http://australia.gov.au/about-australia/australian-story/austn-painters

Australian Painters – the new landscape, Heidleberg School

http://www.nhm.ac.uk/nature-online/art-nature-imaging/collections/first-fleet/art-

collection/topography.dsml

See examples below:

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First Fleet artwork collection

First Fleet artwork collection

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The images in this section are largely of two types – views and charts – and the majority are by George Raper, Midshipman. It would have been part of Raper's normal routine to keep some record of his voyage and chart new waters. Raper is precise in his details and many of his views can readily be identified in today's landscape.

Watling's drawings are similarly precise but have a greater element of considered composition and he brings the Aboriginal people into his views to show this is a landscape in which things are going on.

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First Fleet artwork collection

First Fleet artwork collection

History

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The arrival of the First Fleet in Sydney Cove in 1788 was an historic moment in itself. The collection also records a number of other events which are today commemorated in place names or which could have had a profound effect on subsequent developments.

The drawings give us an important historic record but they also raise many questions. It is interesting to speculate how much of what we see is a faithful record as was attempted in recording the specimens and how much reflects the imperfection of memory or motive when trying to portray an event.

http://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/discover_collections/history_nation/terra_australis/artists/index.html

Artists of the First Fleet

A lasting outcome of the arrival of the First Fleet was the artwork produced from the earliest days of settlement. These drawings depict Indigenous people and the Australian environment at the point of colonisation in 1788.

Many of the artists from the First Fleet were naval officers, such as William Bradley and George Raper, whose formal training included sketching and watercolour painting. Some artists remain unknown and may have included convicts.

View William Bradley's artworks

View George Raper's artworks

The State Library collection includes over 370 drawings and illustrations dating from the early years of the colony, including over 100 works by an artist, or artists, identified only as the Sydney Bird painter.

Further collections of artworks include:

Richard Pulteney

These drawings of Australian flora and fauna, some dated 1797, were owned by English botanist, Richard Pulteney. The artist is not known and the works may have been created in England.

Robert Anderson Seton

This album of watercolour drawings of Australian natural history was owned by Robert Anderson Seton and dates from around 1800. The album is comprised of copies of sketches from Governor John Hunter's sketchbook, 'Birds & Flowers of New South Wales drawn on the spot in 1788, 89 and 90'.

Arthur Bowes Smyth

Surgeon on the Lady Penryhn, Bowes Smyth’s journal contains 25 watercolour and pen and ink drawings. His drawings include the earliest extant illustration by a European of the emu. The earliest was possibly drawn by Lieutenant John Watts, also of the Lady Penrhyn, and was reproduced in Arthur Phillip's published account of the First Fleet. Watts’ original drawing is now lost.

Philip Gidley King

A series of five watercolour drawings of Indigenous people have been attributed to naval officer and future Governor, Philip Gidley King. It is known that King sketched but no signed works by him are known to exist.

A Direct North General View of Sydney Cove 1794 by Thomas Watling

This is the first known painting of the settlement at Sydney Cove. It was painted by Thomas Watling.

He was sentenced in 1792 to 14 years in Australia for forging a bank note.

Indigenous Australia Art

by Global Kids Oz on September 11, 2011

Art speaks a language of its own: the language of love, history and cultural evolution. Take the

Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave, for instance. Chauvet is known to contain one of the oldest cave paintings

in the world. Considered to be a significant pre-historic site, Chauvet yielded a plethora of

information about the life of the people who lived some 30,000 years ago. Isn’t it interesting then,

that just by studying these paintings, experts can understand the culture of an ancient people with

some modicum of accuracy. The art of a community, a people, then, speaks their language. This is

especially evident among some living indigenous communities such as the Australian Aborigines.

Indigenous Australian Art

Indigenous Australian art, also known as Australian Aboriginal art, pre-dates European colonization.

It includes a wide range of art expressed through rock paintings, bark paintings, rock engravings,

stone arrangements, weaving, iconography and symbols, to name a few. Advanced carbon and

thermo-luminescence dating of sites found in Australia indicate that Aboriginal presence has been

strong on the continent for over 40,000 years.

Aboriginal culture is marked by a theme of ‘unity with nature’. In the traditional Aboriginal belief

system, nature, landscape, animals, the environment and communal sharing are inter-connected.

The Dreaming

Aboriginal culture, and by extension its art, music and storytelling, is infused by the Dreaming. This

concept is the essence of the community and its people. The Dreaming is a common term within the

animist creation narrative of indigenous Australians for a personal, or group creation. Though it has

no equal or quantifiable meaning in English, the Aborigines understand Dreaming as the “timeless

time” of formative creating and a continuous creation. The Dreaming and Dreamtime helped and

still helps the Aboriginal community understand and explain life, as well as the creation of the world.

The Dreaming is extremely vital to the community because it determines their value system, their

belief and also influences the community’s relationship to the world around them.

In fact, Dreaming is such a strongly held value in the community that a few Aboriginal tribes have

used it to argue their title over traditional tribal land before the High Court of Australia. In short,

Dreaming is the soul of the Aboriginal community. When they apply it to art, it expresses their

existence as a whole.

Art and the Aborigine

Like all forms of art, Aboriginal art represents and symbolizes their world, their beliefs, and their

Dreaming as a people. Unlike most forms of art, the term encompasses everything from dancing,

singing, body decorations, sand drawings etc. For the Aborigine, art does not solely mean painting or

drawing. It is not an activity that is separate from their normal routine in life. The Aborigines believe

that everyone is an artist, and there is no notion of an artist being a special person with special and

unique skills. However, as the Aboriginal community continues to adapt to modern Western culture,

this idea too is changing.

Aboriginal Art Forms

Aboriginal art forms vary among the tribes and even among people within a tribe. This is because art,

to the Aborigines, symbolizes the Dreaming, and just as each person’s dreaming is different; the art

too is very varied. Colours were procured from ochre mining pits and tribes established methods to

trade in this pigment. They also used pigments made from clay, wood ash or animal blood.

There were and still are considerable variations in the symbolic representation of rock art and

paintings. However, certain symbols within the Aboriginal modern art movement are expressed in

the same way across regions, for example circles within circles, blue or black colours used to depict

water etc.

Aerial landscape art, a genre of art from ancient times, is also very important to the movement. In

short, aerial landscape art is a maplike, a bird’s-eye-view of the desert. While earlier rock, sand and

body painting were used to depict this form of art, modern day Aboriginal artists use the canvas.

When viewing Aboriginal art or icons, the meaning should be derived after taking into consideration

the entire painting, the artist’s origins, the story behind and the style of the painting as well as the

type of colours used.

Aboriginal art is unique in that the people are pouring their language, their culture, values and belief

system into it. This kind of art is not meant to be viewed in isolation like an impressionist painting.

Aboriginal art is as large and continuous as the landscape itself; it is a precious fragment of the

Dreaming.

Aboriginal Symbols and their Meanings

(Photo: Aboriginal symbols depicted in painting)

Aboriginal symbols are an essential part of a long artistic tradition in Australian Aboriginal Art and

remain the visual form to retain and record significant information.

Aboriginal people used symbols to indicate a sacred site, the location of a waterhole and the means

to get there, a place where animals inhabit and as a way to illustrate Dreamtime stories.

To understand and appreciate Aboriginal symbols (or iconography) imagine how you would indicate,

record and recall essential information or place names or events in a non material world.

Since Aboriginal people travelled vast distances across their country, significant information was

recorded using symbols in regular ceremony. Sand painting and awelye (body painting) ceremonies

kept the symbols alive and remembered. Later, these symbols were transformed into a more

permanent form using acrylic on canvas but the meanings behind the symbols remains the same.

Contemporary Australian Aboriginal paintings from the Central and Western Desert art regions in

Central Australia are rich in aboriginal symbols.

Generally the symbols used by Aboriginal Artists are a variation of lines, circles or dots. Similar

symbols can have multiple meanings and the elaborate combination of these can tell complex

Aboriginal Dreamtime Stories. Combining the stories the Aboriginal artist tells about the painting with

an understanding of the meaning behind the symbols, will lead to a greater appreciation of the work.

This painting by Denis Nelson Jupurrula is a good example of an

Aboriginal painting rich in Aboriginal symbols. This painting is titled

Kangaroo, Rain, Flying Ant, Possum Dreaming. The bottom left of

the painting shows the kangaroo tracks around a campfire (white

circle). The smoke (white line) rises from the fire into the sky

creating rain clouds (purple sky with symbols for rain). In the centre

of the painting is the flying ant which migrates to form a new colony

when the rains come. The possum tracks are shown on the left side

of the painting in the yellow section.

The U shape reflects the mark left behind by a person. Groups of U

shapes would indicate a meeting place for aboriginal people sitting

around a campsite.

The gender of the aboriginal people is determined by what is associated with this symbol. For

example spears would indicate a group of men.

In this painting Bush Tucker Dreaming by artist June Sultan Napanga she depicts

iconographical symbols of woman (U), coolamon and digging stick. This indicates

aboriginal women gathering aboriginal food

Tracks whether human or animal are shown by the tracks left behind in the sand and are generally

represented as an aerial view. As examples:

A snake is represented by a curvy line

A porcupine by a series of short parallel lines

A dingo (Australian native dog) by a set a paw prints

A lizard or goanna by two parallel lines with small prints on either side made by feet

In this painting Janet Spencer Nungurrayi is representing her Wardapi Jukurrpa

(Goanna Dreaming) using the tracks left by the goanna.

Concentric circles,straight lines can be depicted in many ways and the combination of these symbols

can tell more complex Aboriginal Dreamtime Stories.

A series of concentric circles represent meeting place, campsite or waterhole

A series of parallel lines represent a journey path, sandhills (tali), a creek or a

riverbed

In this painting Tingari Cycle by artist Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri depicts aboriginal

symbols to indicate the journeys taken by the Tingari ancestors, as they travelled

and stopped to create sacred ceremonial sites.

Wavy lines may indicate running water, a series of creek beds or sand hills.

In this painting Inland Sea by artist Dorothy Napangardi, illustrating watercourses,

ancestral tracks, sandhills at a significant sacred site, Mina Mina (Women's

Dreaming) at Lake MacKay, north-west of Yuendumu region in Central Australia.

Dots are one of the conventional symbols that are widely used in the Central and

Western desert art regions in Central Australia. This art form being referred to as dot paintings.

Patterns of dots are used to represent many Aboriginal Dreamtime Stories -

including stars or native berries. Aboriginal artists often use the technique of over-

dotting to obscure meaning and to mask certain symbolism.

In this painting Dreamtime Sisters aboriginal artist Colleen Wallace uses dots to

illustrate stars.