Notes
Painted circa 1840
Uncomprehending of the complex ritual meanings of Indigenous song and dance, the first Europeans in Australia commonly viewed the corroboree as a form of entertainment, as spectacle. The firelight performance perfectly suited the late 18th and early 19th century taste for 'savage scenes' and nocturnal chiaroscuro, while for the classically-educated, the pattern of repeated gestures and dance steps in the lines of dancers made a nice reprise of the Roman sculptural frieze. It is hardly surprising that corroboree scenes became a standard trope of Aboriginality amongst early settler writers and artists.
The catalogue of such pictures made prior to 1850 includes paintings and drawings by Henry Brinton, Sophia Campbell, Henry Darcy, William Fernyhough, Richard ffarington, Henry Glover, John Glover, William Romaine Govett, John Lewin, Joseph Lycett, P.H.F. Phelps, Walter Preston and George Augustus Robinson. Richard Browne's and Augustus Earle's portraits of Birabahn (Magil) and Burgun (Desmond) only describe single figures, but the sitters have their torsos decorated with the body painting appropriate for a corroboree. In addition to these autograph paintings and drawings, a number of dance scenes were also published (and variously pirated) as prints, usually within narratives of exploration and/or settlement.υ1
Sadly, there are few known images of the corroborees of the Darug or Eora, the original inhabitants of the area around Port Jackson. There were very few competent figure painters in the first decades of white occupation, and the devastating 1788 smallpox epidemic and the subsequent adjustment of tribal territories had severely compromised traditional tribal practices. However, in the northern 'secondary punishment' settlement of Newcastle, the European presence was smaller, possibly less infectious and evidently a little less disruptive of Aboriginal society. Browne's Birabahn and Earle's Burgun, for example, were both men of the Awabakal, traditional owners of the country from Brisbane Water to the Hunter River. Moreover, as John McPhee, Shane Frost and Jakelin Troy have recently shown, Newcastle's energetic commandant, Major James Wallis, and his convict artist, Joseph Lycett, were interested recorders of the culture of the local Aboriginal culture.υ2 Wallis arranged a corroboree to mark the occasion of Governor Macquarie's visit to Newcastle in 1818, and sketched himself and/or commissioned three distinct corroboree scenes: a watercolour, an oil and an etching.
The present work is from a generation later, but shows that traditional ceremonies were still being performed in the Lake Macquarie region in the 1840s. When ethnographer Henry Hale and artist Alfred Agate of the United States Exploring Expedition travelled to the area in the summer of 1839-40, they met with the missionary Rev. Lancelot Threlkeld, and with Birabahn, and evidently witnessed a corroboree. The published account of the expedition includes the following description:
These dances are not only the usual close of their combats, but are frequent in time of peace. They appear almost necessary to stir up their blood; and under the excitement they produce, the whole nature of the people seems to be changed. To a spectator, the effect of one of these exhibitions almost equals that of a tragic melodrama.
A suitable place for the performance is selected in the neighbourhood of their hut. Here a fire is built by the women and boys, while such of the men as are to take a share in the exhibition, usually about twenty in number, disappear to arrange their persons. When these preparations are completed, and the fire burns brightly, the performers are seen advancing in the guise of as many skeletons. This effect is produced by means of pipe-clay, with which they paint broad white lines on their arms and legs, and on the head, while others of less breadth are drawn across the body, to correspond to the ribs. The music consists in beating time on their shields , and singing, and to it the movements of dancers conform. It must not be supposed that this exhibition is a dance in our sense of the word, nor is it like anything that we saw in the South Sea islands. It consists of violent and odd movements of the arms, legs and body, contortions and violent muscular actions, amounting almost to frenzy. The performers appear more like a child's pasteboard supple-Jack than than any thing human in their movements.υ3
This action continues for a time, and then the skeletons, for so I may term them, for they truly resemble them, suddenly seem to vanish and reappear. The disappearance is effected by merely turning round, for mingling with the dark background. The tree illuminated by the fire, are brought out with some of the figures in bold relief, while others were indistinct and ghost-like. All concurred to give an air of wildness to the strange scene. As the dance proceeds, the excitement increases, and those who a short time before appeared only half alive, become full of animation, and finally were obliged to stop from exhaustion.
Such is the performance illustrated in the present work, though the painting's concerns are clearly more Picturesque than anthropological. The work is here for the first time correctly ascribed: to Henry Curzon Allport, patriarch of the well-known Tasmanian artistic and legal dynasty. A former pupil and companion of John Glover (1767- 1849), and himself an accomplished painter and a professional drawing master, Allport migrated to New South Wales in late 1838, arriving in Sydney in April 1839. Although unable to make a living from his art, he was a gifted and prolific sketcher, and from his earliest days in the colony received commissions for house and estate portraits from members of the colonial elite. One such was the Port Macquarie police magistrate and pastoralist Major Archibald Innes; Allport painted at least five watercolours for him, dated July 1839.υ4
Not only is Allport known to have visited the area on at least this one occasion, but the confident figure drawing and smoky moonlight atmosphere of this work are entirely consistent with his Romantic style. Most obviously Allportian is the treatment of the foliage; closely-comparable spindly saplings and single-brushstroke leaves are found in several of the artist's signed watercolours. Curiously, the strongly-silhouetted tree stump on the left and the reclining figure in the right foreground resemble those in more naïve but slightly earlier views of a corroboree at Duranbah, on the Upper Manning, New England by the sketcher Henry Darcy. This may be coincidence, but it is conceivable that Darcy's works were shown 'in the folio' amongst Sydney's close artistic community, and may thus have had some influence on Allport's composition.
1. See, for example: David Collins, An account of the English colony in New South Wales (1802); François Péron and Louis de Freycinet, Voyage des découvertes aux Terres Australes... (1807-16); Jules Durmont d'Urville, Rapport a l'Academie royale des sciences de l'institut, sur la marche et les operations du voyage de decouvertes de la corvette L'Astrolabe... (1829) ; Edward John Eyre, Journals of expeditions of discovery into Central Australia, and overland from Adelaide to King George's Sound... (1845); Charles Wilkes, Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition, (1845).
2. John McPhee (ed.), Joseph Lycett: convict artist, Sydney, Historic Houses Trust of New South wales, 2006, pp. 84 - 121
3. Charles Wilkes, Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition during the years 1838,1839, 1840, 1841, 1842 (6 vols.), Philadelphia: Lea & Blanchard, 1845, vol. II, pp. 188-189
4. The works are: Lake Innes - from lawn looking North West ...; Port Macquarie from the steam wharf ...; The creek or bay at Port Macquarie ...; Port Macquarie - from the hill near the church; Port Macquarie - from Oyster Bay. They are contained within a folio of 45 ink and watercolour drawings 35 x 51 cm (within framelines) or smaller, in the Dixson Galleries, State Library of New South Wales, PXD 86
