THOMAS BOCK
A haunting set of portraits of Tasmanian Aboriginal people, owned by the British Museum and painted by Thomas Bock — a famous convict artist transported to Van Diemen’s Land in 1824 — is being shown in Australia for the first time
The famous colonial artist came to Van Diemen’s Land as a convict in 1824 but the artwork he created here is now thought to be among the most significant from early times of British settlement
There’s a deeply affecting series of portraits on show at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery. To see them is like looking at a photo board of missing people — only the faces are incongruously contained within pretty frames, each a beautifully rendered piece depicting a proud Tasmanian Aboriginal. Owned by the British Museum, this extraordinary collection of artworks showing notable historical Tasmanian figures such as Manalakina, Tanalipunya, Wurati, Trukanini and Multiyalakina (Eumarrah) is being displayed for the first time in Australia as part of TMAG’s current exhibition, Thomas Bock.
A disquiet emanates from this collection of watercolours painted by one of the state’s most intriguing convict artists.
“We know what happened to each one of these people and it’s not a happy story,” says one of TMAG’s Indigenous Cultures curators, Julie Gough, whose ancestor Mannalargenna (Manalakina) is depicted in one of the artworks.
“For me, the portraits are emotional to spend time with. It makes me feel angry at what unfolded on this island.
“Hopefully this exhibition will provoke and inspire people to gain knowledge about what happened here.”
Though the portraits are the heart and soul of the exhibition, they are part of a bigger collection of watercolours, drawings and daguerreotypes (early photographs) by Bock, which offer a glimpse into the broader social, cultural and political life of Hobart in the mid-1800s, and the artist’s private life.
The show was developed in collaboration with Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, England, where the artist was born and spent the first part of his life. The director of Ikon, Jonathan Watkins, who co-curated the exhibition with TMAG’s principal curator of Art, Jane Stewart, discovered TMAG-owned work by Bock on a visit to Hobart four years ago.
“We were looking through storage boxes, and Jonathan was particularly struck by Bock’s Personal colour chart (undated) when he realised Bock was from Birmingham,” Stewart says. “We were interested in taking Bock back to Birmingham.”
This ambition was accomplished late last year, and early this year when the exhibition was shown at Ikon Gallery with support from an Australian Government grant.
Stewart says she became absorbed in Bock’s life during the curatorial process. She discovered a character who was sentenced to transportation to Australia after being found guilty of trying to cause his pregnant young lover to miscarry.
The up-and-coming engraver was also a portrait artist, and having left behind his wife and five children, he virtually picked up where he left off when he arrived in Hobart Town in 1824. Within a decade he was one of the most respected artists in Van Diemen’s Land, and had a new partner, a fellow ex-convict, whom he married and helped raise seven children.
“This exhibition has allowed me to re-contextualise and reconsider Bock’s work,” Stewart says. “The remarkable thing about Bock is he never experienced hard labour. They needed his skills to produce things. He was quickly pressed into service as an engraver. He is an example of a convict who was quite important in the establishment of the colony.
“I was captured by his story and trying to understand him better through his work.”
Bock’s paintings reveal much about the fledgling colony. Within months of being in Hobart, he was asked to draw infamous Alexander Pearce, who was hanged for murder and canni-
balism. Bock’s drawings of him, contained within a glass cabinet as part of the exhibition, were produced for phrenological purposes (skull readings, which purportedly revealed information about a person’s character).
“[Pearce] was being sensationalised in the media and compared to a vampire, but the drawings don’t show any of that hype.”
Other highlights include Bock’s personal sketchbook, which traces his “passage from a free man in Birmingham to a convict in Hobart and gives us insights into his life”; and intimate domestic pictures of a woman, presumed to be his second wife Mary Ann Cameron, with two children.
There are also evocative nude life drawings, most likely of Mary Ann (they are the only life drawings known to have survived from colonial Tasmanian times); a masterful depiction of Hobart Town; and some tiny dauguerrotype portraits.
“The breadth of the convict artist’s work, the insight into his life and, undeniably, bringing the original set of portraits from Britain to Tasmania are probably the most significant aspects of this exhibition,” Stewart says.
Thomas Bock is being shown concurrently with The National Picture: The Art of Tasmania’s Black Wall at TMAG until November 11. Though the two were curated separately, they dovetail well because of The National’s focus on the “Black War” and the controversial “Conciliator”, George Augustus Robinson, and the Tasmanian Aboriginal people he attempted to “pacify” between 1828 and the 1850s.
Some of these Tasmanian Aborigines are depicted in the British Museum portraits shown in Thomas Bock. Seen together, the two exhibitions provide an unprecedented and excoriating visual history of a dark, brutal chapter in Tasmania’s colonial past. Through them, we learn about the mass displacement of Tasmanian Aborigines in the Black War (generally understood as being from 1824 to 1831), their association with George Robinson, their subsequent deportation to Flinders Island, and the eventual return of those who survived Wybalenna to putalina (Oyster Cove) in 1847.
“The Government allowed them to come back in 1847. They were exiled from 1831 and only 47 remained from more than 200,” Gough says. “Bock was critical in that period in depicting people who passed away on Flinders Island, including one of my ancestors. In 1835 Mannalargenna died, and he’s the ancestor of many Tasmanian Aboriginal people. He’s one of the most wellknown portraits.
“The exhibition gives an identity to many people who have been overlooked. We should all know the names of the people who made it back from Flinders.”
The presentation of these portraits as colonial art, and the British Museum’s ownership of them will likely be troubling for some because it’s clear they are are not just artworks.
“They feel haunted. They are presented as colonial art, but they are more and different to colonial art,” Gough says.
“It’s an exhibition in a colonial space. The portraits are in a row, they are framed and contained by the eye of Western artists. So I have mixed feelings on seeing them. They are artworks of our people by non-Aboriginal people, but they are a direct portal to our ancestors and history. These watercolours produced two decades before commercial photography are the closest we can get to images of these old people. We see them carrying cultural objects made with their own hands.”
Stewart says she was guided by the curator of the British Museum’s Oceanic collections, Dr Gaye Sculthorpe, whose ancestors are Tasmanian Aborigines.
It was Dr Sculthorpe’s idea to hang portraits of men and women next to each other if they were known to be couples. “We were trying to establish who these people were. It was Gaye’s suggestion that we hang the artworks as couples and that felt right because it felt as though we could restore some integrity to them, and something more personal,” Stewart says.
“These people weren’t drawn by Bock of their own free will. They were with Robinson’s party but they were effectively prisoners. While these are terrific portraits and are some of the most sensitive done of Aboriginal people of this period, it’s also poignant to note that the portraits that show the profiles of Aboriginal people are very scientific in nature.”
Robinson commissioned the portraits in the exhibition for a book he was planning to write about Tasmanian Aborigines, but eventually sold them instead. The original set, of which copies have been made, became the property of the British Museum, where they’ve been stored and kept in pristine condition since.
“They haven’t been exhibited before and that’s why they are in such good nick. They haven’t been exposed to the light … We don’t own them, but they are in good hands and it’s terrific to bring them to Tasmania for the first time. It feels a bit like bringing them home.”