of their experience and talent, and were using as their models poorly prepared specimens.
Midshipman George Raper’s drawings suggest the spontaneous and unstructured approach of colonial artists to their work. Closely observed and carefully rendered, yet flawed in their overall realization of the form and living shape of his subjects, his drawings often placed an animal next to a plant, with no obvious relationship between the two apart from their capacity to create strikingly graphic compositions. Raper titled his drawings generically: his watercolor of a kookaburra is simply Bird and Flowers of Port Jackson (Natural History Museum, London). These seem to be the work of a man whose enjoyment of natural history was about surface appearances, rather than a passion for science.
Of all the colonial artists, Thomas Watling was the most competent. Born in Scotland in 1762, Watling received enough training as an artist to articulate picturesque theory and confidently compose an image. In 1789 he was sentenced to 14 years transportation for forgery. Unhappy with his assignment to the “haughty despot”, John White, he compiled (in part by plagiarizing from a book about the United States) a small pamphlet which outlined his views on the pictorial potential of NSW, described his life in the colony, and announced a proposed publication of views of it.21 On the one hand Watling commended the luxuriant and flattering appearance of NSW, while on the other he complained of its scarcity of picturesque features such as bold rising hills or happily opposed off-scapes. If given the freedom to select and combine elements of its landscape – in other words engage his artistic imagination – he asserted he could have created satisfying works of art rather than the mere topographical records demanded of him by White.22
There is no doubt that Watling’s landscapes and portraits were considerably more sophisticated than those of the Port Jackson Painter, or George Raper. Watling’s control of perspective and scale mean that his drawings, such as the Natural History Museum’s A Partial-View of New South Wales, Facing to the North-West, present an ordered view of the settlement, within the formula of a conventional topographical drawing. By contrast the Port Jackson Painter’s busy landscapes, such as A View of Sydney Cove – Port Jackson March 7th 1792, threw an abundance of inconsistently scaled detail haphazardly across the page, although the irregularity was perhaps a more honest representation of the settlement than Watling’s neat composition.
In the foregrounds of both these images are Aboriginal people, whose presence is a reminder of the persistence of Aboriginal culture in NSW. Aboriginal people, who were a source of constant fascination to Europeans, were in part all the more intriguing because of their withdrawal from contact with them until September 1790. It was only the negotiations between the two communities which followed the spearing of Governor Phillip on 7 September at Manly Cove that re-established contact. The pressures on the Gadigal people since the First Fleet arrived were intense, rapid and devastating. The smallpox that swept across Sydney Harbour in early 1789 decimated them. Land and resources, for thousands of years occupied uncontested, were suddenly alienated. Spears, implements and canoes were stolen as souvenirs. The naval officer Daniel Southwell concluded that it must be a “heavy loss to these people when deprived [of their implements]; and there is much reason to conclude that the rage for curiosity; and the unjust methods made use of to obtain [souvenirs]” was a significant cause of the conflict between the two cultures.23
European responses to the Aboriginal peoples were complex and contradictory, but underlying nearly every interaction was an implicit belief in the inherent superiority of Christian European civilization and culture, and therefore the unthinking acceptance and endorsement of the inevitable alienation of Aboriginal land by Europeans without compensation or negotiation.
Contact between the colonists and the local people was resumed in late 1790 and the surviving drawings, mostly by the Port Jackson Painters, are from this period. About 15%, or 70 drawings, of the Watling collection are indigenous subjects but, unlike natural history drawings, they do not seem to have been copied, circulated or published in Europe.
The limitations of the Port Jackson Painters’ talents meant that their portraits lacked a pictorial language to create conventionally composed images. Formulaic landscapes, sparsely vegetated, often situated by water, and skies of soft evening light predominate: again these are not backgrounds created from original observation but are dropped in from what appears to be a bank of templates. Their elaborate descriptive titles and framing, in most cases, with formal ink wash borders or roundels suggest that the watercolors were to be treated more seriously than on-the-spot sketches. A portrait such as Balloderree (which must date after September 1790 but before his death in December 1791) matches David Collins’ assessment of him as a fine young man. Ballooderry’s strong torso, with its elegant markings, and his direct gaze create a sympathetic image, and it would seem that the artist has responded to a subject sitting in front of him.24
It is clear, however, that these are documentary illustrations rather conventional portraiture. The Port Jackson Painter captured general characteristics rather than attempting summations of personal character. Lengthy titles, named individuals, depictions of customs such as hunting and fishing, and an emphasis on material culture and tools and implements, reflect general colonial conversations about Aboriginal people, and can be matched to what was being written in journals and diaries. These were illustrations of a people being documented from a position of curiosity, power and authority. It was certainly not a dialogue or conversation. Carefully observed, but awkwardly executed, these images with their inexpertly rendered facial profiles and over-sized eyes, brought the same compromised gaze to the Eora, that the Port Jackson Painter brought to the colony’s natural history.
Two similar but not identical watercolors of the spearing of Governor Phillip in September 1790 illuminate some of these issues.25 The drawings closely align to the description of the immediate aftermath of the incident provided by Watkin Tench.26 Aboriginal men are fleeing into the bush, Phillip stands on the shore with Captain Waterhouse, attempting to extract the spear in his shoulder, and the only gun which worked has been fired. David Collins noted that the colonists had four guns with them: four guns are shown in the watercolors. These watercolors have a sense of being recreations of events of great local significance: they are minor history paintings no doubt composed from the stories later recounted by the participants.
Tench hoped that the rapprochement which emerged after the spearing of Phillip would lead to deeper understanding between the two cultures noting that “We gradually continued henceforth to gain knowledge of their customs and policy:– the only knowledge which can lead to a just estimate of national character.”27 Thomas Watling’s watercolors and pencil drawings, which date from late 1792, are as already been noted, more sophisticated than those of the Port Jackson Painter. His fluency with the basics of orthodox pictorial language mean that his portraits are much more conventional in their structure and realization: indeed Watling rarely diverted his practice to depicting customary activities or material culture. Yet despite Watling’s putative realism, his portrait of Colebee, whose face was “very thickly imprinted with the marks” of smallpox, reveals no evidence of the disease.28 Watling’s own views on Aboriginal people, which were not sympathetic, are not evident in these portraits, which reflect instead the sentiments of his employer, John White.
The frontispiece to the second volume of Collins’s An account of the English colony … (1802), A Night Scene in the Neighbourhood of Sydney, probably also based on drawings by Watling, is a romantic depiction of a group of Aborigines peaceably enjoying themselves by the light of the moon. In his preface to the volume, Collins wrote, “It were to be wished, that they never had been seen in any other state than … in the happy and peaceable exercise of their freedom and amusements.” Watling’s more literate compositions locate Aboriginal people within the language of European painting, recalling genre images of the picturesque rural poor by artists like Richard Westall and Francis Wheatley while at the same time playing on the nostalgia of dispossession.
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By 1800, as
