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NLA News - home June 2005 Volume XV Number 10
click to enlarge
Fig. 1
William Westall (1781–1850)
Port Jackson: A Native [possibly Colebee] 1802
pencil drawing; 26.3 x 22.6 cm
Pictures Collection
nla.pic-an4562332

Port Jackson People

Keith Vincent Smith explores the idea that depictions of Port Jackson Aborigines by William Westall and the ‘Port Jackson Painter’ may indeed be the famous contemporaries Colebee and Bennelong

I would like to propose that the subjects of two of the pencil portraits of ‘native’ men made by William Westall in Port Jackson in 1802 might be the well-known Indigenous Sydney leaders Colebee and Bennelong. Both sketches are in the collection of the National Library of Australia.

While there is no definite proof, the idea is intriguing. Colebee and Bennelong were abducted from Manly Cove by Lieutenant William Bradley on 23 November 1789 on the orders of Arthur Phillip, first governor of the colony of New South Wales. Colebee was a Cadigal, from the clan which inhabited the present Eastern suburbs of Sydney, while Bennelong was a Wangal from the south side of the Parramatta River. Colebee soon escaped and Bennelong ran away in May 1790, but both men ‘came in’ separately to the Sydney settlement in late 1790 to receive iron hatchets and seal verbal peace agreements with Phillip.

click to enlarge
Fig. 2
William Westall (1781–1850)
Port Jackson: A Native [possibly
Bennelong] [1802]
pencil drawing; 31.8 x 26.4 cm
Pictures Collection
nla.pic-an4562309
 

William Westall (1781–1850), a protégé of Sir Joseph Banks, was appointed by the Admiralty in London as landscape and topographical artist on HMS Investigator which circumnavigated the Australian continent under the command of Matthew Flinders between 1801 and 1803. Westall, a classically-trained artist aged 2 , drew the two Aboriginal men while the ship was in Port Jackson from 9 May to 22 July 1802, but did not record their names. The date 3 July 1802 appears at the bottom left of Fig. 1—nine days before Investigator left Sydney to sail north.

While only a small number of Aboriginal people around Port Jackson were familiar with the European settlers, or interacted with visitors, Bennelong and Colebee were the leading Indigenous men in Sydney at that time. Although his hairstyle is different, the pencil portrait of Colebee by the Scottish convict artist Thomas Watling in Fig. 3 bears comparison to Westall’s ‘native’ of Fig. 1. Both men wear the possum skin headbands of initiated men.

Fig. 3
Thomas Watling (b.1762)
Colebee
Pencil
Watling 28, image reference 12028
© The Natural History Museum, London

His facial features (the deep-set, narrowed eyes and the space between them, the shape and breadth of his large nose, the beard style and his rather sullen expression) are very similar to those in Westall’s sketch. The face of the man in Westall’s study is consistent with that of a person who has aged 0 years since first portrayed by Watling between 1792 and 1796. In 1802, Colebee was perhaps 45 years of age.

Elaborate and deeply marked cicatrices—raised scars on the upper chest and shoulders—are clearly shown in the two Westall portraits and have perhaps been exaggerated by the artist. No cicatrices appear in Fig. 3 or in other portraits of Colebee by Watling. However, there is ample historical evidence that the bodies of both Colebee and Bennelong were marked with these ceremonial cuts as well as wounds from ritual revenge battles.

click to enlarge
View of Entrance into Port Jackson Taken from a Boat Lying Under the North Head [1790?]
watercolour; 11.7 x 24.2 cm
Probably the work of Henry Brewer
Pictures Collection
nla.pic-an4910576

Midshipman Newton Fowell of the First Fleet flagship HMS Sirius gave Colebee’s names as ‘Gringerry Kibba Coleby’. ‘Gringerry’, that is Goungarree (Robert Brown, 1803) or Congare (Maroot the Elder, to Benjamin Bowen Carter, 1798), was the Sydney language name for the cuts in the chest. According to David Collins, ‘Kibba’—from gibba, kibba or kebah, a rock or stone—was a term indicating that a man’s front tooth had been knocked out by a stone during initiation.

It is likely that Colebee’s totem was the white-bellied sea eagle (Haliaetus leucogaster). In a caption for one of his pictures, Watling recorded the Indigenous name of this majestic bird as goo-le-be (gulbi).

There is no documentary proof that Colebee was in Port Jackson in 1802 because there are no written references to him between 1793 and January 1805. In July 1805, Colebee and Bennelong, who were usually allies, fought a duel over Bennelong’s wife Kurubarabulu. Colebee probably died in a payback battle in 1806 or not long after, but his death was not officially recorded.

click to enlarge
Fig. 5
Samuel John Neele (1758–1824)
engraver
BENELONG: A Native of New Holland
engraving print; 18.8 x 15.2 cm
[London: s.n., 179?]
Pictures Collection,
nla.pic-an9353133

On the other hand, Bennelong was certainly in Port Jackson at the same time as Westall. From April to July 1802, Bennelong often visited the French voyager Pierre Bernard Milius of the ship Naturaliste, who was recuperating from illness in a house at Sydney Cove. According to Milius, Bennelong was usually naked when he arrived, but, as a concession to European manners, he covered himself with ‘a kind of napkin’, which he took off when leaving.

George Howe, manager of the government printing press, later said Bennelong only occasionally visited Philip Gidley King, governor from 1800 to 1806. ‘The Governor frequently clothed him and he dined at the servant’s table in the kitchen,’ wrote Howe, ‘but eventually he took to the bush, and only occasionally visited Government House’.

François Peron, zoologist with the French expedition led by Nicolas Baudin, considered Bennelong the senior Aboriginal man in the area in 1802. Like the First Fleet officers, the French scientists measured Bennelong’s body for their records of ‘savage peoples’. Peron gave Bennelong’s age as 35 or 36.

It is difficult to equate Westall’s subdued ‘native’ (Fig. 2) with the impish, bright-eyed images by the ‘Port Jackson Painter’ in Native Named Ben-nel-long of Fig. 4.

While researching my biography of Bennelong, I identified two further portraits of Bennelong by the Port Jackson Painter (Watling 55 and 56, Fig.s 4. and 4.2), for comparison with Fig. 4. They show him with only a few ritual cicatrices on his chest and forearms. These pictures are in the Natural History Museum, London.

Fig. 4
‘Port Jackson Painter’ (fl.1788–1797)
Native Named Ben-nel-long. As Painted When Angry after Botany Bay Colebee Was Wounded c. 1790
Watling 4 , image reference 12041
© The Natural History Museum, London
Fig. 4.1
‘Port Jackson Painter’ (fl.1788–1797)
A Native Going to Dance
Watling 55, image reference 12055
© The Natural History Museum, London
Fig. 4.2
‘Port Jackson Painter’ (fl.1788–1797)
A Method Used by the Natives of New South Wales of Ornamenting Themselves
Watling 56, image reference 12056
© The Natural History Museum, London

Engravings of Bennelong made while he was in London in 1793 and 1794 are even harder to compare with the almost full face of Fig. 2 because they are in profile.

The foppish figure of BENELONG: A Native of New Holland (Fig. 5), the only known portrait made in Sydney, published in James Grant’s Narrative of a Voyage of Discovery (1802), at least reveals much the same degree of world-weariness.

Westall survived the shipwreck of HMS Porpoise with Flinders (and his cat Trim) at Wreck Reef off the Queensland coast in August 1803. He returned to England via China and India, arriving there in 1805. He saved his art works, but probably lost his journal, so we are unlikely to find out positively whether these two Port Jackson men were indeed Colebee and Bennelong.

KEITH VINCENT SMITH is the author of King Bungaree (Kenthurst, NSW: Kangaroo Press, 1992) and Bennelong (East Roseville, NSW: Kangaroo Press, 2001) and is currently a PhD candidate in Indigenous Studies at Macquarie University, Sydney.

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