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 he made a series of portraits of mainly Awabakal and Worimi people. These portraits appear to verge on caricature, which is how they were often read, but they also focused on the careful delineation of material culture. They present as a mixture of ethnography and caricature, which was in part exacerbated by Browne’s limited capacity for figure drawing. Essentially a purveyor of tourist pictures, Browne maintained a stock range of about ten images of Aboriginal people, as well as animals like kangaroos and emus, from which patrons could select copies: multiples of these now held in collections around the world. These were either images of generic curiosity, similar to the many plate books illustrating exotic native costumes published in Europe in the nineteenth century, fetishizing the difference, or illustrations with a moral or social purpose: the missionary William Walker Browne, for example, sent Browne’s Bruair to colleagues in London as a “representation of female wretchedness” that required their support.44
The first free artist to migrate to New South Wales was the 30-year-old natural history illustrator and printmaker John William Lewin, who set out for NSW, according to his brother, so that his illustrations could be drawn “on the spot, and not from dry specimens, or notes still more abstruse.”45 Lewin arrived in Sydney in 1800 and died in the town in 1819. He noted that his first challenge was that “everything was contrary to known knowledge in England.”46
Perhaps it was this difficulty that propelled Lewin’s sudden stylistic development. Within months of arriving in Sydney his insects and birds are depicted in their natural environments, and composed dynamically, with the supporting foliage – often laid down in bold diagonals – occupying the page to its edges. Vegetation is as carefully detailed as the subject itself. His White-naped honeyeater (NLA) of 1800, with the xanthorrhoea flower bisecting the middle of the page from top to bottom, is nothing like his previous and more conventional European work, and was an entirely original design solution. It was a truly significant break with the traditions in which he had been trained, and anticipates the work of artists like John James Audubon or John Gould.
Lewin’s ambition was to publish illustrated natural history books, and his first years in NSW were spent preparing Prodromus Entomology; or, a natural history of the lepidopterous insects of New South Wales (London, 1805) and Birds of New Holland (London, 1808), neither of which did well in a European market depressed by the Napoleonic wars: and indeed copies of Birds of New Holland were probably destroyed in transit from London to Sydney. His third attempt at publishing, Birds of New South Wales, was printed in Sydney in 1813 by the Government Printer, George Howe. This edition, the first illustrated book published in Australia, was compiled from rejected plates from Birds of New Holland, and only thirteen copies have survived. Its basic text betrays Lewin’s inability to write the new language of science, but the dynamic quality of its plates, and the specificity of his observations, reveals his strength as a natural history illustrator.
By 1810, Lewin seems to have abandoned any idea of serial publishing or illustration. Instead he turned in part (he also offered art classes, opened a general store, and ran a public house) to larger scale watercolors of well-known exotic or curious plants and animals, designed to be hung on a wall rather than to sit in a portfolio. Subjects included platypuses, Gymea lilies, waratahs [small trees], swamp lilies and brush turkeys: but they were
