Richard Browne’s Portraits of Aboriginal Australians: Analysing the Evidence

Abstract

Richard Browne (c. 1776–1824) was the most prolific artist working in Sydney in the 1810s and early 1820s to depict Aboriginal people, known for producing sets of Awabakal, Worimi and other individuals in a range of poses. This article reappraises his idiosyncratic and often criticised portraits through an intensive re-analysis of his oeuvre. For this, all examples held in Australian institutions and known private collections were examined, and information collated from auction and provenance records. This analysis has resulted in a revised tally of around one hundred individual watercolours, significantly more than previously realised. Inscriptions, papers and watermarks were compiled and compared, providing evidence of Browne’s working methods. Recently emerged examples of his art strengthen knowledge of his market, including French explorers and Wesleyan missionaries. For the first time, a list of the individuals he named and painted has been compiled, to aid future research by Aboriginal communities.

The engraving … is an accurate likeness (and not a caricature, as one at first sight would be apt to imagine), of one of the natives of New South Wales, with his wooden shield.

James Dixon, 1822

In Browne’s drawings of aborigines [sic] … [t]he figures have been reduced to a comic formula … The natives are no longer seen as individuals but as grotesque caricatures, the type forms, in distorted silhouettes, being reshuffled and reassembled from group to group.

Bernard Smith, 1960

Browne’s portraits occupy an ambivalent, but important, place in the colonial record. They can be read as condescending caricatures, as inexpertly executed likenesses of curiosities, or as proud portraits of significant Awabakal and Worimi people, whose descendants still occupy their land today.

Richard Neville, 2012

I look now … at the [watercolours] and they’re my relatives: I’m looking into the face and the eyes of that relative all those years ago … [The artist was] there, they looked into that person’s eyes, they touched that person … We don’t look exactly like them today, you know, but inside we do. The genes they have, we have inside of us.

Shane Frost and Kerrie Brauer, 2013¹

Richard Browne (c. 1776–1824) was the most prolific of the few artists recording and selling portraits of Aboriginal people between Sydney’s foundation in 1788 and the arrival of professional artists such as Augustus Earle and Charles Rodius in the mid-1820s and 1830s. His output comprised two concentrated periods – as a convict in Newcastle (1812–13), and as a free man in Sydney (1817– c. 1821): no art is known outside these years, nor do preliminary drawings survive. Minimal documentation about his life exists. Unlike other artists, he did not advertise in Sydney newspapers and although his watercolours are carefully inscribed, for many years his identity was unconfirmed.

As a convict Browne created a volume recording Australian birds, animals and insects, but his emancipist output, the focus here, consists principally of a body of paintings of Awabakal and Worimi men and women, and others from unidentified Countries. Browne’s portraits are anatomically dubious and stylised, yet occasionally demonstrate technical precision and delicacy. Crude contemporary copies further compromise his reputation. Interpretations of his depictions have varied considerably, as illustrated by the quotes above. In the mid-twentieth century, Bernard Smith and others read them as gross, racist, condescending caricatures. Later analyses have been more measured, allowing for artistic ineptitude and giving credit to Browne’s attention to ethnographic detail. Voices not consulted in Smith’s day are those of Aboriginal descendants like Frost and Brauer, for whom the portraits are weighted with personal significance as manifestations of the appearance and existence of ancestors.

Regularly included in surveys of Australian art history from Smith’s European Vision (1960) onwards, Browne’s life and art have been researched most notably by Niel Gunson in his biographical entry in Joan Kerr’s Dictionary of Australian Artists (1984, 1992), Tim Bonyhady in his commentary on the Skottowe Manuscript (1988), and State Library of New South Wales (SLNSW) Mitchell Librarian Richard Neville, who curated the sole exhibition of Browne’s art to date, held at the Newcastle Art Gallery in 2012.² They provide what little is known of Browne’s biography and give valuable contextualisation of his oeuvre. Information about Browne’s art had advanced little until new material came to light in recent years. In 2017, two watercolours surfaced from a long-held French collection, depicting the Awabakal man Burigon, or ‘Long Jack’, and a unique, large painting of two kangaroos. Auctioned in Paris, they were purchased for the Silentworld Foundation Collection, Sydney.³ In 2020 a nineteenth-century scrapbook filled with prints and newspaper cuttings, and including a watercolour by Browne of a ‘semi-naked tribesman’ called Memora, was auctioned in Nottingham, England. It was acquired for the University of Melbourne Art Collection (UMAC) in 2022 (Figure 1).⁴

Figure 1. Richard Browne, Memora, 1818–22, watercolour and gouache, in scrapbook. University of Melbourne Art Collection.

This article’s aim is to reappraise the Sydney portraits of this idiosyncratic and enigmatic artist through a re-analysis of his oeuvre, including this new material. As no catalogue raisonné of Browne’s oeuvre exists, all examples held in Australian institutions and the British Library were examined, and information was collated from auction records and known private collections (see List). Provenances were traced as watercolours changed hands and sets were separated. Inscriptions, papers and watermarks were compiled and compared, providing evidence of Browne’s working methods. This analysis has resulted in a revised tally of around one hundred individual watercolours, significantly more than previously realised.⁵ In addition, eight works sometimes attributed to Browne have been confirmed as contemporary copies. Importantly for the descendants of those Browne depicted, a list of the individuals he named and painted has been compiled and is presented here. This list also draws attention to the often duplicated and amalgamated poses. I am grateful to Awabakal descendant Shane Frost and Worimi man Lennie Anderson for their assistance. While consultation with the relevant communities is in its early phase, this list and the research that supports it will provide core information for a new, collaborative model of analysis of Browne’s Aboriginal portraits.

Newcastle convict artist 1812–13

Browne was baptised into the Catholic faith in Dublin in May 1776, but nothing is known of his education or artistic training, and no personal documents survive. Sentenced in February 1810, Browne’s original crime is unknown, lost in the explosions at the Irish Public Record Office in 1922. There is no evidence he was a forger, as is occasionally stated.⁶ Having arrived in Sydney aboard the Providence in July 1811, he was soon sent to Newcastle for an additional, unrecorded misdemeanour. This small penal station was established for secondary punishment seventy-five nautical miles north of Sydney, where around a hundred convicts laboured at coal mining, timber logging, lime burning (destroying vast shell middens), and harvesting sea salt.⁷ Initially sent for a year, Browne served his seven-year sentence there, marrying convict Sarah Coates around 1815.⁸ Nothing else is known of his time there bar his utilisation as an artist on two projects.

For the first, Browne provided a topographical view of Newcastle and its impressive location at the mouth of Coquun, the Hunter River, which formed the basis of a two-part panorama in Absalom West’s series of etched views of New South Wales, published in Sydney 1812–14. Both prints are inscribed ‘I.R. Brown Pinx’. Although his original design has not survived, a pen and ink drawing of the right-hand plate exists.⁹ This is probably a contemporary copy, not signed by Browne but rather acknowledging him as the source. The uneven inscription is incompatible with Browne’s handwriting, and the tiny detail of a convict apparently bending (but not baring) his bottom behind a soldier’s back seems unlikely for a convict early in his sentence.¹⁰

The second was at the instruction of Lieutenant Thomas Skottowe, the young Commandant of Newcastle (1811–14), for whom Browne illustrated a volume recording the natural history of the region, a popular, even competitive topic for Europeans in exotic locations.¹¹ Known informally as the Skottowe Manuscript (SLNSW, hereafter the Manuscript), it originally comprised thirty (now twenty-seven) full-page watercolours of animals, birds, fish, insects and reptiles, as well as a page of Indigenous implements. Each painting is preceded by short, elegantly inscribed descriptive text, including local dialect names of the creatures and tools. The volume contains Browne’s earliest known depictions of Aboriginal people: a full-page frontispiece shows a couple carrying their daily utensils through a simple landscape, and an elaborately composed title page includes a vignette of a family camped beneath a tree. This page replicates the multiple fonts and design of a published volume (probably Skottowe’s unachieved intention) and records ‘THE DRAWINGS BY T. R. BROWNE N.S.W / 1813’ (Figure 2).¹² These additional, and still unexplained, initials (first ‘I’ then ‘T’) caused ongoing confusion about his identity until an 1820 bust portrait auctioned in 1987, signed with his full name ‘Richard Browne’, confirmed that the convict Brown/Browne at Newcastle was indeed the ‘R. Browne’ later painting in Sydney.¹³

Figure 2. Richard Browne, Title page of Select Specimens from Nature (the Skottowe Manuscript), 1813, watercolour and pen and ink. State Library of New South Wales.

The Manuscript demonstrates Browne’s erratic ability as a visual documenter, showing his endearing limitations in portraying native birds and animals, elongated into sinuous, doll-like shapes or puffballs of feathers. As David Attenborough politely described them, they are ‘less than scientifically accurate’.¹⁴ Yet the cold-blooded creatures (butterflies, moths, fish and other insects) are depicted with meticulous skill. It might have been assumed that multiple artists were responsible if the volume was not so clearly signed. A level of artistic training is clearly indicated, with some knowledge of the conventions of natural history illustration, evident in the formulaic convention of depicting often-oversized birds on generic branches, and the arrangement of specimens as though in a collector’s cabinet. Artists working at a remove from their specimens – such as Sarah Stone depicting Australian birds from skins in London – had reasons for inaccuracies. Browne, with access to living and freshly killed specimens, had little excuse, bar ability and visual acuity. His people display similar variation: the couple depicted on the frontispiece have excessively small hands and feet and awkward torsos, but the man’s placid gaze has been painted with unusual delicacy.

During his many years in Newcastle, Browne presumably had close, possibly personal contact with Aboriginal people and frequent opportunities to observe their activities and abilities on land and water. Although not without conflict, Newcastle’s penal years (1804–22) saw a brief period of cooperation and coexistence, before the Hunter Valley was opened up to free settlers, and violence over land use escalated.¹⁵ Aboriginal men acted for the British as hunters, fishermen, guides, interpreters and trackers of escaped convicts, their knowledge of Country and kinship connections from the Shoalhaven region to Port Stephens evident in their continued mobility through the bush (unlike the ship-reliant British). In return, they negotiated access to food, tobacco, alcohol and some degree of protection, while continuing many aspects of their cultural and economic activities, including initiations and ceremonial gatherings of many hundreds of people, such as the corroboree coordinated by the Awabakal leader Burigon for Governor Macquarie’s visit to Newcastle in 1818.

Such ongoing activity was recorded by convict artist Joseph Lycett, who had arrived in Newcastle in July 1815, as in his now-famous nocturnal corroboree scene painted for Commandant James Wallis.¹⁶ Appointed as a reward for his ‘zealous exertions’ in leading the attack on Dharawal people (the Appin massacre) in April 1816, Wallis served in Newcastle from June, and used convict artists and craftsmen such as Lycett and Walter Preston to document his achievements and advance his reputation, via oil paintings, watercolours, etchings and decorated collectors’ chests.¹⁷ Wallis had close contact with local communities, aided in particular by Burigon as his assistant and intermediary. An amateur artist himself, Wallis painted over twenty-five individuals, including Burigon, in their Country, collaging the images into an album with mementoes of his Newcastle years, and kept himself and his artists stocked with art supplies.¹⁸ Despite overlapping with Browne for seven months, there is no evidence that Wallis utilised Browne’s skills, as some have suggested, nor of Browne having access to painting materials subsequent to his Skottowe commission, despite the supposition that he took sketches or finished paintings to Sydney upon his departure.¹⁹ Browne’s two known Newcastle projects stand apart from the subsequent flourish of creativity under Wallis’ aegis and Lycett’s post-Newcastle art, yet are essential to contextualise his Sydney output.

Sydney painter and free man 1817–24

Browne completed his sentence in February 1817 and, ‘free by servitude’, returned with Sarah and daughters Mary and Eliza to Sydney. In the convict muster of that year, he is recorded as a painter, which has been presumed to refer to painting houses, possibly inn signs and the like.²⁰ But he was also establishing his artistic business: watercolours are signed and dated between 1817 and 1821 and inscribed with his addresses: 9 Macquarie St (1818); 27 Philip St (1819–20); and 41 Philip St (1821). None are confirmed as having been painted between 1822 and January 1824, when he died, leaving Sarah with five daughters and pregnant with their only son.²¹

Over this period Browne painted portraits of a small number of Aboriginal individuals and even fewer creatures, which he produced in multiples and sold in sets. He painted eleven or twelve men and four women in several poses, three birds and the occasional kangaroo (see List).²² Browne apparently saw little market for the Antipodean birds and animals he had depicted for Skottowe. He painted only an emu, striding in profile; a ‘mountain pheasant’ (lyrebird), perched heraldically on a rocky pedestal, displaying his tail decoratively but inaccurately aloft (Figure 3); and a yellow-and-black Regent honeyeater. Nor did he capitalise on Australia’s unique marsupials. Only two paintings of kangaroos are known: a single, coyly smiling creature mouthing leaves; and the previously mentioned pair of kangaroos. Possibly he chose not to compete with John Lewin, who was well established in the colony as an accomplished natural history artist. Although other contemporaries Richard Read senior (arrived 1813) and junior (arrived 1819) advertised their ability to depict ‘Birds, Flowers, Native Figures &c’, their surviving works are principally portraits of settlers and Sydney views.²³ Browne hence had minimal competition in producing portraits of Traditional Owners.

Figure 3. Richard Browne, The mountain pheasant, 1819, watercolour and gouache. Art Gallery of South Australia.

A single watercolour dated 1817 is the earliest known Sydney image painted by Browne, a unique depiction of ‘Broken Bay Jemmy’ (traditional name unknown) (Figure 4).²⁴ Painted for ceremony, Jemmy raises a club, with a womera tucked into his string belt and holding a decorated shield. A missing tooth indicates that he is initiated. Browne has paid close attention to his strong nose with flared nostrils and creased brow, his stance one of strength and determination. Jemmy is depicted against a blank background, with slight shadows the only indication of a three-dimensional space, unlike the landscapes Browne had previously included in the Manuscript. This became the overwhelming norm for his subsequent portraits: identities unlocated, removed from Country (a visual trope common in ethnographic and scientific imagery, as well as the then-popular silhouette). The most anatomically convincing of Browne’s portraits, Jemmy shows that Browne could paint in finer detail and with closer observation of the physiognomy of his ‘sitters’ than he subsequently demonstrated.²⁵

Figure 4. Richard Browne, Broken Bay Jemmy, 1817, watercolour and gouache. State Library of New South Wales.

The two known portraits dated 1818, of Bruair carrying a firestick and Wambela carrying a long digging stick, are framed with a painted border, like Jemmy and illustrations in the Manuscript, a device not seen in Browne’s later paintings.²⁶ These are the only signs of experimentation in his poses: from hereon, his portraits each follow a precise formula: Magill crouches, Burigon (‘Burgun’) stands tall, Ginatoo hobbles, while Killigrant departs with a laden bag (Figure 5). Despite minor variations – the length of Ginatoo’s walking sticks and colour of her skirt, or Coola-benn’s shield – the almost-identical repetition of posture and angle of tools is so striking that it has been suggested that Browne used stencils.²⁷ Having studied numerous examples, I see no evidence of this. It is also rare to see any under-drawing, which again indicates a precision of technique, when motivated.

Figure 5. Richard Browne, Killigrant, 1817–22, watercolour and gouache. National Gallery of Victoria.

Physical evidence

This formula of set poses, profiles and implements clearly served Browne well.²⁸ Analysis of the physical evidence shows he produced them in groups, possibly to order (rather than producing multiple paintings of a single individual at once). He used a variety of wove and laid papers from several English mills, with watermarks dating from 1813 to 1818. He also inscribed his paintings with several different fonts. For example, five portraits (SLNSW DGA 3) are on Whatmans & Balson laid paper, dated 1813, inscribed with a flourishing script and a tapered underline; six portraits (NLA NK 149) are on a yellowy wove paper with names written in capitals. In contrast to the named but unsigned full-length figures, the three birds, the two male busts and a pair depicting a couple fishing in a canoe and then preparing their catch, are always inscribed with Browne’s name, date and address, as well as the title. These details are important for dating other works identified as from the same set.²⁹

Analysis of the portraits’ inscriptions has been overlooked to date. Browne’s script is beautiful, most certainly that of a literate man, accomplished – and possibly trained – in skilful ornamental embellishments. Elizabeth Ellis is the only published scholar to recognise (contra the otherwise authoritative Bonyhady and the current SLNSW catalogue) that the Manuscript’s text, while in Skottowe’s voice, was ‘all written in Browne’s fine clerk’s hand’, describing Browne as ‘an educated Dubliner’.³⁰ This puts a different complexion on its production, the relationship between Browne and Skottowe, and raises the possibility that Browne might have been employed for other, unrecognised administrative purposes in Newcastle.³¹

Browne inscribed his works clearly, recording the names of his sitters – mostly, their own cultural and totemic names, not those given by settlers. When Smith criticised him as producing ‘comical silhouettes of well-known natives by nicknames such as Long Jack, Pussey Cat, and Hump Back’d Maria’ (merging the two names given to Ginatoo), he misrepresented Browne by citing his exceptions, rather than his norm. Of the individuals, Burigon and Magill are well known, remembered as valued guides, translators and mediators to the British, and as highly respected ancestors of the Awabakal people today. Burigon (Long Jack, d. 1820) aided Commandant Wallis, among others, who subsequently recalled him ‘with more kindly feelings than I do many of my own colour, kindred, nation’ (Figure 6).³² His murder by an escaping convict resulted in the first conviction and execution of a European for this crime: Magill bore witness.³³ Raised in Sydney, but later initiated on Country, Magill (Biraban) (c. 1800–46) was ‘my almost daily companion for many years’ to the missionary Lancelot Threlkeld, the two men collaborating to record the Awabakal language, and to assist Aboriginal people charged in the British legal system.³⁴ The deaths of both Burigon and Magill were reported in newspapers, their skills and assistance praised. Of the women, Bruair is recorded by the Wesleyan missionary William Walker as ‘well known to my poor Coke’, Walker’s recently deceased ‘disciple’. As Coke was the son of Wangal man and British mediator Bennelong, Bruair might also have been Wangal, her Country near Parramatta where Walker was then based.³⁵ Ginatoo was ‘well known about Sydney’, as Browne noted on two versions of her portrait; her death by 1821 is also recorded.³⁶ A recollection of early Sydney published in 1882 provides further, tragic information that she had been badly burnt in a fire which caused her disability.³⁷ ‘Broken Bay Jemmy’ was probably one of the many Garigal people who lived in or visited Sydney, while Towa might be the Yuin (Jervis Bay) man painted by Lewin in 1810.³⁸ Interestingly Browne did not paint Bungaree, who was depicted by local and visiting artists from 1820 onwards.

Figure 6. Richard Browne, Burgun, 1817–22, watercolour and gouache. National Gallery of Victoria.

The most contextual information provided by Browne was inscribed on his three bust portraits, of Worimi men Coola-benn and Cobbawn Wogi, and Cobbawn Wogi’s wife Wambela (Figures 7 and 8) – although confusingly Browne recorded both men on different versions as chiefs of ‘Ashe Island Hunters River’ and also of Port Stephens, some forty kilometres north.³⁹ Barring the annotated portraits of Jemmy and Ginatoo, his full-length watercolours of individuals, including those of Burigon and Magill, record only their names. To date, available archival records or community memory have been unable to confirm the Countries of Cobbawn Dol, Harria, Memora, Ningi Ningi, Killigrant and Bruair. The assumption has been that these are Awabakal and Worimi people whom Browne knew and painted while in Newcastle, yet it is possible that some of these individuals were from other Countries, seen by Browne in Sydney or on unrecorded travels. A census of individuals in the Lake Macquarie and surrounding regions was undertaken by Threlkeld in 1828, long after Browne had left. This recorded a combination of traditional and English-given names: barring Magill, none have been identified that correspond with Browne’s individuals.⁴⁰ Without further evidence coming to light, these people cannot yet be reconnected with their Countries or possible descendants.⁴¹

Figure 7. Richard Browne, Wambela, din or wife of Cobbawn Wogi, Native Chief & &, 1820, watercolour and gouache. University of Melbourne Art Collection.

Figure 8. Richard Browne, Cobbawn Wogi, Native Chief of Ashe Island Hunters River N.S. Wales 1820, watercolour and gouache. State Library of New South Wales.

Browne’s buyers

Unlike contemporary artists such as Lewin and Lycett, no examples of Browne’s Sydney work are currently known with provenances linked to residents in the colony, with the notable exception of missionaries. His portraits and bird paintings were acquired principally as affordable tourist souvenirs, collected by people in transit or to send home. Gradually they have filtered back to Australia. Browne’s art first entered Australian institutional collections when the Petherick Collection was acquired by the Federal Parliamentary Library (now the NLA) in 1909, but it was the heightened market for colonial art in the period leading up to the bicentenary of colonisation in 1988 that was the most revelatory, with several large collections surfacing from private British collections and being sold and separated. London dealer Bernard Quaritch Ltd offered a group of eight portraits and the three birds in 1981.⁴² In 1985 Sotheby’s sold nine works from a disbound album, each numbered and clearly stamped with the collector’s mark ‘A. ATKIN / BLACKBURN’ (see Figures 6 and 12).⁴³ An Ann Atkin was living in Blackburn, Lancashire in 1841: this is the closest yet located to this elusive collector.⁴⁴ These sheets are numbered 1–8 and 22, which suggests that this album originally comprised at least twenty-two works. If all by Browne, the group must have contained almost all of his known poses. The catalogue for Sotheby’s Sydney auction, 29 October 1987, gives the best idea of what Browne’s sets once looked like, with eighteen watercolours offered (the three birds, the three busts, the fishing pair, plus ten individuals). These are now scattered in public and private collections (for example, Figures 5 and 7).

Undoubtedly Browne also sold smaller groups or individual works, given the uneven numbers of known depictions of individuals (see List).⁴⁵ For example, three watercolours were owned by East India Company soldier and passionate natural history collector Major-General Thomas Hardwicke. A visitor travelling from Australia presumably gifted them prior to Hardwicke’s retirement and departure from India in 1823. Hardwicke pasted the watercolours onto one page of an album, together with a pencil drawing of a young southeast Asian man holding a hookah.⁴⁶ The album is now in the British Library, with Hardwicke’s enormous collection of Indian School natural history drawings. Another unexpected example of the speedy dissemination of Browne’s art is seven works that somehow made their way to Rio de Janeiro by 1821. There they were copied, probably traced, extremely coarsely, by or for Edmund Pink, a young merchant, surveyor and amateur artist known never to have visited Australia.⁴⁷ Was Pink shown some examples by a traveller, and hastily copied them for his own collection?

The conveyers of these examples are unknown. We do know, however, that members of the French scientific expedition in the Uranie, which circumnavigated the globe between 1817 and 1820 under the command of Louis de Freycinet, purchased Browne’s art. As with the 1800–03 voyage led by Nicolas Baudin (on which Freycinet served as cartographer), the crew recuperated and restocked in Sydney. This was in November–December 1819, at the height of Browne’s known output. During the 1960s and 1970s, Freycinet’s descendants dispersed his collection, and a number of Browne’s paintings were privately sold by Quaritch. Unfortunately, records of this sale, and the portraits, are currently unlocated.⁴⁸

Hence the importance of the Paris auction in late 2017. This sale included twenty-one lots from a private French collection, comprising drawings and watercolours undertaken on the Baudin voyage by artists Charles-Alexandre Lesueur and Nicolas-Martin Petit; watercolours by Uranie artist Jacques Arago; and the previously mentioned watercolours by Browne of ‘Long Jack’ (Burigon, in stylised profile standing on one leg) and the pair of kangaroos.⁴⁹ The latter is signed ‘Richard Browne’ (only the second known example) and dated 1819, and both have additional inscriptions in French. Browne’s title ‘Kangaroos N.S. Wales’ has been amended to ‘Kanguroos’, closer to the French spelling. The provenance of this group to Freycinet is further confirmed by marine drawings connected to his family, in whose possession this group remained until sometime after 1840.⁵⁰

This small collection is indicative of the merging of visual material produced during and following the two French voyages. After Petit’s early death in 1804, and Lesueur’s emigration to America in 1815, their art passed to Freycinet, who continued the complex task of preparing and publishing the Baudin voyage account, and subsequently that of his own voyage, a vast project that took the rest of his life.

One watercolour, produced in the later 1820s by Pierre Antoine Marchais, was proofed as a detailed, but ultimately unpublished, colour engraving for Freycinet’s account (Figure 9).⁵¹ It depicts an Indigenous trial: a man painted for battle aims a spear at another, who holds a parrying shield. Seven Aboriginal people watch in a verdant landscape, with xanthorrhoea indicating the Australian location. The two fighting men are unmistakably based upon two drawings by Petit sold in the Paris auction.⁵² Previously unknown, they join a group of detailed charcoal drawings done by Petit ‘à bord du Géographe’ during the Baudin expedition’s 1802 Sydney visit. A seated observer is based upon a palawa woman whom Petit had also drawn: a finished watercolour of her was one of the items auctioned.⁵³ Marchais was thus drawing upon Petit’s images made during the Baudin voyage close to two decades earlier. As David Hansen has noted, and the auction confirmed, Marchais also appropriated figures by Browne with which he must have been provided by Freycinet.⁵⁴ The background left figure standing with the raised club is clearly that of Ningi Ningi by Browne (Figure 10), and the body of the man standing with one leg raised is that of Burigon/Long Jack, merged with the head of a man by Petit.⁵⁵

Figure 9. Pierre-Antoine Marchais, Aboriginal formal combat in landscape, 1820s, watercolour. Silentworld Foundation Collection.

Figure 10. Richard Browne, Ningi Ningi, 1817–22, watercolour and gouache. State Library of New South Wales.

I propose that watercolours by Browne influenced another, published, plate of an Aboriginal family walking before a campsite.⁵⁶ Its inscription acknowledges that it is a composite image by Sébastien Leroy ‘d’apres divers croquis’ (‘after various sketches’). The principal, well-known influence for this group is the engraving A family of New South Wales, based upon a watercolour attributed to Lieutenant Philip Gidley King and illustrating Captain (later Governor) John Hunter’s An Historical Journal of the Transactions at Port Jackson and Norfolk Island, 1793.⁵⁷ First Fleet books such as this had been swiftly translated into numerous languages, and were included in the well-equipped French expeditions’ libraries.⁵⁸ Browne himself apparently knew this illustration, painting a similar family for a commissioned letterhead (see below). Unsurprisingly, Leroy also drew upon other French material: the reed necklace and shield of the father, and the double-hooked fishing line and bark bucket carried by the mother appear in studies by Lesueur. Yet there are elements unseen in other French depictions: the woman carries her net bag from her head, as in Browne’s depictions of Killigrant and Bruair, and her fishing line has a float replicating theirs (Figure 5). Similarly, Wambela and Bruair carry their toddler as this mother does, on her shoulders, one leg either side, a pose not recorded as such by Petit (Figure 11).⁵⁹

Figure 11. Richard Browne, Wambela, with child, 1817–22, watercolour and gouache. State Library of New South Wales.

Why would Browne’s watercolours, with their obvious artistic limitations, have been of value to the French? The answer may be in the drawings by (and subsequent prints after) Jacques Arago and Alphonse Pellion, who were employed as artists on Freycinet’s voyage. Arago and Pellion drew various studies of Sydney men wearing ragged European jackets, often no trousers, with dreadlocked hair and downtrodden expressions.⁶⁰ By contrast, Browne’s portraits avoid all reference to colonial impact (bar Ginatoo’s skirt). Like the earlier Petit drawings they may have been valued as representing traditional activities, even customary poses, not witnessed by the French in Sydney.⁶¹

The Wesleyan connection

The clearest evidence we have of Browne’s clientele is several letters from missionaries Samuel Leigh and William Walker. The first Wesleyan Methodist minister in the colony, Leigh arrived in Sydney in 1815. He travelled widely around the settled counties, establishing a 240-kilometre preaching circuit of fourteen towns. Following a period in England, Leigh returned to New South Wales on 16 September 1821 with the young Reverend Walker, appointed specifically to serve as a ‘Wesleyan Missionary to the Aborigines of this Colony’.⁶²

Within six weeks, Leigh was dictating letters to his ‘dear brethren’ at the Wesleyan Missionary Society about their reception and intentions. Dated 1–22 November 1821, they are decorated with letterheads commissioned from and swiftly executed by Browne. The seven images on fifteen double-sided sheets are versions, in a reduced scale and with looser brushwork, of busts of Cobbawn Wogi and Wambela and full-length figures of Burigon and Ginatoo – all unnamed but identifiable – plus the family group previously mentioned, a display of Indigenous tools and weapons (like the final page in the Manuscript, minus the steel-headed axe), and a portrait of a Māori man (Leigh was the first Wesleyan missionary in New Zealand). Retained by the Society through subsequent organisation changes, the letters were gifted by the Uniting Church of Australia to the National Gallery of Australia in 2013. Leigh explained to his readers, ‘The rough Drawings I have sent you of the natives in New South Wales are good in their likeness and the accounts which accompanies them are correct from my own observations’. In fact, the extensive text, about Aboriginal and Māori activities, beliefs and customs, is a combination of personal and previously published information. It provides valuable context to many of Browne’s depictions, such as that, ‘as soon as the child has acquired strength enough It is set upon the shoulders of its mother with its legs round her neck and lays hold of the hair of her head to keep itself up’, exactly as Browne depicted (Figure 11).⁶³ Leigh also included information specific to Browne’s watercolours. Regrettably we read of the murders of both Burigon, ‘a sensible and intelligent man … cruelly stabbed to the Heart’, and Ginatoo, ‘whom I knew & she was well known as she walked the Streets in Sydney’. While Burigon’s death was widely reported and his murderer executed for the crime, this is the only evidence currently known of Ginatoo’s fate, killed by Wawyurinee while he was drunk.⁶⁴

Leigh praised the skill and ingenuity of Aboriginal men in a variety of activities but made evident his firm belief not only in the inferiority of traditional lifestyles but also in a lack of intelligence, perception and emotion. He made now-extraordinary statements such as, ‘The natives will not know that the operation of taking out the tooth will cause much pain’, and ‘The natives of NSW are capable of forming friendship and of feeling sorrow’, as though human emotions were in doubt. As often occurred, derogatory general comments were contradicted by praise of, or warmth towards, individuals, as expressed by Wallis and Leigh towards Burigon, and by Threlkeld and others towards Magill.

Two years later, Walker sent portraits of Bruair and Ginatoo to his Wesleyan community, writing on the back of Bruair’s: ‘Dear Fathers & Brethren – I send you this as the representation of female wretchedness’.⁶⁵ Depicted carrying her net bag and bark water carrier (which he records as narrami and bangalley), from our perspective today Bruair looks confident and well equipped rather than wretched. Both portraits are dated 1818, yet Walker sent them in 1823. Browne was recorded in the 1821 muster as a labourer.⁶⁶ Had he ceased painting but continued to sell his ‘remaining stock’, or had Leigh acquired them at an earlier date?

That Leigh had earlier associations with Browne is indicated by a group of four watercolours that, unusually, have no inscriptions but rather pencilled annotations, including that ‘Mr Leigh Knew Them & had them taken from life by a convict’. Apparently depicting Cobbawn Wogi, Killigrant, Memora and Towa, these are noticeably well painted within Browne’s oeuvre. The group came to the SLNSW in 1932 within a collection of images of Aboriginal Australians, including Browne’s earliest dated portrait, of ‘Broken Bay Jemmy’, and works by Rodius, William Fernyhough, Benjamin Duterrau and others.⁶⁷ Perhaps the collector brought these together, but if the four paintings are also early examples of Browne’s portraits, it is possible that Leigh’s commission was a factor in his subsequent specialisation. But where did Leigh meet these people, and Browne? Although he preached in Newcastle (dates unknown), it is likely that this was not until after Browne’s return to Sydney, following the opening of Christ Church, Newcastle, later in 1817.⁶⁸ That Browne was called a convict does not contradict him making them in Sydney: even now he is frequently described as a ‘convict artist’ despite the majority of his art being made after completing his sentence.

Additional Wesleyan connections to Browne’s art continue to emerge. A group of five portraits (SLNSW DGA 3) have names written on the reverse which appear to have clerical associations: ‘Mr Middleton’ is likely George Augustus Middleton, Anglican minister at Newcastle 1820–27, and ‘Mr Butterworth’, London-based Joseph Butterworth, philanthropist, associate of abolitionist William Wilberforce, and general treasurer of the Wesleyan Missionary Society. Women also received these watercolours: an untitled portrait of Bruair is inscribed ‘drawing sent to Mrs Neale by a friend of one of the natives of New South Wales’, a phrase likely to indicate a missionary.⁶⁹ The portrait of Memora recently acquired by UMAC was pasted into a scrapbook that belonged to Mrs W.H. Butler, of whom little is yet known except that she was a supporter of the ‘Benevolent or Strangers’ Friend Society’, a Methodist charity (Figure 1).⁷⁰ These connections between Browne’s art and Methodists in Australia and England provide tantalising avenues for further research.

The interpretation of Browne’s Aboriginal portraits

It is tempting to compare Leigh’s Eurocentric perceptions of Aboriginal anatomy and attributes with Browne’s depictions of his subjects. Indeed, they correspond remarkably closely, from the thin limbs to the excellent teeth (a feature rare among those on a European diet). Leigh wrote:

The Natives of New South Wales are … very slender and of the middle stature, their limbs are very small the arms and legs are very thin … 

The features of the natives are very unpleasant to a European Their eyes are sunk in their head their eyebrows project much their noses are flat with nostrils very wide their sight however is very good, their mouths are wide and lips thick their teeth are white & sound and even. The women have more pleasing features than the men, some of them have the appearance of modesty, the men are much disfigured with their bushy black beards and a reed which is thrust through the cartilage of the nose of many of the young men.⁷¹

Leigh’s descriptions, while a reflection of his own aesthetic preferences, nonetheless present a mixture of admirable and ‘unpleasant’ attributes. By contrast, Browne’s portrayals have been lambasted as intentionally base caricatures. But are they really ‘cruelly satirical drawings’ as the Rienits wrote in 1963, or ‘stick-legged monkeys in grotesque poses’ as Geoffrey Dutton wrote in 1974?⁷² Browne may have painted Europeans equally eccentrically. Unfortunately, none are known, but we do have his inaccurate depictions of fauna. Browne’s profiles, notably Towa’s awkward stance and Cobbawn Wogi’s large lips and protruding tongue, seem particularly derogatory. But is Towa’s form any less attenuated than that of Browne’s lyrebird (Figures 12 and 3)? And could Cobbawn Wogi be Browne’s attempt to convey ceremonial facial expressions? Leigh recorded, under Browne’s letterhead probably depicting Cobbawn Wogi, that: ‘the men … [put] out their tongues as far as they can staring with their eyes and disfiguring their faces with all the horror imaginable’ (Figure 13), like the more-familiar Māori pukana and whetero.⁷³

Figure 12. Richard Browne, Towa, 1817–22, watercolour and gouache. Art Gallery of South Australia.

Figure 13. Unknown copyist, after Richard Browne, Ninge Ninge and Nigral, Natives of New South Wales, 1820s, watercolour and gouache. National Library of Australia.

The pseudo-science of phrenology, the belief that intelligence is ascertainable through skull shape, is inevitably raised in discussions of Browne’s profiles. While Johann Kaspar Lavater’s theory of physiognomy developed in the later eighteenth century, and human remains were collected from the earliest years, phrenology developed in popularity in Britain during the 1810s and in Australia from the mid-1820s, after Browne’s death. Thus Sasha Grishin’s assessment of Browne’s art as ‘phrenological illustrations’ is incorrect.⁷⁴ Nor are they distorted silhouettes, as Smith and Grishin claimed. While they draw upon that visual convention, care is evident in Browne’s application and layering of colours, the texture of the hair, the folding and shading of string belts worn around the waist, the construction of the bark buckets, and jointed fishing spears – cultural objects recorded for ethnographic interest.⁷⁵

Badly rendered contemporary copies of his work further exacerbate Browne’s already compromised reputation.⁷⁶ One group, painted in noticeably brown paint, shows the two fishing scenes, and combines Killigrant and Ginatoo onto one sheet, and Harria and Cobbawn Wogi carrying a fish onto another, with their names unevenly inscribed below.⁷⁷ The images are rougher than Browne’s technique; Harria’s club appears particularly baguette-like, and body paint has been applied haphazardly. Even more coarse are four paintings, each combining two portraits onto significantly larger horizontal sheets including indicative landscapes and painted borders. These crass renditions have none of Browne’s assurance with brush and pen, and display a lower level of anatomical understanding, with misplaced eyes, exaggerated lips, and roughly depicted musculature (compare Figures 10, 12 and 13). Unsigned and undated on papers watermarked 1815, the works have lengthier and more informative inscriptions than usual, written in a much less literate hand than Browne’s. A story has arisen that Browne’s son William, born in 1824 after his death, painted copies.⁷⁸ If so, they could be dated no earlier than around 1840. The evidence does not support this, yet someone saw commercial opportunities with these crude versions around Browne’s lifetime.

Andrew Sayers compared Browne’s art with the early contact art of the Port Jackson Painter(s), writing that both ‘had limited talents yet were capable of achieving striking artistic effect. They were both concerned with … [Aboriginal] patterns of hunting and fishing, their dress and implements’.⁷⁹ This analysis seems fairer than to compare Browne’s abilities with the subsequent, and markedly more skilful, portraiture of Earle, Rodius and Thomas Bock. That is not to say that Browne did not make expedient choices. The quality of the image of ‘Broken Bay Jemmy’ shows that he had the ability to be more realistic – he could, for example, paint feet rather than lumpen appendages. Yet he chose instead a level of stylisation and made careless alterations: poses are repeated under different names, as with the men carrying fish; the same lower half is used for the bodies of Jemmy, Ningi Ningi and Memora; spelling of names is inconsistent (Wambela/Wambella/Wambla); facial features change across versions. More significantly, the depiction of body paint varies, showing the widespread British ignorance of the quintessential spiritual connection of a person to their particular design.⁸⁰

Yet Sayers makes a vital point in the assessment of Browne’s art: ‘Neither [the Port Jackson Painter nor Browne] intended to project an image of the noble savage but they portrayed the Aborigines as fearsome and warlike’. Browne depicts strong and confident individuals. This is particularly noticeable in the frontal portraits in which the viewer’s eyes meet Burigon’s impassive gaze, Ningi Ningi’s war grimace, Wambela’s engaging smile (Figures 6, 7 and 10). It is this sense of connection that resonates with some descendants (and others may disagree): ‘[Browne] looked into that person’s eyes, they touched that person … I’m looking into the eyes of someone I’m related to’.

If [Browne] was trying to portray them in a kind of racist view … he would have [shown] them in a degrading position … He hasn’t done that, he has just drawn them the way he has drawn them, in his style … He has painted the tools and weapons that the people used … including the tools that the women used each day – the fishing line, the net bag, the water carrier; I like it how he has included women and the things that the women would do.⁸¹

Conclusion

This analysis has aimed to review all known examples of Browne’s Aboriginal portraits and the recorded information about them in archives and secondary sources, including acquisition and auction records. All accessible examples have been examined, including their papers, dated watermarks and Browne’s previously largely overlooked inscriptions, which establish him as a literate man of some education. This physical evidence gives insight into the production of his sets, and allows the identification of contemporary copies. Often-repeated claims have been considered and, in some cases, corrected, particularly that he used stencils and that his son later made copies. New evidence gleaned from works coming to auction since 2017 has been examined, shedding fresh light on Browne’s relationship with Freycinet’s scientific expedition to Australia and with the Wesleyan missionary community, both of which offer avenues for further research. Previously, there was no tally of the number of Browne’s works or a list documenting his subjects and their variations, as is given here. On this basis, Browne’s oeuvre is proven to be larger than previously estimated. Most importantly, it is hoped that the list of individuals, whom he identified by name and probably knew, will be a crucial resource for ongoing re-evaluation of Browne’s portraits and depictions of material culture by Aboriginal Australians.

Table

Richard Browne watercolours in collections
Public:
AGSA	Art Gallery of South Australia	4
ANMM	Australian National Maritime Museum	2 copies
BL	British Library	3
MHNSW	Museum of History NSW	2, plus 7 copies on 5 sheets
NGV	National Gallery of Victoria	2
NGA	National Gallery of Australia	10
NLA	National Library of Australia	20, plus 6 copies
NTNSW	National Trust (NSW)	1
NAG	Newcastle Art Gallery	2, plus ‘attributed’ drawing
SLSNW	State Library of New South Wales	17, plus Skottowe Manuscript and drawn copy of print
UMAC	University of Melbourne Art Collection	2
Private:
PC	anonymous private collections	7
GC	Garangula Collection, NSW	3
KSC	Kerry Stokes Collection, Perth	3, plus 1 copy
SWF	Silentworld Foundation Collection, Sydney	2
Unknown	known from sales records, currently unlocated	18

List of people and their poses

Most of Browne’s images appear in multiple versions. Browne often used the same pose inscribed with different names (e.g. Cobbawn Wogi, Cobbawn Dol, Burgun); these duplications are noted below. Burigon, Bruair and Wambela each appear in three separate poses; Cobbawn Wogi appears in two. Untitled works have been listed under the most common depiction of that pose. Spelling variations of names have been included.

Men

Broken Bay Jemmy

• frontal, standing loosely, holding shield and raised club [SLNSW]

Burgun/Burgon

• frontal, standing with spear and shield [BL, NGV, NGA, NLA, NAG, KSC]

Burgun/Burgon (titled Long Jack) and Harria

• in left profile, standing on one leg holding spear and raised club: Long Jack [NLA, SLNSW, SWF]; Harria [unknown]

Cobbawn Wogi

• in left profile, bust, with spear [NGA, SLNSW, unknown (2)]

Cobbawn Wogi and Cobbawn Dol and Burgun/Burgon

• in left profile holding a fish: Cobbawn Wogi [BL, NLA, SLNSW, PC], Cobbawn Dol [NLA, GC, unknown], Burgon [NGA]

See also Natives returned from fishing.

Coola-benn/Coolabenn

• in right profile, bust, with varying shield and spear [NLA, NAG, SLNSW, PC]

Magill/Magil (Biraban)

• frontal, crouched with stick raised in both hands before face [NLA, SLNSW, KSC, unknown]

Memora/Mimora

• frontal, standing loosely holding stick with both hands behind head [NLA, SLNSW (2), UMAC, PC, unknown]

Ningi Ningi

• frontal, standing loosely with shield and raised club [SLNSW, unknown]

Towa/Tow-wa (sometimes misread as Sowa)

• in left profile, with shield and raised club, wearing hair in conical wrapping [AGSA, SLNSW, unknown].

Additional names Niga and Nigral are known only in contemporary copies.

Women

Ginatoo/Gunatoo, also known as Pussey Cat and Humpy Mary/Hump-back'd Maria

• in left profile, using two walking sticks [NGA, NLA (3), SLNSW, unknown (2)]

Killigrant/Killagrant and Bruair

• in right profile, carrying full net bag, fishing line and water carrier: Killigrant [AGSA, NGV, NLA (3), SLNSW, PC, unknown], Bruair [NGA, NLA]

• in left profile, carrying full net bag, firestick and water carrier: Bruair [unknown]

Wambela/Wambla/Wambella

• frontal, bust, smiling [NGA, NLA, SLNSW, UMAC]

See also Natives returned from fishing.

Wambela/Wambla/Wambella and Bruair

• frontal, carrying a child on her shoulders, holding net bag and digging stick: Wambela [NLA, SLNSW, KSC, PC], Bruair [unknown]

• frontal, carrying a child on her shoulders, holding long stick and fishing line: Wambela [GC]

The unnamed child holds Wambela/Bruair’s hair (4) or waves toy tools (2).

Fishing scenes

Natives fishing

• a man standing in a canoe with a fishgig in hand, a woman seated behind by a fire, paddling [NLA, SLNSW, GC]

Natives returned from fishing

• a man presenting fish to a smiling woman seated at a fire before bushes [BL, NLA, SLNSW]

The man is in the same pose as Cobbawn Wogi, Cobbawn Dol, Burgun holding fish; I identify the woman as Wambela, making Cobbawn Wogi, her husband, the most likely.

The Leigh letters [NGA] depict Burgun, frontal and Ginatoo (both named in his text); and Wambela, bust and Cobbawn Wogi, bust (both unnamed) – these are included above. In addition:

• a family group walking left, comprising a man in profile with a fish, a woman carrying a child (combining features of Killigrant and Wambela), plus a young boy with toy tools

• a Māori with tā moko, wearing a thick cloak and carrying a spear

• an arrangement of Aboriginal tools and weapons (similar to that in the Skottowe Manuscript)

Natural history

Emu

• in left profile [AGSA, NTNSW, PC, unknown (3)]

Mountain pheasant

• lyrebird, in left profile with tail spread [AGSA, MHNSW, NGA, NLA, unknown]

Regent

• Regent bowerbird, facing left [SLNSW, MHNSW, PC, unknown]

Kangaroo

• facing right [NLA]

• two kangaroos, facing towards each other in landscape [SWF]

The following watercolours were typically paired:

• Cobbawn Wogi and Wambela, busts

• The fishing scenes

• Emu and Mountain pheasant

Notes

1 James Dixon, Narrative of a Voyage to New South Wales and Van Dieman’s Land (Edinburgh: John Anderson, 1822), vi; Bernard Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1960/1989), 221; Richard Neville, Richard Browne: A Focus Exhibition (Newcastle: Newcastle Art Gallery (NAG), 2012), [3]; Shane Frost and Kerrie Brauer, Awabakal descendants, interview with Neville in Treasures of Newcastle from the Macquarie Era (Newcastle: State Library of New South Wales (SLNSW)/NAG, 2013), 24.

2 Niel Gunson, biography in Joan Kerr, ed., The Dictionary of Australian Artists: Working Paper I A–H (Sydney: Power Institute, 1984), 104–6, updated in Kerr, ed., The Dictionary of Australian Artists (Sydney: Oxford University Press, 1992), 102–3; Tim Bonyhady commentary, The Skottowe Manuscript, facsimile (Sydney: David Ell Press/Hordern House, 1988); Neville’s collaborative work with NAG and Awabakal and Worimi communities (ibid.). Individual watercolours have been discussed by curators, dealers and auction houses.

3 Silentworld Foundation Collection, Sydney, SF001614–615.

4 Mellors & Kirk, Nottingham, 24 June 2020, lot 298, catalogue entry. The watercolour was removed from the album prior to acquisition by UMAC. 2022.0026.001-002.

5 Neville suggested more than fifty portraits and about ten subjects: see Richard Browne: A Focus Exhibition. My tally includes all Sydney works, including the letterheads (NLA 2012.4828.1–7). Fifteen of the watercolours are currently unlocated, presumed in private Australian collections.

6 As, for example, in Kenneth Dutton, ‘The Skottowe Manuscript and the Cook Connection’, Journal & Proceedings of the Royal Society of NSW 153, no. 2 (2020): 158.

7 The name Awabakal was subsequently given to the traditional owners of this Country: this is now used by community members.

8 Marriage was encouraged but no record of a ceremony is known, possibly due to Browne’s Catholicism.

9 SLNSW V1B/Newc/1810-19/1.

10 A simple watercolour depicting Newcastle is also signed as by Browne: the style and 1807 date make this unlikely (NAG 1987.022).

11 Similar enterprises were undertaken in the 1790s by surgeon John White with convict Thomas Watling, and Captain William Paterson with convict John Doody on Norfolk Island.

12 It is fortunate that Skottowe allowed Browne to sign his art, and that West acknowledged those involved in his published series.

13 Coola-benn, 1820, sold Sotheby’s (Sydney), 29 October 1987, lot 131; now NAG 2010.12. This confirmation was published by Gunson, 102.

14 David Attenborough, Skottowe foreword.

15 See Mark Dunn, The Convict Valley: The Bloody Struggle on Australia’s Early Frontier (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2020).

16 Lycett, [Corroboree at Newcastle], 1818, SLNSW DG228.

17 See Elizabeth Ellis, Rare and Curious: The Secret History of Governor Macquarie’s Collectors’ Chest (Melbourne: Miegunyah Press, 2011), 117 (Macquarie’s praise), 131 ff. (art projects). Wallis arrived in Sydney in February 1814; Skottowe departed in April 1815. Skottowe may have shown his volume to Wallis, inspiring him.

18 Wallis also depicted Kerang (Little) Dol and Kerang Wogi, compared with Browne’s Cobbawn (Big) Dol and Cobbawn Wogi. Album of watercolours by Wallis and Lycett bound with Wallis’ An Historical Account of the Colony of New South Wales (London: Rudolph Ackermann, 1821), SLNSW SAFE/PXE 1072.

19 David Hansen, [Browne entry], in Alisa Bunbury, ed., This Wondrous Land: Colonial Art on Paper (Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2011), 86; Dutton, ‘The Skottowe Manuscript’, 158–9; Dunn, 61.

20 Population muster, 1817, NSW State Records HO 10/8.

21 Mary born c. 1815, Eliza c. 1816, Esther c. 1819, Ann c. 1821, Sarah c. 1824, William 1824.

22 Ten men are known; contemporary copies depict Niga and Nigral – these may be the same man, hence the unconfirmed total.

23 Advertisement, Sydney Gazette, 17 February 1821, 4. A rare Aboriginal portrait by the Reads is Bugger Bugger, 1824, SLNSW P3/278.

24 SLNSW SAFE/PXA 615 fol. 5.

25 ‘Sitter’ is used cautiously; the degree of willing involvement or formal posing by those depicted is unknown.

26 Wambela: Garangula Collection, NSW; Bruair: sold Bonhams (Sydney), 14 November 2010, lot 421.

27 Gunson, 103.

28 Series depicting costumes, cultures and lower classes were a popular European genre.

29 One unusual portrait of Coola-benn is lacking the address (SLNSW). Inscriptions below Wambela, bust vary: only one has a lengthy inscription, as ‘Din, or Wife of Cobbawn Wogi, Native Chief & &’ (UMAC).

30 Ellis, 69; Bonyhady, 24, 28; SLNSW, https://collection.sl.nsw.gov.au/record/92eV2xdY (accessed 21 August 2023).

31 Few documents in Skottowe’s hand survive for comparison: see letters to Colonial Secretary Campbell, 9 August 1811, 25 October 1813. NSW State Archives INX-99-119657, INX-99-119674.

32 Wallis, recollections of Burigon Jack, in Volume 1: Manuscripts and artworks from an album assembled by Major James Wallis, SLNSW PXD 1008/vol. 1.

33 See particularly Shane Frost, ‘Burigon: Chief of the Newcastle Tribe’, in John McPhee (ed.), Joseph Lycett, Convict Artist (Sydney: Historic Houses Trust of NSW, 2006), 93–5; and ‘The death of Burigon, Chief of the Newcastle Tribe, 1820’, https://hunterlivinghistories.com/2016/02/09/burigon/ (accessed 21 August 2023).

34 L.E. Threlkeld, An Australian Grammar (Sydney: Herald Office, 1834), 88. See ‘Reminiscences of Biraban or M’Gill and Patty by the Rev. Lancelot Threlkeld’, https://hunterlivinghistories.com/2020/02/14/biraban-mgill/; and ‘Biraban and Threlkeld: Finding the third space’ (film), https://hunterlivinghistories.com/2022/02/21/biraban-threlkeld/. ‘Magill’ is used in this article to correspond with the portraits (accessed 21 August 2023).

35 Annotations on Bruair, sold Bonhams 2010, lot 424.

36 Versions: sold Bonhams 2010, lot 420; NLA NK149/B.

37 Samuel Leigh, letters to the Wesleyan Missionary Society, NGA 2013.4828.1–7 (5: 17 November 1821); Obed West, ‘Old and new Sydney’, Sydney Morning Herald, 24 May 1882, 3. My thanks to David Hansen for this reference.

38 British Museum 1893,0803.50.

39 The frontispiece of James Dixon’s travel account showed ‘Cobawn Wogy’, bust. Dixon wrote, ‘Many of these characters are to be seen at Sidney. This engraving was copied from a portrait of one of them painted by an artist there’. Dixon, vi.

40 A man Tower is listed by Threlkeld (compared with Browne’s Towa): his traditional name is recorded as Mu-ta. ‘1828 Return of the Black Natives’, in Australian Reminiscences and Papers of L.E. Threlkeld, ed. Niel Gunson (Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, 1974), 361.

41 As noted by Shane Frost, email correspondence with author, 16 January 2023. Aboriginal people continued to travel widely during these years.

42 Quaritch sales document, 1981, SLNSW PXA 371.

43 A group of eleven hand-coloured prints from the Absalom West series, with Atkin’s stamp, is in the MHNSW collection.

44 ‘1841 England, Scotland and Wales Census’, National Archives, Kew, UK, PRO HO 107.

45 Killigrant and Ginatoo are the most numeric but, given the ratio of depictions of women to men (4:11 or 12), are likely to have been selected more frequently.

46 British Library Add MS 11031 ff. 68–70.

47 Seven portraits on five sheets, MOS 2005/21. Browne’s inscriptions are also replicated, copying a range of his fonts. Pink wrote a clear dated list of his copies but made several unusual spelling variations of names.

48 Conversation with Derek McDonnell, formerly at Quaritch, 6 August 2019.

49 Baron Ribeyre & Associés, Paris, 22 November 2017, lots 8–32.

50 See ‘Provenance’, in Deutscher and Hackett/Hordern House, The Baudin Expedition to Australia, 28 November 2018, catalogue, 60–1.

51 Watercolour: Silentworld Foundation, SF001740; proof print: SLNSW SV/308.

52 Two illustrated in Deutscher and Hackett/Hordern House, lots 10–11, now private collection; UMAC 2017.0386.

53 Private collection, on loan to Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart.

54 David Hansen, ‘“Another Man’s Understanding”: Settler Images of Aboriginal People’, in Colony/Frontier Wars, eds Cathy Leahy and Judith Ryan (Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2018), 111, n. 3.

55 Skottowe recorded the Newcastle tribe’s name for this club is Cadgawang. The man’s head is based upon a Petit portrait of a man he named as Mororé/Cou-rou-bari-gal (Musée d’histoire naturelle (MHN), Le Havre, France, 20038.2). The head of the standing man at right may be based upon Petit’s drawing of ‘Collins’. MHN, 22033.1.

56 Jacques Messidor Boisseau (engraver), Sébastien Leroy (draughtsman), Nouvelle-Hollande; Port-Jackson. Famille de sauvages en voyage, plate 102 in Freycinet’s Voyage autour du monde (Paris: Chez Pillet-Aîné, 1824–39), atlas historique.

57 John Hunter, An Historical Journal of the Transactions at Port Jackson and Norfolk Island (London: John Stockdale, 1793).

58 Petit’s Sydney drawings show that he knew illustrations in David Collins’ An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales (London: Cadell and Davies, 1798).

59 Petit depicted a mother and her large toddler perched on one shoulder, but not astride as here. MHN 20036.1. The feather headdress worn by the father might be influenced by Burigon’s.

60 See Grace Karskens, ‘Red Coat, Blue Jacket, Black Skin: Aboriginal Men and Clothing in Early New South Wales’, Aboriginal History 35 (2011): 1–36, for discussion of men’s agency in their clothing choices.

61 There could conceivably be Browne watercolours in Russian collections, given the two Sydney visits of Fabian Bellinghausen’s first Russian Antarctic Expedition in 1820.

62 See Glen O’Brien, ‘Methodism in the Australian Colonies, 1811–1855’, in Methodism in Australia: A History, eds Glen O’Brien and Hilary M. Carey (Farnham, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2015), 15–27.

63 Leigh, 1 November 1821. NGA 2013.4828.1.

64 Leigh, 17 November 1821. NGA 2013.4828.5.

65 Annotations on Bruair, sold Bonhams 2010, lot 424 (as per note 35).

66 Population muster, 1821, NSW State Records HO 10/36.

67 SLNSW SAFE/PXA 615.

68 Conversation with Glen O’Brien, 27 March 2023.

69 NGA 2017.392. Previously identified as Killigrant, I believe this is Bruair, with her rounded rather than elongated features.

70 Report of the Benevolent or Strangers’ Friend Society (London: William Tyler, 1851), ‘Donations and Subscriptions’, 6.

71 Leigh, 1 November 1821, NGA 2013.4828.1.

72 Rex and Thea Rienits, Early Artists of Australia (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1963), 197; Geoffrey Dutton, White on Black: The Australian Aborigine Portrayed in Art (Adelaide: Macmillan, 1974), 27.

73 Leigh, 15 November 1821. NGA 2013.4828.4.

74 See M. John Thearle ‘The Rise and Fall of Phrenology in Australia’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry 27, no. 3 (1993): 518–25; Sasha Grishin, ‘Realism, Caricature and Phrenology: Early Colonial Depictions of the Indigenous Peoples of Australia’, in The World Upside Down: Australia 1788–1830 (Canberra: NLA, 2000), 17.

75 Conversation between Shane Frost and author, 2 March 2023.

76 In addition to the copies by Edmund Pink (MOS 2005/21), there is also a copy of Ginatoo ‘from an original picture in the Possession of Thomas Harding Esqr. 1824’ (NLA NK 2770).

77 NLA NK 215.

78 Gunson, 102.

79 Andrew Sayers, Drawing in Australia (Canberra: Australian National Gallery, 1989), 20.

80 Cicatrices were common for Newcastle people; some painted markings may indicate these.

81 Frost and Brauer, in Treasures of Newcastle from the Macquarie Era, 24–5.