Progress versus the picturesque: White women and the aesthetics of environmentalism in colonial Australia 1820-1860

Art History

Volumn 25, Issue 3, 2002, Pages 341-357

  Jordan, Caroline ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE   (Australia)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61249527208     PISSN: 01416790     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/1467-8365.00325     Document Type: Review

References (51)

1. P. Chapman (ed.), The Diaries and Letters of G.T.W.B. Boyes Vol. 1 1820-32, Melbourne, 1985, p. 177
2. R. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600-1860, Cambridge and New York, 1995, p. 6 and passim
3. See R. Neville, A Rage for Curiosity: Visualising Australia 1788-1830, Sydney, 1997. Information is from the caption to the image in the exhibition, not included in the catalogue
4. B. Smith's classic reference, European Vision and the South Pacific, 2nd edn, Melbourne, 1989 (1st edn 1960), pp. 295-7, discusses Louisa Anne Meredith's writings on the picturesque, although Smith does not analyse any images by women or make any other mention of a woman artist in this otherwise rich investigation of colonial amateur culture
5. Smith's standard reference history Australian Painting 1788-1860, London, revised edn 1991 (1st edn 1962), does not refer to any women artists in the chapter 'Early Artists of Australia', although neither does it include male amateurs. Women find no place in P. Carter's discussion of the picturesque or, indeed, elsewhere in his influential The Road to Botany Bay: An Essay in Spatial History, London, 1987
6. Empirical evidence of the existence of numerous amateur women artists in colonial Australia has since been near comprehensively documented in J. Kerr (ed.), Dictionary of Australian Artists: Painters, Sketchers, Photographers and Engravers to 1870, Melbourne, 1992
7. On Anglo-Indian women and the picturesque, see S. Suleri, 'The Feminine Picturesque', in The Rhetoric of English India, Chicago and London, 1992, pp. 75-110
8. and R. Ray, 'The Memsahib's Brush: Anglo-Indian Women and the Art of the Picturesque, 1830-1880', in J.F. Codell and D.S. Macleod, Orientalism Transposed: The Impact of the Colonies on British Culture, Aldershot UK and Brookfield USA, 1998, pp. 89-116
9. MS The Illustrated Indian Journal of Frances (Fanny) Eden 1837-8, India Office Library, London, p. 17
10. S. Mills, Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of Women's Travel Writing and Colonialism, London and New York, 1993, p. 3
11. The problematic categories of the 'amateur' and the 'professional' for nineteenth-century women artists have been discussed elsewhere. See C. Jordan, 'No-Man's Land? Amateurism and Colonial Women Artists', Art and Australia, vol. 32, no. 3, 1995, pp. 358-65
12. and C. Jordan, 'The Public Amateur and the Private Professional: A Re-evaluation of the Categories of Public and Private in Colonial Women Artists' Work', Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, vol. 1, no. 2, 2000, pp. 42-60
13. S. & K. Morris, A Catalogue of Birmingham and West Midland Painters of the Nineteenth Century, Stratford-upon-Avon, 1974
14. V. Rae-Ellis, Louisa Anne Meredith: A Tigress in Exile, Hobart, 1990, p. 37
15. Rae-Ellis, op. cit. (note 9)
16. S. O'Neill, 'Charles Meredith' in B. Nairn, G. Serle and R. Ward (eds), Australian Dictionary of Biography Vol. 5: 1851-70, Melbourne, 1974
17. K. Alford, Production or Reproduction? An Economic History of Women in Australia 1788-1850, Melbourne, 1984, p. 126
18. L.A. Twamley, The Annual of British Landscape Scenery: An Autumn Ramble on the Wye, London and Birmingham, 1839, p. 10
19. Nostalgia is identified as a keystone of the picturesque in S.K. Robinson, Inquiry into the Picturesque, Chicago, 1991, p. 101
20. Gilpin exhibits a similar preoccupation with the evocation of British history. See A.M. Ross, The Imprint of the Picturesque on Nineteenth-Century British Fiction, Waterloo, Ontario, 1986, p. 11
21. Convict-artist Thomas Watling's melancholic reflections on the absence of the picturesque in Australia are particularly eloquent. See R. Gibson, 'This Prison, This Language: Thomas Watling's Letters from an Exile at Botany Bay' (1794) in P. Foss (ed.), Islands in the Stream: Myths of Place in Australian Culture, Sydney, 1988, pp. 4-28
22. L.A. Meredith, Over the Straits: A Visit to Victoria, London, 1861, pp. 49-50
23. Fanny to William: The Letters of Frances Leonora Macleay 1812-1836, Sydney, 1993, p. 56
24. L.A. Meredith, My Home in Tasmania, during a Residence of Nine Years, 2 vols, London, 1852, vol. 1, p. 27
25. T. Griffiths, 'Past Silences: Aborigines and Convicts in our History-Making', Australian Cultural History, no. 6, 1987, pp. 18-32, esp. pp. 20-1
26. Meredith, Over the Straits, op. cit. (note 16), pp. 179-80
27. Carter, Road to Botany Bay, op. cit. (note 4), p. 243
28. Meredith, My Home in Tasmania, op. cit. (note 18), vol. 2, p. 90
29. L.A. Twamley, The Romance of Nature, or the Flower Seasons Illustrated, 1836
30. Flora's Gems, or, the Treasures of the Parterre, 1837
31. and Our Wild Flowers Familiarly Described and Illustrated, 1839, all London
32. See, for example, Meredith's failed efforts to keep a daisy alive in the garden of her first colonial home, Rae Ellis, Tigress in Exile, op. cit. (note 9), pp. 88-9
33. G.T. Stilwell, Mary Morton Allport: A Commemorative Exhibition 1831-1981, Hobart, 1981
34. H. Allport, 'Joseph Allport', A.G.L. Shaw & C.M.H. Clark (eds), Australian Dictionary of Biography Vol. 1: 1788-1850, Melbourne, 1966
35. MS Mary Morton Allport's Journal: 1832-3, Allport Library and Museum of Fine Arts, Hobart, n.p
36. MS Mary Morton Allport's Journal 1852-4, Allport Library and Museum of Fine Arts, Hobart, n.p.; Stilwell, Mary Morton Allport, op. cit. (note 27)
37. L.A. Meredith, Some of My Bush Friends in Tasmania, London, 1860
38. MS Mary Morton Allport's Journal, 1852-4, op. cit. (note 29)
39. Mrs Fenton, The Journal of Mrs Fenton: A Narrative of her life in India, the Isle of France (Mauritius), and Tasmania during the years 1826-30, London, 1901, p. 390
40. Robinson, Inquiry, op. cit. (note 12), p. 96
41. Meredith, My Home in Tasmania, op. cit. (note 18), vol. 1, p. 88
42. A recent book examing the history of environmentalism through Australian art, published subsequent to the writing of this article, contains an extended assessment of Meredith's contribution as an environmental activist. Tim Bonyhady, The Colonial Earth, Melbourne, 2000
43. 'Ambivalence' is a key concept in H. Bhabha's theorization of the insecurity of the male European colonizer's authority over the 'colonized'. For instance, see 'Signs taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a tree outside Delhi, May 1817', Critical Inquiry, no. 12, Autumn 1985, pp. 144-65
44. Rae-Ellis, Tigress in Exile, op. cit. (note 9), pp. 183-4
45. For an extended discussion of this trope see R. Rosaldo, 'Imperialist Nostalgia', Representations, no. 26, Spring 1989, pp. 107-22
46. On the notion that Aborigines were doomed to die out after white contact, see S. Sheridan, '"Wives and mothers like ourselves, poor remnants of a dying race": Aborigines in Colonial Women's Writing' (1988) in her Along the Faultlines: Sex, Race and Nation in Australian Women's Writing 1880s-1930s, St Leonard's, NSW, 1995, pp. 121-34
47. MS Mary Morton Allport's Book of Verse, c. 1830-90, poem undated, Allport Library and Museum of Fine Arts, Hobart
48. H. Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, Ringwood, Victoria, 1995, pp. 4-5 and 30-2
49. P. Grimshaw, 'Female Lives and the Tradition of Nation-Making', Voices (Canberra), vol. 5, no. 3, Spring 1995, pp. 30-44, p. 34
50. Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, op. cit. (note 43), pp. 29-30
51. Sheridan, 'Wives and Mothers', op. cit. (note 41), makes reference to the writers Catherine Langloh Parker and Jeannie Gunn's Little Black Princess (1905) in this context, p. 126