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NLA News - home july 2006 Volume XVI Number 10

Robert Hoddle: Pioneer Surveyor–Artist in Australia

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Robert Hoddle (1794–1881)
Ginninginderry [i.e. Ginninderra] Plains, New South Wales  c.1835
watercolour; 18.0 x 41.7 cm
Pictures Collection

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Bernard Goode
Portrait of Robert Hoddle  1860s
hand col. ambrotype; oval
21.5 x 16.5 cm
Pictures Collection

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Berres Hoddle Colville examines the contribution of one of Australia’s great surveyors

The dramatic emergence and sale of two parcels of Robert Hoddle’s watercolours and drawings have highlighted a little-known side of his life and work. The first paintings appeared just months after the publication in April 2004 of my biography of this pioneer surveyor. Acknowledged as a highly competent draughtsman—he was a Royal Military surveyor and draughtsman in the Royal Engineers, trained by Ordnance Survey—he is now recognised as a prolific artist whose landscapes are of considerable historic value as social documentary records of their day. Not only is much of the country shown in an almost pristine state before white settlement changed it forever, but Hoddle included the human element. Among those depicted were his survey team of convicts and ticket-of-leave men with bullocks, horses and dogs; the occasional settler’s hut; a man with cattle or sheep; often a small figure of Hoddle himself, seated painting, and in almost every painting Aboriginal people, singularly or in groups, which provides evidence of an amicable relationship.

The work of surveyors is fundamental to a country’s social fabric and economic development, and Hoddle knew measurement to be the basis of ‘civilised’ land use. Born in London in 1794, he emigrated to Australia on half pay in 1822. Hoddle’s major contribution to his new country was through surveying which expanded topographical knowledge of the young British colony, helped plan roads and towns, and identified boundaries of settlers’ properties.

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Robert Hoddle (1794–1881)
View from Limestone Hill Called Campbell’s Hill, New South Wales, March 1832
watercolour; 27.5 x 42.0 cm
Pictures Collection

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Hoddle was quickly recognised as an explorer and a man of many ‘firsts’. In October 1824, he travelled north to Moreton Bay as the surveyor-general with John Oxley. He described Aboriginal customs, making the earliest known European drawing of a bora ring. He was the first surveyor to mark the northern route through the Blue Mountains, known as ‘Bell’s Line of Road’, and enter the Burragorang Valley. He was also probably the first to climb Mount Budawang and Pigeon House.

The National Library recently purchased six Hoddle artworks. The paintings of Limestone Plains—now the Australian Capital Territory—are of special interest. Research by the Library’s Pictures Librarian, Linda Groom, indicates that Hoddle was the earliest known European to paint the Canberra countryside. His field books date these survey assignments during the years 1830 to 1836. Squatters who were establishing their stations on those undulating plains were urgently pressing for government surveyors to legalise their holdings. Hoddle’s field book indexes list well recognised names of pastoralists—Palmer, Campbell, Gardiner and Hamilton Hume, for example—together with the number of acres the government granted them, or the number for which they had applied. The indexes provide a mini history of the ACT, Goulburn and surrounding areas, Lake George, Lake Bathurst and Berrima. Some property names still survive—Yarralumla is one. Captain Charles Sturt, awarded 5000 acres for his exploration, also applied to purchase a further 5000 acres. Sturt’s selection, granted in 1835, lay in the triangle bounded by the waters of the Murrumbidgee and Molonglo rivers and Ginninderra Creek. It was a good piece of land but Sturt never lived there. He sold the property and moved to South Australia.

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Robert Hoddle (1794–1881)
View from Illawarra Range en route to Kiama, 1830  1847
watercolour;
20.8 x 26.0 cm
Pictures Collection

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The National Library holds two Hoddle watercolours of the landscape that he called ‘Ginninginderry Plains’, which is now the Canberra suburb of Belconnen. The first to be acquired, and for years the only painting by Hoddle in the Library’s collection, was quite badly discoloured, although the topography is still clear. However, the second more recently purchased Ginninginderry painting is a gem. Featuring a broader landscape, it is one of Hoddle’s finer, and somewhat larger, watercolours.

Another Library acquisition is an ink wash drawing by Hoddle entitled The Seven Day’s in the Week’s Occupation of the Australians, Hunting. One might query the use of the word ‘hunting’. Mustering, or even, as has been suggested, cattle duffing (stealing) was already a well-established local custom. Apparently a quick, humorous sketch (Hoddle’s animals were never his strong point; his fine surveyor’s training in topographical drawing and perspective excluded human and animal anatomy), it is nonetheless a vivid picture full of action. The rider cracks his stockwhip, and horse, cattle and dogs are depicted at full pelt, providing a glimpse into another side of life on the Limestone Plains.

Hoddle’s painting, View from Limestone Hill, Called Campbell’s Hill, New South Wales, March 1832, caught the attention of Groom. With neither place name used today, she made valiant attempts (by climbing trees!) to discover the vantage point from which Hoddle made his painting, finally deciding that Mount Pleasant was the location. Groom was interested that, in this painting, Hoddle had followed the Picturesque style of the time by using the method of
‘selecting and combining’ features. Groom noticed that Hoddle had taken some latitude, for example, in depicting the mountains more prominently. So, why would a surveyor do this?

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Robert Hoddle (1794–1881)
Unidentified Coastal Landscape, New South Wales, [1]  [between 1823 and 1881]
watercolour & pencil;
17.5 x 25.6 cm
Pictures Collection

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Part of the answer, I would suggest, may be that all written work produced by a surveyor was government property. Hoddle’s field books, maps and plans, letters and official reports, were all handed in to the Surveyor-General’s Department. Hoddle’s maps were drawn with as much accuracy as his survey instruments allowed—most of his surveying was done with a chain and circumferenter. His field books contained many sketches illustrating both topography and signs of human occupation indicated by ‘huts’, information that was sought by the government. On the other hand, his paintings, like his private diary on which my biography is based, were his own and were not to be handed in. They were mostly completed on his one free day, Sunday, while out in the bush. At times he may have enhanced and enriched significant features, but they are fine pictures, a delight to the eye and surely a source of refreshment to the artist himself.

Hoddle’s View from Illawarra Range en route to Kiama, 1830 is one of several paintings that he made of this historic and most arduous survey, undertaken in an attempt to make a track through the rainforest which he described as ‘the most formidable brush’. The objective was to enable produce to be brought directly from the rich cow pastures to the boat harbour at Kiama, and then by sea up to Sydney. In the mid-winter of July 1830, he set forth by the Wingecarribee Swamp, along the great Illawarra escarpment, to find a way to descend to Saddleback Mountain and then to Kiama. His painting shows the rocky cliffs within sight of the Tasman Sea. He reported to surveyor-general Thomas Mitchell that ‘Bridle Path is very dangerous’ and ‘a rough one for man and beast’. He always had a care for his animals, as he did for his often recalcitrant convict team, pleading for heavier ‘cloathing’ and better quality boots for them.

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Henry Gritten (1818–1873)
Kiama, Illawarra, N.S.W.  1860
oil on canvas; 58.5 x 45.5 cm
From a sketch made by Robert Hoddle in 1830
Pictures Collection

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For whatever reason, perhaps lack of time or interruption, Hoddle frequently left his paintings without a date, title or location. Listing for sale catalogues, however, requires works to be titled with an approximate date. Two paintings purchased by the National Library which are untitled, undated and unsigned, were listed by the auction house in Melbourne as Unidentified Coastal Landscape, New South Wales with the dates that Hoddle was in Australia, that is, ‘between 1823 and [his death in] 1881’.

Hoddle painted many pictures of Mount Macedon, Victoria in the late 1830s and 1840s, some of these from Batman’s Hill, Melbourne. Those he titled offer clues to many he did not identify. Two National Library acquisitions have been identified as providing views looking towards Mount Macedon from the eastern shores of Port Phillip, a favourite view of Hoddle’s. On the left are glimpses of the You Yangs, invariably marked by Hoddle as ‘Station Peak’, the name given to the area by Matthew Flinders on climbing the range in 1802. Both paintings include a settler’s hut on a bank above the waters of the bay. Hoddle also left many paintings of Batman’s Hill, then called Pleasant Hill, with its graceful casuarinas that he described as ‘the most ornamental and delightful promenade for this end [west] of the city’. Batman’s Hill was Hoddle’s datum point for the whole survey of the Port Phillip district.

With 14 years’ experience in New South Wales, Robert Hoddle sailed south to the Port Phillip district with the governor of New South Wales, Sir Richard Bourke, in March 1837. Appointed surveyor-in-charge, Hoddle laid out the new town of Melbourne by the Yarra River based on the traditional grid. He wrote: ‘it promises to be a large city’. His survey, personally and successfully carried out in late 1844 to March 1845, right up to the source of that flood prone river, was one of his more difficult, but important, undertakings.

After the Port Phillip district was separated from New South Wales in 1851, superintendent Charles La Trobe was appointed lieutenant governor, and Robert Hoddle the first surveyor-general, of the new colony of Victoria.

BERRES HODDLE COLVILLE is the author of Robert Hoddle, Pioneer Surveyor, 1794–1881, published in 2004

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