Newcastle's creative frontier

NEWCASTLE benefited from having some talented convict artists and senior officials with an interest in art, as a new exhibition shows.

Corroboree at Newcastle

NEWCASTLE made an unpromising start as a penal colony within a penal colony. Joseph Lycett, in whose 1824 publication Views in Australia both words and pictures generally convey a positive image of the new settlements, is forced to admit: "Newcastle has been for many years the place of banishment, to which refractory convict and other malefactors have been sent, by way of punishment."

He adds, however, that "latterly Port Macquarie has been selected for that purpose, as Newcastle was found, by experience, to be not sufficiently remote from Sydney to prevent the escape and return of the prisoners. This settlement has been recently much enlarged and improved."

He was right in this last assertion. Under governor Lachlan Macquarie, and particularly in the decade from 1812 to 1822, the official policy of developing the town and its harbour and other facilities coincided with the appointment of a series of senior officials who were interested in art. It also coincided with the presence of several talented convict artists, above all Lycett himself, who were put to work for the government. The collective achievement of these years is the subject of an exhibition drawn from the collections of the State Library of NSW and the Newcastle Art Gallery and showing in Newcastle.

It is a small but substantial exhibition, in which perhaps the first striking thing is to witness the physical transformation of the land. The most distinctive feature of the city's original topography was a large rocky island standing a little offshore, at the end of Colliers Point (Signal Hill). This picturesque formation, originally known as Coal Island for its visible coal seams, and today as Nobbys Head, is dramatised in one of the very earliest images of the colony: an engraving (1812) after a drawing by Richard Browne, an Irish convict who had been sent up to Newcastle for re-offending within months of arriving in Sydney. The engraver Walter Preston had been sentenced to death for highway robbery before being transported to NSW instead, and he too was subsequently sent to Newcastle before eventually gaining a pardon.

The island is still a distinctive feature in an oil painting by Lycett (c. 1818) that takes an expansive view of the city, the bay and the coastline beyond, all under a moody cloud-filled sky. The slightly later view he drew for reproduction as a hand-coloured etching in Views in Australia takes a closer view, omitting the hillside with the original Christ Church overlooking the town, but still focusing on the solitary and impressive mass of the rock standing in the waves. Lycett's view, presumably based on drawings done during his stay in Newcastle, before his return to Sydney and then to England in 1822, shows no signs of the subsequent transformations of the landscape, although he does refer to changes under way in the accompanying text.

Nobbys Island was in reality doomed, first of all by the practical requirements of access and the improvement of a safe anchorage in the harbour. A series of later images follows the progress of a breakwater as it reaches out from the point to rock. One of the most talented amateur artists in the colony, Lieutenant Edward Close, himself in charge of the building work, represents the project with a subdued enthusiasm in his watercolour of 1820: the breakwater is almost visibly growing, with an army of tiny laborious figures and several small cranes visible as silhouettes. The sweeping curve of the beach that leads from foreground to background is a conventional landscape device but also functions as a metaphor for the energy and ambition of this enterprise.

In the comprehensive panorama of the city that Close painted in 1821 before his retirement to take up civilian life as a settler in the Hunter Valley, he shows the breakwater reaching even further, almost to its goal. Perhaps the angle of the view exaggerates the progress, for Macquarie Pier, as it was named, was not finished until 1846; the project was suspended in 1823 when governor Thomas Brisbane reduced funding for public works, and did not resume until 12 years later in 1835. In 1839 gangs of convicts were set to work quarrying the island for rock to fill in the remaining stretch.

If today Nobbys Head seems sadly diminished, it is not only by the loss of its insularity or because it was deformed by the quarrying of so much stone to build the breakwater; it is also that it was deliberately shortened because its enormous mass acted as too much of a windbreak for sailing ships rounding the head. In the 1850s, there was a plan to blow it up and three tunnels were dug in 1853-54 to lay the necessary charges; all of this is detailed in Roslyn Kerr's report In Search of Nobbys' Tunnels, which is available online. Kerr documents the debate - an early example of a conservation campaign in Australia - that eventually led to the abandonment of the most destructive proposal in favour of levelling the top of the island to create a platform for a lighthouse; this still entailed reducing its height from about 43m to 30m, and in the process destroying the characteristic tooth-like profile it has in all the early colonial depictions.

Before the new lighthouse was built, there was a coal-burning one on Signal Hill; Close designed a building for it in the form of a Chinese pagoda. It does not appear in his own panorama but occupies a prominent position on the right of a view of the colony by Thomas Mitchell in 1828, like a folly in a Georgian garden. Further to the west, Christ Church also occupied a picturesque hilltop position, but the most striking example of a late neoclassical aestheticism flourishing in the unlikely setting of a penal colony of last resort was the prison disguised as a palladian villa designed by the most ambitious of Newcastle's commandants, Captain James Wallis.

It was Wallis who employed and encouraged Lycett and Preston, although he was also a keen amateur artist; there is some disagreement about whether he or Lycett executed the drawings subsequently attributed to him in their engravings by Preston. But he is without doubt the author of some elegant line drawings of landscape views produced with a camera lucida, a device also employed by such contemporaries as Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Unlike the much older camera obscura, the camera lucida, invented in 1807, works by looking through a prism that allows one to see the view and one's sheet of paper simultaneously, and to trace the former on to the latter.

Wallis was thus an artist and an impresario, and his most remarkable project in the latter role was the production of the so-called Macquarie Collector's Chest, which is the centrepiece of the exhibition. There seems to be no clear precedent for this miniature and portable museum, like a wunderkammer compressed into a campaign chest. It was designed to show off the natural history of Newcastle and required the co-ordination of a team of cabinet-makers, natural historians, taxidermists and painters, all within the deadline of the governor's visit in 1818.

In some ways this is a quintessentially Enlightenment project, with its taxonomic ambition to represent the different genera and species of birds, insects and other creatures to be found in the area. At the same time the abundance of material collected in so small a space means clarity of exposition is necessarily sacrificed to the display of variety; the ostensibly Enlightenment and encyclopedic spirit of the project gives way to a romantic revelling in the sheer profusion of natural variety. Surrounding the trays of natural history specimens, meanwhile, are small landscape compositions by Lycett, illustrating views of the region, and sometimes including larger birds that are too big for the scale of the surrounding scenery. Wallis may have had some hand in these paintings, which were reproduced by Preston under his name.

Some of the bird and insect specimens in the box were no doubt collected by the local Aborigines, with whom Wallis was on good terms; he used to take two of them, including the local tribal leader Burigon, also known as Jack, on hunting expeditions, and they may be the figures represented returning with a kangaroo in the middle ground of Lycett's Inner View of Newcastle (c. 1818). We know the commandant arranged for a corroboree to be held in Macquarie's honour on the occasion of the governor's visit to Newcastle. "At night," Macquarie records in his journal, "Jack, also known as Burigon, King of the Newcastle Native Tribe, with about 40 men, women and children came by Captain Wallis' desire to the Government House between 7 and 8 o'clock at night and entertained us with a carauberie in high style for half an hour in the grounds."

There is an important painting of a corroboree at Newcastle by Lycett that may be from the same year and may even be based on drawings made on this occasion, although it probably incorporates and synthesises material observed at different times. The painting is of considerable anthropological interest, recording, for example, a number of different postures and dance movements that must have seemed particularly striking to the artist, even though they were probably not all being performed simultaneously, as they appear in the painting.

The picture also records, on the left, an initiation ceremony in which young men are having a front tooth knocked out: the young men stand in a row while in front of each an older man holds a wooden peg against the tooth and prepares to strike hard with another piece of wood or a stone: presumably the aim is to knock the tooth out with a single swift blow. On the right hand side of the composition is what appears to be a man beating his wife; perhaps this is included as an example of reprehensible contemporary behaviour contrasting with the dignity of timeless ritual and ceremony.

There are many other images of Aborigines, including a series by Browne that also record important ethnographic information, although it is unclear whether certain stylistic peculiarities are due to the limited competence of the artist or his intention to caricature his subjects. A clear distinction of portrait and caricature is intended, however, on one fascinating sheet from the Wallis and Lycett album: a small pencil drawing of Burigon, emphasising nobility and refinement, is pasted in above a much larger colour rendering of another Aborigine named Dick, represented as sly and coarse. Below is the dry, yet poignant handwritten caption: "Two Natives of New South Wales. Dick killed Burigon one day with one blow."

Treasures of Newcastle
Newcastle Regional Art Gallery, until May 5