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were perfectly suited to colonists more interested in curiosity than science.47

      Perhaps the most splendid celebration of colonial natural history were Captain James Wallis’s two Collector’s Chests (both now held in the State Library of NSW). Wallis commissioned the chests, and strategically gifted one to Governor Macquarie. The chests, decorated with painted panels, were inspired by military campaign furniture. Stuffed with locally collected birds, insects, shells and coral, the specimens were carefully arranged in spectacularly colorful patterns in specially-built drawers. The paintings on panels of the chests, mainly views of and around the settlement of Newcastle, were executed by Joseph Lycett. The largest painting, on the two flaps of the uppermost internal box, depict an arrangement of local fish, arranged very much like a still life portrait of dead game, such as one might see in any number of English country houses.48 Lewin had also painted Fish Catch at Dawes Point (Art Gallery of South Australia), a similar, though larger and independent image, probably made around the same time. These celebrations of natural history were very much part of the cultural colonization of NSW, in which nature was co-opted into a representation of the colony as engagingly exotic and ultimately desirable country.

      For Wallis, the Chests encapsulated his Newcastle experiences: in a brief memoir of his time at the settlement, Wallis reflected on his pleasure in living at Newcastle, his friendship with Burigon, the leader of the local Awabakal people, and his delight in fishing and kangaroo hunting – very much the pursuits of an English gentleman. Wallis recalled the thrill of the chase, the accumulation of trophies, and the brotherhood of the hunt, although in this case the companions “ministering to my pleasures” were “an honest and brave Scotch Sergeant” and the “King of Newcastle”, Burigon. Lycett perhaps included these two men in his Inner View of Newcastle, ca.1818 (Newcastle Art Gallery), as a kind of biographical signature for Wallis, who remembered Burigon “with more kindly feelings than I do of many of my own color, kindred & nation,” a sentiment which suggests the complexity of indigenous relations, given Wallis’s complicity in the Appin massacre of 1816.49

      By the 1820s, it seems that the inventiveness and ambition of the sorts of unique responses to colonial life typified by Wallis’s patronage had dissipated, becoming more conventional and contemporary. Colonists, for example, were early adopters of the idea of the panorama. In 1820 Alexander Riley, merchant and substantial landholder, argued that

      When Robert Burford’s panorama of Sydney was launched in London, in 1828, after drawings made by Augustus Earle, colonists were clear about its value as a political and economic manifesto, and as a prominent investment prospectus. The South East Asian Register of October 1827 offered “the thanks of the community, as their political friend.” Panoramas were read by contemporaries as a short-hand for mimetic truthfulness, yet the ambiguity of Sydney’s origins persistently undermined that authority. The Times, of 28 December 1828, wondered how Burford’s panorama of Sydney could illustrate one of the “finest spots in the universe” when by a “by a strange inconsistency” it was also the receptacle “of the very dregs of society.”

      The three plates of Major James Taylor’s aquatint panorama [The Town of Sydney, New South Wales], published in London in 1821, took Sydney into the nineteenth century world of the fashionably toned aquatint. Taylor’s busy composition, full of anecdote and detail, celebrated the success of a military town. The very masculine world depicted (there are only two women in the three prints) centers on the Military Hospital (now the SH Ervin Gallery on Observatory Hill). Behind the Hospital, bathed in a golden light symbolic of the town’s virtue, is Sydney itself. Those troubling convicts are present, but are working productively, or sleeping compliantly, in the margins, just like rural laborers in English fields. This was all reassuring evidence of the conformity of Sydney to the idea of a typical English town, where criminals and the lower classes knew their place.

      On the other hand, Joseph Lycett’s best known work, Views in Australia, issued in London in parts between 1824 and 1825 illustrated both NSW and Tasmania in 50 plates. It is unclear how much involvement Lycett actually had in its creation or direction in London: its subject matter suggests that the Riley family, who had proposed a panorama in 1820, possibly helped shape its content, as three of their properties are illustrated. Views in Australia celebrated the colony’s potential for pastoral development, the growth and sophistication of its built infrastructure and the beauty of its landscapes. This coalition of interests was unique but, like the Taylor panorama, was very much designed to promote the colony as a valuable addition to the Empire, and a potential site of investment. That Views in Australia now included images chosen for their inherent beauty, rather than any productive or utilitarian purpose, and for their ability to conform to the aesthetics of desirable European landscapes indicates, too, how colonization was not only the physical subjugation of the landscape, but its intellectual and imaginative occupation as well.51

      The most interesting colonial artist of this period, Augustus Earle, arrived in Sydney in late 1825. An English-trained and well-traveled flâneur of peripheral cultures, Earle’s insightful observations of the peoples and places he encountered on his travels suggest his deep curiosity in people and their lives, which manifested itself in boldly designed and composed watercolors. Earle’s enjoyment in the documentation of everyday life, from bushranging to views of towns and landscapes always prominently inhabited by people, was a marked break with the conventional formality of depictions of the colony up until that time.

      In the three years Earle spent in Sydney his portraits were commissioned by the colonial elite. Subjects included Governor Thomas Brisbane and the leading colonial official Captain John Piper and his wife (Piper argued for his own family’s social pre-eminence by commissioning his portraits at the same size as the Governor’s). Earle opened Sydney’s first gallery, taught art and published the first pictorial lithographs in Australia. While his formal oil portraits lack character, his watercolors were sensitive and finely observed. His portrait, for example, of Desmond (National Library of Australia), an Awabakal or Worimi man, is perhaps one of the finest early nineteenth century colonial portraits, deeply imbued with life and insight.

      Few other colonial artists tackled the subject of convicts quite as directly as Earle in his lithograph A Government Jail Gang N.S. Wales, published in London in 1830. The lithograph was in part inspired by ubiquitous illustrations of street portraits of the urban poor and their unusual occupations.52 The exaggerated criminal physiognomy of Earle’s convicts locates them squarely within contemporary representations of the English underclass.

      Earle’s records of Aboriginal life could be either richly and sympathetically observed, like his exceptional portrait of Desmond, or tough, as with Natives of N.S. Wales as Seen on the Streets of Sydney, also published in London. In text describing this plate Earle attributes the circumstances of Aboriginal people to “the Whites locating so much [of their] land [which] has destroyed their hunting grounds and means of subsistence.”53 Earle well may have intended a dig at colonists by setting this view of Aboriginal dissolution outside a European pub, but most of his audience would have read the image in the context of English street literature and robust graphic art, which dissolved the issues of urban poverty into grotesque or picturesque subject matter.

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