British Women and Cultural Practices of Empire, 1770-1940 by Rosie Dias Kate Smith

Author:Rosie Dias,Kate Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA

Figure 5.2 William Oswald Hodgkinson, ‘Koorliatto, New South Wales’, 1861, pencil drawing, Album of Miss Eliza Younghusband, South Australia, 1856–65. National Library of Australia.

The antithesis of the verdant river scene painted on a gum leaf, this image of an outback waterhole formed by hostile Nature, is nevertheless memorialized through such romantic verse and its sentimental inscription in an oval format.

In addition to this drawing, Eliza’s album also contains a watercolour by Hodgkinson of a skirmish between members of the expedition party and the Wangkumara at Bulloo in southwest Queensland on 22 April 1861.59 After a number of exchanges in which the Wangkumara entreated the expedition party to leave the camp, which encroached upon a significant ceremonial site, violence ensued. Hodgkinson depicts the moment when the Wangkumara, wearing body paint and bearing clubs and spears, advance on the expeditioners who fire rifles from an improvized stockade. Such images of frontier conflict outside of the contact zone are rare in the colonial visual archive, and women’s albums thus play a critical yet undervalued role in their preservation.60 Moreover, the integration of Hodgkinson’s drawings into the pictorial programme of Eliza’s album provides intriguing insight into how such imagery was displayed and domesticated in a drawing-room context.

Hodgkinson presented these images to Eliza for her album along with a lengthy poem of affection on 12 August just days before he left to join the South Australian Burke Relief Expedition on 16 August 1861. Intended as a flirtatious conversation piece that potentially capitalized upon the Younghusbands’ connection to the expedition’s proposed supply transport system, his contribution satisfied the contemporary appetite for illustrated accounts of exploration and travel that highlighted the adversity of the Australian landscape in the face of colonial progress.61 Appearing on the verso of his poetic tribute, the drawing of the clash at Bulloo is juxtaposed with a sketch from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. This incongruous arrangement tempers the impact of such first-hand testimony of frontier devastation, which is neutralized through its inscription in the decorative, sentimental and entertaining trajectory of Eliza’s album. Relegated to the past through commemorative display in the drawing room, a civilized zone far removed from such conflict, the incorporation of Hodgkinson’s imagery in the album reveals the crucial part that album assemblage played in mythicizing the dispossession of Australia’s original inhabitants that accompanied the discourse of settlement.62

This visual strategy of manufactured nostalgia, anchored in the art of arrangement, is reinforced through the placement of a corroboree scene at Wallaroo Bay, South Australia (1860), by the South Australian artis t William Wyatt, in the middle of the sequence of Hodgkinson’s imagery and poem (Plate 8).63 With the recent discovery of large quantities of copper in 1859, the development of mining at Wallaroo became integral to the narrative of colonial progress in South Australia. Wyatt’s portrayal belongs to a significant genre of colonial corroboree painting that presented a staged vision of indigenous culture consigned to a romantic prehistory incompatible with the advancement of European civilization. As Anita Callaway and Candace Bruce have

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