Art Gallery of WA’s Unknown Land exhibition traces colony’s birth

Depictions of the nascent colony of what would become Perth point to the hopes and dreams of settlers.

Detail of George Nash’s An extensive view of Perth, Western Australia with a group of natives (c 1846).

A gentleman, as Oscar Wilde is supposed to have said, is someone who never hurts another person’s feelings unintentionally. One would like to think it was in this sort of spirit that Unknown Land is preceded by a warning that visitors may find some of the titles and annotations of two centuries ago lacking in tact by contemporary standards; one would hope it was not out of fear of the newly invented crime of giving offence.

The prospect of hurt feelings being transformed by litigation into a lucrative cash payout has recently evaporated in the profoundly implausible Queensland University of Technology case, but this paper’s cartoonist Bill Leak has faced demands to prove his innocence of an inherently nebulous charge. This is an extremely disturbing development, with serious implications, as many people realise, for artists, writers and intellectuals, and indeed for a democratic society.

The foundation of our legal system, after all, is the presumption of innocence. If I claim you assaulted or defrauded me, the burden of proof is on me, not on you. Here, though, it seems, as in accusations of heresy or witchcraft, that the burden of proof has been reversed: it is now apparently enough for me to claim you offended me and it is up to you to prove you did not, or perhaps that you did not intend to, or that it was for a greater good. Or of course you could succumb to the implicit blackmail and offer me a cash settlement to go away and drop the charge.

What is very clear in both these cases, even beyond the principle of the presumption of innocence, is that being offended is too subjective a matter to be dealt with by the law. Assault, fraud and other charges are capable of proof; offence is not. It is self-defined and, as we have seen, can be exaggerated, hysterical, frivolous or an outright scam. There must be laws against incitements to hatred and violence, but they should have nothing to do with personal claims of being offended or affronted because these are clearly an invitation to abuse.

Once inside, the Art Gallery of Western Australia’s exhibition offers a fascinating view of the first decades of the Swan River Colony, as the site of what is now Perth was originally called, and of the various other settlements in the early history of the west. Perth was not the first colonial outpost in the region: King ­George’s Sound, in the south of the state, had been visited by ships from Sydney Town from the end of the 18th century, and in 1826 the colony of NSW established a settlement there, after repeated visits by French seafarers had raised the prospect that France might seek to establish its own colony.

Finally, in 1829, the colony of Swan River was officially proclaimed, and intended, like South Australia later (proclaimed 1836), to be a free settlement without convicts, although 20 years later the settlers found themselves obliged to ask for convicts to provide a labour force. Initially though, the idea of a free colony of honest settlers was an important attraction. The new territory was to be a land of opportunity, unburdened by a heritage of vice and crime.

The exhibition is largely made up of small works, often drawings and watercolours, largely by amateur or semi-amateur colonial artists. Melissa Harpley, the gallery’s curator of historical and modern art, clearly has done much valuable work in assembling and displaying this important material, although unfortunately it is nearly impossible to look at these subtle works properly because of the chatter of a relentless taped voiceover throughout the exhibition.

One of the easier pieces to read even under these difficult conditions is George Pitt Morison’s painting of the foundation of the new colony. The picture was painted in 1929 to mark the centenary of the original event and, although hardly a great work of art, it is a memorable image, partly because of its quirky elements: as the governor proclaims the foundation of the new colony, the young woman on the right readies an axe to strike the first symbolic blow in cutting down the tree next to her; the man waiting with a bigger axe will finish the job. Nearby a boy prepares glasses and no doubt warm champagne for a toast.

Not everyone was as sanguine about the future of the new colony at the time. There is an 1830 print by William Heath titled Flourishing state of the Swan River thing in which we see a poor family, apparently famished on a lonely beach, near a humpy with a sign declaring it to be the Swan River Tavern.

Detail from Charles Wittenoom’s Sketch of Perth and Melville Waters (1839).

Most early works, though, emphasise the beauty and potential of the new land. Many evoke the vast empty space and thus possibilities for development. Views of the city of Perth regularly look down from Mount Eliza to the curve of the bay and the rows of houses appearing behind it. This is what we see, for example, in Horace Samson’s view of Perth from Mount Eliza (1852): the original watercolour has the bay extending far into the distance; the lithograph of the same year adds a framing tree for the sake of a more satisfactory composition.

There is a similar view, a few years earlier, in George Nash’s An extensive view of Perth, Western Australia, with a group of natives in the foreground (1846), where the presence of the Aborigines in the front of the picture is contrasted with the orderly rows of market gardens and orchards below and the city beyond. The natives are bemused spectators of the rapid transformation of their familiar landscape by the British settlers.

A number of works look more closely at the new gardens and farms. Henry Willey Reveley has a detailed view of My house and garden in Western Australia (1833), in which his modest cottage stands next to its abundant kitchen garden; on the left is the first water mill built in the colony, an important achievement and evidently a source of pride to the artist-settler.

Spaciousness is evoked in these works, but so is the increasing prosperity of the nascent city. A number of pictures show the rows of new houses that line the streets, notably a pair of hand-coloured prints by Charles Dirk Wittenoom, both published in 1839, only a decade after the foundation of the colony, one showing a street in Perth and the other one in Fremantle.

The much larger watercolour study of the first scene hangs next to the prints, so once again we can compare what the artist saw with the slightly modified version for the print. The things that most interest him, of course, are the wide street and the handsome houses as well as the picket fences with their implications of orderly life, respect of property and privacy.

Many other early pictures of colonial cities — prints of Sydney notably — populate their views with carefully chosen figures to suggest the comfort, prosperity and security of the new colony. Well-dressed ladies and gentlemen, officers in uniform and so on are common. Here, Wittenoom has a couple and their child as the principal human figures, seen as they walk down the footpath. It suggests not only that this is a flourishing colony of free settlers but also a suitable place for family life.

Of course all this progress meant displacing the Aborigines, although some early images, such as Robert Daly’s very long Panoramic view of King George’s Sound, implies friendly co-existence. Englishmen and Aborigines walk freely along the road and an English officer is shown shaking hands with an Aborigine.

There are many early etchings and drawings of Aboriginal people, including an important group by Louis de Sainson, the artist who accompanied the French expeditions of the Astrolabe in 1826-27. Sainson’s vision is neither strictly anthropological nor romantic or even overtly satirical: he seems to see the Aborigines as the picturesque, sometimes comical figures of a genre composition.

A few works reflect open conflict between natives and settlers. The most interesting of these are some sketches by Henry Prinsep, who was raised in an artistic environment in London. Prinsep came to Western Australia to visit a station his father had purchased; he married and remained here for the rest of his life.

The images of conflict relate to incidents during the journeys of John Forrest and Ernest Giles through the Central, Victorian and Western deserts in the mid-1870s, where the explorers claimed they were subject to unprovoked attacks. There is no doubt the Aboriginal population suffered much oppression at the hands of the settlers. Indeed the imperial government delayed granting full responsible government to Western Australia because they were not confident the native inhabitants would be safe from cruelty. In this context Prinsep, a humanitarian, was appointed chief protector of Aborigines in 1898. He was obliged to deal with the crises of displacement, pauperisation, prostitution and disease — menaces far more destructive than any of the skirmishes he had evoked in his drawings a generation earlier.

Unknown Land, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth. Until January 30.