Mammals with personality star in Tails from the Coasts exhibition

A small but attractive exhibition shows nature as alive and flourishing, and is in contrast to a sterile display at our national gallery.

Australian Museum Moonrat, William Farquhar Collection of Natural History Drawings from the National Museum of Singapore. Donated by Mr. G. K. Goh. © Public Domain

All life, including of course human life, is part of the network of ecological systems that we call nature and depends on it for survival. In primitive times, humans lived on the animals they could kill and the plants they gathered in the wild. At a more developed stage, they learned to cultivate the earth, gradually turning wild grasses into nutritious ­cereal crops, and to domesticate animals for milk, meat and wool as well as to serve as beasts of burden.

But our need and feeling for nature go deeper than the necessities of physical survival, especially once those necessities are taken care of. The beauty of flowers and trees, of springtime and the dawn, are attested in very early literature. Trees, flowers and other natural motifs appear in early decorative art, and later in the landscape painting of advanced civilisations like those of China and Europe. Japanese and Chinese ink-painting are grounded in an intuitive sense of the vitality of natural forms like rocks, water and plants.

So an exhibition simply titled Nature, at the NGA, might be expected to explore this spiritual affinity that we feel with the living world around us, especially in an age when we are all supposedly concerned with ecological questions. And indeed the gallery’s website declares: “The natural world is a constant inspiration for artists, who explore the myriad forms of nature as a means of expression, a way to understand the cosmos and to explore their personal relationship with their environment.”

Tails from the Coasts - Australian Museum Black Bittern, William Farquhar Collection of Natural History Drawings from the National Museum of Singapore. Donated by Mr. G. K. Goh. © Public Domain

But talk is cheap in the art world and as I have observed before, the contemporary cultural establishment doesn’t really like nature; it’s happy enough to deplore environmental destruction and attribute it to the excesses of capitalism, but it’s deeply uncomfortable with the crucial question of how life actually comes into being and reproduces itself.

Contemporary gender ideology is committed to the fantasy that sexual differences are a social construct, so that paradoxically you can “identify” as a man or a woman, but you can no longer actually define what those terms mean, since in this world it is not permissible to define a woman as a human with a womb. After all, that could be taken as implying that part of a woman’s biological vocation is childbearing; or indeed that part of man’s vocation, in fatherhood, is taking care of his wife and children during the vulnerable times of infancy and childhood.

So perhaps it should have come as no surprise that the exhibition in question is the most frigid and sterile experience imaginable, and illustrates a quite extra­ordinary level of alienation from any sense of natural ­vitality. The space itself is a bare concrete box. The first thing we encounter is a ridiculous pumpkin by Yayoi Kusama, a work that says more about the artist’s self-­involvement than about the living world. Other large objects include a sculpture by Anselm Kiefer that is of undoubted interest in its own right but could hardly be more inorganic, a set of Aboriginal burial poles, an assemblage landscape by Rosalie Gascoigne, and one of Brett Whiteley’s sillier sculptures.

Apart from this disparate collection of larger pieces, a number of smaller objects have been gathered in rather precious little groups and enclosed in boxes set into the wall and sealed off with glass. In case this was not enough of a barrier between the viewer and the works, most of the recessed and glassed-in boxes are set at an uncomfortable height for viewing. This perverse choice of exhibition design thus prevents the viewer even looking

Tails from the Coasts - Australian Museum Binturong (Arctictis binturong), William Farquhar Collection of Natural History Drawings from the National Museum of Singapore. Donated by Mr. G. K. Goh. © Public Domain

properly at the smaller objects on display, let alone responding to them aesthetically.

But if nature is blighted by wilful and almost puritanical barrenness at the National Gallery, it can be discovered alive and flourishing in a small but attractive exhibition that has come to the Australian Museum in Sydney from the National Museum of Singapore, and comprises 36 out of the total of 477 drawings in the ­William Farquhar Collection. The exhibition’s title, Tails from the Coasts, in spite of the seemingly rather twee pun in its title, presumably also recalls the fact that the Malay word “ekor”, tail, is used as a counting term for animals.

Lieutenant Colonel William Farquhar (1774-1839) was the British Resident in Malacca (1803-18) and then first Resident in Singapore, which had been founded by Sir Stamford Raffles (1781-1826) on a sparsely inhabited island in 1819 to guarantee the safe passage of British trade through the Straits of Malacca, a critical transit point on the trade route between China and India; within only a few years, thousands of Malay and Chinese ­migrants had settled in the new port city.

Raffles and Farquhar had many things in common, including an interest in natural history, long experience of the East and a knowledge of local languages, but they later had a falling-out over Farquhar’s policies in the administration of the new colony and Raffles dismissed him in 1823.

Farquhar, who had been popular in the colony, returned to England, protested in vain against his dismissal, but continued to receive military promotions and ended up a Major General.

It was during Farquhar’s time in Malacca and Singapore, and especially in the Malaccan years, that he undertook a study of the flora and fauna of the Malay Peninsula and commissioned hundreds of natural history illustrations, most probably from Chinese artists. He subsequently gifted the collection, in eight volumes, to the Royal Asiatic Society in 1826.

In 1993, the Society sold them at auction through Sotheby’s, and they were acquired by the Singaporean businessman Goh Geok Khim, who in turn donated them to the National ­Museum of Singapore. The exhibition is divided into three sections, dealing respectively with land, air and sea creatures, and it starts with a particularly fine drawing of a binturong, also known as a bearcat, although it is in fact related neither to bears nor to cats, but is the largest member of the civet family.

Farquhar kept one as a pet, which is why it is the first item in the series, but it is also a good example of the art of the anonymous illustrator just over two centuries ago.

The animal itself is painted in a fresh and lively way, although there is nothing in the image to give us an idea of its scale: we might imagine it to be about the size of a weasel, but it is actually quite a lot bigger. From a natural history point of view, however, it is very accurate, as explained by a curator from the museum in a short video on the museum website: the artist has accurately recorded its unusual coat, with dark fur tipped in white, its white whiskers and the white pattern around its small ears, as well as its orange eyes.

Nature: National Gallery of Australia.

Presumably the artist who painted this watercolour was trained by a British or European natural history illustrator and learned what was expected of this documentary genre. But it is in other aspects of the composition that are not as concerned with documentary accuracy that we can see signs of his original formation, perhaps in Canton: the rocks that are painted in the foreground and on either side are rendered in a characteristically Chinese stylisation, not as a master of the highest genre of ink painting would depict them, but in the mannerism of a decorative artist.

The mammals, in particular, generally seem to have a subtle sense of personality, including the rather jaded-looking Moonrat and the impassive Sambar deer, once plentiful on the island but understandably scarcer now in a highly populated region – although it is remarkable to learn that Singapore is still home to over 60 species of mammals and over 160 of reptiles. Presumably these drawings were made from taxidermised specimens, although as in the case of the binturong, the artist could have had access to living animals as well; but it is clearly easier to imagine the heads of mammals as faces than those of the more alien birds, reptiles and fishes.

We don’t know how many artists were involved in this project, but it was almost certainly more than one or two, for there are discernible differences of style. Many of the bird pictures, in particular – here certainly done from stuffed models – have a static quality that is emphasised by the artist’s focus on the elaborately detailed but flat and almost tile-like patterns of the plumage. Fish and reptile images are also distinctive in being set on blank paper, unaccompanied by elements of landscape in which the ground-dwelling animals or the wading birds are set, or branches of trees with leaves and flowers for the perching birds. As a result, they soar through the void, like a pair of flying lizards (one seen from above and the other from below) or float like the fish in empty space ornamentally defined by a simple painted border.

The exhibition includes several maps that help explain the distribution of species in these regions. One explains the so-called Wallace Line, first proposed by the English naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace in his book The Malay Archipelago (1869).

He had studied the fauna of the region since his arrival in Singapore in 1854, and he discovered that there was a distinct break between the fauna to the west of the Lombok Strait – i.e. that in Bali, Java, Borneo, Sumatra, and the Malay Peninsula – and to the east, i.e. Lombok, Sulawesi, Timor, West Papua, Papua New Guinea and Australia.

The former he called the Indo-Malayan region and the later the Austro-Malayan region. On the Australian side, we had marsupials, unknown in the west, while the monkeys, deer and squirrels of Asia were absent in the east.

The second map shows the path of migratory birds along the vast distances between New Zealand and the north of the Pacific Ocean.

The most important path is known as the East Asian-Australasian Flyway, followed by some 50 million migratory birds every year, from Alaska and the Russian Arctic Circle, where they spend the breeding season, to Australia and New Zealand where they live during the non-breeding season. Many of these birds pass through a wetland reserve in Singapore on their way north or south.

The final map is the Spilhaus World Ocean map, first published by Athelstan Spilhaus in 1979. I had seen a number of maps in the past that put Antarctica in the centre and show the seas all around it, but this one takes a longer view, and from the Antarctic centre represents the world’s oceans as a continuous system, fringed by the shores of the surrounding continents.

The extent of this oceanic mass is vast, and yet the image is also a sobering one in an age when we are beginning to understand the threats to an ecosystem that sustains all life on earth.

Nature

National Gallery of Australia, until August 1

Tails from the Coasts

Australian Museum, until September 7