The high road to Ballarat

A FASCINATING exhibition in Ballarat explores the role of Scottish artists in our colonial history.

The Heart of the Coolins, Isle of Skye (1886) by Keeley Halswelle. From the exhibition: F

THE Scots were always stubbornly independent, even when all the Britons were Celtic peoples. The ­Romans never conquered Scotland, and Hadrian built his wall to contain them in their wild northern lands. After the fall of Rome and the invasion of Germanic Angles and Saxons, Scotland, like other borderlands, was one of the places where the old Celtic ­inhabitants of the British Isles continued to maintain their separate identity.

In the 16th century, the Scots were converted to Calvinism, so while the English were Anglicans, the Scots were Presbyterians. The choice of Ireland to remain Catholic and Scotland to become Protestant had significant consequences for both peoples for the next half millennium. However humourless the Calvinists could be, they did believe that everyone had to form a personal relationship with God, and this meant reading divine scripture.

Thus the Reformation brought a higher level of literacy to Scotland than to many other countries. Building on this advantage, and on a longstanding commitment to public education, the Scots of the Enlightenment period made a disproportionate contribution, among British intellectuals generally, to history, philosophy, science and technology.

At the same time, life in Scotland was not easy. The land was comparatively poor and the weather harsh, and the Highland Clearances of the late 18th and early 19th century put ­additional pressure on rural populations, driving many to seek a new life elsewhere; the vast expansion of the British Empire in the late 18th century would open up abundant opportunities from India to Canada and Australia.

The Scots, educated, resourceful and tough, were prominent in the exploration and early colonisation of Australia. As we learn from this fascinating exhibition in Ballarat, Captain Cook’s artist Sydney Parkinson was a Scot, as was Thomas Watling, the convict painter who left us some of the first pictures of Australia and of the Aborigines by a trained artist.

The Scots were under-represented among the convict population, who were responsible for much of the early violence against the indigenous population, and Enlightenment social and political thought encouraged a sense of common humanity.

Watling’s portraits are sympathetic, with a concern both for culture and habits — such as the picture of a man standing on one leg with the other bent, his foot propped against his knee — and for the personality of individuals. One sketch shows almost all the important members of the government — including Governor Phillip and Captain Hunter, another Scot and Phillip’s successor — visiting a native woman described in the caption of the drawing as distressed. A version of the same composition was adapted for the title page of an early volume on the progress of the new colony.

It seems that the woman’s child is sick or even dead; and perhaps the official party are visiting — accompanied by the medical officer, to whom Watling had been assigned — because they suspect an outbreak of smallpox. Nearby, the most moving image in the exhibition is a tiny watercolour sketch of what the artist believed to be the burial site of natives who had died of smallpox. The emptiness and stillness of the scene are underscored by the solitary figure of a horseman who looks on.

From a slightly later period, but beginning as early as John Glover, there are series of portraits of handsome houses and properties, many of which, especially in Victoria, were ­established by the enterprising and hardworking Scots. But here again, of course, the spread of colonial occupation was at the expense of the native inhabitants. There is a particularly telling pair of pictures by von Guerard — house portraits were not uncommonly conceived as a kind of diptych — in one of which a pale and a dark bull lock horns, perhaps a discreet allusion to the armed clashes that had on this occasion taken place, while in the other, a small group of Aborigines move in a desultory way through land they had once occupied.

Many Aboriginal place names at least were preserved by another Scot, Thomas Mitchell, the colonial surveyor, represented here in an impressive portrait, who had learnt his profession surveying battlefields during the Peninsular War in which the British, led by Wellington, supported Spanish resistance to the Napoleonic occupation.

Lachlan Macquarie, one of the most important Scots of all, had also had an important military career before coming to Australia: in 1799 he had fought in India against Tippoo Sultan at the siege of Seringapatam. Alexander Macleay had been a prominent administrator as well as a celebrated entomologist before taking up the position of Colonial Secretary in his retirement both for the money and especially because of the whole new universe of insect life that awaited collection and taxonomic analysis in this new world. Macleay’s elegant Georgian home, Elizabeth Bay House, still stands, and his collection of insects became the basis of the Macleay Museum at the University of Sydney.

Another scholarly individual who made an important contribution to the University of Sydney was Professor Anderson Stuart, who, after brilliant medical studies at the University of Edinburgh, was appointed the first professor of anatomy and physiology at the new university. He was in effect the founder of the School of Medicine and the builder of the handsome ­Anderson Stuart building adjacent to the Quadrangle, which he is seen imagining in a portrait drawing by Lionel Lindsay (1916).

Not all the most notable portraits are of individuals quite so distinguished. There is an impressive pair of full-length portraits by Augustus Earle of Captain John Piper and his wife (c. 1826), she sitting surrounded by numerous offspring, he standing in uniform. He gave his name to Point Piper where he had a beautiful villa which he was forced to relinquish shortly after the portraits were painted, living out the latter part of his life at Parramatta.

More substantial a figure was John Forrest, a brilliant and daring explorer who, as still a young man, mapped the desert regions to the east of Perth, accompanied by his brother. An ­illustration of the time shows the jubilation of the pair and their Aboriginal guide as they reach known territory, the north-south telegraph line recently laid across the continent from Adelaide to Darwin. Much later, after a successful political career, loaded with titles and honours, he is painted in his baronial robes in a magnificent full-length portrait by Phillips Fox, the artist’s last work before his premature death in 1915. But the Scots were not simply hard-working and successful as colonists in Australia; there was also, since the Romantic period, a special mystique associated with Scottish traditions. Scotland had not impressed Dr Johnson, who visited in 1773.

Johnson didn’t think much of a Scottish poet called James Macpherson either. Macpherson had invented an ancient Celtic bard he named Ossian, and published under his name, from 1760, a series of epic poems which he claimed to have translated from original Gaelic sources.

There was enough authenticity in the folk tales on which he based his poems to lend them credibility, and Ossian was enthusiastically embraced in a period that was rediscovering ancient Nordic and medieval traditions — long dismissed by the Renaissance and Enlightenment — and longing to find a Nordic Homer. The imaginary poet was translated into most modern European languages from French and Danish to Russian and Hungarian, and inspired literary works, musical compositions and especially countless paintings.

But even after the decline of the fashion for Ossian, there were other authors who kept the fascination for things Scottish alive. The novels of Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832), which are today enjoying something of a revival after a period of neglect, were wildly popular all over Romantic Europe and indeed with an increasingly international readership.

On a less grandiose level and with a more modest international reach, Robbie Burns (1759-96) had popularised the Scottish dialect and from the middle of the 19th century, Burns festivals became a focus of Scottish consciousness; the first one in Australia was held in Melbourne in 1845.

Painters produced nostalgic pictures of a traditional Scottish way of life that was ebbing away in the modern world, like Thomas Faed’s scene of a simple family gathered quietly in humble surroundings while a teenage boy reads from the Bible (1845-46). Successful settlers had themselves portrayed in Scottish costume or with other allusions to a proud heritage.

At the same time another category of picture was produced and collected both by wealthy private owners and by the new Australian public galleries. As the catalogue — really an accompanying book — points out, the specificity of these works has tended to be overlooked when they have been classified simply as British. Pictures like Peter Graham’s After the Massacre at Glencoe (1889) or Keeley Halswelle’s The Heart of the Coolins, Isle of Skye (1886) are both in historical reference and in topography very distinctly Scottish.

The most characteristic of these paintings are romantically inspired views of dramatic rocky landscapes in the most rugged parts of Scotland, images of sublime nature that were at the same time emblematic of the culture itself: the harsh land in which the most deeply admired character traits of the Scottish people had been forged, as though by nature herself.

For settlers now living on prosperous pastoral stations in the Western District of Victoria, some of them with grand colonial homes, such paintings were not only memories of the very different land of their forefathers but talismans of the moral virtues, born of centuries of endurance, that had brought them the success they now enjoyed.

For Auld Lang Syne: Images of Scottish Australia from the First Fleet to Federation

Art Gallery of Ballarat, to July 27