasia in Melbourne in 1866-67.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Fred Kruger (Australian born Germany, 1831-1888)
William and Annie Barak with their son, David, at Coranderrk Aboriginal Station
c. 1875

Fred Kruger (Australian born Germany, 1831–1888)
William and Annie Barak with their son David at Coranderrk Aboriginal Station
c. 1875
Yarra Ranges Regional Museum, 9499

Fred Kruger (born Johan Friedrich Carl Kruger, 18 April 1831 – 15 February 1888) was a German-born photographer noted for his early photography of landscape and indigenous peoples in Victoria, Australia. …

In 1866, Kruger first registered his photography business at 133 Cardigan Street, Carlton, Melbourne, before moving it in August 1867 to High Street, Prahran, Melbourne, continuing there until 1871, then relocating in Preston to High Street and again to Regent Street in that suburb.

During this period, Kruger was achieving international recognition for his landscape photography, including the award of medals from both the 1872 Vienna Exhibition and the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition. He became the first photographer to take group photos of the first Aboriginal cricket team in 1866, which became one of his most recognised images, and was subsequently commissioned in 1877 by the Aboriginal Protection Board to create a collection of work including portraits of the Aboriginal residents of the Coranderrk reserve, an Aboriginal reserve run by the colonial government of Victoria, which was made public in 1883. Kruger won more awards; a gold medal for the best collection of landscape views and another, for the best panoramic view of Geelong, at the Geelong Industrial and Juvenile Exhibition in 1879.

In March 1879 Kruger was photographing groups of Geelong residents, ensuring each person could easily be identified in his detailed views, as he did when photographing the Corio Bay rowing crew in November 1879. …

Kruger then settled in Geelong permanently, and his photography studio is registered on 29 December 1887 at Skene Street, in the Geelong suburb of Newtown. He created a collection in 1880 of twelve views of the streets and buildings of Geelong, winning him an award at the Melbourne International Exhibition (1880). The government of Victoria engaged him to photograph the Yan Yean Waterworks for the Colonial and Indian Exhibition in London. Kruger gained commissions from house owners to photograph their homes, most famous of which was from Lady Loch, the wife of the Governor.

Kruger made three visits to the Queenscliff region in 1881, 1882 and 1885, capturing views to include the buildings of the settlement and its marine setting. On 15 February 1888, Kruger died of peritonitis (inflammation of the membranes of abdominal wall and organs). Large holdings of his work have been showcased at the National Gallery of Victoria.

Text from the Wikipedia website

William Barak (c. 1824-1903) and Coranderrk

William Barak (or Beruk), was the last traditional ngurungaeta (elder) of the Wurundjeri-willam clan, first inhabitants of present-day Melbourne, Australia. He became an influential spokesman for Aboriginal social justice and an important informant on Wurundjeri cultural lore.

Barak was born in the early 1820s at Brushy Creek near present-day Croydon, in the country of the Wurundjeri people… Barak attended the government’s Yarra Mission School from 1837 to 1839. When he joined the Native Mounted Police in 1844, he was given the name of William Barak. He was Police Trooper No.19. In early 1863, Barak moved to Coranderrk Station, near Healesville, Victoria with about thirty others… Upon the death of Simon Wonga in 1875, Barak became the Ngurungaeta of the clan. He worked tirelessly for his people and was a successful negotiator on their behalf. He was a highly respected man and leader, with standing amongst the Indigenous people and the European settlers.

Coranderrk Station

Coranderrk Station ran successfully for many years as an Aboriginal enterprise, selling wheat, hops and crafts on the burgeoning Melbourne market. Produce from the farm won first prize at the Melbourne International Exhibition in 1881; and other awards in previous years, such as 1872. By 1874, the Aboriginal Protection Board (APB) was looking for ways to undermine Coranderrk by moving people away due to their successful farming practices. Neighbouring farmers also wanted the mission closed as the land was now deemed ‘too valuable’ for Aboriginal people to occupy. Photographer Fred Kruger was commissioned to document the site and its inhabitants.

Coranderrk Petition

In the 1870s and ’80s, Coranderrk residents sent deputations to the Victorian colonial government protesting their lack of rights and the threatened closure of the reserve. A Royal Commission in 1877 and a Parliamentary Inquiry in 1881 on the Aboriginal ‘problem’ led to the Aborigines Protection Act 1886, which required ‘half-castes under the age of 35’ to leave the reserve.

Activist William Barak and others sent a petition on behalf of the Aboriginal people of Coranderrk to the Victorian Government in 1886, which reads: “Could we get our freedom to go away Shearing and Harvesting and to come home when we wish and also to go for the good of our Health when we need it … We should be free like the White Population there is only few Blacks now rem[a]ining in Victoria, we are all dying away now and we Blacks of Aboriginal Blood, wish to have now freedom for all our life time … Why does the Board seek in these latter days more stronger authority over us Aborigines than it has yet been?”

As a result of the Aborigines Protection Act of 1886, around 60 residents were ejected from Coranderrk on the eve of the 1890s Depression. Their forced departure crippled Coranderrk as an enterprise, with only around 15 able-bodied men left to work the hitherto successful hop gardens. Almost half the land was reclaimed by government in 1893, and by 1924 orders came for its closure as an Aboriginal Station, despite protests from Wurundjeri returned servicemen who had fought in World War I.

Barak is now best remembered for his artworks, which show both traditional Indigenous life and encounters with Europeans. Most of Barak’s drawings were completed at Coranderrk during the 1880s and 1890s. They are now highly prized and exhibited in leading public galleries in Australia. His work is on permanent display in the National Gallery of Victoria Ian Potter Centre at Federation Square, Melbourne.”

Text from the “William Barak” and “Coranderrk” Wikipedia web pages.

Fred Kruger (Australian born Germany, 1831-1888)
David Barak at Coranderrk Aboriginal Station
c.1876
Museum Victoria

“This small, carte de visite sized photograph says more to me than most of the other photographs in the exhibition put together. It is almost as though the photographer had a personal attachment and connection to the subject. This poignant (in light of following events) dark, brown-hued photograph shows the son of elder and leader William Barak about the age of 9 years old in 1876. In 1882, David fell ill from tuberculosis and arrangements were made to admit him to hospital in Melbourne. These were thwarted by Captain Page, secretary of the Aboriginal Protection Board, and Barak had to carry his sick child all the way from Coranderrk to Melbourne and the home of his supporter Anne Bon. David was admitted to hospital but died soon after, with his father not even allowed to be by his bedside. After David’s death there is a heavy sadness noticeable in Barak’s eyes (see the book First Australians by Rachel Perkins, Marcia Langton, p. 104).

Unlike other photographs of family groups taken at Coranderrk, Kruger places David front on to the camera in the lower 2/3 rds of the picture plane on his own, framed by the symmetry of the steps and door behind. David glasps his hands in a tight embrace in front of him (nervously?), his bare feet touching the earth, his earth. The only true highlight in the photograph is a white neckerchief tied around his throat. There is an almost halo-like radiance around his head, probably caused by holding back (dodging) during the printing process. Small, timid but strong, in too short trousers and darker jacket, this one image – of a child, a human being, standing on the earth that was his earth before invasion – has more intimacy than any other image Kruger ever took, even as he tried to engender a sense of intimacy with the environment.”

Dr Marcus Bunyan. Review of “‘Fred Kruger: Intimate Landscapes” at the Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne” on the Art Blart website 01/07/2012 [Online] Cited 08/04/2016.

Fred Kruger (born Germany 1831, arrived Australia 1860, died 1888)
Aboriginal cricketers at Coranderrk
c.1877
albumen silver photograph
13.3 x 18.6cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Gift of Mrs Beryl M. Curl, 1979

Unknown photographer
[A group of Aboriginal men at Coranderrk Station, Healesville]
Nd [perhaps c. 1895-1900 looking at the age of Barak]
Silver gelatin photograph
15.6 x 20.1cm
Collection of the State Library of Victoria

Studio portrait of sixteen Aboriginal men, five standing, five seated on chairs, the rest on the ground, all except two full face, wearing European dress. Barak back row 2nd left. Information provided by Aunty Joy Murphy, Wurundjeri Senior Elder confirming that Barak is correctly identified. Preferred title supplied by the Aboriginal Liaison Officer, Museum of Victoria.

Talma & Co. (1893-1932) 119 Swanston St. Melbourne
Barak, Chief of the Yarra Yarra Tribe [Barak drawing a corroboree]
c. 1895-98
Gelatin silver photograph
13.3 x 8.5cm., on mount 22.7 x 16.5cm
Inscribed in ink on mount l.l.: From Mrs. A. Bon, / “Wappan”.
Collection of the State Library of Victoria

Barak working on a drawing attached to the wall of a vertical slab hut. There is a wooden picket fence at the right hand side.

Barak (Yarra Yarra chief, 1824-1903)
Aboriginal ceremony
c. 1880 – c. 1890
Brown ochre and charcoal on cardboard
73.2 x 55.5cm
Collection of the State Library of Victoria

William Barak (Yarra Yarra chief, 1824-1903)
Aboriginal ceremony, with wallaby and emu
c. 1880 – c. 1890
Brown ochre and charcoal on cardboard
73.0 x 56.0cm
Collection of the State Library of Victoria

Alfred William Howitt (1830-1908)

Alfred William Howitt (1830-1908), explorer, natural scientist and pioneer authority on Aboriginal culture and social organization, was born on 17 April 1830 at Nottingham, England, the oldest surviving son of William Howitt and his wife Mary, née Botham. He was educated in England, Heidelberg and University College School, London. In 1852, under the press of family needs, he went with his father and brother Charlton to Melbourne where they had been preceded in 1840 by William’s youngest brother Godfrey. A reunion was one purpose of the visit but William and his sons also intended to try their fortunes on the new goldfields. They did so with modest success at intervals in the next two years. The experience turned the course of Alfred’s life. He learned to live with confidence in the bush, and its natural phenomena, so strange and as yet so little studied, stimulated his mind to their scientific study. In 1854 his father and brother returned to England but Howitt elected to remain, thoroughly at home in the Australian scene.

Young and handsome, of short and wiry build and notably calm and self-possessed, he fulfilled his mother’s prophecy that ‘someday Alfred will be a backwoodsman’. For a time he farmed his uncle’s land at Caulfield but, unattracted by the life, turned again to the bush and as a drover on the route from the Murray to Melbourne made the passing acquaintance of Lorimer Fison. An experienced bushman and ardent naturalist, Howitt was sent in 1859 by a Melbourne syndicate to examine the pastoral potential of the Lake Eyre region on which Peter Warburton had reported rosily. He led a party with skill and speed from Adelaide through the Flinders Ranges into the Davenport Range country but found it desolated by drought and returned to warn his sponsors. His ability as a bushman and resourceful leader came to public notice when, after briefly managing a sheep station at Hamilton and prospecting in Gippsland, he took a government party through unexplored alpine country to gold strikes on the Crooked, Dargo and Wentworth Rivers. He was an obvious choice as leader when in 1861 the exploration committee of the Royal Society of Victoria decided to send an expedition to relieve or, as the worst fears sensed, to rescue Robert O’Hara Burke, William Wills, John King and Charley Gray. Howitt’s discharge of this assignment was exemplary. Without blunder or loss he twice led large parties on the long journey to Cooper’s Creek. He soon found King, the only survivor, and took him to a public welcome in Melbourne but avoided the limelight for himself. Then, at request, he returned to bring the remains of Burke and Wills to the capital for interment. On the second expedition he had explored a large tract of the Barcoo country.

For his services Howitt was appointed police magistrate and warden of the Omeo goldfields, and in 1863 began a distinguished career of thirty-eight years as a public official, twenty-six of them as magistrate. In 1889 he became acting secretary of mines and water supply and in 1895 commissioner of audit and a member of the Public Service Board. He retired in January 1902 on a pension but served on the royal commission which in 1903 examined sites for the seat of government of the Commonwealth, and was chairman of the royal commission on the Victorian coal industry in 1905-06.

Such a career would have sufficed an ordinary man but Howitt attained greater things within it. Physical and intellectual fatigue seemed unknown to him. ‘What are they?’ he asked drily at 75 when Fison inquired if he never felt the infirmities of old age. In his long magistracy he travelled enormous distances annually (in one year, it was said, 7000 miles [11,265 km]) on horseback throughout Victoria. He read while in the saddle and studied the natural scene with such assiduous care that from 1873 onward he began to contribute to official reports, scientific journals and learned societies papers of primary value on the Gippsland rocks. He pioneered the use in Australia of thin-section petrology and chemical analysis of rocks. His fundamental contribution was his discovery and exploration of the Upper Devonian series north of Bairnsdale. He also made important studies of the Lower Devonian volcanics in East Gippsland and compiled magnificent geological maps of the area. In botany his Eucalypts of Gippsland (1889) became a standard authority and he collected hundreds of varieties of ferns, grasses, acacias and flowering plants. But his greatest eminence came from his work in anthropology, which was his main interest and relaxation after 1872…

Read the full biography by W. E. H. Stanner. “Howitt, Alfred William (1830-1908),” on the Australian Dictionary of Biography website Volume 4, (MUP), 1972 [Online] Cited 09/04/2016.

Alfred Howitt, the leader of the party to rescue Burke and Wills, circa 1861, from William Strutt album illustrating the Burke and Wills exploring expedition crossing the continent of Australia from Cooper’s Creek to Carpentaria, June 1861, DL PXX 3

Batchelder & O’Neill
Alfred William Howitt
c. 1863
Albumen silver carte-de-visite
9.0 x 5.2cm
Collection of the State Library of Victoria

Howitt full length in the photographers’ studio, leaning on a button-backed chair, wearing a three-piece winter suit, with a watch-chain and holding a pair of gloves in his right hand.

Batchelder & O’Neill
Alfred William Howitt
Nd
Albumen silver carte-de-visite
on mount 10.7 x 6.5cm approx.
Collection of the State Library of Victoria

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Video: ‘Utopia’ by John Pilger (2013)

January 2014

Ashamed to be Australian…

John Pilger (Australian, b. 1939)
Utopia
2013

Wow, I heard about this video, but nothing compares to seeing and watching Australia’s sordid History and in-humane treatment of the first people. Given that the founding father Barton and recently Lang Hancock actively advocate for sterilisation of the blacks and half-breeds are both confronting and appalling. Denial of basic facilities like electricity, plumbing, good running water, adequate schooling, adequate health services, adequate shelter, transportation – even though these people are tax-paying persons, therefore they are required to have adequate facilities – special mention that this is happening still in 2019, informs thinking people how poor the rights of indigenous peoples are, and how in-humane the Government of Australia is, with regard to first nation people living on their traditional lands. NOTE: Trachoma and other preventable diseases are widespread with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, despite Australia being economically viable country, and these diseases can be prevented. Politicians are not doing enough – end of story.

Eunice Rongo Kizmaz’s comment on YouTube website [Online] Cited 19/01/2021

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Video: ‘Cottees: There’s a lot to celebrate’ (2012) by GPYR-Melbourne / insidious racism?

October 2012

insidious
adj.
Proceeding in a gradual, subtle way, but with harmful effects

There is a lot to celebrate living in Australia, the lucky country, especially if you are a white kid growing up in the perfect world of Cottees advertising. I have been viewing these TV commercials since 1986 and have yet to see an Indian, Asian, Aboriginal or child from a Muslim family in any of them. As far as I can see it is only white children of middle class suburban families that can “seize the day” in Cottee’s vision of contemporary Australia.

I ask my readers, do they think that these adverts promulgate a form of insidious racism? Are these adverts a form of racism by exclusion, rather than one by outright declamation?
Is this exclusion a form of societal system of oppression?

I leave the answer for you to decide.

Perhaps they should have said, “No matter how many white kids end up in your backyard, there’s always enough Cottee’s to go around…”

“We’re all responsible for naming, and saying no to, racism. We must call it when we see it… Race hate, racism, careless words – can harm entire populations. They can change the way that we live together… Racism can only be resisted, and eradicated, through solidarity, and cooperation. There are no exceptions. History has no bystanders – only participants.”

.
Graeme Innes AM, Race Discrimination Commissioner at the Australian Human Rights Commission, August 2011

VIDEO NO LONGER AVAILABLE

Cottees There’s a lot to celebrate (2012)

“This Sunday will see the launch of a new campaign for Cottee’s cordial. Created by George Patterson Y&R Melbourne, the commercial aims to take the brand back to its roots by celebrating the simple goodness of childhood – and the fact that no matter how many kids end up in your back yard at the end of the day, there’s always enough Cottee’s to go around.

Says Troy McKinna, advertising manager at Cottee’s: “We’re hoping the generation of Australians who grew up with classic ‘My dad picks the fruit’‚ ad will share this new Cottee’s classic with the next one.””

CLIENT:
Advertising Manger: Troy McKinna
Brand Manager: Karen Elsbury

Cottee’s Cordial – Australian TV Commercial (1998)

Cottee’s cordial ad from mid 90’s

Cottees Cordial Australian Commercial 1980s

Cottees Country Blend Cordial (Nd)

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January 2023

Abstract

Keywords

Golden splendour: privilege, ceremony and racism in 1920s-1930s Australia

Privilege

Ceremony

Racism

Footnotes

Locations

Topics

Camden Grammar School

Audrey Pickburn

AT ST. JAMES’ LAST NIGHT’S WEDDING FAVIELL – PICKBURN

PICKBURN – FAVIELL

Jenolan Caves

Governor of New South Wales

IN DIVORCE

“Party at Darling Point”

Sydney Harbour Bridge construction

Byng

Lucknow

Exhibition dates: 5th March – 4th October 2021

In our sight, in our mind

Footnotes

Gurindji strike (or Wave Hill Walk-Off) led by Vincent Lingiari

Why did the Gurindji people strike?

How was the dispute resolved?

What’s the backstory to your famous land rights photograph?

An historic handful of dirt: Whitlam and the legacy of the Wave Hill Walk-Off

Mervyn Bishop: pioneer, artist, and source of inspiration

How diverse was your photographic subject matter?

Why is ‘Life-and-death dash’ misunderstood?

Exhibition dedicated to photographer Mervyn Bishop opens in Canberra

About Mervyn Bishop

What is your legacy? And whose work do you admire?

Additional images not in exhibition

Dawn – A Magazine for the Aboriginal People of N.S.W.

Charles Perkins (Australian, 1936-2000; Arrernte; Kalkadoon)

July 2021

Footnotes

Locations

Topics

Blue Mountains

Tarana

Breeza

Avoca Beach

John C Reid and Mark C Reid

O.E. Friend (died 1942)

Obituary

Belmont Regatta

Adolphe

Foxlow

Customs House, Sydney

Muswellbrook

Belmont Soldier’s Memorial Hall and Belmont School of Arts

Belmont

Weeroona and the Reid’s

John Christian Reid

Maitland

Breeza

Wisemans Ferry

Moss Vale

Frensham School

La Perouse

John Dunn

Macquarie Watchtower

South Australian Railways

Trans-Australian Railway

Ooldea

Kalgoorlie-Boulder

Boulder

Perseverance Gold Mine, Golden Mile Mines, Kalgoorlie-Boulder, Kalgoorlie-Boulder Shire, Western Australia, Australia

Great Boulder Gold Mine, Golden Mile Mines, Kalgoorlie-Boulder, Kalgoorlie-Boulder Shire, Western Australia, Australia

Fremantle Prison

Geraldton

Shark Bay

Gin

December 2018

1910s Australia

Poolamacca Station

AT ST. JAMES’
LAST NIGHT’S WEDDING
FAVIELL – PICKBURN