NATIONAL LIBRARY OF AUSTRALIA
EXHIBITION

Paradise Possessed
The Rex Nan Kivell Collection

Curator: Michelle Hetherington

 

Dates of Opening

6 August 1998-7 February 1999

Exhibition Hours:

Monday-Thursday 9am-9pm
Friday-Sunday 9am-5pm

Exhibition Events

Merchandise

Press Release

Online Exhibition

 

Pictures Catalogue

Paradise Possessed - About the Exhibition

{Rex Nan Kivell (at left) with fellow director Harry Tatlock Miller at the Redfern Gallery, London}

The Rex Nan Kivell Collection, containing about 15,000 items, forms part of the central core of the National Library's holdings. Curator Michelle Hetherington introduces the Paradise Possessed exhibition.


Rex Nan Kivell (at left) with fellow
director Harry Tatlock Miller at
the Redfern Gallery, London


From the Manuscript Collection

 

The possible existence of a great south land can be traced back to the writings of Ptolomy, who believed that a large land mass must exist in the earth's southern regions as a balance to the land in the north. Unable to be verified, due to the great distances involved, the existence of the southern land remained in the realm of myth for over 1500 years. The lack of accurate information did not prevent people from speculating upon what this southern land would hold, but seemed rather to encourage the imagination. In early maps and descriptions of Terra Australis Incognita, rather than leave a blank space, the land is peopled with European fears or desires-expressions of the monstrous or the exotic.

 

Terra Australis became a setting for utopias and distopias, a land in which to demonstrate the possibilities of human behaviour, and raised the hope that a second Eden might exist, a paradise rich and unspoiled. When the European nations began to seek the substance behind the myth and to set out on voyages of discovery, it was with the desire to possess paradise. In John Hawkesworth's An Account of the Voyages Undertaken by Order of His Present Majesty for Making Discoveries in the Southern Hemisphere, we find the following statement:

"Whereas nothing can redound more to the honour of this Nation, as a maritime power, to the dignity of the Crown of Great Britain, and to the advancement of trade and navigation thereof, than to make discoveries of countries hitherto unknown; and whereas there is reason to believe that lands and islands of great extent, hitherto unvisited by any European power, may be found in ... climates adapted to the produce of commodities useful in commerce; and whereas his Majesty's islands ... lying within said tract, not withstanding their having been first discovered and visited by British navigators, have never yet been sufficiently surveyed as that an accurate judgement may be formed of their coasts and product: his Majesty taking these premises into consideration, and conceiving no juncture so proper for an enterprise of this nature, as a time of profound peace, which his kingdoms at present happily enjoy, has thought fit that it should now be undertaken."

With these words, attributed to George III, the official reasons for the conquest and possession of the Antipodes are revealed. Honour, power, dignity, advancement of trade and navigation; all are to flow from discovery. Rejecting the legends and 'revealed truths' of those twin sources of earlier authority-the Scriptures and the classics-the Enlightenment valued knowledge based on evidence, logic and probability. Reflecting these values, the King's speech links national prestige with the expansion of knowledge and emphasises the importance of 'accurate judgement'. The speech also implicitly assumes a right-greater than that of the inhabitants-to what might be discovered. The intellectual expansion of horizons that characterised the Enlightenment and the early voyages of discovery that helped push back the physical boundaries of the known world are parallel journeys, each influencing and informing the other.

{View in Ulietea, 1786} {Whaler Britannia}
John Webber (1752-93)
View in Ulietea 1786

oil on canvas: 43.4-61 cm
from the Pictorial Collection

Thomas Whitcombe (1763-1824)
Departure of the Whaler Britannia
from Sydney Cove
1798

oil on canvas, 82 x 122.5 cm
from the pictorial collection

The voyages of the eighteenth century in particular were undertaken in part to gather reliable information that would extend scientific knowledge. The information gathered by these voyages-documentary evidence such as maps, astronomical and navigational calculations, pictorial representations of new lands and their inhabitants, plants and animals, specimens, artefacts such as weapons, costume and artworks, journals and log books-was keenly sought and collected. While the Admiralty owned those images created by voyage artists as part of their contract, crew members could profit from the sale of souvenirs and the publication of eyewitness accounts and prints. Like the earlier curiosities that filled the cabinets of connoisseurs in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, documentary evidence from the Antipodes served as a means of both deducing and imposing the order of nature.

{Maori cleavers [18--?]} In 1919, a reversal of the flow of riches from the Antipodes to Europe began. In this year Rex Nan Kivell, just demobilised from the New Zealand Expeditionary Force, purchased the first items of what would become the Rex Nan Kivell collection. Scouring the markets, and visiting museums and galleries, Nan Kivell further developed his interest in both contemporary art and antiquarian studies. In 1925 he joined the Redfern Gallery (in London) which specialised in modern-particularly French-art, becoming Managing Director in 1931.

 

(Above) Maori cleavers [18--?]

wood, bone, stone and shell; 46 cm or less
from the Pictorial Collection

As Director, Nan Kivell could develop his skills of discrimination and connoisseurship while also earning a good living trading in art, and with his extensive contacts in the world of auction houses and dealers was in an ideal position to extend his collection. Originally conceived as the basis of a pictorial history of Australia and New Zealand, Nan Kivell's interests began to extend beyond the purely pictorial. Fascinated by the web of interconnection in his chosen field, the collection came to encompass the whole range of documentary evidence created during the voyages of discovery, exploration and colonisation of the Antipodes in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the associated material produced as a result of those voyages. Fine condition was an important consideration for Nan Kivell when collecting materials, but comprehensiveness and coherence seem to have been his principal aims. Items in a variety of media-from early maps, navigational instruments, etchings and pamphlets to choice oil paintings, manuscripts and important first editions-were collected for the light they could shed on European activity in our region, for their role in creating a complex picture of our past.

In going beyond the portraits of the elite and artworks judged at the time to be aesthetically important, to materials collected for their possible documentary importance, Nan Kivell both anticipated and provided the material for a re-evaluation of the history of our region. Collecting items from his base in London had advantages. In an oral history interview recorded by Hazel de Berg for the National Library in 1970, Nan Kivell stated: 'I was privately accumulating the Australasian collection. I had very little competition in this area, there were probably not more than half a dozen collectors for the items I was selecting.'

As a result of his inclusive approach, Nan Kivell's collection represents an invaluable research tool, containing both iconic works (such as George Carter's Death of Captain Cook) and much that is quirky and unexpected. Works from the collection have featured in major survey and reassessment exhibitions such as the Art Gallery of New South Wales Bicentenary exhibition Terra Australis: The Furthest Shore, and Encounter with Eden: New Zealand 1770-1870, part of the celebrations of the 150th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi. However the sheer size of the collection-containing about 15 000 items-has meant that a thorough survey is yet to be published. Few works published on the history of Australia and the Pacific region in the last 20 years have not drawn extensively on the Nan Kivell collection for images and information, but the collection itself, and its remarkable creator, remains relatively unknown.

Animated by a passion for discovery similar to that of the early navigators and explorers of Terra Australis, Rex Nan Kivell has provided the people of our region with one of the largest formed collections of material relating to their history, a collection which is a work of art in itself. The Nan Kivell Collection forms a vital foundation for the National Library's major task of representing the history of our country and region. In 1998, the centenary of Nan Kivell's birth, the Library is holding a major survey exhibition of his magnificent collection. Paradise Possessed: The Rex Nan Kivell Collection.

Michelle Hetherington is curator of the Rex Nan Kivell exhibition


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Last updated 24 November 1998