Native Colonials: Violet Mace’s Australian Aboriginal-Inspired Pottery Designs

Abstract

In the first half of the twentieth century, many Australian artists, such as the Tasmanian ceramicist Violet Mace (1883–1968), sought to find a distinctly Australian visual expression. Although Modernist aesthetics challenged Mace and her contemporaries to explore abstraction, in order to convey Australia’s specificity she turned to Australian history. Initially, her imagery touched on frontier conflict and the motifs of nineteenth-century Aboriginal artists such as Tommy McCrae. After tracing the sources of Mace’s imagery, this article asks to what extent her representations de-historicised the frontier past and enabled contemporary viewers a comfortable distance from what many Australians now see as a story of violent conquest. Perhaps Mace’s imagery can be read as an episode in a national history of slowly growing appreciation of Australian Aboriginal culture, increasing discomfort with the story of racial and cultural inferiority, and willingness to acknowledge that Australia is the product of invasion.

Notes

1 This paper builds on a short article by the author on Mace’s work published in Art Monthly 307 (May 2018): 28–33. In the same year, Mace was the subject of an appendix to a catalogue published for an exhibition of Maude Poynter’s work, though neither the exhibition nor the catalogue included any of Mace’s work: Glenda King, Maude Poynter: Painter and Potter (Hobart: Australiana Society, 2018). The earlier literature on Mace is not extensive and mostly consists of brief historical accounts. These contain some valuable information but also factual errors, most frequently Mace’s birth year, usually cited as 1890 rather than 1883. These are: J. Bartram et al., Early Tasmanian Pottery 1920–1950, exhibition catalogue (Hobart: Tasmanian School of Art, TCAE, 1979); C. Ackland and C. Campbell, ‘Pioneer Craftswomen from the Bothwell Area’, Tasmanian Historical Research Association Papers and Proceedings, Hobart, June 1994, 85–8; G. King, ‘Violet Mace’ and ‘Studio Pottery in Tasmania’, in Australian Art Pottery 1900–1950, eds K. Fahey, J. Freeland, K. Free and A. Simpson (Sydney: Casuarina Press, 2004). Penny Edmonds differs in offering a close examination of Mace’s work and its sources in an account of Mace’s use of the Proclamation Board image, in P. Edmonds, ‘The Proclamation Cup: Tasmanian Potter Violet Mace and Colonial Quotations’, reCollections 5, no. 2 (October 2010).

2 Nicolas Thomas, Possessions; Indigenous Art/Colonial Culture (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1999), 111–14.

3 Margaret Preston’s work and writing on Australian Aboriginal art, modernity, modernism and the need for an Australian national culture has been the subject of enquiries by a number of authors, most extensively in H. McQueen, The Black Swan of Trespass: The Emergence of Modernist Painting in Australia to 1944 (Sydney: Alternative Publishing Cooperative Limited, 1979), and more recently in David Macarthur, ‘The Experience of Aboriginality in the Creation of the Radically New’, in The Modernist World, eds Stephen Ross and Allana C. Lindgren (London: Routledge, 2015), 227–34; Ann Stephens, ‘Blackfellows and Modernists: Not Just Black and White’, in Pacific Rim Modernisms, eds Mary Ann Gillies, Helen Sword and Steven Yao (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 151–70.

4 Margaret Preston, ‘Art for Crafts: Aboriginal Art Artfully Applied’, The Home 5, no. 5 (1 December 1924): 30–1.

5 Violet Mace to Graeme Lloyd Pretty, Curator of Anthropology, 10 June 1968, AA199, South Australian Museum Archives.

6 Mace and Poynter shared a great-grandfather in George Meredith (1777–1856). Poynter was a descendant through his first wife Sarah Westall Hicks (1782–1820) and Mace through his second wife Mary Anne Evans (1795–1842).

7 Preston, ‘Art for Crafts’, 31.

8 McQueen, 151–2.

9 Mitchell Rolls, ‘Painting the Dreaming White’, in The Real Thing, Australian Cultural History 24 (2006): 3–28.

10 ‘Society of Arts and Crafts’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 25 July 1929, 5, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article28049374 (accessed 9 October 2017).

11 Preston, ‘Art for Crafts’, 31.

12 ‘Woman’s Interests’, The Daily News (Perth), 1 February 1933, 9 (Home Edition), http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article83916304 (accessed 6 October 2017).

13 ‘The Society of Arts and Crafts’, Sydney Mail, 26 October 1927, 29, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article158297780 (accessed 17 October 2017).

14 The whereabouts of this earlier jug are unknown, and the five cups included in the 2016 TMAG donation the earliest known extant examples of Mace’s ‘Australian Aboriginal’-themed works.

15 ‘Aboriginal Drawings’, The Australasian, 2 July 1927, 69, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article140798226 (accessed 13 April 2018).

16 For example: ‘Local and General News’, The Ararat Advertiser, 20 May 1926, 2, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article75030153 (accessed 11 November 2019); ‘An Aboriginal’s Funeral’, Albury Banner and Wodonga Express, 8 November 1901, 29, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article128568125 (accessed 11 November 2019).

17 Violet Mace to Graeme Lloyd Pretty, 10 June 1968.

18 Andrew Sayers, Aboriginal Artists of the Nineteenth Century (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1996), 38–41.

19 Sylvia Kleinert, ‘Deconstructing “the Decorative”: The Impact of Euro-American Artistic Traditions on the Reception of Aboriginal Art and Craft’, in Craft in Society: An Anthology of Perspectives, ed. Norris Ioannou (Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1992), 121–2.

20 Sayers, 46–8.

21 Violet Mace to Graeme Lloyd Pretty, 10 June 1968. Mace mentions that she had a large collection of books and other material on the Australian Aboriginal people and their art: ‘in my search for suitable material I became interested in the aboriginals [sic] themselves & have a number of books & pamphlets on these very interesting people’.

22 Ian Harmstorf, ‘Basedow, Herbert (1881–1933)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, published first in hardcopy 1979, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/basedow-herbert-5151/text8633 (accessed 8 January 2018).

23 ‘The Book World Reviews’, The Mercury (Hobart), 21 March 1925, 15, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article23805346 (accessed 8 January 2018).

24 Herbert Basedow, The Australian Aboriginal (Adelaide: Preece and Sons, 1925), 330.

25 Ibid., 172.

26 Ibid., 320.

27 Preston may have been confused in her recollection, as Stead was a naturalist who is not listed as publishing on this subject. She may have had in mind G. Horne and G. Aiston, Savage Life in Central Australia (London: Macmillan, 1924). Margaret Preston to Violet Mace, 4 August 1934, State Library of Tasmania, Letters to and from various persons, notes and associated papers, mainly relating to Meredith family history, 17 January 1819–31 July 1959, NS123/1/93.

28 Maurice Schild, ‘Albrecht, Friedrich Wilhelm (1894–1984)’. Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, published first in hardcopy 2007, https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/albrecht-friedrich-wilhelm-12126/text21725 (accessed 5 August 2022).

29 ‘Current Events’, The Age, 16 January 1934, 6, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article203375392 (accessed 5 August 2022).

30 Friedrich Wilhelm Albrecht to Violet Mace, 8 August 1934, AA199, South Australian Museum Archives.

31 Sayers, 37.

32 Margaret Preston, ‘The Application of Aboriginal Designs’, Art in Australia, third series, 31 (March 1930): 23–4.

33 Trustees of the Public Library, Museums and National Gallery of Victoria, Australian Aboriginal Art, July 1929, 21.

34 Ibid., 20.

35 Violet Mace to The Anthropological Society of NSW, 26 May 1956, AITSIS collection (Mandraby.F01.CS).

36 ‘For Women’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 27 October 1937, 7, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article17414763 (accessed 17 October 2017).

37 ‘Some Fine Creative Work by Women’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 2 November 1937, 18 (Women’s Supplement), http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article17418681 (accessed 8 November 2016).

38 ‘A Woman’s Notebook’, Truth (Sydney), 21 August 1938, 34, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article169088510 (accessed 17 October 2017).

39 Violet Mace to Graeme Lloyd Pretty, 10 June 1968.

40 Ibid.

41 Margaret Preston, ‘Away with Poker Worked Kookaburras and Gum Leaves’, Sunday Pictorial, 6 April 1930, 22.

42 Rolls, 9.

43 ‘Aboriginal Art’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 12 August 1941, 7, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article17755882 (viewed 9 October 2017).

44 Preston, ‘Away with Poker Worked Kookaburras and Gum Leaves’, 22.

45 Margaret Preston, ‘The Indigenous Art of Australia’, Art in Australia, third series, 11 (March 1925).

46 Rolls, 3–28.

47 ‘Aboriginal Art’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 12 August 1941, 7, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article17755882 (accessed 9 October 2017).

48 Ian McLean, ‘Aboriginalism: White Aboriginals and Australian Nationalism’, http://australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-May_1998/mclean.html

49 Liz Conor, ‘Friday Essay: The Politics of Aboriginal Kitsch’, 3 March 2017, https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-the-politics-of-aboriginal-kitsch-73683 (accessed 14 July 2022).

50 Kleinert, 123.

51 A.S. Kenyon, ‘The Art of the Australian Aboriginal’, in Australian Aboriginal Art (Melbourne: National Museum of Victoria, 1929), 15.