Telling the Story of Australian Art in new and innovative ways
Swedish-born artist Oscar Friström’s Duramboi 1893 depicts James Davis, a young convict sent from Scotland to Australia. Davis escaped from a Moreton Bay penal colony in 1829 and lived with several Indigenous groups in the area, particularly on Fraser Island (where he was known as Duramboi), until he was found in 1842. During this time, Davis learned many languages and customs, and was treated as an honoured guest. He later worked as a guide for settlers and occasionally as a court interpreter.
Oscar Friström, Sweden/Australia 1856-1918 / Duramboi 1893 / Oil on canvas / Gift of the artist 1895 / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery
Sidney Nolan, on the other hand, imagined and mythologised the experience of Scottish woman Eliza Anne Fraser, who was shipwrecked off the coast of Queensland in 1836. Accounts of Mrs Fraser’s experience, steeped in colonial assumptions and elevated to the status of legend through multiple and contradictory tellings, effectively demonised the island’s inhabitants, and the stories have since been contested. Nolan’s evocation of an outsider in an unfamiliar landscape is closely tied to his own emotional state at the time (he visited Fraser Island in 1947 at the end of a dramatic breakup with Sunday Reed).
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The story of Mrs Fraser gave rise to the naming of the island, which is called K’gari by the Indigenous people of that land. Here, Nolan’s works appear alongside the black-and-white photographs of Fiona Foley’s Badtjala woman 1994 — portraits based on ethnographic photographs of an unnamed ancestor held in museum collections. Foley counters the tale of Eliza Fraser: her self-representation as part of this lineage serves to restore a sense of her people’s dignity, power and agency.
Transformative works also feature in the display, including Arthur Boyd’s Sleeping bride 1957–58 — an acquisition from Boyd’s important allegorical series titled ‘Love, marriage and death of a half-caste’, otherwise known as ‘the Brides’ series. Resulting from the artist’s travels to central Australia in 1953, it is considered one of the most significant achievements in Australian modernism, akin to Sidney Nolan’s ‘Ned Kelly’ paintings from the 1940s.
Dr Kyla McFarlane, Australian Art, QAGOMA
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Your reimagined Australian Collection brings together art from different times and across cultures. After 120 years of building the Collection, there are many stories to tell of traversal and encounter, we focus on this theme as we continue with our series on Australian art.
Scottish-born artist Ian Fairweather’s Lights, Darwin Harbour 1957, generously on loan from a private collection, recalls the moment he left Australia in 1952 on a homemade raft. The journey — after 16 days on the open sea — ended on a beach on Indonesia’s Roti Island and inspired New Zealand artist Michael Stevenson to create The gift (from Argonauts of the Timor Sea) 2004–06, a ‘replica’ of the raft based on various accounts, including written descriptions.
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Fairweather’s goal was to return to Britain, which he eventually did, but in 1953 he came back to Australia, finally settling on Bribie Island. There, he completed some of his greatest works, including the religious painting Gethsemane 1958, recently gifted to the Collection by Philip Bacon AM. Stevenson’s raft is a touchstone for the many journeys and encounters in this display. It resonates not only with Fairweather’s singular mission, but also with Australia’s place in the world, and the complex, continuing history of those who have arrived on and departed from its shores.
Connections across the water date back further than colonisation. For hundreds of years, Macassan traders from Sulawesi, Indonesia, travelled to Australia over the Timor Sea to trade and share knowledge with northern Australian Aboriginal people. The influence of this exchange can be seen in works such as Ngaymil/Dathiwuy artist Larrtjanga Ganambarr’s Balirlira and the Macassans c.1958, and Anindilyakwa artist Gulpitja’s Bara, the north-west wind 1948.
By telling the story of Australian Art, we can observe the changing nature of portraiture — the shift from democratic modes such as the nineteenth-century photograph, to oil paintings produced after a number of sittings and preparatory sketches. These portraits tell stories of contact between cultures, including colonial and immigrant experiences. Many of these stories connect to the history of Queensland, through the artists and their chosen subjects.
Swedish-born artist Oscar Friström, a professional artist working in Queensland in the late nineteenth century, was known for his portraiture, including those of Aboriginal subjects. Friström’s Duramboi 1893 depicts James Davis, a young convict sent from Scotland to Australia. Davis escaped from a Moreton Bay penal colony in 1829 and lived with several Indigenous groups in the area, particularly on Fraser Island (where he was known as Duramboi), until he was found in 1842. During this time, Davis learned many languages and customs, and was treated as an honoured guest.
Oscar Friström, Sweden/Australia 1856-1918 / Duramboi 1893 / Oil on canvas / Gift of the artist 1895 / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern ArtAuschar Chauncy, England/Australia b.c.1836-1877 / Portrait of Richard Edwards 1874 / Oil on canvas / Purchased 2001. Queensland Art Gallery Foundation Grant / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art
Besides nineteenth-century portraits of European settlers, those from the twenty-first century include William Yang’s ‘About my mother’ portfolio, from 2003, which accounts for the life of this second-generation, Chinese–Australian woman, who raised the artist in Dimbulah, in far north Queensland.
Brisbane artist Michael Zavros’s self-portrait Bad dad 2013 in which the artist — the son of a Greek Cypriot father and Australian mother — floats idly in a backyard pool, Zavros makes playful reference to the mythical Greek Narcissus, who fell in love with his own reflection.
Dr Kyla McFarlane is former Head of Australian Art, QAGOMA
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Feature image detail: Auschar Chauncy Portrait of Richard Edwards 1874
Highlighted in our third post on your Australian Art Collection reimagined are works which are included in the chronological ‘spine’ along the back wall of the Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Galleries. Adjacent to Dale Harding’s wall commission view works from both the European landscape tradition and representations of country by Aboriginal artists.
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Conrad Martens’s Forest, Cunningham’s Gap 1856 is an early Queensland watercolour depicting the steep track from the Great Dividing Range’s tropical rainforest to the Darling Downs plains below. An English-born colonial painter, Martens arrived in Australia after working on the HMS Beagle as the ship’s artist. Nearby are Judy Watson’s sacred ground, beating heart 1989 and Gordon Bennett’s Untitled 1991. Watson produced sacred ground before visiting Waanyi country in north-west Queensland, the home of her matrilineal family; the natural pigment and pastel work reflects the artist’s deep connection to her ancestors. Bennett’s painting depicts a ship adrift on a stormy sea, amid images of Aboriginal heads. Referencing the Raft of the Medusa 1818–19 by French artist Théodore Géricault, Bennett asks us to consider the effects of the upheaval caused by colonisation, specifically the separation of people from their homeland.
These paintings join other treasured works by artists such as Russell Drysdale, Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori, Rosalie Gascoigne, Eugene von Guérard, Rosemary Laing, Daphne Mayo, Jon Molvig, Fred Williams, and of course, R Godfrey Rivers, whose Under the jacaranda 1903 holds many stories. Rivers was an important figure in Brisbane — an artist, teacher and champion of the Queensland National Art Gallery (which opened in 1895) — and he, like the tree in his painting, and like so many people living in Brisbane today, came here from elsewhere. (In the jacaranda’s case, on trading ships from South America.) Under the jacaranda has a history with our audiences, who have admired it for many years — some even lay jacaranda flowers under the painting when the trees bloom in spring.
R. Godfrey Rivers, England/Australia 1858-1925 / Under the jacaranda 1903 / Oil on canvas / Purchased 1903 / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art
We also explore our physical involvement with the land through agriculture and mining, so central to the history of the state, along with the development of the country’s labour movement and working women. The Queensland climate, which has shaped ideas of ‘the deep north’, also features here, with works by celebrated artists Margaret Olley, Max Dupain, Tracey Moffatt, Kenneth Macqueen and others. Moving back in time, George Wishart’s newly restored A busy corner of the Brisbane River, painted in 1897 (since identified as the Eagle Street Wharves), is a rare depiction of the river’s bustling commercial activity around the turn of the century. Charles Blackman’s Stradbroke ferry 1952 brings us to Minjerribah (North Stradbroke Island), where contemporary Quandamooka weaver Sonja Carmichael is based. The Ngughi artist’s commission is an installation of jewelcoloured bowls woven from natural, commercial raffia and discarded nylon fishing nets, materials found on the shoreline of her island.
As visitors enter and leave the end gallery, near the Gibson entrance, they will encounter Anmatyerre artist Emily Kame Kngwarreye’s timeless Utopia panels 1996, a major commission completed by the artist at the end of her brief painting career and in the last year of her life. Among her boldest pieces, the multipanel series is one of the Gallery’s great works.
Dr Kyla McFarlane is former Head of Australian Art, QAGOMA
The second in our series on your Australian Art Collection reimagined, we focus on the major commission from Dale Harding, descendent of the Bidjara, Ghungalu and Garingbal peoples of central Queensland, who has been inspired by the significant galleries of rock art around his country near Carnarvon Gorge. One of five exciting commissions for the re-presentation of the Australian Art Collection, four of which are by contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists,1 Harding’s work reminds us of the existence of thousands of years of Aboriginal art history. As curator Bruce McLean noted during the planning of the new display:
Aboriginal painting represents at least 99 per cent of the timeline of Australian painting, and Harding’s works have attempted to address that fact through an engagement with contemporary art . . . The work also highlights the existence of [rock art] galleries as epicentres of cultural reverence for millennia throughout the Australian landscape, many of which are today concealed from our view.
The commission also points to post-European contact, in terms of trade, ingenuity and adaptation: working with family members, the artist has used a bright blue pigment reminiscent of the Reckitt’s Blue pigment originally used to brighten white laundry. One of the first introduced products highly valued by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, Reckitt’s Blue was traded widely along the colonial frontier. Used as a paint, the pigment was quickly adopted by many who previously only had access to an earthy ochre palette. Today, shields, clubs and boomerangs featuring the vibrant blue colour can be found in museums throughout the country and are a reminder of this moment of early exchange. At the same time, Indigenous peoples were being forced from their lands, and an involuntary shift into domesticity on pastoral stations occurred: Harding’s wall painting highlights the complexities of these early points of contact through his blue-stencilled images of tools.
Dale Harding’s work was commissioned with funds from anonymous donors through the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Foundation.
Endnote 1 Harding is joined by Alick Tipoti (Kala Lagaw Ya people), Daniel Boyd (Kudjla/Gangalu people), Sonja Carmichael, and non-Indigenous artist Helen Johnson.
The recent passing of Inge King, AM, and Bea Maddock, AM, saw the loss of two significant and highly respected figures in Australian art. We commemorate these great women in the Collection.
Inge King
Ingeborg Viktoria (Inge) King, AM, (1915–2016) was a leading non-figurative sculptor in Australia for more than five decades. Born in Berlin, she moved to Australia in 1951 and was a founding member of Centre Five, an important Melbourne group of modern sculptors who were strong advocates of contemporary sculpture in the public realm. King exhibited regularly from the 1960s, as well as producing many significant public sculptures. She was also a long-time member of the Gallery’s Foundation.
Inge King’s Sculptural form 1958, which she generously gifted to the Collection in 2015, is a primary example of the organic nature of her early work and her forays into carving and casting. Following her move to Australia, King’s work changed markedly from earlier emotive figurative abstractions in wood and stone. Sasha Grishin characterised this period as one of:
. . . gestation during which she acquired new skills, experimented with new materials and was struggling to come to grips with the Australian landscape and cultural environment and her own position as a migrant woman artist with two small children.1
In 1959, King began making welded sculptures, originally working the metal to make rugged expressive forms. Gradually, however, she both simplified and reduced them in form, but even the smallest of her sculptural objects possess a simultaneous intimacy and monumentality, a counterpoint to the imposing monumental style for which she is best known. King’s celestial Great planet 1976–77 is a monument in steel, painted black, with a circular void at its centre. Sculpture writer Ken Scarlett observed that: ‘beyond its formally satisfying design, Great planet has an air of mystery, an aura of power and a commanding presence’.2
King’s interest in suspended sculptures was first exemplified by her Calder-influenced works of the early 1950s; Hanging sculpture, 3rd version 2002 returns to this preoccupation. Around 2000, her work turned to a long series of figurative abstractions, based on dynamic bodies in motion, mythical beings, birds and animals, of which this gift of the artist to the Collection is an example.
Bea Maddock
Beatrice Louise (Bea) Maddock (1934–2016) was born in Tasmania, and after training in Hobart in the mid 1950s, she left for London in 1959 to undertake postgraduate studies in painting and printmaking at the Slade School of Art, travelling to France, Italy, Holland and Germany during vacations. She returned to Australia in 1962, basing herself first in Launceston and Melbourne.3 She exhibited widely in Australia and overseas, and was a dedicated senior educator who moved in and out of teaching throughout her career.
Maddock worked with technical prowess across many media including drawing, photography and painting, though she is best known for her printmaking and artist books. Her oeuvre has gravitas, autobiographical introspection and a sense of quietude — isolation, loneliness and colonised histories were common themes. She explored the history of her home state of Tasmania, and the effects of colonisation, in two major works in the Collection. Maddock’s multi-panelled encaustic (wax and pigment) and collage landscape work Tromemanner – forgive us our trespass I–IV 1988–89 is a panoramic landscape with geographic texts in English and Aboriginal languages. Produced for ‘The Jack Manton Exhibition 1989: Recent Work by Twelve Australian Artists’, Tromemanner depicts the Saltpan Plains at Tunbridge and addresses the devastating colonial history of the island. Beneath the landscape and texts, Maddock included a series of artifacts in individual compartments. In 1992, curator Anne Kirker wrote:
there are 48 artifacts in all, representing the approximate numbers of bands (sub tribal groups) belonging to Tasmania . . . By choosing this Australian state as her focus, she not only asserts a personal identity with it, but faces up to the historical facts of the genocide of the original inhabitants of Van Diemen’s Land.4
Maddock followed Tromemanner with TERRA SPIRITUS … with a darker shade of pale 1993–98 — a 40-metre panorama in ochre, which Maddock gathered and ground by hand — a work that documents and meditates on the entire coast of Tasmania. The geography depicted across the drawing’s 50 sheets is again named by the artist in both English and Aboriginal languages, recorded respectively in letterpress and hand-drawn script across the ocean. Technically astute, the work combines aspects of drawing and printmaking through a stencil process, and takes viewers on a journey of circumnavigation, rewarding both the long view and close inspection.
The recent passing of these significant and highly respected figures is a major loss for Australian art, and we feel privileged to have the works of such great Australian women artists in the Collection.
Endnotes 1 Sasha Grishin, The Art of Inge King: Sculptor, Australian Macmillan Art Publishing, Melbourne, 2014, p.76. 2 Ken Scarlett, ‘Centre Five Revisited’, in Lynne Seer and Julie Ewington, eds. Brought to Light II: Contemporary Australian Art 1966–2006 from the Queensland Art Gallery Collection, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 2007, p.20. 3 Anne Kirker, ‘Bea Maddock’, in Janet Hogan (ed.), The Jack Manton Exhibition 1989: Recent Work by Twelve Australian Artists [exhibition catalogue], Queensland Art Gallery, 1989, pp.16-17. 4 See Anne Kirker and Roger Butler, Being and Nothingness: Bea Maddock [exhibition catalogue], Australian National Gallery, Canberra, 1992, pp.13–22.
Kyla McFarlane is Acting Curatorial Manager, Australian Art.
We acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the land on which the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art stands and recognise the creative contribution First Australians make to the art and culture of this country.
