FIGURE 4.2. A view near Grose Head, New South Wales, 1809. For details please see Table 4.1.

Eyre was also a contributor to the 24 images of Absalom West’s Views in New South Wales, which West (a publisher rather than artist) issued between 1812 and 1814. John Lewin, and convict artists Richard Browne and Philip Slaeger also contributed plates for the publication, which traversed all the major sites of colonial development (with an emphasis on Sydney), and acknowledges the colony’s foundation history with the inclusion of a view of Botany Bay. The Sydney Gazette that noted that the prints were taken “off at a press constructed by a workman who had never before seen such a machine,” and were engraved by a “person who had many years been out of his profession.”³³

      The bold clouds, the thick networks of engraved lines, the modest ambitions of the compositions, and the formulaic framing and staffage, of these plates, all typical of late eighteenth-century topographical views, confirm how easily the colony could slip into the familiar aesthetic of English imagery. Captain James Wallis, Commandant of the Newcastle settlement between 1816 and 1818, employed a similar aesthetic in his series of twelve views, which were engraved at Newcastle (allegedly on copper intended for the bottom of ships). Although Wallis claimed authorship of the views in the legends printed beneath them, at least six of them were in fact after drawings by Joseph Lycett (an indication in itself of the problematic status of a convict artist in the colony).³⁴ These line-engravings, which again concentrated on the colony’s major settlements, also embraced the ubiquitous and universal visual language of the British Empire. In the letterpress which was published with the London edition of the plates, An Historical account of the colony of New South Wales of 1821, Wallis affirmed that the plates were both a contemporary record of the colony and a document of history:

      To those who are fond of tracing the progress of countries, and watching the advance of associated industry and ingenuity, these faithful representations of the incipient state of a Colony, which is in all probability destined … to become the mistress of the Southern Hemisphere … cannot but be particularly gratifying… [the engravings] offer the most striking proof of the unparalleled progress of this Colony … These glorious triumphs of colonization.³⁵

In 1820 Governor Macquarie sent Earl Bathurst a watercolor of Sydney by Lycett, which he described as “extremely correct” image, noting that he had not previously been able to get views “Painted to my satisfaction or Sufficiently well executed.”³⁶ For Macquarie these drawings were a more effective and immediate measurement of the success of his regime than any memorandum he could write to Bathurst. Macquarie also earlier sent Earl Bathurst more than ten large and elaborate watercolors, by John Lewin, of previously unknown birds, animals and plants brought back from John Oxley’s expeditions into the interior of the colony.³⁷ Illustrations of natural history curiosities were, for Macquarie, equally relevant as arguments for colonial progress and substance, with the added lustre, too, that such interesting natural history specimens were discovered by an expedition he had initiated.

      It is perhaps surprising that Macquarie did not exploit John Lewin’s series of watercolors made on the Governor’s triumphal march across the Blue Mountains in 1815, given the significance of the Bathurst Plains to the future of the colony. Lewin’s vision, shaped by his training as a natural history illustrator, was determinedly literal, despite the selection of views in the 15 surviving watercolors being decided by Macquarie’s enthusiasm for dramatic or picturesque vistas or views encountered on the expedition. Lewin’s capacity to capture the form and texture of the bush the expedition passed through could not be rivalled by other colonial artists at the time. Yet when the French expedition artist, Alphonese Pellion published in 1822 his view of Cox’s Pass, Passage de Cox dans les Montagnes-Bleues, creates an image of picturesque grandeur. By contrast, Lewin’s plain watercolor of the road does not celebrate the achievement of its construction in the same way that Pellion does. It is a much more modest image with little sense of the drama of the road, and is more aligned to his training as an illustrator.³⁸

Intriguingly, Macquarie’s most significant act of patronage involved Government House which he appears to have had decorated with paintings of Aboriginal people and natural history specimens. An 1815 visitor described its interior as “spacious and well fitt’d up with drawings of full length representations of the original Natives & their Customs, likewise representations in full size of different kinds of Fish and Birds peculiar to the Country.”³⁹ The centerpiece was unquestionably Lewin’s 15 feet by 18 feet painting of a corrobboree [Aboriginal dance ceremony], painted in 1812 (now lost), which according to Macquarie hung in the dining room. Its ambition was rhetorical rather than ethnographic (although the figures were said to be from life), with a design which was “symbolical of the Christian religion inviting [Aboriginal people] to happiness.” The design reflected the Macquaries’ belief in the importance of Christianity in resolving the purported disadvantage of Aboriginal people: “calm Religion’s genuine Voice” pouring “into darken’d Minds her lucid Rays” as Michael Massey Robinson put it, in his Ode for the Queen’s Birth Day, 1811, which was a possible inspiration for the composition.⁴⁰ Displaying Aboriginal “primitiveness” within the epicenter of colonial administration was an implicit contrast to the opportunities offered by Christianity and colonization: these paintings illustrated the base from which English civilization would lift them.

      Corroborees intrigued Europeans. The dramatic plate Corrobborree or Dance of the Natives of New South Wales – in Wallis’s An historical account of the colony of NSW – was a savage counterpoint to the triumphs of civilization. Wallis noted that “the beauty of the scenery, the pleasing reflection of the light from the fire round which they dance, the grotesque and singular appearance of the savages, and their wild notes of festivity” contrasted with anything ever witnessed in “civilized society”.⁴¹ This plate, and its large companion oil, Corrobboree at Newcastle (Dixson Galleries), were both the work of Lycett. While the oil is explicitly romantic with its cloudy moonlight over Nobby’s Head, trees illuminated from below by the many fires, and allusions to the work of Lycett’s fellow English Midlander artist Joseph Wright of Derby, it is also thoroughly documentary, recording in detail various dances and ceremonies, even if some would not have been performed near others or even publicly. Lycett was a careful observer, whose watercolors, prints and paintings of Awabakal culture are well detailed. Indeed Shane Frost argues that Lycett’s major series of 20 watercolors largely of Newcastle, now known as the Lycett Album (National Library of Australia), must have been created with the co-operation of the Awabakal people, given his apparently easy access to their ceremonies and traditional cultural practices.⁴²

      However for most of the early decades of the nineteenth century, Aboriginal people were moved to the margins of images, or in canoes on the harbor, but now rarely, unless painted by exploring expedition artists framing them as ethnographic objects, in the center of images as subjects in their own right. Their apparent absence is perhaps an inverse reaction to the violence and conflict on the boundaries of European expansion. Judge Barron Field described this de-centering in the 1820s as giving a “locality to the land, [whose] honest naked simplicity affords a relief to the eye from the hypocritical lour of the yellow-clad convict”.⁴³ The 1790s interest in portraits of individuals, and documentation of traditional life, did not carry on into the nineteenth century.

It was really only in the late 1810s that images of Aboriginal people became commercially available through convict artist Richard Browne. Browne had been sent to Newcastle in 1811, and returned to Sydney in 1817. During his time in Newcastle