Colony: Australia 1770-1861, National Gallery of Victoria

While this show evokes the pathos of indigenous dispossession, there is a more pervasive pathos in a new-world science.

Unknown etcher, after George Stubbs: The kanguroo, an animal found on the coast of New Holland (1773)

The colonisation of Australia started much later than that of any other significa­nt part of the world encountered by the Europeans in the age of global exploration that began more than 500 years ago, at the zenith of the High ­Renaissance. A great southern land, a Terra Australis, had been posited by geographers in antiquity; the globe would be unbalanced ­unless there were some land mass in the southern hemisphere corresponding to Europe, Asia and Africa in the northern half of the world. But the reality of Australia’s size and boundaries would not be known until James Cook’s voyages.

Our continent was not detected by Europ­ean navigators in the first century of exploration. It was only a little more than 400 years ago that Dutch sailors first set foot on the coast of Western Australia. Then, remarkably, it took almost another two centuries before any kind of settlement was established. The fact is surprising becaus­e of the alacrity with which far smaller and less important lands, and even small ­islands, were occupied, equipped and fortified. The lack of European interest comes after at least 1000 years of indifference from our neighbours to the north, where civilisation developed in Java, as part of the spread of Indian influence, in the eighth century AD.

If that cultural movement had continued to spread, at least the northern part of our contin­ent might well have been occupied a millennium ago by Indonesian settlers, with cities and an economy that no doubt would have attracted the interest of the Dutch when they became the main Western power in the region in the 17th century. But for various reasons this did not happen, and the Aborigines were left to lead their immemorially ancient way of life virtually unchanged and undisturbed until the end of the 18th century.

Slowly the coastline of Australia was more fully and more accurately plotted on successive maps, but the east coast remained a matter of conjecture until Cook’s great voyages in the second half of the 18th century. As I observed several months ago, during a flurry of excitement about colonial monuments, the primary school cliche that Cook discovered Australia is obvious­ly simplistic and even inaccurate. But his charting of the east coast was the consummation of a process of objective mapping and of situating the Australian continent within a global­ geographical matrix that clearly deserves to be considered as a significant achievement in the history of our knowledge of the planet on which we live.

Port Jackson Painter, Half-length portrait of Gna-na-gna-na (c. 1790)

Colonisation followed soon after Cook complete­d the map of our continent. There is something poetically appropriate about this, but more mundane motivations included the urgency­ of finding a new home for transported convicts once the American Revolution had stopped transportation to Virginia. As the rate and capacity of international trade increased with the dawning of the industrial revolution, colonies also became more important as ­sources of various raw materials and as strategic outposts.

Sydney town was founded in 1788, the year before the French Revolution, which threw ­European politics into turmoil and engaged Britain in war with France, escalating with the rise of Napoleon and ending with his fall in 1815. In Australia, meanwhile, sub-­colonies were ­established on Norfolk Island, at Hobart and Newcastle; outposts arose in the north, in what would become Queensland, and in the south, at the site of Melbourne in 1835.

In 1836, the city of Adelaide was inaugurated as a free colony, with an ideal and rational urban layout and no convicts. Even earlier, Perth had been established as the Swan River Colony in 1829; it also was intended as a free settlement, although the colonists sub­sequently were obliged to request shipments of ­convicts from the middle of the century.

All the colonies faced various difficulties in their early days but in hindsight their growth, in a not particularly promising land at the very ends of the earth, was impressive in its rapidity and in the ambitions the colonists soon ­conceived for their new cities. In the many early views of the various colonies in this remarkable exhibition, it is the rate of growth that is particularly striking. A few years after its beginning as a tent city, Sydney had an ever-increasing ­number of brick and stone houses. The origins of some of the city’s schools and other institutions go back to a generation after foundation. By 1850, the University of Sydney, the first in the Empire, was established.

Melbourne had started later but had grown faster than Sydney, and by 1851 a petition­ for the separation of Victoria from the colon­y of New South Wales gained royal approva­l. Months later, gold was discovered and the wealth generated by the ­diggings quickly turned Melbourne into a great 19th-century city. The gold rush also enormously increased the population of settlers, from less than 500,000 before 1850 to more than three million by the 1880s; Melbourne alone soon had a population of more than 500,000. Melbourne too founded a university, the year after Sydney, and by 1861, after only 10 years as an autonomous colony, the city established its public library, which included the first incarnation of the National Gallery of ­Victoria. And this is the date that has been taken as the end point of the present exhibition.

Fascinating as these early images of the colonie­s are, though, there is much more to see, including many portraits of important figure­s in the colonial story and of Aborigines, the earliest even predating the foundation of the first colonies. And there is a wealth of natura­l history illustrations, fine and sometimes exquisite drawings and watercolours, prints and paintings, of ­animals, birds, insects and plants of all kinds.

James Sowerby, Embothrium speciosissimum (now Telopea speciosissima) (1793)

On a first visit to the exhibition, we tend to be absorbed by the myriad individual studies of the new life forms and natural phenomena that so fascinated our earliest colonial artists — working as they were at the climax of the passion for natural history and particularly botany, and in the period that in effect was preparing the way for the new theories of evolution and genetics. There are ultimately too many of these drawings, prints and other documents to examine each of them as closely as they deserve, but it is on walking through the exhibition again and surveying all this material collectively and from a distance that we may be struck by another level of significance.

For although many, if not most, of these plants and living creatures had been known to the Aborigines for thousands of years, they had never been understood, represented or analysed­ in anything like this way. The difference­ cannot be reduced to degrees of accuracy­ of observation or to a superior system of taxonomy. It consists in an entirely different way of thinking about the world, a wholly different framework that is essentially that of science, and that in this form evolved from the proto-scientific theories of the Renaissance to mature in the scientific revolution of the 17th century.

Modern science arguably arises from the confluence of two traditions. One is the heritage of classical Greece, which gave us the confid­ence that human reason could understand nature­; but the other is the Judeo-Christian traditio­n, which places reason ultimately outside nature. For the medieval mind, the world made sense only from the perspective of God, who stood outside creation. Humans could achieve a degree of understanding of the universe by striving to conceive it from God’s point of view although, as we learn at the end of Dante’s Divine Comedy, our minds are not capab­le of assimilating the divine vision, even if we are permitted a momentary glimpse of the ultim­ate truth of the cosmos.

The Renaissance reclaimed the Greeks’ confide­nce in the human mind, and that is why its interest in the theory of perspective is so much more than a device for pictorial compos­ition. It was a metaphor for the intelligibility of the world from the point of view of the human mind. Yet the nascent science also inherited the sense of seeing nature from the outside, from a privileged vantage point beyond the living world itself. It was this combination that determined the specific quality, and ultimately the power, of this new kind of knowledge. The new science was predicated on a clear distinction ­between the knowing subject and a world of ­objects; and that objective world of matter, as Descartes later defined it, is quintessentially ­defined by extension, or quantifiability. Everything in the objective world can be defined by size, shape, mass, location and so on, and scientific laws describe the regularities in the behaviour of objects under different circumstances.

Henry Burn, Swanston Street from the Bridge (1861).

Francis Bacon, one of the early philosophers of science, had ridiculed medieval scholasticism as being like a virgin consecrated to God, who bears no offspring. The new science, based on the experimental method, produced predictable results and allowed us to achieve concrete ­outcomes in the world. Its success in this regard has been extraordinary: Western science has transformed the world and the lives of every human on the planet, consigning all rival ­systems of practical knowledge to obsolescence. But that is not to say that science answers all our questions, and especially not our questions about human experience and meaning. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote in his essay L’oeil et l’esprit (1960), “la science manipule les choses et renonce a les habiter”: science manip­ulates things but no longer dwells in them.

The exhibition, seen from this perspective, is like an extraordinary museum of the arrival of the scientific mind in a land where nothing of the sort had previously existed. Aboriginal thought was mythic, preliterate and consequently pre-rational. It had therefore no critical reflexivity or analytical distance. There was intim­ate knowledge of the environment, woven inextricably into mythic tales about creation, the nature of the land and the norms of human life, but in such a culture there is no second-degre­e thinking; the priority is to ensure that the store of cultural knowledge, as fully mastered­ by the elders of the tribe, is passed on intact to the next generation through the successi­ve stages of initiation.

This is a world in which life can remain virtual­ly unchanged for thousands of years at a time. There is no history or progress in the sense that these have long been pervasive, dynamic and sometimes destructive themes in the West. But on the other hand there is an incomparable sense of dwelling in the natural environment.

So although this exhibition constantly evokes the pathos of the indigenous dispossession that coincided with colonial progress, there is an even more subtle and pervasive pathos in the insatiable scientific study and classification of a new natural world that somehow remains alien and strange, implicitly contrasted with an ancient, pre-rational and visceral sense of ­belonging to a place.

Colony: Australia 1770-1861.

National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Until July 15.