[The following text is adapted from the brochure for the original National Library of Australia exhibition, Country & Landscape. Guest Curator: Professor Ken Taylor, Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University]
The words ‘country’ and ‘landscape’ each resonate with an enduring sense of place, suggesting physical presence and embodying symbolic values. For Indigenous Australians, the word ‘country’ expresses the rich, sustaining inter-relationships between people and place, with its sense of rites and custodianship. ‘Landscape’, a European notion, suggests something seen with the eye but interpreted —‘mediated’, and sometimes philosophically or aesthetically ‘constructed’—with the mind. The two concepts of course have cross-cultural connection, with common ground as well as differences. In viewing the images of this online exhibition, you are invited to ponder the dual concepts of ‘country’ and ‘landscape’, their interrelationship, and the question of whose landscape, whose country, it is that we are being shown.
The British tradition of eighteenth-century picturesque landscape, melding ‘nature’ and ‘culture’, found fertile ground in colonial Australia. In eighteenth-century Britain, Nature was the supreme aesthetic, social and political value—iconified in the great landscape estates, gardens and parks created by William Kent, Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown, Humphrey Repton and R.P. Knight. Similarly in Australia, early on both written and graphic images eulogised the park-like landscape of south-eastern Australia and the coastal belt of Western Australia. The ‘picturesque’ approach—depicting Australia as a natural Garden of Eden, as an Arcadia in the Antipodes waiting to be occupied—was central to the act of the colonists constructing a known place (terra cognita).
Following the poetic (idyllic, or pastoral) landscape style inspired by seventeenth-century artists such as Claude Lorrain, colonial Australian paintings often portray a humanised foreground with water in the middle ground, set against a backdrop of sublime nature. In Britain, the picturesque form had also been popularised by the travel writings of William Gilpin. ‘The purpose of [picturesque] landscape was to arouse the emotions, stir the imagination, and to delight the eye with its naturalness.’ (1) In so doing, artists more than likely ‘improved’ on what they saw, in line with Gilpin’s view that: ‘We must ever recollect that nature is most defective in composition; and must be a little assisted.’ (2) Australian ‘picturesque’ representations were a direct reflection of the English country park estate, and the grazing landscape, portraying a model of high civility and nature in the Antipodes.
In Australia, Conrad Martens was one artist who mimicked Claude Lorrain’s style. Likewise, the convict artist Joseph Lycett held a similar view to Gilpin, but with the added impulse of wanting to show viewers in Britain the investment and life opportunities which Australia presented. Lycett’s aquatints (published in his book Views in Australia (1824/25), in England following his reprieve), clothed the Australian landscape in greens that were lightened from his original watercolours with their natural brown hues. Presumably this was done to attract would-be colonists, and the accompanying text to the pictures was similarly seductive.
Gradually we see this ‘picturesque’ representation of the Australian landscape change. The evolution connects significantly, in part, to the way in which the Indigenous inhabitants are portrayed within the landscape.
In early Australian colonial art, the Indigenous people are often shown as ‘adorning’ the composition; as part of the harmonious whole. They were depicted as part of the exotic ‘otherness’, of the scientific wonder, of the new colony. Many of these views were produced for consumption back ‘home’ in Britain, often painted when the artists had returned to England, and created from their earlier notes and sketches. The work is often openly Romantic, evoking a benign wilderness setting.
Behind this implied ‘inclusion’ however, there sometimes lay the ambiguity of the Indigenous people’s uncertain future. The images might evoke a Garden of Eden where the Indigenous people lead an idyllic life: cast in the role of Adam and Eve before the fall brought about by European settlement. As ‘Nature’s children’, they might presumably disappear with the civilising influence of European domination. Relating to this, depicted in rural and town scenes, the Indigenous figures were also shown as subsidiary to the ‘improvements’ brought by the settlers; portrayed as temporary figures at the edges of the landscape’s stage. As ‘fringe-dwellers’.
Among the early colonial depictions, those of the convict artist Joseph Lycett give a more realistic impression of undisturbed Aboriginal life. His series of 20 watercolours from about 1818 is one of the most valuable collections of landscape paintings to depict Indigenous people in their daily life and in their own ‘country’. The images are significant both as works of art, and as rare historical documents showing scenes of fishing and hunting, of family groups in social settings, and of men holding a corroboree. In particular, Lycett vividly presents the Aboriginals’ use of fire for hunting and tells the pictorial story of how the ‘open, park-like’ landscape so loved by the Europeans on arrival was in fact an Indigenous creation via ‘firestick farming’ (the management technique named by archaeologist Rhys Jones). Burning had a deep association with ceremony and sacred rituals linked to territory, and fire stories and fire dreamings are critical to the Indigenous peoples’ relationship with country.
Notes
1. A. Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology. The English Rustic Tradition, 1740–1860. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989, p.72.
2. W. Gilpin, Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty; on Picturesque Travel and Sketching Landscape to Which Is Added a Poem on Landscape Painting, 4th edn. London: R. Blamire, 1792, p.67.