progress versus the picturesque: white women and the aesthetics of environmentalism in colonial...

Progress versus the Picturesque: white women andthe aesthetics of environmentalism in colonialAustralia 1820±1860

Caroline Jordan

In theory, the picturesque was able to slip untroubled from the survey of well-trodden British or Continental beauty spots to anonymous colonial terrain. Whatwas supposed to matter was the sensibility that the cultivated `pilgrim' or`wanderer' brought to the scene. The picturesque tour and the drive forsettlement had the elements of the visual search and the journey in common, butthe physical and psychological trials of settlement were not so easily sublimatedinto an aesthetic frame. British artist±settlers already steeped in the conventionsof picturesque vision often found it difficult to create and preserve in theAustralian colonies, in marked contrast to India. In Australia, colonists had tograpple not only with the patent Anglocentrism of their imported landscapeaesthetic in a foreign and sometimes inhospitable environment but with theappalling rate of destruction that often accompanied the manifestations of`progress', such as land clearing, on the colonial frontier. As G.T.W.B. Boyes, asophisticated amateur exponent of the Claudean picturesque and ColonialAuditor in Hobart, Tasmania, commented in his diary shortly after his arrival inSydney in 1824:

I soon found occasion to lament the unfeeling spirit that urged the settlersto give so many noble trees so wantonly to the axe and the flame. Toreproach such people for want of taste would be absurd, few of them everheard of such a principle, but a sense of interest might have struck themforcibly ± that to leave timber upon parts of their property which they hadno intention to cultivate would be the highest economy.1

Graphic depictions of the treeless vistas that so offended Boyes figure rarely in thecorpus of early colonial Australian landscape imagery. Instead, there are countlesspicturesque and topographical views of established and respectable settlements,published by professional artists, to proclaim the successful imposition of anordered cultural hierarchy in the Australian colonies to would-be Britishemigrants. To uncover the counter-picturesque, one must rely rather on writtenaccounts by nineteenth-century amateurs in published and unpublished diariesand memoirs, books on picturesque travel, and images and poems by colonialamateur artists. A turn to an obscure amateur watercolour of 1803 held in theMitchell Library, Sydney, Government Farm at Castle Hill, for example, yields a

Art History ISSN 0141-6790 Vol. 25 No. 3 September 2002 pp. 341±357

341ß Association of Art Historians 2002. Published by Blackwell Publishers,108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

glimpse of a more brutal landscape-in-progress. A deep valley pockmarked withstumps extends beyond the frame, as far as the eye can see, a no-man's land ofmutilated trees surrounding an embryonic settlement (plate 24).

According to Richard Grove, the environmental excesses occurring in thecontext of European capitalist expansion at the colonial periphery specifically intropical island colonies from the mid-seventeenth century provided the rightconditions for a modern conservationist ideology to begin development.2 Thisessay argues that another aspect of this incipient colonial environmentalconsciousness can be seen in the protests against progress made in the name ofthe picturesque by emigrants like Boyes. Further, it will argue that an analysis ofthe classed and gendered dimensions of the inherent contest between, on the onehand, progress and capitalist expansion and, on the other, of the picturesque andconservationism, will help to tease out the peculiarly colonial characteristics of itsdevelopment in a specific location: Australia, in the nineteenth century.

To one of Boyes's class and sensibilities, a landscape such as GovernmentFarm at Castle Hill was not only ugly, but imbued with the crudity of the slavelabour that went into its making. Indeed, the anonymous author of this image wasprobably a convict or soldier who may have produced it as proof that GovernorPhillip's convicts were being put to good use on his workfarm.3 For Boyes, theenemies of the picturesque were specifically lower-class settlers with nopretensions to the possession of taste. Siding with the picturesque aestheticagainst the more egregious forms of colonial progress was clearly a product of theeducation of the higher classes in the colonies. It was also a gendered positioning.Women amateurs occupy a place at the bottom of the nineteenth-century artist

24 Anon, Government Farm at Castle Hill, c. 1803. Watercolour, 24 � 35 cm. Mitchell Library,State Library of New South Wales.

PROGRESS VERSUS THE PICTURESQUE

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hierarchy and consequently rarely make an appearance in books on Australian arthistory and visual culture ± in relation to the picturesque or otherwise.4 Thisoversight is hardly deserved when, in fact, the ornamental education of well-bredwomen and their expected cultivation of sympathetic emotion led them to beclosely identified with the exercise and appreciation of the picturesque in theAustralian colonies, as elsewhere in the British Empire.5

The inclusion of women in an analysis of the colonial picturesque complicatesthe simplified class perspective lent by Boyes. In the colonies, when white womenof a certain class aligned themselves with the picturesque, it was often in protestagainst the actions of their direct masculine counterparts. The nature of thisantagonism is neatly illustrated in an Anglo-Indian anecdote from a journalwritten by Fanny Eden, the upper-class sister of the Governor-General LordAuckland, to a friend in England, in which Eden describes going on a shootingexpedition in 1836. For the men of the expedition the purpose was a typicallyAnglo-Indian orgy of game-hunting, while Fanny was there as an equally typical`pilgrim of the picturesque', whose main idea was to sketch:

We moved six miles today and all the way through jungles literally overrunwith wild roses covered in blossoms ± the gentlemen have with them eachsix rifles in their howdahs, and shoot at all the innocent wild beasts theymeet ± just as I was disserting on the exceeding beauty of one rose bush agreat wild hog rushed out of it and charged the elephant . . . the instantafter it had five balls through it, and then, dear, I settled that I have notaste for the shooting part of the expedition and shall confine my genius tothe picturesque and there is more than enough space for it here. Thoughtthat hog's was a shocking piece of murder . . . it seemed to be such a finestrong beast so exactly fitted it its own jungles I do not see our right totake our love of destruction there.6

Eden's feminine attachment to the picturesque in the face of an organizedmasculine campaign of `murder' is `confined' and ineffectual. As both Sara Suleriand Sara Mills have argued in respect of colonial women writers, women'sposition as agents of culture can be read to map the extent of feminine power andagency more generally within the stereotypically `masculine' colonial project.7

Middle- and upper-class white women like Eden, unlike their brothers, fathers andhusbands, were not the gun-toters, tree-loppers and law-makers of the colonies.While women were excluded from agency in the masculine depredations of killing,clearing and dispossession on the frontier, they were able to occupy an exemplaryrole as aestheticizers and civilizers, the natural champions of the picturesque andthrough it, of environmental and species conservation. I will argue, however, thatthe ultimate test for the conservationist sensibility of the picturesque in Australiawas the dispossession of Aboriginal peoples by European settlers, whoselivelihoods were perceived to depend on it. The breakdown of women's use ofthe picturesque as a vehicle for dissent against progress at this crucial point marksthem as active and complicit imperialist subjects. The main figures to be examinedhere are Louisa Anne Meredith and Mary Morton Allport, two British±Australianartists, one `professional' and one `amateur' respectively, who emigrated from


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their native Birmingham to the remote penal colony of Van Diemen's Land(Tasmania) between 1830 and 1840.8

The tourist picturesque

Louisa Anne Meredith supplies the necessary transitional figure to chart theprogress of the picturesque from that of the tourist in Britain to the emigrantjourneying into the Australian interior. Meredith was professionally wellestablished as an artist and writer in Britain under her maiden name of LouisaAnne Twamley before her emigration in 1839 at the age of twenty-seven. Herthriving career as a poet and illustrator of five books, and as a self-supportingminiaturist who had over two dozen portraits exhibited at the Birmingham Societyof Arts, once led her to scoff at an offer from relations to go out as a governess toAustralia.9 Nevertheless, that was her fate after marriage to her cousin CharlesMeredith, the son of pioneer settlers in Tasmania. The couple originally had theidea of pursuing a pastoral life in New South Wales but when this venture failed,they moved to Tasmania to be near Charles's family. Meredith never ceased toregret leaving England nor to hide her disdain for the colonies. However, makingthe best of the upheavals necessitated by following her husband's chequered career,as, variously, pastoralist, police magistrate and parliamentarian, she turned towriting and illustrating numerous travel, natural history and children's books onAustralian themes, principally for British audiences.10

Meredith's last British book, An Autumn Ramble on the Wye (1839), capturesthe moment of picturesque travel for most middle-class free women settlers inAustralia, who only began emigrating in large numbers during the 1820s.11 By thetime Meredith was commissioned by her publisher to write An Autumn Ramble,the upper-class fad for picturesque travel had devolved into a populist, evenhackneyed, pursuit. Making the tour herself from industrial Birmingham,Meredith was well aware that the picturesque in Britain had becomeinstitutionalized in tourist spaces such as the Wye Valley, first popularized forthe amateur sketcher by the Reverend William Gilpin in 1770. Her response wasto try and revive a spirit of discovery and excitement by inviting the day tripper torecast herself as a `pleasure-pilgrim' to the `shrines of the picturesque' and escapefrom modernity via ecstatic meditations on nature and the heroic British past.History and nostalgia are equally important to the reverence excited by thenatural landscape in Meredith's version of the picturesque and her descriptionsare interleaved with chunks of history recycled from Coxe's Historical Tour andLeland's Itinerary.12

Despite her best efforts, Meredith found that her communion with thehistorical picturesque was debased by the prosaic realities of mass tourism. Thedesired state of intensely felt nostalgia for the past relied on concentrated powers ofthe imagination and did not tolerate the intrusion of the present. When Meredithsat down to sketch in Tintern Abbey she was conscious of feeling regulated by thetables and stones provided for the purpose at all the best viewpoints. It took someeffort finally to achieve her reverie: `As I sketched, my thoughts were busy with allthe lore I possessed touching the history of this ancient place . . . pageantry and



pomp were before me, and I could almost hear the chaunting [sic] priests as theypaced up the `̀ long-drawn aisle'', when my pencil fell from my hand at thedisenchanting sound of `̀ Where can John have put the sandwiches?'' '13

This difficulty was exacerbated in the Australian colonial context. LouisaAnne Meredith was not the first British artist±settler to fail to engage herpicturesque subjectivity with the Australian environment.14 For Meredith, theironic struggle to accommodate the vulgarization of the picturesque in Britain wastranslated into a more complex failure of the picturesque to take hold in rawcolonial Australia. Its lack became a metaphor for her failure to assimilatecompletely to an alien environment. In An Autumn Ramble, the presence of theold, the gnarled, the ruined, the `melancholy character of Autumn' with its`myriad-tinted woods' and `lichen-clad rocks' were essential vehicles for thetriggerings of nostalgia.15 But even the humblest clicheÂ s of the British picturesquewere absent in Australia. The destruction of an old Tasmanian mill prompted thisreflection on lack by Meredith:

No one at home can imagine how lovers of art, and what art delights in ±picturesque forms and mellow bits of colour ± lament such changes. Nowell-built colonial edifices have yet had time to get respectably old-looking;all are as sharp and raw as ever; mere parvenus of yesterday; and failing allsuch ancienne noblesse as the castles, abbeys, churches, mansions, andmanor-houses of the old world, even a rickety, tumble-down old woodenmill has its value.16

A melancholy affected the perceptions of another exceptional observer of thepicturesque, Fanny Macleay, like Meredith a skilled artist and English emigrant inAustralia. Despite an interest in art and science, developed under the influence of herfather and brother, both distinguished naturalists, Fanny's enthusiasm was depressedat being permanently separated from her beloved brother William and by herinstinctive distaste for the new landscape. After riding out around Sydney in 1826, amere four months after her arrival from England, Fanny reported to William: `Thereseems great sameness here owing to the country being flat & all the trees all beingeither Casserinas or Eucalyptus ± indeed the trees have the appearance of havingbeen barked and destroyed by lightening they are as ugly as you can imagine trees tobe.'17 Despite the freakishly deformed trees, which might in other circumstances havebeen deemed worthy of a Salvator Rosa, Fanny accused the country around Sydneyof an unpicturesque monotony, a charge echoed in Meredith's dislike of the `widebrown deserts' of New South Wales.18

If the natural landscape promised little joy for the sketcher of the picturesque,nor could there be any resort to history as its inspiration in Australia. Thisperceived lack of history could not yet be imaginatively supplemented by that ofthe indigenous population, as has been the pattern in the twentieth century. Whitesettlers laboured under the belief that the nomadic Aborigines who had occupiedthe continent for 40,000 years were `timeless', without a history and civilization,leaving the land legally a terra nullius waiting to be inscribed by Europeans.19 Inthe absence of a legible (read white) history of any depth in the country, Meredithresorted to likeness to England as her criterion for the presence of the picturesque



in Australia. She commented on a Melbourne mansion that, `I saw nothing soEnglish-looking as `̀ Burwood'', in the whole colony; and my powers of encomiumdo not farther go.' Musing on her sketch she was most pleased with the likeness of`the grand, old, gnarled, and bending gum-tree' to an English oak, completing atransformation from the blighted and the foreign into the picturesque and thefamiliar (plate 25).20

Assimilation and the picturesque

Paul Carter, in his `spatial history' of Australia, The Road to Botany Bay, exploresthe idea that the sudden perception of the picturesque stands for assimilation, afeeling of `at-homeness', in the alien colonial environment.21 This assimilation,expressed in the gradual strengthening of the fragile claims of the picturesque onthe Australian landscape, could also take time to develop. In Macleay's case, itwas a year before she could write to William, `Since I last wrote I have seen muchbeauty ± I have been reconciled to the country I think I could live here verycontentedly all my life.'22

Carter further argues for the intentionality of the picturesque in establishingthe landscape as a place to settle, rather than as a neutral aesthetic response to it.He perceives a `connection between the visible picturesque and the invisibleprospect of home, the tension between motion and rest always implicit in

25 Louisa Anne Meredith, Burwood, near Melbourne, residence of Sir James Palmer, c. 1860.Pencil, 13.1 � 19.3 cm, from a sketchbook used for illustrations to her Over the Straits: A Visitto Victoria. Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales.



travelling'.23 Meredith's colonial travel stories reflect this settler's search for thefamiliar rather than the adventurer's discovery of difference. Emigrant travelcould be a source of much discomfort and anxiety, which a focus on thepicturesque destination of home was required to redeem and mask. WhenMeredith was uprooted in 1844 from her second and favourite Tasmanian homeon the east coast, the prospect of the journey into the bush was deeply disturbingto her: `I felt as if there were some evil spell upon us, dooming us always to go onwandering, as if for us earth had not a home.'24 The anxious imperatives ofsettlement obliterated the conceit of being a `wanderer' in search of thepicturesque, and replaced it with a yearning for the realization of `Home'/home,the England she had left behind or the signifier of the end of the journey.

Meredith found no compensation when she arrived at `Lath Hall' at PortSorell on the isolated north coast of Tasmania. Although she used picturesqueconventions to represent it, they failed to work talismanically to make it eithertolerable or habitable. Her friend Bishop Nixon's drawing of the house, thefrontispiece of the second volume of My Home in Tasmania (plate 26), has itglimpsed through a winding woodland passage, epitomizing the ideal of respite atthe end of the traveller's journey. But the ideal is slyly subverted by the addition ofa snake in the foreground, an allusion to the presence of the evil serpent in theGarden of Eden. The picturesque name Meredith gave the house on arrival, `LathHall', is really a joke alluding to its rough timber construction, which she clearlyfound repulsive. The bush in which the house is set was anti-picturesque; gloomyand oppressive. Meredith even failed to find salvation in her `pets' and `bushfriends', the flora and fauna. In this place, her discussion of wildlife turns on flies,ticks, snakes and scorpions.

For women especially, the last resort of the picturesque in Australia was theminutiae of nature. When Meredith and others collected specimens of native floraand fauna to sketch in miniaturist detail, they were following well-establishedBritish precedents. Meredith had made a substantial contribution to the genre ofpoetic flower books for women in Britain in the 1830s, in which feminine feelingwas pervasively identified with flowers.25 A sub-cult of the humble Englishwildflower versus the showy exotic blooms of the glasshouse simultaneouslycelebrated a becoming feminine modesty with nationalistic British pride.Transposed to Australia, this translated into a peculiarly feminine expression ofimperial patriotism, exemplified in Edward Hopley's popular painting and print,A Primrose from England, which features a crowd with women at its centreworshipping the `first primrose in Australia' as it arrives at the docks (plate 27).While other sentimental imports by settlers, such as the Scottish thistle and therabbit, rapidly developed into robust environmental scourges, the transplant ofthe fragile primrose could be interpreted as carrying a more personal note ofwarning to the emigrant women featured prominently in Hopley's painting. Theexpatriate's struggle to persuade the plants of an English spring to thrive in herAustralian garden (frequently ending in frustration and failure) was an obviousmetaphor for the problems of survival of the `lady' in the bush.26

A transference of allegiance from the English wildflower to the Australian wasan emotionally charged, if altogether conventional, feminine path to assimilationinto the new country. Mary Morton Allport is typical in this respect. Allport was



born Mary Chapman in 1806, the daughter of a Birmingham publican. Sheattended a school run by a Mrs Hannah Allport in Aldridge, Staffordshire, whereshe apparently received a good ornamental education. The schoolmistress'daughter and her son, the artist Henry Curzon Allport, were followers of JohnGlover and tutored young Mary and the other pupils in his picturesque landscapedrawing technique. Coincidentally, Mary emigrated to Tasmania in the same year

26 After Bishop Francis Nixon, Lath Hall, 1852. Engraving, frontispieceto L.A. Meredith, My Home in Tasmania, vol. 2. Tasmaniana Library.State Library of Tasmania.



as the ageing Glover, in 1831, and painted his portrait in miniature. The reasonfor Mary's emigration was her marriage in 1826 to Mrs Allport's youngest sonJoseph. They voyaged out with their baby and four business partners to take upland outside Hobart. There Mary recorded a succession of their crude bushdwellings in her unfailingly delicate line. In July 1832 Mary advertised her servicesas a miniature painter in the Hobart Town Courier. Although a more refinedartist than Meredith, particularly in picturesque landscape and natural history,Allport made few public artistic forays and her miniature painting was not enoughto supplement the failing pastoral venture. On its collapse soon afterwards, sheand Joseph returned to Hobart, where Joseph had secured a legal positionthrough the offices of George Meredith, Louisa Anne Meredith's father-in-law.27

Allport's diary, begun on her return to Hobart from the bush, charts thebeginnings of her sentimental education in the native flora. Not quite one yearafter her emigration, in November 1832, Allport was pining so strongly forEnglish snowdrops that they came to her in a dream:

Painted a snow-drop in my album from memory ± I have never seen one inthis colony, and my heart yearns for them. I dreamed one night that AuntChapman sent me a large box full ±`But who will teach the flowers,Which our children loved, to dwellIn a soil that is not ours?Home, home and friends, farewell.'28

27 After Edward Hopley, A Primrose from England, 1858. Engraving, 23.8 � 34.8 cm.Collection: Bendigo Art Gallery.



In the next month, during her confinement with her second child, Allport beganpainting Australian wildflowers brought down for her from Mount Nelson andMount Wellington around Hobart by her husband and another man. By the 1850sAllport's passion for the native flora was well established. Her speciality becamethe painting of wildflowers on chessboards, one of which was exhibited at theUniversal Exhibition of Industry in Paris in 1855, and her later diary records hertutoring her daughter and other young ladies in the art at home.29

The close description of Australian wildflowers and native marsupialssimilarly gave Meredith a place for her lost vocation of the picturesque inAustralia and a route by which she could try and assimilate even to the despisedPort Sorell. Typically, she began in a didactic spirit, criticizing the intellectuallaziness of her less enlightened colonial neighbours: `When living in a newcountry, and in great measure apart from the advantages of civilized life, it is nosmall solace and pleasure to possess the habit . . . of deriving interest andamusement from the perusal of whatever page of the great book of Nature liesopen to us.' More thoughtfully she added that, without the guidance of books onthe subject one was accustomed to in England, `if we would learn from Nature,we must strive to read her own untranslated history.'30 In place of conjuring upthe prescribed pages of history in her imagination, as Meredith had once done incontemplation of the Wye, she was conscious of having to write into thesupposedly blank book of antipodean nature, presumably in ignorance ofAboriginal knowledges. This project determined the trajectory of Meredith's laterpublished works. In one of her best-known books, Some of my Bush Friends inTasmania, she sentimentalized, eulogized and anthropomorphized Australianflora and fauna for popular audiences, as she had formerly done for Englishflowers, finally laying claim to the despised bush by domesticating it.31

Power and the picturesque

When shrunk into the microscopic observation of natural history, the picturesqueprescribed a feminine sphere within colonialism. Meanwhile, outside in thelandscape, transformations were being wrought over which women had littlecontrol and which directly assaulted the fragile natural beauties they had come tocherish. The instability of women's own claims to power within patriarchy gavethem the sanctioned roles of compassion, of links to nature, of sensibility to feelingand beauty, even while this was declared marginal, fanciful and impractical in theworld of colonial masculine affairs. Mary Morton Allport's Tasmanian journal of1853 describes the powerlessness of women as bearers of the picturesque sensibilitybefore the masculine onslaught of stripping, clearing and killing. Mary MortonAllport records her grief over the destruction of some Tasmanian blue gums on herhusband's property, which, twenty-one years after her dream of the snowdrops,she describes as exceeding the beauty even of the English birch:

27 July 1853 I went into the valley this morning to see the men cuttingdown the bank, but I had better have staid [sic] away I was so vexed. Thepretty blue gums from Grass-tree hill, which were planted on purpose to



hide that ugly fence by the hot beds, had just grown high enough to makethat place an ornament instead of an eye-sore, and Papa had them cutdown before my eyes, while I begged their lives in vain.32

While Allport's protest was confined to her husband's property, her aesthete'sconcern at indiscriminate land-clearing had been echoed elsewhere in the colonies.Mrs Fenton, colonist and literary admirer of the picturesque in India beforeemigrating to Tasmania with her second husband in 1829, wrote that shesometimes accompanied her husband into `Fenton Forest', where he was directingthe sawing-up and burning of trees to clear the ground; `I go for a double motive ±to have an eye on Fenton and to intercede for the preservation of any fine tree ± tothe wonder of by-standers, to whom all trees are the same.'33

Defence of the picturesque in the face of such development was not, in anysimple way, gendered feminine. Mrs Fenton certainly would not have thought so:her memoir contains the admission that she preferred the company of men.34

`Feminine' poetic gushings about nature, of a type embraced by Meredith in someof her published writings, was not her style. Concerns about the fate of thepicturesque in the colonies were expressed by both men and women. This suggestsinstead that possession of taste, which included an ability to recognize thepicturesque, equalled a degree of alienation from agency in capitalist develop-ment. As G.T.W.B. Boyes acknowledges, in the quotation at the beginning of thisessay, the majority of settlers and labourers lacked any idea of the picturesque,and, moreover, he did not reasonably expect them to possess it. In other words,the battle for preservation was a class issue. The elitism of taste was in this casenot illustrative of the power exercised by the ruling class, but rather of itspowerlessness, as a feeble obstacle to the cross-class European interest in seeingcolonial land develop. This impotence was merely compounded for women.Hence the picturesque was only metaphorically feminine in a binary structurewhose other signifiers were `civilization' and `taste' versus `philistinism' and`profit'. Class is a more important practical determinant than gender inidentification with the picturesque in this instance. Conservative femininity andthe picturesque overlap, then, only as marginalized positions whose critique ofpower and progress is institutionalized but ultimately impotent.

Sidney K. Robinson has argued that the latter is inherent in the picturesqueaesthetic. In his view, the picturesque's function as an antidote to the expressionof power inevitably led to accusations of frivolity; `In the face of the powerexerted to construct the stone bridge, the attention that the picturesque pays to thedecaying condition of the wooden one seems artificial to those committed toprogress.'35 But the picturesque was by no means totally opposed to progress.Rather, it was about knowing when to stop development, when to preserve ratherthan to cut down or replace. Meredith was typical in her preference for thinned-out trees, mixed with buildings, over the threatening monotony of `virgin'bushland. In one of her picturesque descriptions, she praises a thatched cottageshaded by `some particularly fine gum-trees, such as would be deemed highlyornamental in an English park, for trees of this kind growing singly or in groupson rich land are scarcely recognizable as of the same genus with the gaunt scraggyobjects that swarm together in forests'.36



Because most colonists failed to observe this tasteful distinction, thepicturesque critique of progress remained a point around which an environmentalactivism could form. In Meredith, the two strands came together. Meredith usedher books as a public forum to set forth her views on a variety of environmentalissues, including cruelty to animals, the decimation of species of fauna by huntersand the contamination of picturesque sites by tourists, the latter recalling herearlier criticisms of the Wye. Describing a visit to a fern gully in Hobart in 1846,she wrote, `The ferns . . . were verdant and graceful . . . but the empty champagnebottles which bristled beside the rocks, and the corks and greasy sandwich paperslurking among the moss, savoured considerably more of the creature comfortsthan the picturesque.'37

Despite her public environmental activism, Meredith was not immune fromthe contradictions of simultaneously `civilizing', as befitted her gender andmiddle-class status, and colonizing. Her abrupt switch from condemnation ofthose who failed to respect the laws of picturesque preservation to pragmaticresignation to the often violent destruction accompanying progress can appearshocking. Meredith especially deplored the rapid destruction by hunters of theseal, kangaroo and swan populations in Tasmania. Near her one-time home atSwan Port, she notes sarcastically that egg traders had decimated the black swancolony, where once there had been thousands at every lagoon. Even her pet swanshad been shot. But in the very next paragraph she disconcertingly remarks that, `afine fat swan is by no means a contemptible dish for the dinner table.'38 Theambivalence of Meredith's position as a defender of the picturesque in Australiawas contained within an aesthetic which could simultaneously be at odds bothwith the untouched Australian wilderness and the `rape' of the environment thatwas the associate of colonialism. Some clearing was both aesthetically desirableand economic, just as some killing was a necessity for human survival.39

The problem was one of where power lay in controlling the extent of colonialdevelopment. Mary Morton Allport's futile aesthetic protest over the felling of theblue gums expresses her powerlessness as a woman. Her defence of thepicturesque represented a minority view which carried little weight against the`necessities' of colonial economic development, just as Fanny Eden's did againstthe male ruling-class sport of big-game hunting in India. Hence the position of thepicturesque resonates with the marginalized situation of British women in thecolonies. Without direct access to political, legal, military or economic power,their particular feminine function was to decry the violence of colonialism.Meredith, however, represents a successful negotiation of this structural femininepowerlessness. Not only did Meredith possess her own literary mouthpieces forthe manipulation of public opinion, it also seems that she influenced herhusband's views. In the Tasmanian parliament in 1860, Charles Meredith initiateda pioneering bill to protect the black swan.40

The ambivalence occasioned by the vested interests of the European settler in`progress' versus conservationism in Australia applied most markedly to the fateof indigenous peoples. Here the picturesque was mobilized in the cause ofcommemoration rather than preservation which, naturally, could occur only afterthe victors had been announced. The social-Darwinist idea of the `natural'extinction of Aboriginal people initiated by the coming of the white man was



much anticipated by settlers. One of its expressions is found in a nostalgia for animaginary lost picturesque Arcadia that pre-dated white settlement.41 A functionof this Australian colonial picturesque was to mythologize the destruction thatcame with European settlement, wreathe it in nostalgia and stress the inevitabilityof time passing. In Tasmania it masked the horror of the attempted genocide ofthe Aborigines. This work of nostalgia can be seen in Mary Morton Allport's tinyprint Fern Valley (plate 28), which contains a rare representation of an Aboriginalman or woman by a white woman artist. While the majority of Allport's subjectsare drawn from life this is wholly a romantic invention, a flight of fancy on thesubject of loss, dispossession and destruction. Allport expands on the theme in arelated elegy in her Book of Verse:

Fern! Beneath whose palmy leafSat, of yore, the Native Chief ±Who heards't Corrobbery, feast and song,Echo thy green arcades among!Fern! Thy sable children nowPine beneath a stranger bough! ±With listless aim the Waddy flies,The broken spear neglected lies ±They weep their early greenwood homeThe shaded creek, the verdant dome,

28 Mary Morton Allport, Fern Valley,c. 1830s±40s. Hand-coloured lithograph,9 � 7 cm. Allport Library and Museumof Fine Arts, State Library of Tasmania.



The soft luxuriant mossy floor ±They sing, they dance, they smile no more! ±The white man came with tyrant brandAnd drove them from their father-land.42

Read together, image and poem represent the return of the healing feminine as amourner to the scene of masculine violence. It is surely no coincidence that whilethe figures of the nurturing forest and lost, childish innocence are unmistakablymaternal, the violence in the poem is portrayed as exclusively masculine, the whitetyrant clashing with the native chief in a struggle for the `father-land'. Allportimagined Aborigines living before the white man in the womb-like protection ofthe fern-forest, representing the deepest, most primitive and exotic landscapeavailable for an Australian Arcadia. Her native chief in Fern Valley is armed, butbenign. The poem makes clear why this is so; he is a ghost in the glade.

There is no evidence that either Allport or Meredith were able to describeAborigines from personal observation and interaction. Allport had arrived at theend of 1831, just as the devastating guerilla wars between settlers and Aboriginesof 1824±31 were petering out. By 1833 the remaining few hundred people of thedefeated tribes had negotiated to leave ± voluntarily ± the main island ofTasmania. They were placed onto a reserve on Flinders Island in Bass Strait,where they remained in rapidly declining numbers until 1847.43 This is no doubtthe exile under the `stranger bough' to which Allport refers in her poem. Meredithwas even more at a remove from Aboriginal people and these events, not havingarrived in Tasmania until 1840. In her case, it was her husband's `long anddisastrous experience of their habits' that inform her account. Her purpose wasnot to express feminine grief but to defend the colonial `farmers and countrygentlemen' against opinion in Britain `where, as I well know, the white people aremost erroneously believed to have been the aggressors.'44 The historian PatriciaGrimshaw has uncovered a possible cause for Meredith's especially vehementprotestations: the pioneer Merediths of Oyster Bay on the east coast had beennotorious persecutors of the `natives' in the so-called `Black War'. CharlesMeredith's elder brother was reportedly speared to death by Aboriginal men forthe abduction of Aboriginal women, whom he sold as sexual slaves to whitesealers.45 While Meredith was always concerned to reassure her English readers ofthe domesticity and peacefulness of life in Van Diemen's Land, in order toexpunge the `convict stain', she obviously had much more at stake personally inrewriting the history of settler violence towards Aborigines.

Meredith spun fantasies to aestheticize the recent memory of white violence onthe frontier. Her story of the destruction of the Tasmanian Aboriginal tribes bysettlers places the blame on an outsider, an aggressive Sydney black, `Mosquito',one of a number imported by settlers to assist in hunting down the indigenousAborigines. Mosquito allegedly corrupted the hitherto benign and childlikeTasmanians. Stirred into hostility, they, by her account, justified massive and fatalretaliation by white men. Like Allport's, Meredith's myth preserves a picturesquenostalgia for an Edenic time of peaceful coexistence, a past in which theuncorrupted savage was innocent and free. Many settlers looked back on a timebetween 1804, when European settlement in Tasmania began, and 1824, when the



natives had not been `troublesome'.46 In fact, according to historian HenryReynolds, the Aborigines' decision to wage war was prompted by the sharpgrowth in the European population between 1820 and 1830 which put anintolerable pressure on Aboriginal livelihoods.47 In this light, settler nostalgia forthose who had been defeated and almost destroyed can be seen as a way to masktheir responsibility for the same destruction. Meredith's and Allport's individualresponses differed, but only superficially. Whereas Meredith typically tried todeflect settler responsibility for the Aborigines' change in temper, the genuinelymore compassionate Allport did not. Nevertheless, despite her sincere professionof sympathy and humanity her racism is perhaps no less deeply felt ± the `native'may only be aestheticized and romanticized when consigned to the past. Suchpicturesque mystifications of history found another outlet for women authors andillustrators in children's folk and fairy tales. In literature, Aboriginal narrativeswere considered most suitable for bowdlerized retellings for children.48 Thesefeminine transformations helped to build a new mythic base of Australiannationalism that neutralized the violent facts of dispossession.

Conclusion

It seems the picturesque was one of the first casualties of settlement on thecolonial frontier. In Australia a minority of well-educated British settlers likeMary Morton Allport and Louisa Anne Meredith faced a struggle to transfer theirimported picturesque sensibility to the unique Australian landscape. The ironywas that no sooner had they managed to perceive some signs of the picturesque inthe natural and built environments, than it would be demolished, cut down orshot by lower-class settlers with no claims to the possession of taste. The ruthlessand rapid transformative effects of unchecked land-stripping and hunting on thefrontier prompted contemporary calls for its control, conservation andpreservation. That some of these calls were made in the name of the picturesquemarks this aesthetic sensibility as one of the contributors to the emergence of amore organized and politicized environmentalist movement accompanying`development' in the colonies. Yet the critical relation of the picturesque tocolonial capitalist expansion was a deeply ambivalent one. While the conservative`pilgrim of the picturesque' was likely to be implacably opposed to progress whenthis threatened quaint old buildings, beautiful native fauna and fine trees, thedestruction of indigenous peoples exposed the ambivalence of the white settlerwhose livelihood also depended on land dispossession, crop-planting and thefruits of hunting. In the hands of middle-class white women artists and writers inearly colonial Australia the picturesque often performed the function of deflectingrather than attacking the violence of colonialism. Women were marginal to theeconomic and industrial power wielded by men in the colonies, thus relievingthem of direct responsibility for the worst scourges of settlement. But when thecolonial woman turned her aestheticizing gaze onto the indigenous peoples, shewas nevertheless engaged in a process of mystification and denial which furtheredthe aims of colonial conquest. This occurred regardless of whether she wasostensibly defending or decrying colonialist assaults. The `little white lies' of the



colonial picturesque were like the legal doctrine of terra nullius in Australia,myths manufactured to endorse white occupation of the continent. As such, itsexercise was perhaps as much a psychological necessity to shore up troubled whiteidentities as it was an assault on indigenous ones.

Caroline JordanUniversity of Melbourne

Notes

Acknowledgements: Thanks to Peter Gahan, Tom Griffiths, Fiona Nicoll and Mary Roberts for theircomments, to Andrew Stephenson for including an earlier version of this paper in his session at the CollegeArt Association Conference in Toronto 1998 and to the Australian Academy of the Humanities, the IanPotter Cultural Trust, the University of Melbourne and the Yale Center for British Art for assisting towardstravel for research.

1 P. Chapman (ed.), The Diaries and Letters ofG.T.W.B. Boyes Vol. 1 1820±32, Melbourne,1985, p. 177.

2 R. Grove, Green Imperialism: ColonialExpansion, Tropical Island Edens and theOrigins of Environmentalism, 1600±1860,Cambridge and New York, 1995, p. 6 andpassim.

3 See R. Neville, A Rage for Curiosity: VisualisingAustralia 1788±1830, Sydney, 1997. Informationis from the caption to the image in theexhibition, not included in the catalogue.

4 B. Smith's classic reference, European Vision andthe South Pacific, 2nd edn, Melbourne, 1989 (1stedn 1960), pp. 295±7, discusses Louisa AnneMeredith's writings on the picturesque, althoughSmith does not analyse any images by women ormake any other mention of a woman artist inthis otherwise rich investigation of colonialamateur culture. Smith's standard referencehistory Australian Painting 1788±1860, London,revised edn 1991 (1st edn 1962), does not refer toany women artists in the chapter `Early Artists ofAustralia', although neither does it include maleamateurs. Women find no place in P. Carter'sdiscussion of the picturesque or, indeed,elsewhere in his influential The Road to BotanyBay: An Essay in Spatial History, London, 1987.Empirical evidence of the existence of numerousamateur women artists in colonial Australia hassince been near comprehensively documented inJ. Kerr (ed.), Dictionary of Australian Artists:Painters, Sketchers, Photographers and Engraversto 1870, Melbourne, 1992.

5 On Anglo-Indian women and the picturesque,see S. Suleri, `The Feminine Picturesque', in TheRhetoric of English India, Chicago and London,1992, pp. 75±110 and R. Ray, `The Memsahib'sBrush: Anglo-Indian Women and the Art of thePicturesque, 1830±1880', in J.F. Codell and D.S.Macleod, Orientalism Transposed: The Impact ofthe Colonies on British Culture, Aldershot UK

and Brookfield USA, 1998, pp. 89±116.6 MS The Illustrated Indian Journal of Frances(Fanny) Eden 1837±8, India Office Library,London, p. 17.

7 S. Mills, Discourses of Difference: An Analysis ofWomen's Travel Writing and Colonialism,London and New York, 1993, p. 3; Suleri, op.cit. (note 5), p. 76.

8 The problematic categories of the `amateur' andthe `professional' for nineteenth-century womenartists have been discussed elsewhere. See C.Jordan, `No-Man's Land? Amateurism andColonial Women Artists', Art and Australia, vol.32, no. 3, 1995, pp. 358±65 and C. Jordan, `ThePublic Amateur and the Private Professional: ARe-evaluation of the Categories of Public andPrivate in Colonial Women Artists' Work',Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, vol.1, no. 2, 2000, pp. 42±60.

9 S. & K. Morris, A Catalogue of Birminghamand West Midland Painters of the NineteenthCentury, Stratford-upon-Avon, 1974; V. Rae-Ellis, Louisa Anne Meredith: A Tigress in Exile,Hobart, 1990, p. 37.

10 Rae-Ellis, op. cit. (note 9); S. O'Neill, `CharlesMeredith' in B. Nairn, G. Serle and R. Ward(eds), Australian Dictionary of Biography Vol. 5:1851±70, Melbourne, 1974.

11 K. Alford, Production or Reproduction? AnEconomic History of Women in Australia 1788±1850, Melbourne, 1984, p. 126.

12 L.A. Twamley, The Annual of British LandscapeScenery: An Autumn Ramble on the Wye,London and Birmingham, 1839, p. 10. Nostalgiais identified as a keystone of the picturesque inS.K. Robinson, Inquiry into the Picturesque,Chicago, 1991, p. 101. Gilpin exhibits a similarpreoccupation with the evocation of Britishhistory. See A.M. Ross, The Imprint of thePicturesque on Nineteenth-Century BritishFiction, Waterloo, Ontario, 1986, p. 11.

13 Twamley, op. cit. (note 12), p. 52.



14 Convict-artist Thomas Watling's melancholicreflections on the absence of the picturesque inAustralia are particularly eloquent. See R.Gibson, `This Prison, This Language: ThomasWatling'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.

15 Twamley, op. cit. (note 12), p. 13.16 L.A. Meredith, Over the Straits:A Visit to

Victoria, London, 1861, pp. 49±50.17 Fanny to William: The Letters of Frances

Leonora Macleay 1812±1836, Sydney, 1993, p. 56.18 L.A. Meredith, My Home in Tasmania, during a

Residence of Nine Years, 2 vols, London, 1852,vol. 1, p. 27.

19 T. Griffiths, `Past Silences: Aborigines andConvicts in our History-Making', AustralianCultural History, no. 6, 1987, pp. 18±32, esp.pp. 20±1.

20 Meredith, Over the Straits, op. cit. (note 16),pp. 179±80.

21 Carter, Road to Botany Bay, op. cit. (note 4),p. 243.

22 Fanny to William, op. cit. (note 17), p. 70.23 Carter, Road to Botany Bay, op. cit. (note 4),

p. 243.24 Meredith, My Home in Tasmania, op. cit. (note

18), vol. 2, p. 90.25 L.A. Twamley, The Romance of Nature, or the

Flower Seasons Illustrated, 1836; Flora's Gems,or, the Treasures of the Parterre, 1837, and OurWild Flowers Familiarly Described andIllustrated, 1839, all London.

26 See, for example, Meredith's failed efforts tokeep a daisy alive in the garden of her firstcolonial home, Rae Ellis, Tigress in Exile, op. cit.(note 9), pp. 88±9.

27 G.T. Stilwell, Mary Morton Allport: ACommemorative Exhibition 1831±1981, Hobart,1981; H. Allport, `Joseph Allport', A.G.L. Shaw& C.M.H. Clark (eds), Australian Dictionary ofBiography Vol. 1: 1788±1850, Melbourne, 1966.

28 MS Mary Morton Allport's Journal: 1832±3,Allport Library and Museum of Fine Arts,Hobart, n.p.

29 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).

30 Meredith, My Home in Tasmania, vol. 2, op. cit.(note 18), pp. 246±7.

31 L.A. Meredith, Some of My Bush Friends inTasmania, London, 1860.

32 MS Mary Morton Allport's Journal, 1852±4,

op. cit. (note 29).33 Mrs Fenton, The Journal of Mrs Fenton: A

Narrative of her life in India, the Isle of France(Mauritius), and Tasmania during the years1826±30, London, 1901, p. 390.

34 ibid., p. 118.35 Robinson, Inquiry, op. cit. (note 12), p. 96.36 Meredith, My Home in Tasmania, op. cit. (note

18), vol. 1, p. 88.37 ibid., vol. 2, p. 206. A recent book examing the

history of environmentalism through Australianart, published subsequent to the writing of thisarticle, contains an extended assessment ofMeredith's contribution as an environmentalactivist. Tim Bonyhady, The Colonial Earth,Melbourne, 2000.

38 Meredith, My Home in Tasmania, op. cit. (note18), vol. 1, pp. 98±9.

39 `Ambivalence' is a key concept in H. Bhabha'stheorization of the insecurity of the maleEuropean colonizer's authority over the`colonized'. For instance, see `Signs taken forWonders: Questions of Ambivalence andAuthority under a tree outside Delhi, May1817', Critical Inquiry, no. 12, Autumn 1985,pp. 144±65.

40 Rae-Ellis, Tigress in Exile, op. cit. (note 9),pp. 183±4.

41 For an extended discussion of this trope see R.Rosaldo, `Imperialist Nostalgia', Representations,no. 26, Spring 1989, pp. 107±22. On the notionthat Aborigines were doomed to die out afterwhite contact, see S. Sheridan, ` `̀ Wives andmothers like ourselves, poor remnants of a dyingrace'': Aborigines in Colonial Women's Writing'(1988) in her Along the Faultlines: Sex, Race andNation in Australian Women's Writing 1880s±1930s, St Leonard's, NSW, 1995, pp. 121±34.

42 MS Mary Morton Allport's Book of Verse,c. 1830±90, poem undated, Allport Library andMuseum of Fine Arts, Hobart.

43 H. Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, Ringwood,Victoria, 1995, pp. 4±5 and 30±2.

44 Meredith, My Home in Tasmania, op. cit. (note18), vol. 1, p. 215.

45 P. Grimshaw, `Female Lives and the Tradition ofNation-Making', Voices (Canberra), vol. 5, no. 3,Spring 1995, pp. 30±44, p. 34.

46 Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, op. cit. (note43), pp. 29±30.

47 ibid., p. 51.48 Sheridan, `Wives and Mothers', op. cit. (note 41),

makes reference to the writers Catherine LanglohParker and Jeannie Gunn's Little Black Princess(1905) in this context, p. 126.



progress versus the picturesque: white women and the aesthetics of environmentalism in colonial...

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