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The National Picture: The art of Australia's Black War
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Reconsidering Australia’s history — The National Picture: The art of Tasmania's Black War
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Installation view of Benjamin Duterrau's The Conciliation [1840, oil on canvas, 119 x 168 cm, TMAG] and 10 Plaster Bas-Reliefs: Timmy; Attention; Trucanini, wife of Woureddy; Anger; Surprise; Mannalargenna, the chief; The manner of straightening a spear; Woureddy, a native of Bruny Island; Incredulity; Suspicion [1835, painted plaster, nine of which are approx 35 x 27 cm and Timmy is 55 x 39.6, TMAG].
Photo: courtesy of Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery.
Jonathan Holmes
Jonathan Holmes
In June 2013, Greg Lehman — co-curator with Tim Bonyhady of the compelling recent exhibition, The National Picture: The art of Tasmania's Black War* — published The Conciliation: A Founding Document. [1] In this article Lehman notes that the Museum of Australian Democracy (in Old Parliament House, Canberra) recognises a painting titled The Conciliation (1840) by the colonial artist, Benjamin Duterrau (1768-1851), as the 'first historical epic painting in the Australian Colonies’, and MOAD goes on to say that 'it now marks the long path towards legal acknowledgement of Tasmanians of Indigenous descent’. [2] Lehman argues that despite the Museum recognising the painting as a founding document in Australia's history, there has been very little in-depth research into its meaning. As he explains:
One man is shaking hands with another. Some of the figures are gesturing toward this interaction. Others watch or are preoccupied. There are dogs and a kangaroo, as well as several spears. No buildings are in sight. It is probably daytime. For most viewers, progressing an interpretation of the painting as an historical document will be difficult beyond this reading. [3]
When the impressively researched exhibition opened this year during Canberra’s winter, The National Picture drew together intensive collaboration between two museums and two scholars across considerable distance. The resulting achievement has produced both a remarkable exhibition and an outstanding publication of enduring value. First shown at the NGA but split across two floors (May– July); later more tightly configured in three adjacent galleries at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery in Hobart (August–November), the exhibition’s importance in Tasmania has entailed a further showing in the north of the state (Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Launceston, where the tour will end on 17 February 2019).
Installation view of Benjamin Duterrau's The Conciliation [1840, oil on canvas, 119 x 168 cm, TMAG] and 10 Plaster Bas-Reliefs: Timmy; Attention; Trucanini, wife of Woureddy; Anger; Surprise; Mannalargenna, the chief; The manner of straightening a spear; Woureddy, a native of Bruny Island; Incredulity; Suspicion [1835, painted plaster, nine of which are approx 35 x 27 cm and Timmy is 55 x 39.6, TMAG].
Photo: courtesy of Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery.
With the institutional resources that only the NGA could provide as lead partner, while TMAG was prepared to lend a considerable number of its most valuable holdings, in partnership with other loans, the guest curators were enabled to create an absorbing and challenging visual account of the central painting's gestation in the 1830s and its enduring significance. Their research reconstructed the work’s historical, political, social and cultural context, as well as reflecting on the harrowing aftermath of the depicted ‘event’ itself, while bringing fresh attention to its longer-term implications for the descendants of the first peoples of Tasmania.
Benjamin Duterrau’s arresting painting, The Conciliation (in TMAG’s collection since 1945) was a study for a much larger historical work referred to as The National Picture, which Duterrau finished in the early 1840s. Now lost, this latter painting was around three metres by four metres in size and would have dwarfed the surviving Conciliation. The two works sought to portray a defining episode in Tasmania's Black War, which was brought to a close during the early 1830s.
Both paintings represented an imagined ‘moment’ in late 1831, when the missionary and government representative, George Augustus Robinson (1791– 1866), achieved a tense pact with members of the Big River mob, one of the last significant groups of Aboriginal Tasmanians fighting settler occupation on the island. The apparent ‘conciliation’ came to represent a more general pact that would eventually see the Aboriginal population incarcerated on Flinders Island later in the 1830s.
As Lehman and Bonyhady observe in their finely researched analysis of the surviving painting and its numerous preparatory works, [4] the relatively minor British artist, Benjamin Duterrau, arrived in Tasmania in August 1832 — just eight months after the journeyman builder and Methodist missionary, Robinson, had returned to Hobart with twenty-six Aboriginal Tasmanians from the Big River tribe. Agreeing to give up their resistance to the 'British invasion' in return for regular food supplies and protection, their arrival in Hobart was widely seen as indicating that open conflict between settlers and the Aboriginal clans of the island was drawing to a close.
Installation view of Benjamin Duterrau's (L-R) Woureddy, 1834; Truggernana, 1834; Tanleboueyer, 1834; Manalargenna, 1834.
Photo: courtesy of Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery.
Although Duterrau hadn’t arrived in Tasmania until later in 1832, he rapidly became friendly with Robinson and sought to record these momentous local events. Like the earlier-arrived artist John Glover, Duterrau made studies of a number of the Aboriginal Tasmanians with whom Robinson was associated. This was before they were exiled to Flinders Island in what was widely regarded as a litany of broken promises — by both Robinson and the Tasmanian government.
In his ‘conciliation’ efforts, George Augustus Robinson had set up his first mission camp on Bruny Island south of Hobart in 1829. In a harbinger of the tragic events to come, he oversaw a camp in which the Aboriginal Tasmanians succumbed to a range of illnesses, dominated by complications from common colds, flu-like symptoms and pulmonary complaints, and the mission camp was all but decimated by the end of 1830. While still ostensibly supervising on Bruny Island, Robinson, with financial support from Lieutenant-Governor Arthur, embarked on a campaign to bring in almost all of the surviving Aboriginal groups living outside settled districts between 1830 and 1835, for ultimate trans-shipment to the newly formed mission, Wybalenna, on Flinders Island.
The peace-making endeavours of Robinson’s missions were largely brokered by a group of six notable Aboriginal individuals whom he had originally befriended on Bruny Island, and who travelled across Tasmania with him on his several ‘conciliation’ journeys of the 1830s. They included the Tasmanians Woureddy (d. 1842) and Trucanini (1812?–1876), who had become partners in 1829, along with Tanleboueyer (1807–1835) who would later marry the renowned north-eastern chief, Manalargenna (c.1770– 1835). Manalargenna is thought to have joined the missionary expeditions sometime later in 1830.
Installation view of Benjamin Duterrau's (L-R) Woureddy, 1834; Truggernana, 1834; Tanleboueyer, 1834; Manalargenna, 1834. Photo: courtesy of Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery.
Photo: courtesy of Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery.
All natural leaders, these figures were amongst a number of prominent Aboriginal Tasmanians who would become especially renowned in the Colony during this traumatic period of history, and it was as a result of their distinction locally that they were represented in a large number of paintings, drawings, sculptures and prints by artists such as Benjamin Duterrau (1768–1851), Thomas Bock (1795–1851), John Glover (1761–1849) and Benjamin Law (1807– 1882). Duterrau, for instance, during the two years after his arrival in Hobart, created four significant, almost life-size oil portraits of Woureddy, Trucanini, Manalargenna and Tanleboueyer (all dating from 1834).
These works provided a dramatic presence — with two equally compelling portrait busts of Woureddy and Trucanini by the sculptor Benjamin Law (1897– 1882) — in the exhibition's first gallery when shown in Hobart. The paintings had eventually been sold for £20 each to the Government of Tasmania in 1837, although by that time Woureddy and Trucanini had been ‘disappeared’ to Flinders Island in Bass Strait; and both Manalargenna and Tanleboueyer had died — the former similarly in exile on Flinders Island, while the latter perished in Hobart.
John Watt Beattie, The Tasmanian Room [1902, albumen print, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery. Presented by Mrs FV Thomson, 1989].
Photo: Courtesy of Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery.
Benjamin Law, Woureddy, an Aboriginal Chief of Van Diemen's Land, 1835 cast plaster, painted Benjamin Law, Trucaninny, wife of Woureddy, 1836 cast plaster, painted Collection: National Portrait Gallery, Canberra
Co-curator Tim Bonyhady has commented that a key motivation for the purchase of these portraits by the Government was as a form of memorial to a people and a culture that was passing. The mood had obviously changed just over a half-century later, however, because the portrait paintings appear in a crowded installation of the state museum’s permanent collection, as recorded in a photograph by John Watt Beattie titled The Tasmanian Room (1902). There the vivid portraits are displayed in the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery amongst a panoply of taxidermied fauna and preserved flora and other Tasmanian-related objects. In Beattie’s photograph they have moved from a world of human events into a natural history context, displaced and stripped of any agency — an agency they most certainly must still have had while displayed in the Legislative Council in the latter part of the nineteenth century; and an agency that was restored to them so powerfully in this exhibition. Duterrau seems almost immediately to have recognised the longer-term implications of the arrival of the Big River Mob in Hobart. As soon as he established himself in Tasmania, he set to work on a project lasting over ten years, to produce a suitable representation of what he understood to be Robinson's achievement: namely a picture of ‘reconciliation’ and a kind of treaty that would symbolise Robinson's purported success in bringing armed conflicts to an end in what early became known in local accounts as the Black War. The Duterrau historical project began with individual portraits, and from 1834 until the early 1840s his attention was consistently drawn to the subject of conciliation in drawings, etchings, bas-reliefs and several important paintings of Robinson and of Aboriginal hunters — all of which were brought together in the recent exhibition as likely studies for the eventual ‘big picture’. In the second gallery in Hobart, the curators chose to display the numerous scaled-up portrait bas-reliefs (or plaster-modelled images in shallow relief ). This grouping vividly highlighted the key protagonists next to the striking painting of The Conciliation, while the life-sized encounter titled Mr Robinson's first interview with Timmy (1840, NGA) was displayed on the adjacent wall. The latter work has a vivid presence, being only marginally smaller than The Conciliation itself. It was probably the model for the central group that included George Augustus Robinson and Timmy in both The National Picture and The Conciliation.
Benjamin Duterrau Native taking a kangaroo 1837, oil on canvas, 121.5 x 167.5 cm, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Purchased 1979.
Image: National Gallery of Australia
Elsewhere in the exhibition Duterrau's Native taking a kangaroo of 1837 (NGA) not only alludes to then-current hunting techniques (Aboriginal hunters were by then using European dogs to capture kangaroos); but the figure — in almost exactly the same extended pose, except now with a spear and maireener shell necklace — later becomes the model for one of the central figures in The Conciliation (1840), where its scale suggests that it was also to be an important component in The National Picture.
In the space of three relatively small galleries at TMAG, the curators were able to achieve a remarkably cohesive experience – one that was all the more strangely compelling because of the striking maladroitness of the principal artist, Duterrau. Placement, of course, is everything; and the separation of the four large portrait paintings along with the Benjamin Law portrait busts (all of which more recently have been seen as parenthetical sentinels to the Conciliation in the Henry Hunter Gallery at TMAG) highlights the centrality that the figures of Trucanini, Woureddy, Manalargenna and Tanleboueyer command in the imaginative construction of The Conciliation.
This is so much the case that these four celebrated Aboriginal Tasmanians are not only identified by the authors as central figures in the ‘treaty’ discussions but also highlighted a second time as key background figures (primary historical ‘witnesses’) in the composition of the major painting that Duterrau eventually developed. Their significance is further underscored in the previously-mentioned (lost) National Picture, and Mr Robinson's first interview with Timmy (1840) where, flanking Robinson, the background figures of Manalargenna and Woureddy appear to have been drawn directly from the original 1834 portraits, while they are given much more prominence than originally evident in the preparatory work, The Conciliation.
Death by violence, starvation and disease had led the estimated 4,000 Aboriginal Tasmanians at the turn of the century to be reduced to around two hundred surviving by 1840, the overwhelming majority of whom were now in exile on Flinders Island. With the knowledge of their tragic eventual fate, the ten pencil and watercolour landscape drawings and portraits by John Skinner Prout (1805–76), and the seven depictions by Simkinson de Wesselow (1819– 1906) — all assembled in the third gallery in Hobart — were especially poignant. These works are amongst very few visual documents recording life on the island between 1836 and 1847, when Wybalenna was eventually abandoned; and they provide an enduring representation of a desperately reduced population of Aboriginal people, now clothed in European cast-offs and exiled from their traditional homelands.
The years spanning the promise of the portraits of 1834 and their later interpretation in The Conciliation in 1840 may help to explain what the curators perceived as Duterrau’s contingent and ambiguous approach in the later composition. By this time, as Tim Bonyhady's chapter in the catalogue, ‘The Art of Pacification’, so effectively elucidates, Robinson's star had become increasingly tarnished. [5] By then Duterrau would have been keenly aware that his aim to celebrate Robinson's achievement in a history painting of national consequence was now contested, as reports began to emerge of the plight of the exiled Aboriginal Tasmanians and Robinson’s role in their demise.
The reversed small versions of ‘the national picture’ in the exhibition are a signifier that a subtle shift occurs in the mood of the later summarising painting, and hence of Duterrau's more questioning conception. In works such as The small outline of a national picture (1835, TMAG) there are several notable exclusions that were introduced to The Conciliation, and presumably also The National Picture. The kangaroo in Native taking a kangaroo of 1837 is now reworked and included in the foreground, whereas it is absent in the smaller studies; and there is a distinctive lack of ornament in the early works, whereas ornament becomes a prominent feature of the more elaborated Conciliation.
Installation view of John Glover's Mills' Plains, Ben Lomond, Ben Loder & Ben Nevis in the distance [1836, Deddington Tasmania, oil on linen canvas, 76.2 x 152.5 cm, TMAG]; The bath of Diana, Van Diemen's Land [1837, Deddington, Tasmania, oil on canvas, 76 x 114 cm, National Gallery of Australia]; Mount Welling and Hobart Town from Kangaroo Point [1834, Deddington, Tasmania, oil on canvas, 76.2 x 152.4 cm, Nerissa Johnson Bequest Fund 2001, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery and National Gallery of Australia].
Photo: courtesy of Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery.
Lehman's analysis of the subtle adjustments in iconography that appear in The Conciliation is astute and informative. On a meta-level a narrative of exhortation, suspicion, intervention and potential resolution is built up, and the uneasy interplay is underscored in the foreground where the warriors prepare their weapons in readiness for further conflict, and a tense ‘truce’ between kangaroo and dog is intimated. Elsewhere Greg Lehman argues that the lack of a necklace on Timmy's neck ‘is replaced with nothing but Robinson's handshake and the broken promise it symbolises’, [6] whereas all of the other Aboriginal people in the painting bear body ornaments as a distinctive signifier of their heritage and culture. Lehman identifies Woureddy as the figure tugging at his maireener necklace on the far right-hand side of the painting while his wife, Trucanini, exhorts him to listen to Robinson. Woureddy's gesture clearly points to the loss of culture threatened by this ‘truce’.
The second gallery in Hobart, which focused on The Conciliation, also included several portraits of George Augustus Robinson along with fascinating pages from his missionary notebooks — all clearly intended to highlight the principal role that he played in the pacification process. Furthermore, there was an intriguing juxtaposition between The Conciliation painting, displayed on the far wall, and three of the four John Glover paintings in the exhibition which were presented on the facing wall: a juxtaposition that underscored the troubled question of presence and absence already alluded to in this review.
Lehman and Bonyhady are among a number of scholars who have observed that the Aboriginal Tasmanians were in effect made to ‘disappear’ from the landscape and towns between 1804 and the declaration of martial law by Governor Arthur in 1828.
Indeed, the prologue of the exhibition introduces one of the first-known representations of violent confrontation between settlers and Tasmanian Aboriginal people in Tasmanian art: a small oil painting by an unknown artist titled Aboriginal raid on Milton Farm, Great Swanport, Tasmania (c.1832). This is a potent marker and inclusion in the exhibition, even though the tiny painting and two associated drawings come at the end of a period of relatively sustained conflict during the previous decade — prolonged events of conflict and violence that have abundant testimony in diaries and manuscript documents but were barely touched upon in the visual record.
Another significant inclusion in the exhibition was an anonymous painting of the 1820s casting further light on this question of presence and absence. In The new road leading to the northward road from New Norfolk, Van Diemen's Land (c.1825), barely distinguishable troopers in the distant background appear to be marshalling a road gang of convicts; meanwhile in the foreground, on the near side of the River Derwent, two Aboriginal men stand watching from behind a tree, completely unobserved and invisible to those on the other side of the river. It is really only these two works, along with various versions of the famous painted boards conceived by George Frankland, Tasmania's Surveyor-General, and titled Governor Arthur's Proclamation to the Aboriginal people (1829–1830), that give a sense of the lengthy conflict that so strongly defined the island’s history in the 1820s. For the most part, the Aboriginal peoples of Tasmania are excluded from the visual record during that crucial decade of most bitter struggle and violence.
In light of this relative absence of representations of Aboriginal Tasmanians in the first thirty years of colonial rule in Van Diemen’s Land, the sudden focus on the plight of the surviving groups in the 1830s and 1840s within such a large body of local visual art was compellingly highlighted by this exhibition. It raises profound and enduring questions about why this occurred in the nineteenth century.
The exhibition included four paintings by the outstanding colonial artist, John Glover, who also incorporated Aboriginal groups in his 1830s paintings of the Tasmanian landscape. Facing The Conciliation in the Hobart installation were Glover’s Mills Plains, Ben Lomond, Ben Loder and Ben Nevis in the distance (1836); The bath of Diana, Van Diemen’s Land (1837); and Mount Wellington and Hobart Town from Kangaroo Point (1834): and they all highlighted a profound conundrum that confronted both Glover and Duterrau.
Each of the Glover paintings depicts groups of Tasmanian Aborigines — sometimes in large numbers — going about seemingly normal activities in the landscape; and like Duterrau, Glover painted these works after considerable contact with groups of Aboriginal people whom Robinson had been able to persuade to surrender. Art historian Ian Mclean, in an essay ‘Figuring Nature: painting the indigenous landscape’, has argued convincingly that Glover's compositions in these paintings have authenticity, the authenticity of a witness — of camp life, corroborees, and entertainment; and furthermore, like Duterrau, Glover was keenly aware of the impending destruction of traditional Aboriginal society and culture. [7]
The choices the two artists make in the 1830s are starkly contrasted and highlighted by McLean: Duterrau's aim is history painting, the individuals have agency, and they have identity, not just in that contemporary context but also for the many descendants of the original population; Glover's paintings, on the other hand, can best be described as natural histories and, as McLean notes, the artist clearly intended not to individuate his subjects. Glover wrote to Robinson at the time, when presenting him with the commissioned painting, Natives at a corrobory, under the wild woods of the Country [River Jordan below Brighton, Tasmania] (c.1835), which was also included in the second TMAG gallery:
If on the one hand indigenous presence and agency are emphasised with great authority (and they were highlighted, too, in the final TMAG gallery where contemporary interventions by artists such as Julie Gough, Ricky Maynard, Gordon Bennett and Geoff Parr clearly emphasise these issues), the antithetical trope — that of absence, and the political decision to ‘disappear’ the Aboriginal population from mainland Tasmania — remains one of the deeply troubling realities of the time, and continues to have great relevance today. Glover's solution was to evoke an ahistorical world that prefigures European occupation, albeit with the exception of Mount Wellington and Hobart Town from Kangaroo Point; [9] Duterrau's solution was to face the problem front on, and to try to account for what he considered to be Robinson's achievement in bringing about a peaceable solution to the Black War, even if he also flags the impending demise of the Aboriginal Tasmanians along with their unique society and culture.
The chances of finding Duterrau’s huge National Picture, which disappeared sometime after the auction of the artist’s estate in 1851, now appear to be slim. Nevertheless, we have The Conciliation — conserved with so many of its companion works in Hobart — to continue to impose its presence as one of the key documents of Australia's early colonial history.
Installation view of The National Picture: The art of Tasmania's Black War at Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery.
Photo: courtesy of Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery.
The curators of this memorable exhibition have created a challenging and exemplary case study of the meaning and context of this important painting, and its continuing significance in our national history. []
* The National Picture: The art of Tasmania's Black War was shown at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (12 May–29 July 2018), the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart (17 August–11 November 2018), and the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Launceston (24 November 2018–17 February 2019).
Jonathan Holmes is Emeritus Professor and Honorary Fellow in the School of Creative Arts, Faculty of Arts, Law and Education at the University of Tasmania. He writes mainly on Australian art, craft and design and, since the late 1970s, has curated over 35 exhibitions for various bodies.
Text citation: Jonathan Holmes, ‘Reconsidering Australia’s history - The National Picture: The art of Tasmania's Black War’, Museums Galleries Australia Magazine, Vol. 27(1), Museums and Galleries Australia, Canberra, Summer 2018, pp. 24-33.
1. Greg Lehman, ‘The Conciliation: A Founding Document’, June 2013, (online, accessed 30.10.2018) .
2. Lehman 2013.
3. Lehman 2013.
4. The National Picture: The art of Tasmania's Black War, curated by Tim Bonyhady and Greg Lehman, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2018.
5. The National Picture, p. 86.
6. Tim Bonyhady, ‘The art of pacification’, in The National Picture: The art of Tasmania’s Black War, pp. 73–126.
7. Ian McLean, ‘Figuring nature: painting the indigenous landscape’, in John Glover and the Colonial Picturesque, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (curated by David Hansen), TMAG, Hobart, 2003.
8. McLean 2003, p. 130.
9. Even in this example one could argue that the river separation between the old society and the new acts as a metaphor for the impending exile of the Aboriginal Tasmanians, now ‘disappeared’ over the water to the Furneaux islands.
