Relics of Encounter: Rapport and Trust in the Early Portraits of the Aborigines of New South Wales

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Notes

1. Thomas Watling, Letters from an Exile at Botany Bay, to his Aunt in Dumfries: Giving a Particular Account of the Settlement of New South Wales, with the Customs and Manners of the Inhabitants, (Sydney: University of Sydney Library, 1999).

2. Watling, Letters from an Exile, np.

3. For a discussion of the emergence of the ‘comic’ savage see Bernard Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific, 2^nd edn (Sydney: Harper & Row, 1985), 169–177.

4. For a discussion of the shift towards more racist imagery in the late 1830s, see Elisabeth Findlay, ‘Peddling Prejudice: “A Series of Twelve Profile Portraits of the Aborigines of New South Wales”‘, Postcolonial Studies: Culture, Politics, Economy 16, no. 1 (2013): 2–27. See also Sasha Grishin, ‘Realism, Caricature and Phrenology: Early Depictions of the Indigenous Peoples of Australia’, The World Upside Down: Australia 1788–1830 (Canberra: National Library of Australia, 2000), 13–19.

5. Geoffrey Dutton, White on Black: The Australian Aborigine Portrayed in Art (Melbourne: Macmillan in association with the Art Gallery Board of South Australia, 1974), 7.

6. Ian Donaldson and Tamsin Donaldson, eds, Seeing the First Australians (Sydney: George Allen & Unwin, 1985).

7. Inga Clendinnen, Dancing with Strangers: Europeans and Australians at First Contact (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Clendinnen views the mid-1790s as a point of decline, but here it will be argued that evidence of a relationship of trust can be seen in the images into the first years of the 1800s.

8. Grace Karskens, The Colony: A History of Early Sydney (Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2009).

9. See in particular Bronwen Douglas, ‘Voyages, Encounters, and Agency in Oceania: Captain Cook and Indigenous People’, History Compass 6, no. 3 (2008): 712–37 and ‘Introduction: Foreign Bodies in Oceania’, in Foreign Bodies: Oceania and the Science of Race 1750–1940, ed. Bronwen Douglas and Chris Ballard (Canberra: ANU EPress, 2008), 1–30; Shino Konishi, The Aboriginal Male in the Enlightenment World (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012); and Maria Nugent, ‘Encounters between Captain Cook and Indigenous People at Botany Bay in 1770’, History Compass 6, no. 2 (2008): 469–87.

10. Bernard Smith, ‘The First European Depictions’, in Seeing the First Australians, 21–34, 29.

11. For a discussion of the collection see Bernard Smith and Alwyne Wheeler, eds, Art of the First Fleet and Other Early Australian Drawings (Melbourne: Oxford University Press in association with the Australian Academy of the Humanities and the British Museum (Natural History), 1988); Bernard Smith, Imagining the Pacific in the Wake of Cook's Voyages (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); and Peter Emmett, Fleeting Encounters: Pictures and Chronicles of the First Fleet (Glebe: Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales, 1995). The collection includes a subset of works labelled ‘Banks Ms34’ because it was once part of Sir Joseph Banks's library. It is now known as the ‘Watling Collection’, but the title is again a misnomer because the work of other artists is catalogued within the group.

12. For a discussion of Watling see Hugh Gladstone, Thomas Watling Limner of Dumfries (Dumfries: Privately Published, 1938); Sasha Grishin, Australian Art: A History (Melbourne: Miegunyah Press, 2014), 42–44; and Rex Rienits and Thea Rienits, ‘Thomas Watling’, in Early Artists of Australia (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1963), 56–79.

13. In Letters from an Exile, he requested that his aunt in Scotland place an advertisement in a local paper for subscribers. He stated that ‘one or two years would return me back with as correct an history, and a faithful and finished a set of drawings of the picturesque, botanic, or animate curiosities of N. S. Wales, as has ever yet been received in England’. In the Dumfries Weekly Journal of 25 March 1794 he also placed an advertisement for subscribers to his work, which would include ‘native groupes (sic)’, and stated that he had already begun the book.

14. One of the most prominent figures from this period was Bennelong, but most of the images of him were made in England and therefore do not fit within the parameters of this paper on early settler/explorer imagery. The contrast between the images produced in London and those made in Australia is illuminating, and highlights how important the encounter space was. See Kate Fullager, ‘Bennelong from Res Nullius: the Decline of Savagery’, The Savage Visit: New World People and Popular Imperial Culture in Britain 1710–1795 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 177–87.

15. Keith Vincent Smith, Bennelong: The Coming In of the Eora: Sydney Cove 1788–1792 (East Roseville: Kangaroo Press, 2001).

16. Keith Vincent Smith, ‘Colebee’, Dictionary of Sydney (2008), http://trove.nla.gov.au/goto?i=article&w=163285966&d=http%3A%2F%2Fdictionaryofsydney.org%2Fentry%2Fcolebee.

17. Vincent Smith, Bennelong.

18. Rienits and Rienits, ‘Thomas Watling’, 56.

19. Bronwen Douglas, ‘“Novus Orbis Australis” in Foreign Bodies: Oceania and the Science of Race 1750–1940, ed. Bronwen Douglas and Chris Ballard (Canberra: ANU ePress), 99–155.

20. Konishi, The Aboriginal Male.

21. Watling, Letters from an Exile.

22. For a discussion of the Aboriginal attitudes to encounter and the place of imitation, see David Hansen, ‘Death Dance’, Australian Book Review (April 2007): 27–32; and Paul Carter, ‘Encounters’, in Fleeting Encounters, 16.

23. See Watling's Wear Rung Commonly Known by the Name of Mr Long and Karra Da who Exchanged Names with Captain Ball in the Natural History Museum in London (Watling Drawing, no. 36).

24. Watkin Tench, A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson (London: Nicol and Sewell, 1793), 139.

25. R. J. Lampert, ‘Aboriginal Life Around Port Jackson’, in Art of the First Fleet, 19–69.

26. Kathleen Wilson, ‘Breasts, Sodomy and the Lash: Masculinity and Enlightenment Aboard Cook's Voyages’, in The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Routledge, 2003), 169–200. See also Patty O’Brien's ‘The Gaze of the Ghosts: European Images of the Aboriginal Women in New South Wales and Port Phillip 1800–1860’, in ed. Jan Kociumbas. Maps, Dreams, History: Race and Representation in Australia (Sydney: Braxus Publishing, 1998); and ed. Jan Kociumbas, The Pacific Muse: Exotic Femininity and the Colonial Pacific (Washington: University of Washington Press, 2006).

27. Watling, Letters from an Exile.

28. Dutton, White on Black, 17. For a discussion of the complex and erratic writing in Watling's letters see Ross Gibson's publications: ‘This Prison this Language: Thomas Watling's “Letters from an Exile at Botany Bay”‘, in Island in the Stream: Myths of Place in Australian Culture, ed. Paul Foss (Leichhardt: Pluto Press, 1988), 4–28 and Ross Gibson, ‘“Each Wild Idea as It Presents Itself”: A Commentary on Thomas Watling's Letters from an Exile at Botany Bay’, in South of West: Postcolonialism and the Narrative Construction of Australia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 19–41.

29. See Gibson, ‘This Prison this Language’, 4–28 and Gibson, ‘“Each Wild Idea as It Presents Itself”‘, 19–41.

30. Smith, European Vision, 160.

31. Smith, European Vision, 162.

32. See Elisabeth Findlay, Arcadian Quest: William Westall's Australian Sketches (Canberra: National Library of Australia, 1998); T. M. Perry and Donald H. Simpson, eds, Drawings by William Westall (London: Royal Commonwealth Society, 1962); Richard J. Westall, ‘William Westall in Australia’, Art and Australia, vol. 20, no. 2 (1992): 252–56.Jacqueline Bonnemains, Elliott Forsyth and Bernard Smith, eds, Baudin in Australian Waters: the Artwork of the French Voyage of Discovery to the Southern Lands 1800–1804 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press in Association with the Australian Academy of the Humanities, 1988).

33. His sitters are not identified, partly because these works do not appear to have been made for official purposes or publication, but they can still be classified as portraits because of the focus on capturing individual detail.

34. See Jean Fornasiero and John West-Sooby, ‘Taming the Unknown: The Representation of Terra Australis by the Baudin Expedition 1801–1803’, in Encountering Terra Australis, ed. Jean Fornasiero, Peter Monteath and John West-Sooby (Kent Town: Wakefield Press, 2004), 71.

35. Keith Vincent Smith has argued that the Westall image is of Colebee; see Keith Vincent Smith, ‘Port Jackson People’, National Library of Australia News 15, no. 9 (July 2005): 7–9.

36. John O’Leary, ‘“Unlocking the Fountain of the Heart”: Settler Verse and the Politics of Sympathy’, Postcolonial Studies 13, no. 1 (2010): 55–70.

37. Rhys Jones, ‘Images of Natural Man’, in Baudin in Australian Waters, 35–64; and Philip Jones, ‘In the Mirror of Contact: Art of the French Encounters’, in The Encounter, 1802: Art of the Flinders and Baudin Voyages, ed. Sarah Thomas (Adelaide: Art Gallery of South Australia, 2002), 164-175.

38. Howard Morphy, ‘Encountering Aborigines’, in The Encounter, 1802,153–54.

39. Morphy, The Encounter, 1802.

40. For a discussion of Cuvier see Bronwen Douglas, ‘Climate to Crania: Science and the Racialization of Human Difference’, in Foreign Bodies, 33–96; Martin J. S. Rudwick, Georges Cuvier, Fossil Bones and Geological Catastrophes (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1997); and Bernard Smith, Imagining the Pacific (Carlton: Melbourne University Press at the Miegunyah Press, 1992), 186–87.

41. The original image is three-quarter length and is held in the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle, Le Havre. This image, in which the damning letterpress is added, is engraved by E. Piper.

42. Philip Jones, The Encounter, 1802, 172.

43. Karskens, The Colony, 41.

44. See Bernard Smith, The Spectre of Truganini, 1980 Boyer Lectures transcript (Sydney: The Australian Broadcasting Commission, 1980), 17–18.

45. Karskens, The Colony.

46. O’Leary, ‘“Unlocking the Fountain of the Heart”‘, 68.