4 Early Sydney: A Land of Wonder and Delight

      Richard Neville

      Early Australian art is often seen as being at war with the country: the landscape was alienating and confronting, its population of convicts deliberately hidden from view, its natural history simply too upside down and weird to be truthfully depicted, and the whole aesthetic of the country was so remarkably different that artists simply couldn’t see it properly, resorting instead to the pictorial tropes they brought with them from Europe.

      Of course the story is much more complicated, and in some respects, much simpler than this. Colonial artists, once the colony settled after the confusion of its establishment, were subject to market forces, and the whims and interests of clients, like any artist in any provincial European town.

      Indeed the trajectory of art in the early colony can perhaps be broadly defined in three distinct phases. The first phase, in the difficult first decade of the colony, is one of documentation, when the most significant impetus for artists – either officers, or employed by officers – was to record the astonishing natural history and curious Indigenous people they encountered. The emphasis in this decade was on producing extensive inventories of images: of plants, birds, animals, Aboriginal people, and landscapes. Emphatically documentary, often limited in art knowledge, and compositionally naïve, this list making was rarely systematic, but rather was driven by the shock of the new, and an underlying enthusiasm to record, for European collectors, what was encountered in NSW.

The second phase – roughly the first three decades of the nineteenth century – reflects the more settled nature of the colony, but also alludes to its unique circumstances. The enthusiasm for collection and documentation had waned significantly by 1800, by which time Europeans felt that the colony’s future and security had been established, and the sense of raw excitement about its difference had abated. Elizabeth Macarthur’s comment is pertinent to this change:

      On my first landing everything was new to me, every Bird, every Insect, Flower, &c in short all was novelty around me, and was noticed with a degree of eager curiosity, and perturbation, that after a while subsided into calmness.¹

      During this period images of natural history, indigenous people and topographical views still accounted for the majority of local commissions. But these were made by professional artists, and often explicitly described as souvenirs for people returning to Europe. Richard Read Senior’s advertisement in the Sydney Gazette of 17 February 1821 epitomizes this period. He begged leave “to inform Captains of Ships, and other Gentlemen, that he has on Sale, some very superior Views of various parts of New Holland, together with Drawings of Birds, Flowers, Native Figures.”

      There was thus a significant difference between the enthusiastic amateur artists of the first decade of colonization and the increasing professionalization of the artists’ community from around 1800, enhanced, ironically, by the transportation of so many artists and craftsmen: John Eyre, Richard Browne, Richard Read Senior, Joseph Lycett, Walter Preston, Francis Greenway, John Austin, John Lancashire and Samuel Clayton all arrived in the first two decades of the nineteenth century.

      The third phase of artistic activity coincides with the increase in free emigration into the colony from the mid-1820s. In 1825 the population of NSW was about 36 000. By 1851 the population had increased more than fivefold to about 179 000–117 000 of those were free emigrants who arrived in the colony between 1831 and 1850. Such an influx significantly impacted the way the colony saw itself. No longer did it want to emphasize its difference through its curious natural history – rather colonists celebrated its conformity to European paradigms, a “new Britannia in another world” as William Charles Wentworth so succinctly described it.²

      None of these particular visions represented a consistent and united vision of how the colonists themselves interpreted the landscape: attitudes to NSW, its natural environment, its society and its potential were very much shaped by the context of individual colonists. The early anxieties about its sustainability and permanence – the embryo of the notion that the settlement was some kind of hell, or fatal shore – was in the famines of the early 1790s. Surgeon General John White’s initial assessment of the “badness of the country” had within a few years evolved to the idea that it would soon be independent of England. White attributed his change of heart to making his first assessment “when hunger was very pressing.”³

The famines exacerbated another fundamental issue with European perceptions of the colony: its very raison d’être as a settlement for criminals. As David Collins wrote in 1798, “From the disposition to crimes and the incorrigible characters of the major part of the colonists … the word ‘Botany Bay’ became a term of reproach that was indiscriminately cast on every one who resided in New South Wales.”⁴ It was a persistent theme, neatly encapsulated nearly 30 years later in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine review of Peter Cunningham’s Two years in New South Wales, which was published in 1827. The review noted that colonial writers were “considerably mistaken [in] the nature of the interest with which the colony is regarded in the mother country.” Stories of successful settlements, Blackwood’s claimed, were nowhere as engaging as the tales of the “most murderous, monstrous, debased, burglarious, brutifed, larcenous, felonious, and pickpocketous set of scoundrels that ever trod the earth.” Indeed “ninety-nine out of a hundred” English people, when asked to describe NSW, would “think only of ropes, gibbets, arson, burglary, kangaroos, George Barrington and Governor Macquarie.” ⁵

      When presenting NSW to England, the need to prove that it could successfully develop and grow into a English town worthy of the Empire, or maybe even ultimately a Southern Empire itself, in spite of its penal origins, was a dominating concern for colonists. Convicts themselves rarely appear in colonial art, and nor are their interests reflected. Rather colonists commissioned imagery which documented the success of their enterprise, and demonstrated the colony’s evolution into a flourishing British settlement.

      ***

      In 1794 Thomas Palmer wrote of NSW:

      To the philosophic mind, it is