Beat Of A Different Humdrum

Sydney Morning Herald

Thursday June 14, 2007

Steve Meacham

Time-travelling in Canberra provides a view of daily life in Australia in the 1800s, writes Steve Meacham.

"COOEE is such a strange word," Martin Terry admits. "It's a welcome. But in the bush it can also be a distress call. The ambiguity of the word conveys what I was trying to do with this exhibition. In 19th-century Australia, things were rarely as they seemed."

Ambiguity is the reason Terry chose the uniquely Australian greeting for the title of his new exhibition, which opens today at the National Library of Australia. Curating it meant many months sifting through the library's enormous archive of 500,000 paintings, drawings and photographs. He hasn't seen them all, of course - though he did look at about 50,000 before whittling that down to the 150 that will feature in the show.

Cooee's subtitle is "Eyewitness accounts of everyday life". And therein lies the curator's challenge. The onus is on distilling an interesting perspective through the most unusual of exhibition prisms: the humdrum and mundane.

What Terry was looking for was a portrait of normal life, things that our forefathers and mothers took for granted but which highlight differences between them and us. So his exhibition is the antithesis of most art shows. There are no works by famous, or even hugely talented artists. Most are the handiwork of intrepid amateurs or anonymous settlers and townsfolk. Some were women, many were convicts. None were selected for their visual aesthetics.

"The National Library has been collecting since Federation," Terry explains. "But we've never collected pictures the way an art museum collects. The things we gather in are pictorial evidence, visual documents."

They are things no self-respecting art gallery would be interested in. Such as? "What sheep looked like in the 19th century. We've bred out a lot of the characteristics of 19th-century sheep and cattle."

Terry found that, as he looked through the piles of prints and photographs, five distinct themes emerged from the random depictions.

"How we viewed indigenous Australians. How we altered the landscape. How we had fun. How we were employed. And, overarching everything, how did our country grow in less than 100 years from a small convict settlement into a modern industrial nation?"

Of all the ambiguities, none is more tantalising than the relationship between the first Australians and the newcomers who arrived since the First Fleet. The early European settlers were fascinated by and scared of the Aboriginal people they were displacing.

Keen convict artists featured their indigenous neighbours prominently even before the arrival of John Lewin - the colony's first "free" professional artist - in January 1800.

Ironically, one of the men most responsible for the appropriation of Aboriginal land, Thomas Mitchell, the NSW government surveyor, was impressed by the practicality of the Aboriginal call of "cooee", a cry that crossed tribal borders. He declared it "so much more convenient than our own holla, or halloo".

And yet by the 1850s, according to Terry, "a quality of melancholy settled across the country as indigenous people, first Australians, start disappearing from Sydney, then other urban areas. They disappear from the visual discourse."

But not forever. With the advent of photography, indigenous people reappeared as a portrait subject. "For all the wrong reasons," Terry says, citing Fred Kruger's photograph of Gellibrand of the Colac tribe, taken about 1877. "Photography was this wonderful invention which could catalogue the first Australians before they all disappeared."

Another image Terry selected is a watercolour of King Street, Sydney, in the 1850s by an unknown artist. What appealed was the scruffiness of everyday life. "A naive artist doesn't tidy up the landscape in the way [colonial artist] Conrad Martens always did ... you see dogs running across the muddy streets."

Terry's exhibition also explores the eternal Australian dichotomy: the search for private space versus the need for social interaction. One image shows an Aboriginal girl living on Nullarbor Plain, drawn by a young white man who had gone there to settle.

"There's really something quite weird about wanting to live in such an isolated place," Terry says. Yet the same people relished gathering at markets, saleyards, outback pubs - and in their thousands at the Domain for a cricket match.

Cooee: Australia in the 19th Century is at the National Library of Australia, Canberra, until September 9.

© 2007 Sydney Morning Herald

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