Wandering Canberra's NGA
We visit art galleries. Everywhere. We love them. And to be honest, we love their cafés. It always feels a tiny bit extravagant to meander through rooms and rooms of art and then sit down for a little snack and a Negroni. Now that’s a great day!
But here’s the deal—we are not art critics. We actually don’t know all that much about art, in fact. That doesn’t mean we didn’t like things, though. So we’ll just put some here that we found at least somewhat interesting at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra. This place has a pretty impressive collection of more than 166,000 works. That’s a lot!1 I haven't even watched 166,000 hours of Netflix.
As much as I'd love to wax lyrical about each piece, the truth is, I can’t tell a Matisse from a Modigliani, and my attempts at describing art would probably make you laugh out loud or retch or both at once.2
Instead, I've decided to do something more else—share my favorite pieces from the National Gallery in the following series of photos. Why photos, you ask? I figured it was preferable to my sketches3 or misguided commentary and random analogies.4 Though, when it’s available, I will provide whatever context I was able to find.
Let’s go!
Interpreting history
Walyer, 2006 (Julie Dowling)
Walyer was a Tasmanian Aboriginal woman abducted in her teens by men from another tribe and traded to sealers for flour and dogs. During her 10 years enslaved by the sealers, she learned English and how to fire a gun. She escaped in 1828 and led the remnants of her people to war using strategically planned attacks. She proved to be a master of guerrilla warfare. She died of influenza in June 1831, shortly after she was captured and having bravely fought for her people in a war with no memorials.
Wreath for Oodgeroo, 2020 (Carol McGregor)
This possum skin coat is a beautiful tribute to Oodgeroo Noonuccal, a remarkable Aboriginal poet, activist, and educator. It features native plants from Oodgeroo’s homeland, Minjerribah. In 1970, Oodgeroo led a major protest on the 200th anniversary of Lt. Cook's arrival in Australia, with protesters casting funereal wreaths into the sea as Cook's landing was re-enacted for a visiting Queen Elizabeth II.
Paradise in the sun, 2010 (Danie Mellor)
This piece envisions the Australia as it might have been imagined before settlement following ideas proposed by French philosopher Rousseau. Based on an illustration by German artist Christopher Switzer for John Parkinson’s 1629 botanical treatise, Paradisi in Sole: Paradisus Terrestris, the image depicts Western ideas of Eden while illustrating the “challenges” presented by European settlement.
Woureddy, an Aboriginal chief of Van Diemen's Land, 1835 (Benjamin Law)
Trucaninny, wife of Woureddy, 1836 (Benjamin Law)
Wurati (d. 1842), a Nuennone man from Bruny Island (Tasmania), was a skilled hunter, boat builder, and renowned storyteller who spoke five dialects. In 1829, Wurati and his second wife, Trukanini, became George Augustus Robinson's trusted assistants, following him to Port Phillip (Melbourne) in 1839 when he was appointed Chief Protector of Aborigines in the new colony. Wurati died in 1842 on the return trip to Tasmania. Trukanini died at Oyster Cove, a former convict depot south of Hobart, close to her Country.
The chase, 2008 (Julie Gough)
This colonial chaise was modified to incorporate spears made from burnt tea tree sticks as legs. It is also impressed with pins that form text originally published in The Hobart Town Courier in 1830 that read, “Two of the aborigines who have been living so long at Mr Robinson's…absconded this morning.... They were encountered in the bush by two broom makers, one a cripple, who succeeded in taking them. The blacks made every effort to escape.... Nothing can tame them.”
Portrait of Bungaree, a native of New South Wales, c1826 (Augustus Earle)
Bungaree (c. 1775–1830) was an Aboriginal Australian from the Darug people of the Broken Bay north of Sydney. When he moved to the growing settlement of Sydney in the 1790s, he established himself as a person able to move between his own people and the newcomers In 1801, he joined Matthew Flinders’ circumnavigation of Australia aboard the Investigator.
And finally, a small selection of works that show how colonial painters presented their own distinctive visions of Australia.
20th century
Notes to Basquiat (Death of Irony), 2002 (Gordon Bennett)
In 1998, Gordon Bennett began a conversation between two colonial continents, Australia and the Americas, and between himself and Jean-Michel Basquiat, the late New York-based young Haitian-American artist with Puerto Rican heritage.
The destruction of the World Trade Center in New York City on 11 September 2001 by militants associated with the Islamic extremist group Al-Qaeda is the backdrop to this work. Bennett references the traumatic impact and subsequent destructive outcome of colonial endeavors around the world. The destructive decay, ironic, and cyclical nature of the capitalist colonial narrative is represented by the densely layered text and imagery and the upscaled 'Captain Cook' figure, malnourished and half-skeletal.
Hippolyta and the Amazons defying Theseus, 1933 (Jean Broome-Norton)
Classicism was particularly influential on Australian art in the interwar years. In this piece, Broome-Norton draws on the myth of when the powerful Amazonian queen Hippolyta was abducted by the Athenian king, Theseus, and subsequently rescued by her army of warriors.
This work, in which Broome-Norton conveys the triumphant figure of Hippolyta with her soldiers at her feet, is undoubtedly her most outwardly virile expression of feminine power.
Untitled (DOC), 2016 (Daniel Boyd)
Boyd's piece is an "appropriation" of German-English painter Johann Zoffany's The Death of Captain James Cook (c.1795), which was painted after Zoffany watched a play about Captain James Cook's death at the hands of Hawaiian people after he'd attempted to abduct their chief, Kalaniʻōpuʻu. Boyd overpaints sections of the original, romanticized image to convey the distortion of history.
Untitled, 1974 (Donald Judd)
“
Three dimensions are real space. That gets rid of the problem of illusionism and of literal space, space in and around marks and colors—which is riddance to one of the salient and most objectionable relics of European art.
”
Albert's Story, 2014 (Vincent Namatjira)
Here Vincent Namatjira tells us about the life of his great-grandfather, Albert Namatjira.
“
He made his mark on the world
through his art and was one of the first
Aboriginal people to really be noticed and acknowledged by non-Indigenous Australians. This led to success, wealth,
fame and even citizenship of the country where he and his people have rightfully
lived on and in unison with Country
basically forever. With wealth and
success came more hard times,
persecution, imprisonment
and an early death.
”
Sculpture
