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Flinders Circumnavigation of Australia
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.
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William Westall

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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