While much has been published on the history of Tasmanian Aborigines up to the end of the nineteenth-century, to date there has been no dedicated focus on the
considerable body of drawings, paintings, sculptures, prints and photographs that depict the indigenous people and culture of Australia’s southernmost extent. This project aims to address that deficit.
Prior to European arrival in Tasmania, Aboriginal people expressed their relationship with self and the cosmos in common with other indigenous peoples of Australia and around the world. A rich record of rock art, body adornment, ceremony and
mythology expressed the inter-relatedness of Tasmanian Aborigines with the constituents of their physical and spiritual world, an inter-connectedness that continues today.33 With the arrival of European observers in Tasmania, some profoundly different methods of representation were introduced to the world of the First Tasmanians.
The assemblage of early colonial Tasmanian images is important for many reasons. Dating back well beyond the arrival of Bowen’s party at Risdon Cove, it emerges from a series of encounters between Dutch, French and British explorers with a
32 Shayne Breen, 'Extermination, Extinction, Genocide: British Colonialism and Tasmanian Aborigines', in Rene Lemarchand (ed.), Forgotten Genocides: Oblivion, Denial, and Memory (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).
33 H. Ling Roth, The Aborigines of Tasmania (2nd edition edn.; Halifax: F. King and Son, 1899); Josephine Flood, Rock Art of the Dreamtime: Images of Ancient Australia (Sydney: Pymble, 1997) 372; Julie Gough, 'History, Representation, Globalisation and Indigenous Cultures: A Tasmanian Perspective', in Clair Smith and Graeme K. Ward (eds.),
Indigenous Cultures in an Interconnected World (St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2000); Greg Lehman, 'Being Here: Authenticity and Presence in Tasmanian Aboriginal Art', in Amanda Reynolds (ed.), Keeping Culture: Aboriginal Tasmania (Canberra: National Museum of Australia, 2006).
people and culture that resonated at many levels, some unique, with European ideas about the origin and nature of humankind. This visual record of exploration results from efforts to document and understand Tasmanian Aboriginal culture by
practitioners of a science of ethnographythat was still in its infancy.34 Elements of this visual history have been captured in numerous published journals and atlases detailing the voyages of navigators including Abel Tasman (1642), Marion du Fresne (1772), James Cook (1777), William Bligh (1788, 1791), Bruny d’Entrecasteaux (1791-1793), and Nicolas Baudin (1802).35 These early observations of the appearance, behaviour and technology of Tasmanian Aborigines were strongly influenced by the ideas of Voltaire, Rousseau, Degerando and many others. This period of representation was propelled by an Enlightenment interest in the empirical observation of nature, challenging neo-classical traditions of the noble savage in which, according to Gaile McGregor,
the primitive man is thought on the one hand to be freer, both physically and emotionally – less inhibited, less oppressed by the necessities of labour, less trammeled with constricting conventions; on the other hand, his simple austere lifestyle, devoid of luxury and sophistication, is supposed to inculcate both character and morality.36
In this way, the First Tasmanians came to occupy roles in a range of philosophical, divine, social and historical dramas that reflected both the European consideration of
34 See Chapter 2.
35 See, for example John Cawte Beaglehole (ed.), The Journals of Captain James Cook on
His Voyages of Discovery (Vol. 2: The voyage of the Resolution and Adventure, 1772- 1775; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for The Hakluyt Society 1966); Edward Duyker, The Discovery of Tasmania: Journal Extracts from the Expeditions of Abel Janzoon Tasman and Marc-Joseph Marion Du Fresne, 1642 and 1772, trans. Edward Duyker, Herman & Maryse (Hobart: St David's Park Publishing, 1992); François Péron,
Voyage of Discovery to the Southern Hemisphere (London: Richard Phillips, 1809); Brian Plomley, The Baudin Expedition and the Tasmanian Aborigines, 1802 (Hobart: Blubber Head Press, 1983); Brian Plomley and Josiane Piard-Bernier, The General: The Visits of the Expedition Led by Bruny D’entrecasteaux to Tasmanian Waters in 1792 and 1793
(Launceston: Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, 1993); Abel Janzoon Tasman,
Abel Janszoon Tasman’s Journal of His Discovery of Van Diemens Land and New Zealand in 1642, trans. Jj. De Hoop Scheffer and C. Stoffel (facsimile edn.; Amsterdam: F. Muller and Co., 1898); H. G. Taylor, The Discovery of Tasmania (Hobart: Cat & Fiddle Press, 1973).
36 Gaile Mcgregor, The Noble Savage in the New World Garden: Notes toward a Syntactics
self and the search for a defining identity by the new colonists. This drama potently materializes in the work of artists attached to these voyages of discovery; notably John Webber (1751-1793), Jean Piron (1767?-1795?) and Nicolas-Martin Petit (1777- 1804), who established the earliest graphic images of Tasmanian Aborigines in the European imagination. There is extensive art historical scholarship on these artists,37 and this will be reviewed to identify specific influences on and aspects of the work of these artists to assist in analyzing particularities of the Tasmanian context.
Potent signifiers of distinctive colonial and social processes at play on the island were also established in the visual record. Many of these have become foundational
documents in Australian national history. Benjamin Duterrau’s history painting, The Conciliation (1840) is perhaps the best example, dramatising the culmination of George Augustus Robinson’s mission of conciliation to conclude the Black War that had raged on the island by removing Tasmanian Aborigines from their land. Portraits of Aboriginal people from this period by painters including Benjamin Duterrau (1768- 1851), Thomas Bock (1790-1855), John Skinner Prout (1805-1876) and Ludwig Becker (1808-1861) contributed a sombre record of a people whose presence on the island was to be almost completely transformed within a few decades as the task of extermination was energetically pursued in Van Diemen’s Land. Yet few of these artists have been examined in a way that focuses specifically on their role in influencing the formulation of the historical, social and cultural identities that continue to characterize their subjects in written histories. Only two of these artists:
37 Jacqueline Bonnemains, Elliott Forsyth, and Bernard Smith (eds.), Baudin in Australian
Waters: The Artwork of the French Voyage of Discovery to the Southern Lands 1800-1804
(South Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1988); Colin Dyer, The French Explorers and the Aboriginal Australians 1772-1839 (St Lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press, 2005); Jean Fornasiero, Peter Monteath, and John West-Sooby, Encountering Terra Australis: The Australian Voyages of Nicolas Baudin and Matthew Flinders (Kent Town, South Australia: Wakefield Press, 2010); Rudiger Joppien and Bernard Smith, The Art of Captain Cook's Voyages (Vol. 3: The Voyage of the Resolution and Discovers 1776-1780; Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1987); Shino Konishi, 'François Péron and the Tasmanians: An Unrequited Romance', in Ingereth Macfarlane and Mark Hannah (eds.),
Transgressions: Critical Australian Indigenous Histories (Aboriginal History Monograph 16; Canberra: ANU E Prints, 2007); Muséum D'histoire Naturelle Du Havre, Baudin in Australian Waters : The Artwork of the French Voyage of Discovery to the Southern Lands 1800-1804 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press in association with the Australian Academy of the Humanities, 1988); Plomley, The Baudin Expedition and the Tasmanian Aborigines, 1802; Thomas, Losche, and Newell (eds.), Double Vision : Art Histories and Colonial Histories in the Pacific ; Gabrielle Baglione and Cédric Crémière, Charles- Alexandre Lesueur: Peintre Voyageur, Un Trésor Oublié (Le Harvre: Conti, 2009).
Benjamin Duterrau and John Glover (1767-1849) have received focused attention on their contribution to how we understand Tasmanian Aborigines.38
Despite this rich body of material just one exhibition, held in 1976, has been dedicated to the appearance of Tasmanian Aborigines in art.39 As a result, the
collective influence of these representations as a powerful and oft-reproduced body of material in the historical archive has yet to be adequately considered in a systematic way. Perhaps more importantly, the ideologies and traditions (academic, visual and literary) that informed the work of these artists has also been neglected, with little work done to continue the important foundations for this field of inquiry that were established by the pioneering work of Bernard Smith.