A Companion to Australian Art. Группа авторов
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the fish, the birds, the reptiles, the plants, the trees, the flowers are all new. So beautiful and grotesque that no naturalist would believe the most faithful drawing, and it requires uncommon skill to class them.6
The natural bounty of the colony was evident from the time Europeans first landed on the east coast. When HM Bark Endeavour sailed into Botany Bay in April 1770 its crew were taken with its botanical riches and abundant fauna. Attempts to engage with Aboriginal people, however, proved impossible, and Captain Cook and his companions could only observe them from a distance. Despite the Endeavour traveling with artists on board, few drawings from Botany Bay have survived, possibly because of the shortness of their stay, and the generally unremarkable topography they encountered. Sydney Parkinson’s Two of the Natives of New Holland, Advancing to Combat, illustrating the vigorous challenge of the two men to the landing of the English, is the sole published image from the Endeavour’s visit to Botany Bay. It was an incident which Cook, Joseph Banks, and Parkinson all recorded in some detail. Tupaia, a high priest from Raiatea who joined the Endeavour at Tahiti, made a basic drawing of Aboriginal people in bark canoes (now in the British Library).7 Sydney Parkinson’s legacy was his botanical drawings, which he did not live to see completed. Cook called the bay Botany Bay to honor the “great quantity of new plants etc” collected by the expedition.8
When the First Fleet landed at Botany Bay in January 1788, there were no visual records to prepare the colonists for what they might find. Disappointed with what they did discover, which seemed unsuitable for settlement, Governor Arthur Phillip noted that Captain Cook’s inadequate textual description reflected the brevity of his visit, and the fact that he had no premonition of the significance of his visit to the future colonization of the country.9 Yet it was possible to separate the disappointment with the conditions of settlement from the pleasure in nature: Palmer’s exuberance reflects the not uncommon surprise and enjoyment of colonists with the natural history they now lived amongst.
Colonists were quick to begin drawing their new environment. On 11 February 1788 the Lady Penrhyn’s surgeon, Arthur Bowes Smyth noted in his diary that he had “etch’d the likeness” of a Xanthorrhoea [grass tree], which he confidently described as “no very bad resemblance of it.”10 It is unclear if the surviving drawing, A View of the Tree at Botany Bay, wh yields ye yellow Balsam, & of a Wigwam,11is the original or a copy, or indeed made later as an illustration for the journal, but its frieze-like composition and unskilled drafting strongly speak of enthusiasm for recording the novelty of the things the colonists were seeing, but within a limited technical vocabulary. A companion drawing, Kangooroo, is simply a copy of George Stubbs’ engraving in John Hawkesworth’s Account of the Voyages in the Southern Hemisphere, and Bowes Smyth notes that “This Animal is so well discribed, & so excellent an engraving is given of it in Capt. Cook’s Voyages that I shall not say any thing of it here.”12
Bowes Smyth’s enthusiasm for collecting natural history specimens and indigenous material culture was typical of his colleagues. Bowes Smyth sought out curiosities at every port he visited, and much of the four months the Lady Penryhn was in Port Jackson Bowes Smyth spent acquiring specimens and artefacts which were intended to be re-distributed in Europe. Drawings, natural history specimens and Aboriginal artefacts were common exports to Europe from the very first. This frenzy for collecting was equally a reflection of the late eighteenth-century Enlightenment pursuit of rational knowledge about the natural world, and an enthusiasm for a much less cerebral celebration of the diversity of God’s creation.
Specimens were either tokens of diplomacy, given strategically to European benefactors and patrons, or profitably sold to collectors. Collectors like John White, the Surgeon-General of the colony, enthusiastically fed specimens and drawings to friends, colleagues and patrons in Europe. These specimens were then engraved in London for his illustrated Journal of a Voyage to New South Wales, published in London in 1790. This was one of the first printed accounts of the colony, with a strong focus on natural history, based in turn on collections he himself had sent back to London.
Given this impetus of documentation it is surprising that of all the trades which came out with the First Fleet, artists do not seem to have been amongst them. This oversight was to the detriment of Thomas Watling, a professional artist who was denied a remission of his sentence for his role in foiling a mutiny because, in part as an “ingenious artist”, he would be an “acquisition to the new Colony at Botany Bay.”13 However before Watling arrived in Sydney in 1792, a lively and prolific community of artists, most with only basic skills, was already active.
These artists, some identifiable but most not, created substantial records of natural history, landscapes, and portraits of Aboriginal people and illustrated accounts of their material culture and cultural practice. The emphasis of nearly all these projects was the extensive – though hardly comprehensive – documentation of birds, plants and people, responding in part to the demands of European collectors for curious and exotic specimens. Often inexpertly executed and composed with what is now seen as a charming disregard for any artistic or genre conventions, these collections were not informed by taxonomic rigor, but were rather omnivorous assemblages of things that could be easily located around the settlement. Despite the challenges to their reliability, these drawings were scrutinized seriously: Mrs. Macarthur, looking at views of Norfolk Island in 1791, noted that “the Island has a most charming picturesque appearance from the drawings I have seen, and what I have heard corresponds with it.”14
In April 1790 Governor Phillip told Sir Joseph Banks that he had commissioned “drawings of all the flowering shrubs in this Country”, an intriguing, and now lost, commission.15 Other significant commissions followed. Bernard Smith coined the term Port Jackson Painter to describe artists, whose identities have remained elusive, working in Sydney from 1788 to the mid-1790s.16 Smith used the term particularly to describe the artists of the collection of the nearly 500 drawings, now in the Natural History Museum, London, and known as the Watling Collection, after its sole identifiable artist, the convict Thomas Watling.
The genealogies of these drawings are opaque. Drawings were made in NSW, and then taken to Europe, where they were eagerly examined, discussed, and frequently copied and distributed widely amongst natural history networks. Their surprising physical presence – their comparatively large size, high degree of finish and often lengthy descriptive titles – make it clear they were conceived as records of a major historical event. The abundance of interconnected drawings implies a collegiate spirit amongst colonial artists, a community of interest, and an enthusiastic sharing of information and drawings.
The State Library of NSW holds a collection of the work of another group of artists collectively known as the Sydney Bird Painter, whose work was copied by the Port Jackson Painter.17 In 2011 the Library acquired the six volumes of the Earl of Derby collection, comprising 745 watercolors of Australian plants birds and fishes.18 Three of these volumes comprise English copies of drawings in the Watling collection. The other three volumes, by unknown artists, were compiled in NSW.
Common to all these collections is an inability to capture the living form of the specimens they depict, and little sense that any field observation informs their work. Body shape poorly recorded or just plain wrong: it is more than likely that artists were working from dead specimens or animal skins. Generally compositions reflect the typical format of English natural history illustration – a single specimen centered in the middle of the page, perhaps on a generic landform or branch, largely devoid of any context. Indeed the prominent English ornithologist, John Latham, who was an enthusiastic recipient of many colonial drawings, complained that they were not annotated with supporting information such as size, habitat, or behaviors, “which had the Painter been at all versed in ornithology, he could not have failed to have remarked in writing.”19 Latham, however, still valued drawings of any description which he could retrieve from NSW, and was often confident enough to use these drawings as the basis of his published descriptions of them.
Drawings which seem have no obvious connections are curiously interlinked. Why is it, for instance, that the extraordinary watercolors of