Duterrau, Glover, Bock: National Picture, Art of Tasmania’s Black War
The violence between colonialists and Tasmanian Aborigines gave way to a brief hope, captured by artists.
The worst episode of violent confrontation between the British settlers of Australia and the land’s original inhabitants took place almost two centuries ago in Tasmania, in what was being called, by 1835, the Black War. About 150 settlers and many more Aborigines were killed before the peace settlement that resulted in the remaining indigenous population moving to Flinders Island, where many of them succumbed to disease. The last of them eventually returned to the mainland and, when they died, it was thought that the whole Tasmanian ethnic group had disappeared. In fact, many of mixed background remain today, largely the descendants of women purchased or kidnapped as the concubines of sealers between 1798 and the first decades of the 19th century.
These events could well be known today only from written records, but as it happens they are illustrated by several visual documents of exceptional interest, in particular by the works of one contemporary painter, Benjamin Duterrau, who felt impelled to commemorate the end of the conflict and the principal figures involved, especially white peacemaker George Augustus Robinson and several of the indigenous leaders. Duterrau was an artist of barely more than amateur ability and limited training who was attempting the highest genre of history painting: there is pathos in this incongruity, yet the work remains vivid, even haunting.
Conflict on the island began as settlement encroached on traditional indigenous hunting lands, despite the official colonial policy of enforcing the rule of law. The situation grew rapidly worse with the arrival of more settlers of convict origin, many of whom were not of the highest moral character. They soon considerably outnumbered the small indigenous population, which originally may have been about 1000 in the settled areas and had been reduced to a few hundred by the end of the period.
Aboriginal raids and settler attacks in reprisal were often savage, including the murder of women and children, rape, mutilation and burning alive. Terror and resentment grew in the 1820s, until by 1828 governor George Arthur imposed martial law in the settled parts of the island. The terms of the decree prohibited the use of force if the Aborigines could be persuaded to leave the settled areas voluntarily, but in practice it was too often taken as justifying wilful killing. Aboriginal attacks and settler reprisals did not cease. In 1830 the government organised a military sweep of the island in an effort to eradicate resistance: this was almost completely ineffectual.
Another approach affirmed the official, if unenforceable, crown and colonial government policy of equal justice for white and black. A series of proclamation boards, based on a design by surveyor-general George Frankland, attempted to illustrate the principle of the rule of law for a native audience who could not read or write — though many convicts too were illiterate. The boards picture black and white men shaking hands, black and white mothers side-by-side and, in the most important scene, show that a white man who kills a black will be hanged, just as a black who kills a white.
One hundred of these, mistakenly called Governor Davey’s Proclamation Boards, were hand copied by convict artists in 1829-30 and nailed to trees. There are seven extant today: this exhibition brings together five of them for the first time. It is fascinating to observe the subtle differences of style and expression in the reproduction of the same prototype, and poignant to see this reiterated assertion of a theoretically possible and desirable harmony between the races, when the reality was one of stubborn hostility fuelled on both sides by fear and anger.
After the failure of the “Black Line” of 1830 (a human chain devised to round up Aborigines), a new hope for resolution arose with the work of Robinson (1791-1866), a bricklayer and Methodist lay preacher, whose initiative was supported by the governor.
He contacted the indigenous people and gained their confidence, persuading a particularly warlike group to lay down their arms in 1831; but the people who had inspired such terror were now a band of only 28. In the next few years he succeeded in bringing in the remaining Tasmanian Aborigines, 300-odd in all, by persuasion or by force, in the belief that this was the only way to protect them from being killed by the colonists.
Crowded together in poor accommodation, however, first at Wybalenna on Flinders Island and then at Oyster Cove near Hobart, and exposed to unfamiliar diseases, many soon died.
Robinson’s promise that eventually they would be allowed to return to their traditional lands was never honoured by the colonial government. By 1836, Benjamin Law’s impressive busts of Truganini and her husband Woureddy already express a sense of melancholy and of the awful gravity of virtually extinguishing a whole people; in the event, Truganini would survive for another 40 years, the last full-blood Aboriginal Tasmanian.
These events are fundamental to an understanding of the representation of the Aborigines in John Glover’s paintings, a point made at the beginning and end of the upstairs section of the exhibition. Glover’s A Corroboree of Natives in Mills Plains (1832), for example, could not have presented such an idyllic view of indigenous life even a year or two earlier, when the natives inspired dread. Now that they had departed, it was possible to imagine them in a different light.
There are several important sets of work in this fine and scholarly exhibition, co-curated by Tim Bonyhady and Greg Lehman, which tell a story all the more moving for being presented without overt breast-beating. The facts speak for themselves more effectively than anything else. And the people live for us in the sympathetic and vivid portraits by Glover, Thomas Bock and John Skinner Prout: not types but individuals overtaken by history and stranded in exile at the end of their lives.
Far less talented than these painters, but more important historically, was Duterrau (1768-1851), who greatly admired Robinson for his humanity and vision and was determined to immortalise him. Born in London to French parents, Duterrau had been an engraver before turning to portrait painting, which he practised in Hobart after immigrating in 1832, but he had never been properly trained in the academic tradition and had little if any experience of figure painting or knowledge of anatomy.
Nonetheless, he conceived the ambition of painting a history composition, and felt that Robinson’s conciliation of the Aborigines was a subject of the highest national and moral importance. He was undoubtedly thinking of precedents such as Penn’s Treaty with the Indians, executed in 1771-72 by Benjamin West, the American-born second president of the Royal Academy (until his death in 1820), who Duterrau may have met and whose work he certainly would have known.
But Duterrau is equally influenced — no doubt particularly because of his French background — by Charles Le Brun, leader of the French Academy in the later 17th century, and in particular his theories of facial expression and his programmatic painting of The Tent of Darius (1661). Le Brun himself was originally inspired by Poussin’s philosophy of expression but, under the influence of Descartes’s theory of the passions (1649), turned it into a mechanistic system of facial movements.
In The Tent of Darius, Le Brun found a subject that allowed him to represent a compendium of expressions, and he later took many of the individual expressive heads as illustrations for a lecture on the subject given at the academy. They were published as individual engravings and in a group on a single sheet, and Duterrau would have had ample opportunity to consult the English translation of the book, A Method to Learn to Design the Passions, published in London in 1734.
Like Le Brun, Duterrau too conceived of his historical composition as a compendium of expressions: he wanted to compress the whole range of reactions, on the part of the Aborigines, that might have preceded or accompanied the making of their pact with Robinson — from suspicion and mistrust to friendliness and goodwill — into the “one moment” that the painter has at his disposal, in Le Brun’s words. And he wanted, moreover, to combine these general expressions with accurate portraits of the principal actors in the event.
This is why, again in direct imitation of Le Brun, he produced a series of individual expressive heads as studies for the great project, a “national picture”, as he called it.
Unlike Le Brun, however, he modelled these heads in clay, perhaps in a quest for great realism or because he thought it would be easier to paint with these three-dimensional models as guides. Unfortunately, his skill as a modeller was not much greater than his ability as a painter, and several of the reliefs have serious errors of proportion or perspective.
These were not the only preparatory studies undertaken by Duterrau: he painted a preliminary scene, Mr Robinson’s First Meeting with Timmy (1840), and several studies of individual figures in various poses and actions, most of which would be rather awkwardly combined in the final work. He also produced portraits of four leading native figures (1834) that were acquired by the state government in 1837 in response to a public petition.
In the final composition, Robinson stands in the centre, shaking hands with Timmy in token of agreement, while the once-feared chief Manalargena and others stand in the background. Truganini stands on Robinson’s left.
The composition is crisscrossed by the gazes of figures looking at each other, as though communicating silently, while a couple of figures are shown sharpening and straightening spears, seemingly representing the traditional way of life, and perhaps also alluding to their warlike nature and the voluntary nature of the peace agreement. A wallaby and a dog face each other as symbols of peaceful coexistence: an Australian version of the lion lying down with the lamb.
The full-scale version of the composition, said to have been more than 3m by 4m in size, has been lost. A few years ago, art historian Stephen Scheding traced it as far as Scotland, where the trail disappeared. Duterrau also produced a smaller version, The Conciliation (1840), now in the collection of the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery. It forms the centrepiece of this exhibition, and is an ambitious and flawed monument to a tragic episode in the early history of Australia.
The National Picture: The Art of Tasmania’s Black War
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, until July 29
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