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William Westall was a 19-year-old student
at the Royal Academy in London, when he was selected by Sir Joseph
Banks in 1801 as the landscape and figure painter on Matthew Flinders’ Investigator expedition to explore the coastline of New Holland. Westall was by
nature a conservative and somewhat reticent character who, despite
being bored and frustrated by the long sea journey, completed geographical
drawings and, occasionally, more finished watercolours that are the
first and most accurate landscapes of this country. Their extraordinarily
high artistic standards are most apparent in his beautiful portraits
of Aboriginal people and the luminous watercolours of their cave paintings,
the first such depictions by a European artist.
These works chart the progress of Flinders’ circumnavigation
from King George’s Sound in Western Australia, across the Great
Australian Bight to the South Australian gulf country, to Kangaroo
Island, and thence to Port Jackson and the Gulf of Carpentaria. The
final drawing Westall made of the journey, View
of Wreck Reef Bank Taken at Low Water: Terra Australis
1803, marks the end of Flinders’ ambitious
expedition, and is a graphic example of the hazards faced by early
travelling artists. It is something of a miracle that any of Westall’s
works survived, let alone the 160 drawings that now form the National
Library’s pre-eminent collection. |
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