Teeming with Life The Wongaloo Project

Griffith’s subject matter reflects the breadth of her interest in the many moods of the life of the land. Some of her most delightful works have been based on the rich bird and animal life found in Australia’s endangered wetlands. Here she has found the intensity of colours, the complex contrasting textures – a landscape nurturing its inhabitants. The many moods of the landscape reward frequent visitors. Every time is different. She has painted the landscape in flood, as sea eagles watch for emerging prey; then painted ghost crabs as they scuttle forth across the mud and royal spoonbills gather for a feast. The overall impact is of nature in harmony with itself.

Inevitably her investigations of tropical wetlands have taken her north, and to Townsville. Pamela Griffith has become a frequent visitor to the Wongaloo Wetlands, that magnificent stretch of swamps and grasslands that is home to many of the endangered species she loves.

Griffith has always been interested in the histories of places she sees, so it was not surprising that after she began to paint in the Wongaloo Wetlands she heard of the remarkable story of the sailor James Morrill, shipwrecked off the Queensland coast in 1846.

In researching him she sought out Morrill’s grave in the Bowen cemetery and read how in 1964 the Royal Historical Society of Queensland had credited him with being ‘the first known white resident of North Queensland’. She heard how after being saved by the local Aboriginal people and living with them for seventeen years, he eventually moved to live with the recently arrived British settlers, where he became a respected conduit between the two mutually suspicious cultures.

Griffith became so entranced by his story that she began to visualise the life of this man who both received and gave generosity, and an Aboriginal culture that nurtured strangers cast upon their shore. The result of these imaginings is the first stage of her grand narrative cycle of paintings to commemorate and honour the adventurous life of James Morrill. Four paintings have already been completed .

The first shows how after the wreck of the Peruvian on Horseshoe Reef at the southern end of the Great Barrier Reef, the initial survivors made a raft from the wreckage which was caught by a current before being cast ashore at Cape Cleveland. The painting shows the bleak prospect of survival of those on the raft, as well as the ghostlike figure of one of the drowned. The next imagines the encounter of the few survivors with local Aboriginal people. Griffith paints these odd ragged figures surrounded by people who did not at first know if these ghost-like starving creatures were even human.

Many years later when he came to tell his story to other Europeans he said that the Aboriginal people warmed their hands with smoke from the fire, and placed them on the frightened survivors to show that they were welcomed. Griffith has painted the ceremonial dance of the Grand Corroboree showing the awkward, unsure white man joining in a joyous ritual of storytelling about the ghosts who came from the sea. He was the sole survivor of the shipwreck to join in the dance, a sign that his survival in this strange exotic land was in part a result of his ability to adapt, learn and respect his surroundings.

The last work on view a peaceful nocturne, Fishing with friends, shows Morrill at ease in his new environment, content with the people who saved him. Yet the placement of the figures show that he is still apart, with them, but not of them.

Joanna Mendelssohn

Oil on canvas

Fishing with Friends 2015