The presence of absence: Tommy McRae and Judy Watson in Australia, the imaginary grandstand at the Royal Academy in London

Abstract

Detail of Tommy McRae, Corroboree or William Buckley and Dancers from the Wathaurong People, c. 1890, ink on paper. University of Melbourne Archives.

Nineteenth-century Indigenous art is remarkably absent from Australian contributions to World Art history. This close reading of Tommy McRae's drawings of a Victorian ‘Corroboree after Seeing Ships for the First Time’ argues that the presences and absences in Australian art history are epitomized in these nineteenth-century Indigenous works. The influence of photography and popular press imagery on McRae's representations of ceremony is analysed. How renderings of figure and ground bring colour and race into the very material support of his drawings is explored. The reverse assimilation of the ‘wild white man’ William Buckley is assessed in regard to the proto-national apparel in the colonial space that McRae illustrates. The reassessment of this early Aboriginal artist is framed by the exhibition of his work in London at the Royal Academy in 2013. Comparisons with Eugene von Guérard and William Barak are made in the visual analysis. The significance of the reception of the Australia exhibition as imaginary grandstand for the nation is further highlighted through Judy Watson's fire and water sculpture.

Keywords:

• nineteenth century
• Australian Aboriginal art
• exhibition history

Notes on contributor

Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll is an Austrian-Australian art historian, artist and curator. She is the author most recently of Art in the Time of Colony, a history of Australian art. She holds a British Academy Newton Fellowship at Cambridge University and a PhD from Harvard University. Her recent exhibitions include Botanical Drift at Kew Gardens London, Allegory of the Cave Painting at Kunstal Antwerp, 40,000 Years of Modern Art: A re-enactment at the Institute of Contemporary Art London, The Making-of Skins Cloak at the National Museum of Australia, and Rise and fall at the Marrakech Biennale. She is currently a Humboldt Fellow in Berlin writing her second book, on the repatriation of material culture from museums. For more information see: www.kdja.org

Notes

1. Author's correspondence with Judy Watson, December 2013.

2. Though it is typical, Kathleen Soriano says, as ‘making exhibitions on the scale of the Royal Academy's main galleries is not an easy thing to do. In my first four years I “lost” nearly a show a year, which is an indication of how one's best-laid plans can still go awry – for all sorts of reasons including war, politics, diva-like behaviour, gazumping by other institutions, or simply being thwarted by the lack of availability of loans.' Interview with the author, 31 March 2014.

3. This information was made public and discussed at ‘Art and Diplomacy II’, a symposium at Kings College London, 4 November 2013.

4. This is taken from an explanation sought for the Royal Academy for why they did not mount Judy Watson's work; email to the author, 31 March 2014.

5. Interview with Soriano, op cit.

6. Soriano justifies this order of things by saying that for ‘the visitor encountering the art for the first time, they needed to know what came before in order to understand the present’. Interview with the author, 31 March 2014.

7. This is a much-expanded version of a paper I gave at Sketch at the event entitled ‘Cafe Intellectual: Reading Robert Hughes’, curated by The Field (Katrina Schwarz and Elizabeth Stanton) in November 2013 as part of The Royal Academy's programme to accompany the Australia exhibition.

8. A full study of the reception of Australia in the press, compared with other exhibitions such as the 1923 Royal Academy exhibition, was written as a Master's thesis in 2013 by journalist Paula Totaro. This was a challenging project, especially considering the fact that the racism expressed in the analysis of Indigenous visual culture became outspoken in reviews such as Brian Sewell's for the London Evening Standard. He wrote, ‘The exhibition is divided into five sections, of which the first is Aboriginal Art – but of the present, not the distant past, at last “recognised as art, not artefact”. By whom, I wonder? For these examples of contemporary aboriginal work are so obviously the stale rejiggings of a half-remembered heritage wrecked by the European alcohol, religion and servitude that have rendered purposeless all relics of their ancient and mysterious past. Swamped by Western influences, corrupted by a commercial art market as exploitative as any in Europe and America, all energy, purpose and authenticity lost, the modern Aboriginal Australian is not to be blamed for taking advantage of the white man now with imitative decoration and the souvenir. The black exploits the white's obsession with conspicuous display and plays on the corporate guilt that he has now been taught to feel for the ethnic cleansing of the 19th century – a small revenge for the devastation of his culture – but the Aborigine offers only a reinvented past, his adoption of “whitefella” materials and, occasionally, “whitefella” ideas (Jackson Pollock must surely lie behind the longest of these canvases) undoing his “blackfella” integrity'; see http://www.standard.co.uk/goingout/exhibitions/australia-royal-academy--exhibition-review-8826000.html (accessed 19 September 2013). I thank Ellen Smith for bringing this to my attention.

9. Jacques Lacan writes of this kind of strategy as mimicry, which ‘reveals something in so far as it is distinct from what might be called an itself that is behind. The effect of mimicry is camouflage. It is not a question of harmonizing with the background, but against a mottled background, of becoming mottled – exactly like the technique of camouflage practised in human warfare' (Lacan 1998: 95–6).

10. In a short section about the parts of the ‘colonial economy’ in which the Kulin participated, this and seasonal farm work is mentioned by Isabel Ellender and Peter Christiansen (2001: 60). The Kulin called the birds by the onomatopoeic name of ‘bullen-bullen’, based on the sound the lyrebirds made while dancing around.

11. Simon Wonga was one of the founding members and the leader of the Coranderrk community until his death in 1875 (this, as Kean says, is ‘in Lyrebird country, near current day Healesville’).

12. He writes ‘they arrived in Melbourne … in a good state of preservation, which is somewhat astonishing considering that the “blackfellow” carried them on his back by day wrapped in the opossum-skin, while by night he had to protect them from the wild cats and other animals' (Becker 1856: 154).

13. John Kean, ‘An Ornithological Encounter, 4 September 1857 Melbourne’, The Empirical Eye, unpublished manuscript.

14. Author's interview with Lindy Allen (Senior Curator of Indigenous Cultures at Museum Victoria), Melbourne, 10 January 2008; see Willis 2004. For further information on this case and for the illustration I am grateful to Mark Nesbitt, curator, Economic Botany Collection, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

15. Kerr's photographs are reproduced and analysed in Lydon 2005.

16. In her Dictionary of Australian Art Online entry, Mary Eagle speculates that his ships (Figure 1) are copied from Corowa Free Press.

17. There is of course a highly differentiated history in which the experiments in photography and lithography during the 1920s and 1930s developed into professional fields later in the century. This is a topic on which several art histories have been written, including Bann 2001 and Graburn 1976.

18. Corroborees have been enacted for white audiences since first contact. George Augustus Robinson was frequently invited to witness them for what could be interpreted as political purposes; see Edmonds 2007.

19. Jane Lydon (2005: 148) is critiquing primarily the Corranderrk photoshoots and their misunderstanding of the vital characteristics of the traditional performances.

20. Mrs G.C. Kilborn reports that Tommy made several trips to Melbourne driving stock to market (Barrett 1935: 86–8).

21. National Gallery catalogue, http://cs.nga.gov.au/Detail-LRG.cfm?IRN=2490 (accessed 1 January 2014).

22. Buckley's version is published (Morgan 1979); this was not the only white man who was recognized to be the returned spirit of a known Indigenous person.

23. C.H.T. Costantini's ‘William Buckley’, 6 feet × 6¾ inches. Buckley lived for 30 years among the natives of Port Philip, 1837. See also Frederick Woodhouse's ‘The First Settlers Discover Buckley’, 1861, oil on canvas, State Library of Victoria; O.R. Campbell's ‘Buckley Discovering Himself to the Early Settlers’, 1869, colour wood engraving on paper, National Portrait Gallery, Canberra; and Henricus van den Houten's ‘Batman's First Meeting with Buckley and the Blacks’, painted in 1878.

24. Wilhelm von Blandowski, caption to Plate 100 in Australien in 142 Photographischen Abbildungen, 1862, at: http://haddon.archanth.cam.ac.uk/collection-development/library-online/blandowskipublscans (accessed 7 November 2013).

25. The Austrian-born, German-trained academic painter Eugene von Guérard might also be considered in relation to the melancholic aesthetic of Australian literature explored in Ellen Smith and John Kean's research; see also Tipping 1982.

26. Nicholas Thomas has criticized the association of the possibly separate stories that appear on a single page of McRae drawings, such as Figure 1: ‘It is not even clear that these images are intended to constitute one composition (the ship in the distance, as it were, in relation to the ceremony in the foreground)’. So while a European viewer, or perhaps any late twentieth-century viewer conscious of ongoing debates about colonial first contact, would see the juxtaposition of a custom emblematic of traditional life and the vessel bearing colonists as suggesting a larger historical burden, ‘it is not clear that the evocation of a fatal contrast was present to McRae's intentions at all’ (Thomas 1996).

27. Mountford then gave crayons to the Ngatatjara people so that he could connect the earlier drawings to crayons he then had the Ngatatjara draw for him (Mountford 1976: 94). Fred Myers, and more recently Phillip Jones, have researched the crayon drawings that were collected by the anthropologist Norman Tindale and are now in the South Australia Museum (author's interview with Fred Myers, 15 April 2007, New York City; author's interview with Phillip Jones, 10 August 2007, Adelaide). Howard Morphy's discovery of a collection of hundreds of Indigenous children's drawings from Carrolup held in the Collegiate University Museum are another set of these kinds of drawing that were recently also repatriated to Western Australia (author's interview with Gaye Sculthorpe). See also Felicia Lee, ‘Surprise Return for Lost Visions’, New York Times, 17 August 2005.

28. Geoffrey Bardon, the art teacher who encouraged this movement in Papunya, his successors, and the artists they managed has most recently been the subject of Johnson 2008. Papunya Tula artists first painted on small boards, approximately the size of the proclamation board, taken from doors and other abandoned parts of the local surrounds.

29. Filmed and shown by Howard Morphy, ‘En-Minding the Body – Yolngu art and the creation of self’, paper presented at ‘Image as Embodiment: Cross-disciplinary Perspectives – A Research Symposium’, Sainsbury Research Unit for the Arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas, Norwich, 9 November 2007.

30. This is the second page of the sketchbook now held in the National Museum of Australia.

31. Andrew Sayers wrote a historiography of the display and study of Yakaduna/Tommy McRae in the twentieth century, titled ‘The Dawn of Art’ (Sayer 1994: 85–9).

32. In Corowa on 8 February 2009, I left the historical society with the president Val Swasbrick as she carried the last McRae original off to be stored in a vault in Albury. At the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, I was not granted access to the originals at all. They have meanwhile been put online.

33. Berlo and McMaster, ‘Encyclopaedias of Experience: A Curatorial Dialogue on Drawing and Drawing Books’, in Berlo 1996: 19–25, esp. 20 and 24.

34. Interview with Nerissa Broben, curator at the Koori Heritage Trust, 29 February 2008.

35. Janet Berlo, in ‘Drawing and Being Drawn In: The Late Nineteenth-Century Plains Indian Graphic Artists and the Intercultural Encounter’ (1996: 13), explores the ‘perverse paradox’ of US military men's interest in Native American art. See also Berlo and McMaster, ‘Encyclopaedias of Experience’ (Berlo 1996: 20–22), for a critique of nostalgia in this context.

36. ‘George McMahon had ten of the paintings, all of which have now been sold. He worked for the Customs on the Murray River between Victoria and New South Wales for a few years. Truth be known, it was probably Grandma [Phoebe Bell Godkin] who paid for them as she had recently received money from her father's estate in New Zealand.’ Wally McMahon (grandson of George McMahon), email message to author, 25 January 2009. Phoebe Bell Godkin was named after the Phoebe Bell ship on which her parents met.

37. ‘Tommy McRae’, Corowa Historical Society wall text, 2009.

38. Information given by Thomas Darragh to the author, Melbourne, 30 January 2009; see also Darragh 1990, 1995.

39. Sayers 1994: 93. Notably, the Internet has made these drawings more available to the public than any obscure displays of which they were previously a part. I will therefore refer to their websites throughout while I describe not the mediated drawings but the originals that I saw. For Oscar's 1898 sketchbook, see Oscar's Sketchbook, National Museum Australia, at: http://www.nma.gov.au/collections/collection_interactives/oscars_sketchbook/.

40. Cooper, ‘Traditional Visual Culture (Sayers 1994: 92).

41. Katie Langloh Parker (1856–1940) ‘collected’ ‘Australian legendary tales: folklore of the Noongahburrahs as told to the Piccaninnies’ and ‘Illustrations by a native artist’ (these were McRae's drawings). She published them in London and Melbourne, with D. Nutt and Melville, Mullen & Slade, in 1897. A sequel, with drawings, appeared as K. Langloh Parker, More Australian Legendary Tales (1898).

42. Argus Camera Supplement, 8 June 1929.

43. The Monthly review focused on the lighting of the exhibition in its criticism that blamed Australian art historians for the poor conception of Australia. Peter Conrad, ‘“Australia” at the Royal Academy, London’, The Monthly December 2013, No. 96.

44. ‘I remember how broken-hearted Tommy was when his children were sent to Koondrook. He came to the house, and, with tears, begged my father to use his influence to allow him to keep the children’ (cited in Barrett 1935: 87). ‘Between 1890 and 1897, however, all of his children were taken from him under government regulations and sent to various reserves in Victoria. He turned to Kilborn to prevent these seizures but without success' (Sayers 1994: 257).