Peddling prejudice: A Series of Twelve Profile Portraits of Aborigines of New South Wales

Abstract

This paper examines the production and market for portraits of Aborigines in early colonial New South Wales. The discussion centers on a group of prints published in Sydney in 1836 under the title A Series of Twelve Profile Portraits of Aborigines of New South Wales. Various versions of these portraits were issued over several years and it will be argued that the changes made to each successive edition increasingly pandered to the prejudices of settler society. The paper will propose that the first prints, in which the artist and the sitter had actually met, are relatively sensitive and are an example of how the Aborigines negotiated a place within colonial Sydney, even to the extent of using the print market to advance their own celebrity status. When, however, the original images were appropriated and altered by later artists, racist overtones came to the fore and we witness the harsh colonial realities of the Aborigines losing any vestiges of control over how they were depicted.

Notes

1. I am very grateful to Richard Neville from the Mitchell Library at the State Library of New South Wales for his detailed comments and corrections. I also want to thank David L Martin and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful and thought-provoking comments.

2. For a discussion of the early print industry in Australia see Roger Butler, ‘Lithographs: The First Twenty-Five Years’, in Printed Images in Colonial Australia, Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 2007, pp 98–143.

3. Tim Bonyhady, ‘Introduction’, in Tim Bonyhady and Andrew Sayers (eds), Heads of the People: A Portrait of Colonial Australia, Canberra: National Portrait Gallery, 2000, p 1.

4. The only significant writing on A Series of Twelve Profile Portraits of Aborigines of New South Wales is Richard Neville's entry in Design and Art Australian Online and a section in his unpublished Master of Arts thesis, as well as several pages in Roger Butler's Printed Images in Colonial Australia and Wantrup's Australian Rare Books 1788–1900, Potts Point, NSW: Hordern House, 1987.

5. It should be noted that there are even more versions of the profile portraits than discussed in this article. A couple of editions of the portraits were produced during the late 1830s and the first half of the 1840s. In 1840 William Baker produced a set of prints based on Fernyhough's 1836 work, although there are fewer copies of these than the Fernyhough/Austin versions. Extant copies of Baker's edition are in the State Library of New South Wales (DSM Q572.991 B); the National Gallery of Australia (back cover NGA 86.624); and the National Portrait Gallery (portrait of John Piper 1999.23.2). These are exact copies of Fernyhough's images but can be identified by the caption ‘Printed and Published by W. Baker King St Sydney’. See Australian (Sydney), 22 October 1840: ‘We have seen a few very faithfully and well executed lithographic likenesses of some ... aboriginal natives ... by Mr Baker of King St ...’. Baker was also responsible for a large, facsimile version of the portraits issued in the mid-1840s, which is close to double the size of the original images, measuring 43 x 32 cm, compared to 27 x 19 cm. See Wantrup, Australian Rare Books, p 300. This large version is in the National Library of Australia (Sref 994.40049915 F366). Many copies also included a list of newspaper reviews of the original publication. So excluding the hand-coloured versions, there are at least four versions: Fernyhough's and Austin's publication, Nicholas's and Barlow's, William Baker's set and his enlarged facsimile.

6. Leigh Boucher and Lynette Russell, ‘“Soliciting Sixpences from Township to Township”: Moral Dilemmas in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Melbourne’, Postcolonial Studies 15(2), 2012, pp 149–165.

7. Jane Lydon, Eye Contact: Photographing Indigenous Australians, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. Also see Ann Maxwell, Colonial Photography and Exhibition: Representations of the ‘Native’ and the Making of European Identities, London: Leicester University Press, 2000.

8. The first series that was issued in September 1836 only included eight men (Bungaree, Jemmy, Boardman, Cullabaa, Mickie, Toby, Bill Worrall and Tommy) and three women (Punch, Mary and Gooseberry), with an image of three Aborigines performing a corroboree on the back cover making up the twelfth image. When the portraits were re-issued in December of 1836, Piper was added to the set.

9. See advertisement in the Australian (Sydney), Friday 16 September 1836, p 3, col 4, announcing that the series would appear on the next Monday.

10. Australian (Sydney), 16 September 1836, p 2, col 4. The series was also reviewed in the Sydney Herald, 15 September 1836, p 2, col 3—‘certainly reflects much credit to all concerned in its production; the printing, is much better executed than any we have seen of this kind in Sydney’.

11. The Colonist, 22 September 1836, p 3.

12. The major sets of Fernyhough's A Series of Twelve Portraits of Aborigines of New South Wales are held in the following collections:

	British Library 1000.i.31, 10008.t.
	National Gallery of Australia NGA 86.624
	National Library of Australia SRef994.400049915 F366 (enlarged facsimile); FRM F2123; PIC S2293-S2305; PIC S2306-S2318; PIC U2181-U2193 NK590; PIC U2194-2220 NK2710
	National Portrait Gallery 1999.23.1-12
	State Library of New South Wales DSM Q572 991 1A5/B; Q572.991 1A1
	State Library of Victoria RARELT 572.9944 F39S

13. The National Library of Australia holds the greatest range of coloured prints.

14. The copy in the British Library (10008.t.21) was owned by Lady Franklin, with a note on the cover stating ‘This copy belonged to Lady Franklin and disposed of by her niece Miss Lefeuge.’ This is in keeping with Lady Franklin's collecting of portraits of the Tasmanian Aborigines.

15. See Richard Neville's entry on Fernyhough in Design and Art Australia Online.

16. For Fernyhough's biography see Neville, Design and Art Australia Online.

17. Their marriage notice appeared in The Colonist, on Thursday 3 November 1836, p 9—‘by the Rev. J. M. McGarvie, Mr. W. H. Fernyhough, youngest son of Captain Thomas Fernyhough, ... to Mrs L. Bennett, youngest daughter of Captain Black’. The notice of the birth appeared in The Colonist, on Thursday 20 April 1837, p 7—‘Births: On Thursday last, at her house in Bridge Street, Mrs. Fernyhough, of a daughter.’

18. One newspaper (The Colonist, 22 September 1836, p 3) reported that the ‘likenesses have been taken from memory’ but this still does not account for the image of Bungaree who he had never met to be able to memorize.

19. The set includes eight pencil drawings (DL PX 47). The drawings are in an album with a marble cover and include portraits of Piper, Cullabaa, Punch, Bungaree, Gooseberry, Mickie, Mary and Boardman. The original drawings for Jemmy, Toby, Bill Worrall and Tommy are not in the group. When the sketches first came into the collection, ‘Rodius's Sketch Book’ was embossed on the spine of the case. The sketches are unlikely though to be by Rodius as they include a portrait of Piper and he almost certainly sat for Fernyhough (see discussion of the Piper image in this article).

20. See Jocelyn Hackforth-Jones, Anita Callaway and Joan Kerr's entry on Rodius in Design and Art Australia Online (http://www.daao.org.au/bio/charles-rodius/); and Joanna Gilmour, Elegance in Exile: Portrait Drawings from Colonial Australia, Canberra: National Portrait Gallery, 2012, pp 77–91.

21. Sydney Herald, 2 October 1834, p 3, col 2.

22. Bonyhady and Sayers, Heads of the People, p 1.

23. Hackforth-Jones et al, Design and Art Australia Online.

24. The Times (London), 19 February 1829.

25. See Grace Karskens, ‘Red Coat, Blue Jacket, Black Skin: Aboriginal Men and Clothing in Early New South Wales’, Aboriginal History 35, 2011, pp 1–36.

26. Karskens, ‘Red Coat, Blue Jacket, Black Skin’, p 4.

27. R H W Reece, ‘Feasts and Blankets: The History of Early Attempts to Establish Relations with the Aborigines of New South Wales, 1814–1846’, Archaeology and Physical Anthropology in Oceania 2, 1967, pp 190–206; and Michael Smithson, ‘A Misunderstood Gift: The Annual Issue of Blankets to Aborigines in New South Wales, 1826–48’, Push 30, 1992, pp 73–108.

28. For a discussion of Lavater's use of the silhouette see John Lyon ‘“The Science of Sciences”: Replication and Reproduction in Lavater's Physiognomics’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 40(2), 2007, pp 257–277.

29. For a discussion of the popularity of pseudo-sciences in Australia see M John Thearle, ‘The Rise and Fall of Phrenology in Australia’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry 27(3), 1993, pp 518–525; and also Sasha Grishin, ‘Realism, Caricature and Phrenology: Early Depictions of the Indigenous Peoples of Australia’, in The World Upside Down: Australia 1788–1830, Canberra: National Library of Australia, 2000.

30. Hugh Honour, The Image of the Black in Western Art, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995.

31. Neville, Design and Art Australia Online.

32. The 1840 version of the prints can be distinguished from Fernyhough's earlier prints by the fact that Fernyhough's initials no longer appear, nor is Austin listed as the printer. The pen and ink originals for the prints are in the State Library of New South Wales (PXA616) and a set of the zincographs is in the National Library of Australia (NK708 LOC NL). There is a surviving Barlow edition that does not have this cover and is entitled ‘Barlow's Profile of the Natives’—see State Library of New South Wales (DG SSV 5).

33. Augustus Earle in Views in New South Wales, and Van Diemen's Land, London: J. Cross, 1830, describes the making of bull: ‘out of an old sugar bag, and wonderful as it may seem, a bag of that description will make a whole party drunk. They separate the parts of the matting, and soak it, then stir it till fermentation takes place, when it is greedily drunk, and intoxication produced, they then become noisy and troublesome, and it is not uncommon for lives to be lost after one of their carousals. It is difficult for the police to interfere, they are scarcely amenable to our laws; but these boisterous meetings are prevented as much as possible.’

34. See Postcolonial Studies special issue on ‘Making Indigenous Place in the Australian City’, 15(2), 2012.

35. Grace Karskens, The Colony: A History of Early Sydney, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2009.

36. There are reports of figures such as Tobin and Gooseberry being arrested for ‘doing “bull”’; see Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, 17 December 1836, p 2. This article also explains that Gooseberry's name came from ‘a soft down upon the chin like her namesake’.

37. Other slight changes differentiate the two sets of prints. In the Piper image a rock is included at the front; in the image of Worrall his left arm is slightly differently positioned; and similarly in the image of Cullabaa the arm is more extended.

38. Liz Conor, ‘The “Piccaninny”: Racialized Childhood, Disinheritance, Acquisition and Child Beauty?’, Postcolonial Studies 15(1), 2012, p 50.

39. For an account of Bungaree see Anita Callaway, ‘Bungaree’, in Sylvia Kleinert and Margo Neale (eds), Oxford Companion to Aboriginal Art and Culture, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2000, pp 551–552; Keith Vincent Smith, King Bungaree: A Sydney Aborigine Meets the Great South Pacific Explorers, 1799–1830, East Roseville: Kangaroo Press, 1992; and Craig Wilcox, ‘Red Coat Dreamer’, The National Library Magazine, March 2011, pp 21–23.

40. Smith, King Bungaree, pp 8–13 and 159–165.

41. David Hansen, ‘Death Dance’, Australian Book Review, April 2007, pp 27–32.

42. Anita Callaway with Candice Bruce, ‘Dancing in the Dark: Black Corroboree or White Spectacle?’, Australian Journal of Art 9, 1991, pp 78–104, discusses how many Aborigines survived by entertaining the settlers, giving demonstrations of throwing boomerangs, for instance, in exchange for money.

43. Karskens has also noted this type of recycling of group scenes of the Aborigines living in Sydney—see ‘Red Coat, Blue Jacket, Black Skin’, p 24.

44. The image of Piper was not in Fernyhough's first issue of the portraits because Piper did not arrive in Sydney until October 1836, a month after Austin advertised the portraits for sale. There are other indicators that it was not completed at the same time, such as Fernyhough signing the Piper portrait with ‘WH Fernyhough’ rather than ‘W.H.F.’ as he does in all the other portraits.

45. For a discussion of Piper see D W Baker, ‘John Piper, “Conqueror of the Interior”’, Aboriginal History 17(1), 1993, pp 17–38.

46. Sydney Herald, 19 December 1836, p 1, col 1, states ‘the likeness and drawing are very good’; and in the Sydney Gazette, 20 December 1836, p 2, col 6, there is discussion of the ‘excellent likeness of Piper’.

47. Sydney Gazette, 20 December 1836.

48. Thomas Mitchell, Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia; with Descriptions of the Recently Explored Region of Australia Felix, and of the Present Colony of New South Wales, 2 vols, 2nd revised edn, London: T W Boone, 1839, vol 2, pp 338–339.

49. Sydney Herald, 19 December 1836, p 1, col 1, notes the receiving of an image of Piper.

50. Sydney Gazette, 20 December 1836, p 2, col 6.

51. Bonyhady and Sayers, Heads of the People, p 3.

52. Bonyhady and Sayers, Heads of the People, p 3.