argument is extended in his Living in a New Country (1992) in which Carter argues that later colonial artists such as von Guérard did not simply reproduce views but “consciously attempt[ed] to construct spaces that could be visualized” (Carter 1992, 61).
A post-colonialist emphasis on spaces of encounter and exchange further contributed to revisionist readings of Indigenous agency in colonial art. In her analysis of Joseph Lycett’s watercolors of the Awakabal people, Jeanette Hoorn has argued that the artist “presents an image of a people in possession and full enjoyment of their land”, providing visual evidence against the doctrine of terra nullius, which had recently been overturned as a justification for colonization by the Mabo decision of the High Court of Australia in 1992 (Hoorn 2005a, 128). Concentrating on the colonial corroboree genre, exemplified in Lycett’s Corroboree at Newcastle, Anita Callaway and Candace Bruce have demonstrated that such paintings are highly charged representations of the cross-cultural encounter (Callaway and Bruce 1991). Reevaluating the landscape paintings of Augustus Earle, a traveling artist of empire who resided in Australia in the 1820s, Leonard Bell has suggested that his Waterfall in Australia (1826–1827) challenges the conventions of typical colonial imagery of sublime scenery. Rather than representing Earle’s visual mastery, possession, and control over the Australian landscape, Bell contends he depicts himself as an intermediary figure on the threshold of a very different experience of knowledge and place. More recently, David Hansen has cautioned against the academic deconstruction that tends to inform art historical revisionism of race relations within the colonial encounter describing it as “a killing field of theory, a terra nullius where imported European aesthetic stock – the Picturesque, the Sublime, the Grotesque, the Melancholy – may safely graze” (Hansen 2010, 47–48).
Beyond a reevaluation of the colonial encounter, an array of scholarship has explored the broad range of visual culture tendencies of the colonial era, resulting in foundational reference works in the field of colonial photography such as The Mechanical Eye in Australia: Photography 1841–1900 (1985) by the photographic historians Alan Davies and Peter Stanbury and Shades of Light: Photography and Australia 1839–1988 (1988) by Gael Newton, as well as in the field of colonial design, most notably, Terrence Lane and Jessie Serle’s Australians at Home. A Documentary History of Australian Domestic Interiors from 1788 to 1914 (1990). One of the most instrumental works to emerge in this context was the Dictionary of Australian Artists: Painters, Sketchers, Photographers and Engravers to 1870 (1992) edited by art and architectural historian Joan Kerr.9The first book to embrace amateur colonial art, it was significant in diffusing the canon and promoting women and aboriginal artists. Similar to William Moore’s The Story of Australian Art (1934) in its pluralistic content culled from a wide variety of sources, Kerr’s Dictionary challenged the linear and ordered narratives of dominant art historical writing, providing an effective alternative model for evaluating Australian visual culture (Peers 2011, 2–3). Anita Callaway’s Visual Ephemera: Theatrical Art in Nineteenth-Century Australia (2000) is one of the most important works to emerge from Kerr’s non-canonical approach. Focusing on ephemeral forms such as transparencies, tableaux, panoramas and theatrical scenery traditionally overlooked in mainstream histories, Callaway examines how such works were “particularly significant” in Australia “as the chief disseminators of High Art imagery, albeit in a Low Art guise” in a carnivalesque system that was a peculiarly Australian cultural process (Callaway 2000 iv, x).
Kerr’s Dictionary also contributed to the feminist narrative of retrieval in works such as Strange Women: Essays in Art and Gender (1994), edited by Jeannette Hoorn, which contains a number of essays that explore the estrangement of women from the landscape and their exclusion from the formation of an Australian identity at the end of the nineteenth century. Hoorn’s compendium was followed by Heritage: The National Women’s Art Book, 500 Works by 500 Women Artists from Colonial Times to 1955 (1995) and Past Present: The National Women’s Art Anthology (1999), both edited by Joan Kerr with the latter also by Jo Holder. Kerr’s continued promotion of amateur art also informs Caroline Jordan’s Picturesque Pursuits: Colonial Women Artists and the Amateur Tradition (2005), which explores the feminine practices of portrait, flower, and landscape painting as critical in forging social networks on a familial, community, and national level while fostering an aesthetic connection to the Australian environment.
The significance of networks of immigrant and traveling artists, amateurs, and designers both within the Pacific Rim and the British Empire in the development of colonial Australian visual culture has figured prominently in more recent research, notably Exiles & Emigrants: Epic Journeys to Australia in the Victorian Era (NGV, 2005), an exhibition curated by Patricia MacDonald and Art and the British Empire (2007), edited by Tim Barringer, Geoff Quilley, and Douglas Fordham. In Images of the Pacific Rim: Australia and California, 1850–1935 (2010), Erika Esau explores the cultural economy of photography, commercial design, and cinema in these two regions, which was governed by “aesthetic exchange dependent on itinerancy, reproducibility and portability” (Esau 2010, 17–18). Itinerancy is also a major theme in Geoffrey Batchen’s reevaluation of colonial Australian photography in an essay for the survey exhibition The Photograph and Australia (Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) 2014), which focuses on the relationship between the photograph as a material object and the circulation of its photographic image, or immaterial double. Batchen argues for a revised history of Australian photography “built around the logic of immigration and dissemination” (Batchen 2015, 264).
In the past two decades a number of monographic exhibitions have also contributed substantially to the expanding discourse of colonial art history. John Glover and the Colonial Picturesque (2004) curated by David Hansen, then Senior Curator at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, combined the artist’s Aboriginal and pastoral landscapes of Tasmanian scenery with paintings produced in Britain prior to his emigration to demonstrate his constructed vision of Australia as an antipodean arcadia that merged Claudean convention with the empiricism of natural history to cater to contemporary taste. The theme of the immigrant artist looking simultaneously back to Europe and forward to Australia also informed the 2011 NGV exhibition, Eugene von Guérard: Nature Revealed. Focusing on von Guérard’s ambition to present the wondrous environment of Australia to the public, while maintaining an absolute fidelity to nature, this retrospective explored the influence of contemporary theories of natural science, particularly Alexander von Humboldt’s directive to artists to depict plants contextually in their local ecosystems, on von Guérard’s Australian landscapes.10
Lewin: Wild Art (State Library of New South Wales [SLNSW], 2012) and its accompanying catalogue Mr. J.W. Lewin, Painter and Naturalist by Mitchell Librarian Richard Neville similarly explores the impact of the natural sciences on the career of Australia’s first professional artist, John William Lewin. Neville reveals how Lewin, schooled in generic natural history illustration “unexpectedly discovered his own visual language” not only through precise observations of Australian vegetation but through his emotional and physical investment in his new home (Neville 2012, 9). Most recently in Australian Sketchbook: Colonial Life and the Art of S.T. Gill (State Library of Victoria [SLVIC], 2015) curator Sasha Grishin, presents S.T. Gill, famed for his 1850s lithographs of the Victorian goldfields and his frank portrayals of prospectors, larrikins, and swagmen, as “Australia’s first painter of modern life” through his interrogation of Australian society and its values. Gill, according to Grishin, was also the first to invent the Australian character of the digger: “tough, resilient, resourceful, possessing a dry humour, one who was true to his mates, but intolerant of all forms of authority, humbug and institutionalized religion” (Grishin conversation 2015). This quintessential type, he contends, was subsequently built upon by the artists of The Bulletin and appropriated by the myth-making nationalist campaign to commemorate Australia’s soldiers in the Great War.
The rediscovery of the wealth and diversity of colonial visual culture challenged the orthodox view that a distinctive Australian art only began with the Heidelberg School in the 1880s, a myth that arose against the backdrop of nationalism and federalism in
