14. “An Australian Incident”: Tom Roberts’s Impressionism and the Colonial Project

Kindred​, Emma

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14. “An Australian Incident”: Tom Roberts’s Impressionism and the Colonial Project

Emma Kindred

Globalizing Impressionism: Reception, Translation, and Transnationalism

In 1891 Tom Roberts was standing on the land of the Bangerang people of the Yorta Yorta Nation as he drew in pencil the preliminary outline of a horse and stockrider trying to slow the desperate stampede of sheep toward water. “Bangerang” has various spellings in English, and this is the version used by the Yorta Yorta National Aboriginal Corporation. The Bangerang people occupied lands in Victoria and New South Wales that included the region known as Corowa since European settlement. Roberts was then a guest of the settler-colonist Henry Hay at Collendina Station in the Riverina district of New South Wales. Half a century before, in 1841, the property had been granted by the Crown as a pastoral...

Author

Emma Kindred

PublisherYale University Press

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00198.018

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-20016

Chapter subject tags:Impressionism (Art)--AustraliaRoberts, Tom, 1856-1931Landscape painting, Australian--19th centuryHeidelberg schoolIndigenous peoples--AustraliaImperialism in art--Australia--19th centuryStreeton, Arthur, Sir, 1867-1943Art criticism--Australia--History--19th centuryArtists, Aboriginal Australian--19th century

14. “An Australian Incident”: Tom Roberts’s Impressionism and the Colonial Project

Emma Kindred

This essay was completed on the lands of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people, the Traditional Custodians of the Canberra region, and I pay my respects to their Elders past, present, and emerging.

In 1891 Tom Roberts was standing on the land of the Bangerang people of the Yorta Yorta Nation as he drew in pencil the preliminary outline of a horse and stockrider trying to slow the desperate stampede of sheep toward water.1 “Bangerang” has various spellings in English, and this is the version used by the Yorta Yorta National Aboriginal Corporation. The Bangerang people occupied lands in Victoria and New South Wales that included the region known as Corowa since European settlement. Roberts was then a guest of the settler-colonist Henry Hay at Collendina Station in the Riverina district of New South Wales. Half a century before, in 1841, the property had been granted by the Crown as a pastoral lease.2 “A pastoral lease is a title issued for the lease of an area of Crown land to use for the limited purpose of grazing of stock and associated activities.” See Australian Trade and Investment Commission, “Land Tenure,” www.austrade.gov.au/land-tenure/Land-tenure/pastoral-leases. Yet this land has never been ceded by its sovereign owners, the Bangerang people, and for this community, the land holds deep ancestral memory of connection to Country and cultural practice. Remaining in the Corowa region, on the border between New South Wales and Victoria, Roberts began work on his subsequent major painting, A Break Away! (fig. 1). Already celebrated in the nineteenth century as an epic history painting of Australia’s pastoral industry, the story depicted is also one of dispossession and the violence of the colonial frontier since British invasion in 1788.3 See Rowan Nicholason, “Yes, This Continent Was Invaded in 1788—An International Law Expert Explains,” The Conversation, January 27, 2020, https://bit.ly/3fOFEpf.

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Description: A Break Away! by Roberts, Tom

Fig. 1. Tom Roberts, A Break Away!, 1891. Oil on canvas, 137.3 × 167.8 cm. Art Gallery of South Australia. Adelaide Elder Bequest Fund, 1899.

Through landscape painting and portraiture, the Australian impressionists (also known as the “Heidelberg School”) formed a persistent visual representation of the colonial project that took root in the late eighteenth century and remains ongoing today.4 For debates concerning terminology, see Gerard Vaughan, “Some Reflections on Defining Australian Impressionism,” in Australian Impressionism, ed. Terence Lane (Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2007), 16–19; and Ann Galbally, “National Life and Landscape: The Heidelberg School as Mythmaker 1880–1905,” in The Cambridge Companion to Australian Art, ed. Jaynie Anderson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 71–83. Tom Roberts, the older and more established artist among these plein-air painters, rendered the landscape with the sturdy self-possession and assurance of a man of empire. The British-born Roberts has continued to be lionized for establishing an Australian impressionist landscape tradition through his enduring images of nationhood.5 See Gerard Vaughan, “Director’s Foreword,” in Tom Roberts, ed. Anne Gray (Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 2015), 8–9; Gabriele Finaldi, “Director’s Foreword,” in Australia’s Impressionists, ed. Christopher Riopelle (London: National Gallery, 2016), 7. In 1915 friend and fellow artist Arthur Streeton dedicated his own exhibition: “To Tom Roberts, from whose quick perception and expression of the principles of impressionism in 1886 sprang the first national school of painting in Australia.”6 William Moore, “Tom Roberts’ Service to Australian Art: The Man Who Blazed the Track,” Sydney Mail, September 30, 1931, 10. Roberts’s narratives of nationhood—both visual and literary—are marked by a distinct masculinity and racial positioning. The landscape is empty of Indigenous people, reinforcing and legitimizing the colonial project in Australia as confirmation of the euphemistic “dying out” of the traditional owners and custodians of the land. In this contrived history of masculine “whiteness,” people from the Asian diaspora working in Australia are also positioned outside the picture plane, and women are restrained by the inactivity and submissiveness of conventional portraiture.

Working in and around Narrm/Melbourne and Warrang/Sydney, the Australian impressionists sought to capture an eternal experience of the landscape, demonstrating an awareness of light as a unifying force and the visual power of the nostalgic image.7 Narrm/Melbourne was established by colonists on land taken from the Boon Wurrung and Woiwurrung (Wurundjeri) peoples of the Kulin Nation. Warrang/Sydney was established by colonists on land taken from the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. These artists valued an intimate connection to the land and an immediacy gained through the direct study of the landscape, seasons, and effects of the sun. In painting the distinct character of Australian light, they realized in the landscape a “dazzling, shimmering glare” that had been absent from the work of earlier artists.8 “The Art of Arthur Streeton,” Sydney Morning Herald, November 22, 1919, 9. Their stylistic approach was not derived strictly from French impressionism, though both schools valued the importance of painting outdoors in order to capture “truth” in nature. Australia’s regional translation of impressionism was closely aligned with European rural naturalism and artists such as Jules Bastien-Lepage who closely attended to modern life.9 See David Hansen, “National Naturalism,” in Lane, Australian Impressionism, 281–87; and Sarah Thomas, “Creating a National Identity: Australia’s Impressionist Landscapes,” in Riopelle, Australia’s Impressionists, 43–49. In tandem, via the work of London-based U.S. painter and printmaker James McNeill Whistler, the work of Australian impressionists was also inflected by an aestheticist use of color, form, and ornament.10 The Australian impressionists championed James McNeill Whistler, who developed a unique form of impressionism based on harmonious and evocative arrangements of broad areas of color and tone. Roberts was responsive to his use of tonal contrasts and decorative details derived from Japanese art. Roberts also employed musical titles, as in Allegro con brio, Bourke St. W. (1886) and Andante (c. 1889). This was likely in reference to Whistler’s common use of titles alluding to music.

In these early years Roberts, together with Australian-born Streeton, English émigré Charles Conder, and other men and women from Narrm/Melbourne’s National Gallery of Victoria Art School, pursued a fashionably bohemian lifestyle of artists’ camps and sketching tours on the traditional lands of the Wurundjeri people.11 Associated with the National Gallery of Victoria, the National Gallery of Victoria Art School was a private fine arts college founded in 1867. Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation are custodians of the area now known as Melbourne and its surrounds. In 1863 Wurundjeri people, including artist William Barak, were moved to Coranderrk Station near Healesville and forcibly resettled off their lands. Their aim was to engage with the purity of the bush and pastoral districts. By working within landscapes seemingly untainted by the encroaching modernity of the developing city, they shunned the perceived ills of industry and commerce. The potency of this visual conception of Australia held, and many of the works remain comfortable signifiers of nationhood to settler Australians. In 1931, speaking of Streeton’s paintings, critic and then-Director of the National Art Gallery of New South Wales James Stuart MacDonald stated that “they point the way in which life should be lived in Australia, with the maximum of flocks and the minimum of factories.”12 James Stuart MacDonald, “Arthur Streeton,” Art in Australia 3, no. 40 (October 15, 1931): 19. This attitude was not new. Already, the second half of the nineteenth century elicited responses by non-Indigenous artists that revealed a common desire to reach an unaffected vision of the past by journeying to sites beyond the industrialized Western city.

The mythmaking implicit in Roberts’s impressionist output is reflected in public attitudes toward cross-cultural engagement and patterns of institutional collecting. During the 1890s, a decade spanning the centenary of British invasion in 1888 and the Federation of Australia in 1901, Roberts painted his most significant national narrative works. During this same period, he completed portraits of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and recorded Indigenous ceremony and cultural practice. Bringing these works back from the art-historical periphery, this essay reassesses their place within Roberts’s oeuvre in the context of his own ethnographic mode of collecting cultural objects and his travel writings published in the popular press. Roberts’s words and images complicate readings of Australian impressionism as a homogeneous vision of settler-colonial Australia and provide a new perspective on Roberts’s contribution to the colonial project through his mythologizing of the bush and pastoral progress.

“AN AUSTRALIAN INCIDENT”: REPRESENTING NATIONHOOD IN THE PASTORAL LANDSCAPE

When Roberts traveled to Corowa in 1891, his intention was to paint a large-scale droving picture. A Break Away! was one of four deliberately nationalist narrative paintings intended to project an idea of “Australia.” Shearing the Rams (1888–90), The Golden Fleece (1894), and Bailed Up (1895; reworked 1927) all placed “strong masculine labour” at the center of their respective compositions.13 Tom Roberts, “Mr. Tom Roberts’s Picture, ‘Sheep-Shearing.’ To the editor of the Argus,” Argus, July 4, 1890, 10. When A Break Away! was displayed at the artist’s Collins Street studio in Narrm/Melbourne, a critic for the city’s Table Talk magazine detailed what he or she read as “An Australian incident—tragic, realistic, picturesque”:14 “Mr. Tom Roberts’ New Picture,” Table Talk, July 17, 1891, 16. “The subject is an excellent one for a great work. A bit of arid country, with ragged gum trees and stunted box [trees] positively frizzling in the heat of a January day; an ultramarine sky, with the tall column of a dust whirlwind on the horizon; a red, dusty track, down which the vanguard of a mob of sheep rush to the water pool just visible on the right corner of the foreground. A horseman vainly strives to check the mad death rush of the sheep; another is just emerging from the dust cloud that conceals the main body of the sheep.”15 “Mr. Tom Roberts’ New Picture.” Divided by a high horizon line, the landscape of burning orange, yellows, and cream is intensified by the saturated blue of a summer sky. With energetic strokes of oil paint, Roberts articulates the frenzied rush of sheep toward the smell of water as a diagonal thrust across the canvas. A stockrider leans hard into his stirrup, his horse’s posture tense and unbalanced, resisting the firm pull at the bit as reins are held tight. A sheepdog, bowled over by the mob, echoes the splayed form of a sheep farther up the canvas. The desiccated carcass of a cow at the base of the log-rail fence underscores the danger of the crush.

The drought of 1888–89 scarred this land. Roberts’s depiction of stumps scattered across the open slope of dead grasses tells of extensive pastoral clearing and soil rendered barren by grazing hooved animals that caused impaction and erosion. Recent research by Bruce Pascoe and Bill Gammage demonstrates the importance of Indigenous agricultural practices that actively managed the land prior to European colonization.16 Bruce Pascoe is a Bunurong, Yuin, and Tasmanian Aboriginal scholar. See Bruce Pascoe, Dark Emu: Black Seeds—Agriculture or Accident? (Broome: Magabala, 2014); and Bill Gammage, The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2012). In the nineteenth century, Aboriginal people witnessed the swift devastation wrought by colonists. Pascoe’s response to this history becomes a sharp lens through which to view A Break Away!: “There were reports of whole dams being drunk dry by mobs of cattle. It must have been shattering. And to see those same mobs of cattle destroy a field of murnong [yam] or grassland that had been cultivated for thousands of years must have been shattering. . . . I think that’s still the trauma that’s reverberating around the country at the moment. The country is sick. It’s in pain. It’s thirsty.”17 Bruce Pascoe quoted in Lorena Allam, “Dark Emu’s Infinite Potential: ‘Our Kids Have Grown Up in a Fog about the History of the Land,’” Guardian, May 24, 2019, https://bit.ly/3fQ3y3t. To revisit the words of Roberts scholar Virginia Spate, this, too, is the “transformative force of Empire.”18 Virginia Spate, “Where the Sun Never Set: Tom Roberts and the British Empire,” in Tom Roberts, ed. Ron Radford (Adelaide: Art Gallery of South Australia, 1995), 80.

In 1891 Australia’s particular brand of impressionism was still being grappled with by critics, as well as those attached to cultural institutions and the wider public. While the Table Talk critic commended Roberts’s rushing sheep in the foreground as “well grouped, well drawn, and well coloured” and the foreshortened horse as “cleverly handled,” the dramatic scene was condemned as an “impression”:

Looking at the large canvas, one feels the story; its impression is conveyed to the eye by the painting; but, alas! here Mr. Roberts’ art stops. He only conveys to the spectator the impression of what a noble picture could be made of the scene. The painting is incomplete; the technique is wanting. The dazzling blue sky is mere paint, from which the brush marks have not been stippled out; the tree foliage is an indistinct blotch; the weird dust column is a brush-streak of sandy-yellow colour; the dust cloud in the middle distance is as opaque as a white-washed wall. . . . If Mr. Roberts would only finish the rest of his picture as well as he has done the bit in the foreground it would greatly enhance his merit as an artist.19 “Mr. Tom Roberts’ New Picture.”

This reception of A Break Away! echoes the criticism of James Smith, who wrote of the Australian impressionists’ famed 9 by 5 Impression Exhibition of 1889: “None of these is to be regarded as a work of art. Neither is a painter’s ‘impression.’ It is simply a record in colour of some fugitive effect which he sees, or professes to see in nature.”20 James Smith, “An Impressionist Exhibition,” Argus, August 17, 1889, 10. Roberts, Streeton, and Conder pasted Smith’s review up at the entrance of the exhibition; later that month, they published a response in the Argus declaring the importance of “what we believe to be a great new school of painting in Australia.”21 Tom Roberts, Charles Conder, and Arthur Streeton, “Concerning ‘Impressions’ in Painting: To the Editor of the Argus,” Argus, September 3, 1889, 7.

GOLDEN SUMMERS: PAINTING DROUGHT

Employing a Whistlerian model, the 9 by 5 Impression Exhibition introduced the Narrm/Melbourne public to an Australian rephrasing of an international art practice. Yet in these intimately scaled works, many of which were painted on cigar box lids, the artists announced a very local understanding of color and light. The act of expanding out the landscape into the vast canvases of A Break Away! or Streeton’s Golden Summer, Eaglemont (1889), reiterated this claim of connection (fig. 2). With the opportunity afforded by scale, these artists created a sense of history-making in the present. Completed in the year of the 9 by 5 exhibition, Golden Summer, Eaglemont, was the first major work by a member of Australia’s “new school of painting” to be exhibited overseas. The painting hung “on the line” at London’s Royal Academy in 1891. The following year, it received a “mention honorable” at the Paris Salon.22 Jane Clark and Bridget Whitelaw, Golden Summers: Heidelberg and Beyond (Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 1985), 104–5. Golden Summer, Eaglemont, was painted during a season of drought while Streeton was living in the farmhouse on Mount Eagle estate at Heidelberg, on the urban fringe of Narrm/Melbourne. He consciously created a large work, poetic in its approach to the local landscape. When it was included in the Victorian Artists Society’s winter exhibition of 1889, the Table Talk reviewer applauded Streeton’s “sense of colour,” noting that he had painted “summer effects as if he loved the country, and had set himself to idealise even the most commonplace scenery.”23 “Mr. Arthur Streeton,” Table Talk, May 10, 1889, 6.

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Description: Golden Summer, Eaglemont by Streeton, Arthur

Fig. 2. Arthur Streeton, Golden Summer, Eaglemont, 1889. Oil on canvas, 81.3 × 152.6 cm (sight); 124.5 × 195.7 × 19 cm (framed). National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. Purchased 1995.

The Country Streeton was painting holds the ancestral memory of the Wurundjeri people, a clan of the Woiwurrung tribal group of the Kulin Nation, whom pastoralists forced off their traditional lands from 1838.24 Ancestral memory is an Indigenous history of connection to Country (as distinguished from non-Indigenous understandings of country/place/landscape), in this case relating to the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. It is knowledge passed from generation to generation, often through aural traditions such as storytelling and song. It encompasses the ongoing practice of culture through story, ceremony, and art, and Indigenous agriculture and aquaculture practiced since time immemorial. For example, the farming of eels and murnong yams and the construction of eel traps and yam-digging tools before European invasion forms part of the ancestral memory of this region. See City of Darebin, “The Story of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Darebin,” https://bit.ly/2CBrxoT. See also Shaun Canning and Frances Thiele, Indigenous Cultural Heritage and History within the Metropolitan Melbourne Investigation Area (Melbourne: Australian Cultural Heritage Management, 2010). The region was cleared by colonists, destroying markers of ongoing Aboriginal connection to Country with the felling of scar trees.25 See Koori History, “Modified Trees (Scar Trees),” March 7, 2016, https://bit.ly/32E7bG1. The overstocking of sheep stripped the land of drought-shielding indigenous grasses, leaving it vulnerable to soil aridity and erosion. Gammage describes how the landscape of Golden Summer, Eaglemont, bears witness to the heavy impact of the pastoral industry. There are “scattered trees lacking low branches and spreading narrowly, so they grew in a forest. They pre-date European occupation, suggesting that settlers cleared the country. The scene reflects how soon settlers upset Australia’s grasses.”26 Gammage, Biggest Estate on Earth, 34. The grasses in the painting are introduced species, not indigenous to Australia.27 Gammage, Biggest Estate on Earth, 34. Gammage cites colonial squatter and author Edward M. Curr, who recorded in Recollections of Squatting in Victoria (1883) the degree of change across Australia’s colonized landscape: “Throughout most of the continent, the most nutritious grasses were originally the most common; but in consequence of constant over-stocking and scourging the pastures, these, where not eradicated, have very much decreased, their places being taken by inferior sorts and weeds introduced from Europe and Africa.”28 Edward M. Curr quoted in Gammage, Biggest Estate on Earth, 34.

While Streeton was enamored with the landscape, describing it as “our hill of gold,” for Gammage, the “golden creams are colours of death.”29Arthur Steeton, letter to Tom Roberts, undated [early 1891], cited in Mary Eagle, The Oil Paintings of Arthur Streeton in the National Gallery of Australia (Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 1994), 26. See also Gammage, Biggest Estate on Earth, 34. As with other iconic works from the early 1890s such as Roberts’s A Break Away! and Streeton’s Fire’s On (1891), this painting set the palette of Australia: summer glare falls sharply across the landscape, with the haze of thick heat and dust. In the gritty vernacular of the bush, these artists sought to convey the poetry of a landscape transformed. Non-Indigenous Australia came to recognize a new and distinct identity in passages of land cleared, controlled, and capitalized. Alongside the work of writers and poets such as “Banjo” Paterson and Henry Lawson, these enduring images are a nostalgic elegy to the bush and pastoral industry, an idea of nationhood set between myth and reality.

Contemporary Wiradjuri and Kamilaroi artist Jonathan Jones writes that “to protect their pastoral interests, squatters cleared and fenced off the land, causing the physical and cultural displacement of Kulin.” Jones cites nineteenth-century Wurundjeri artist Beruk/William Barak, who recollected that “a lot of whitefellow come here by and by and clear the scrub all over the country.”30 William Barak quoted in Jonathan Jones, “Murruwaygu: Following in the Footsteps of Our Ancestors” (PhD diss, University of Technology, Sydney, 2018), 189; see also Judith Ryan, Carol Cooper, and Joy Murphy-Wandin, Remembering Barak (Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2003). Roberts and Streeton enact this same clearing. In the absence of any traceable, direct knowledge of, or connection to, the people of the Kulin Nation, their paintings were intended as statements of progress via the settler pastoral experience, shoring up the idea of a land empty of Indigenous presence. They visualize the colonial project of terra nullius, or land unoccupied or uninhabited.31 By the end of the nineteenth century, Australia’s Indigenous population had been decimated by violence, disease, and dispossession from land and family resulting from colonization. Many surviving Aboriginal people were forcibly removed from their lands and made to live on missions or reserves. Australia was claimed to be terra nullius (no one’s land) by Lieutenant James Cook during his 1770 voyage around the coast of Australia. Following the invasion of Australia and the commencement of European settlement in 1788, the claim of terra nullius dismissed native title and Aboriginal sovereignty. The 1992 Mabo High Court decision overturned the doctrine of terra nullius in Australia, and was followed by the Native Title Act in 1993. See John Gardiner-Garden, “From Dispossession to Reconciliation,” Research Paper 27 1998–99 (Parliament of Australia, June 29, 1999). The removal is underscored by the absence of all indigenous animals in their paintings, with the rare sighting of an occasional bird. Though Roberts and Streeton worked in the bushland fringes of Narrm/Melbourne and Warrang/Sydney, and across regional Victoria and New South Wales, indigenous Australian fauna, such as kangaroos, wallabies, echidnas, and wombats, are never depicted.32 For further information on how colonial settlers responded to Australia’s indigenous animals, see Ken Gelder and Rachel Weaver, “Friday Essay: The Art of the Colonial Kangaroo Hunt,” The Conversation, August 31, 2018, https://bit.ly/30ww2Jp; Des Cowley and Brian Hubber, “Distinct Creation: Early European Images of Australian Animals,” La Trobe Journal, no. 66 (Spring 2000): 3–32; and Steven White, “British Colonialism, Australian Nationalism and the Law: Hierarchies of Wild Animal Protection,” Monash University Law Review 39, no. 2 (2013), https://bit.ly/2OFxCmG. In their place are sheep, cattle, and horses.33 For the impact of introduced species in Australia, see Pascoe, Dark Emu: Black Seeds. These species, introduced by colonists since invasion, were directly connected to pastoral industries of meat and textile production. For a nineteenth-century audience, they represented agricultural progress and the foundation of Australia’s modern economic growth. Australia’s fauna had been a key subject for artists working in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries who were attached to scientific expeditions or working in the fields of zoology and ornithology, but these creatures had begun to disappear from the colonialist picture plane by the late nineteenth century. At the same time, Australia’s animals are abundant in the work of contemporaneous Aboriginal artists William Barak and Yackaduna/Tommy McRae (fig. 3).34 McRae was an Aboriginal artist who spoke Wiradjuri and was either of the Kwat Kwat people or the Wiradjuri Nation. Jones, “Murruwaygu,” 210–11. Their depictions of ceremony and hunting are teeming with local life.

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Description: Untitled (Ceremony) by Barak, William

Fig. 3. William Barak, Untitled (Ceremony), 1900. Earth pigments, watercolor, and pencil on paper, 50.5 × 63 cm. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. The Warren Clark Bequest, 2001.

McRae was living on Yorta Yorta and Wiradjuri lands of the Riverina during the period Roberts was traveling to the area. Humphrey McQueen speculates that Roberts may have heard about McRae, who had worked at Brocklesby Station in Cowra, where Roberts painted Shearing the Rams, but “left no record of contact.”35 Humphrey McQueen, Tom Roberts (Sydney: Pan Macmillian, 1996), 293. McRae’s drawings in pen and ink describe various cultural and social practices, including ceremony, hunting, and contact with European settler-colonials and Chinese prospectors. Often working in notebooks and sketchbooks, his records of Aboriginal engagement with the land, such as stalking emus, fishing, and hunting birds, are set in stark silhouette against pale paper. In Fishing, Emu Hunting (1890s), a possum sits on the branch of a tree overlooking four men hunting emus (fig. 4). McRae depicts the hunt in action, with three men holding empty spear-throwers, having already speared the emus, and one man about to throw his spear. The men also hold bushy sprays as hunting camouflage. Above them is a separate vignette of a man in a canoe standing poised to spear a fish. In Victorian Blacks—Melbourne Tribe Holding Corroboree after Seeing Ships for the First Time (1890s), another possum sits in the fork of a single tree, while men of the Kulin Nation painted in geometric body designs perform a corroboree.36 For further information on McRae’s depictions of ceremony and body-paint design, see Jones, “Murruwaygu,” 218–19. In both drawings the landscape itself remains largely unworked and only indicated by brief, vigorous mark-making.37 Judith Ryan, “Tommy McRae’s Sketchbooks,” Art Journal 42 (June 2, 2014), https://bit.ly/2DZUefn. Jones maintains that the work of both McRae and Barak holds deep cultural knowledge and is a means through which each artist “actively resists colonisation and the annihilation of their cultural life.”38 Jones, “Murruwaygu,” 228. See also Andrew Sayers, Aboriginal Artists of the Nineteenth Century (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1994).

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Description: Fishing, Emu Hunting by McRae, Tommy

Fig. 4. Tommy McRae, Fishing, Emu Hunting, 1890s. Drawing in pen and iron-gall ink, page from sketchbook, 23.8 × 36 cm (sheet). National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. Purchased 1994.

ROBERTS’S “SERIES OF ABORIGINAL STUDIES AND TYPES”

While there is uncertainty surrounding Roberts’s meeting with McRae, there are records of his engagement with Aboriginal people at Collendina Station such as his portrait Gubbie Wellington—One of the Last Blacks of Corowa (1889).39 “Victorian Artists’ Society,” Argus, April 5 1890, 6. The name given to the sitter is an anglicization, likely to have been an imposed nickname. “Gubba” or “gub” is used as a term for “white man” in southeastern Australia.40 Ian G. Malcolm, Australian Aboriginal English: Change and Continuity in an Adopted Language (Boston: De Gruyter, 2018), 180. The reverse of the canvas bears the inscription in Roberts’s hand: “Last of the Murray River Tribe(s). Painted at Mr Henry Hay’s Station—Collendina Nov. 1889.”41 Helen Topliss, Tom Roberts 1856–1931: A Catalogue raisonné (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1985), 1:116. Exhibited in the Victorian Artists’ Society winter exhibition in March 1890, it is the earliest portrait of an Indigenous person by the artist. Roberts, working independently of any government patronage or encouragement, painted at least thirteen portraits and group scenes of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, eight of which were exhibited as a “Series of Aboriginal Studies and Types.” Completed across New South Wales and farther north on Cape York peninsula and the Torres Strait Islands, they form a record of a people that Roberts believed were “dying out.”42 This was a commonly held view among non-Indigenous Australians during this period. See Angela Woollacott, “‘All That Is the Empire, I Told Myself’: Australian Women’s Voyages ‘Home’ and the Articulation of Colonial Whiteness,” American Historical Review 102, no. 4 (October 1997): 1017–18; see also Leigh Astbury, Sunlight and Shadow: Australian Impressionist Painters 1880–1900 (Rushcutters Bay: Bay, 1989), 198.

In a 1926 newspaper article, Roberts discussed the difference in the public’s appreciation for “fine paintings, inspired by the beauty of our country” between the last decades of the nineteenth century and the present. He recalled being asked if he had ever painted Aboriginal people, responding: “I painted one in the Riverina, one in Sydney, and several in Queensland. I thought they would have been an interesting record of a passing race. The one in the Sydney gallery [Art Gallery of New South Wales] was the only one which was bought: the rest are lost, and I do not know where they are.”43 Tom Roberts, “Then and Now: Changes in Art,” Daily Telegraph, June 8, 1926, 11. That these portraits were deemed lost by the artist underscores his belief that while this interest in the “passing race” was more apparent by the 1920s, at the time they were painted, Australia’s cultural institutions were not actively collecting the material. The idea of a “passing race” formed part of the colonial project of regulation, segregation, removal, and eradication that reached into the twentieth century.44 See Museum of Australian Democracy, “Aboriginal Protection Act 1869 (Vic),” https://bit.ly/30C6Zo2 and, https://bit.ly/2CoTr7B. “This document made Victoria the first Colony to enact a comprehensive scheme to regulate the lives of Aboriginal people. This Act gave powers to the Board for the Protection of Aborigines which subsequently developed into an extraordinary level of control of people’s lives including regulation of residence, employment, marriage, social life and other aspects of daily life.” See also Greg Lehman, “Regarding the Savages,” in The National Picture: The Art of Tasmania’s Black War, ed. Tim Bonyhady and Greg Lehman (Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 2018), 23–70. Framed by the ideas of biological evolution and natural selection that held currency at the time, frontier violence and the introduction of diseases by colonizers were often characterized as part of the “survival of the fittest.” State governments and religious orders that oversaw Australian missions assumed the inevitability of Indigenous people “dying out,” seeing their role as “smoothing the dying pillow.”45 See Bringing Them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families (Sydney: Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, 1997), 23, https://bit.ly/2CoYh4M. While there are few sources that provide insight into the views held by Roberts and his fellow Australian impressionist painters, it is likely that his understanding of Aboriginal people by the 1920s was not dissimilar to the position he took during the 1890s as he created this “record.”46 Roberts, “Then and Now,” 11. Similarly, in 1921 Streeton pronounced the extinction of certain groups of Aboriginal people in a public lecture, declaring, “All that remained of knowledge of the dead tribes of Australian Aborigines was furnished by their artists, who used flints and stones to do their carving.”47 Arthur Streeton quoted in “An Artist on Art. Mr. Arthur Streeton’s First Lecture,” Register, July 29, 1921, 8.

Throughout the late nineteenth century, popular definitions of portraiture not only required a likeness, but also, even more fundamentally, presupposed the portrayal of individual identity.48 See Beth Fowkes Tobin, Picturing Imperial Power: Colonial Subjects in Eighteenth-Century British Painting (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999); and Tim Bonyhady and Andrew Sayers, eds., Heads of the People: A Portrait of Colonial Australia (Canberra: National Portrait Gallery, 2000). During a period when the myth of white superiority and advancement was ever present in the visual culture of non-Indigenous Australia, Roberts’s portraits of Indigenous peoples were read by a non-Indigenous public as “types”—signifiers of racial demise rather than as individuals. In an 1892 exhibition review, an unnamed woman writer in Warrang/Sydney noted two portraits purchased by the trustees for the National Art Gallery of New South Wales (the first paintings by Roberts to enter a public collection): Aboriginal Head—Charlie Turner (1892; fig. 5), listed as “Head of an Aboriginal,” and Eileen. While the latter was described by the reviewer as “the embodiment of graceful womanhood; the features are delicate and refined, the coloring natural, and the poise of the head most graceful,” the portrait of Charlie Turner was read through the prominent mythology of the time. She applauded the “insight of the painter,” who had conveyed “depth of expression that brings before us the whole pathos of a dying race, as well as individual misery of the human outcast.”49 “Lady’s Letter from Sydney,” Leader, September 24, 1892, 30. This elegiac tone appeared in other descriptions of Aboriginal men and women by non-Indigenous commentators. In 1897 Frances Fraser similarly described artist William Barak as having “quite the most pathetic look in his eyes I ever saw. The whole history of the race seems written in those faded, brown eyes—a dignified sorrow, the dim memory of a bygone life of wild freedom, an eye alert for danger, ready to command, sweeping a far horizon . . . his look was directed far beyond me, and his thoughts seemed to wander in far-off years.”50 Frances Fraser, “A King at Coranderrk,” Australasian, December 25, 1897, 25. The widely held theory that it was possible to identify and isolate ethnic types framed complex ideas surrounding national character that emerged during the age of empire. Based on developments in ethnographic and anthropological study and natural history, ethnic types were recognized through physical and racial, as well as moral and social, characteristics.51 See W. E. H. Stanner, W. E. H. Stanner: The Dreaming and Other Essays (Collingwood, Victoria: Black Inc. Agenda, 2009); Geoff Gray, A Cautious Silence: The Politics of Australian Anthropology (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies, 2007); A. P. Elkin, “R. H. Mathews: His Contribution to Aboriginal Studies,” Oceania 46, no. 1 (September 1975): 1–24. References to types were common in literature and the popular press and were also employed to define people from non-Indigenous cultures and societies. Jeanette Hoorn notes that they appeared in relation to Australian “white men, especially bush workers,” and Roberts created a bush type who populated scenes such as A Break Away!.52 Jeanette Hoorn, Australian Pastoral: The Making of a White Landscape (Fremantle: Fremantle, 2007), 177. Paintings, illustrations, and photographs became vehicles for the dissemination of the non-Indigenous belief in racial hierarchies, and were a means by which information on different cultures could be documented and recorded. Art reflected and facilitated the establishment of racial ideas, as well as reiterating aspects of social and cultural order.

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Description: Aboriginal Head—Charlie Turner by Roberts, Tom

Fig. 5. Tom Roberts, Aboriginal Head—Charlie Turner, 1892. Oil on canvas on paperboard, 39.4 × 29.8 cm. Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney. Purchased 1892.

In the decades leading up to the Federation of Australia, portraiture reinforced the conception of a national type consisting of strong, healthy, and virile young Anglo-Celtic men and women. Roberts was integral to this process. Among the many commissioned society portraits he completed in the 1880s and 1890s was a three-quarter-length portrait of a youthful, raven-haired woman wearing a sumptuous pink gown with rich contrasting fabric at the sleeves, collar, and bustle.53 Anna Gray et al., Face: Australian Portraits 1880–1960 (Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 2010), 52. This portrait, An Australian Native (1888), was described by McQueen as Roberts’s “assertion of the vitality of the coming Australian race”—a reading predicated on the artist’s populist belief in the fall of the “dying race” of Aboriginal people.54 Humphrey McQueen, “An Association of Natives,” in Bonyhady and Sayers, Heads of the People, 104. Although the portrait itself is very much that of an individual, conveying a distinct likeness and character, the generality of the title suggests Roberts considered his subject as a type—a native-born Australian of Anglo-Celtic origin.

The subject of An Australian Native has been identified as the seventeen-year-old contralto Ada Crossley.55 Gray et al., Face: Australian Portraits, 52. Crossley referred to herself as “a regular bush youngster,” and her identification as an “Australian native” relates to broader mythologies in literature, art, and journalism that tied an emerging Australian identity with the bush.56 Steve Rattle, “Ada Crossley: The Forgotten Australian Contralto,” On Stage, Theatre Heritage Australia, 10, no. 3 (Winter 2009): 24; “Miss Ada Crossley,” Evening Post, November 18, 1903, 5. While “native” is an offensive label for Australia’s Indigenous people, by the end of the nineteenth century, the term had been commandeered by colonists to denote those Australian-born of Anglo-Celtic descent. These were the new “natives.” The Australian Natives’ Association was founded in Narrm/Melbourne in 1871 and lobbied for the political union of Australia’s colonies at the time of federation. In 1889 Table Talk described Streeton as “native-born.”57 “Art and Artists,” Table Talk, July 26 1889, 7. Roberts’s explorations of that which constituted a “type” continued throughout the following decade as he turned to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people as subjects for noncommissioned portraits. The highly finished An Australian Native presents a significant counterpoint to these later works, suggesting that the artist employed what Hoorn has described as “different styles of painting for different races.”58 Hoorn, Australian Pastoral, 177. Across Roberts’s oeuvre, this is also a difference between commissioned portraits, often finished in the studio, and those portraits worked in situ.

“GOING NORTH”: ROBERTS’S JOURNEY TO THE TORRES STRAIT

During key periods throughout the 1890s, Roberts escaped the confines of the city and its steady market of commissioned portraits to fashion himself as an amateur ethnographer, recording the cultural practices of Indigenous people through his art, writing, and collecting. A crewmember aboard the ketch sailboat Jessie, Roberts set sail from Warrang/Sydney in July 1892 on the journey to Cape York and the Torres Strait in Far North Queensland. He completed several portraits and figure studies during this trip, along with a drawing in pencil of a family group, Study of Natives (c. 1892), and the oil painting Indigenous Gathering, Far North Queensland (1892). A black-and-white painting in watercolor and graphite, Group of Six Men Performing a Dance in a Ceremony . . . on Murray Island, Torres Strait (1892), is a rare nineteenth-century depiction of dance from the Torres Strait (fig. 6). Roberts had previously worked in black and white, producing illustrations for print in the 1880s. It is possible he had intended the work to accompany his writings about the journey that would be published in the Argus in 1892, though the illustration was not reproduced.

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Description: Group of Six Men Performing in a Dance Ceremony, Murray Island, Torres Strait by...

Fig. 6. Tom Roberts, Group of Six Men Performing a Dance in a Ceremony, Wearing Plant Fiber Skirts, and Each Wearing a Different Type of Mask (One Appears to Be Fish-Shaped, Another a Human Face), and Holding a Dance Ornament, on Murray Island, Torres Strait, 1892. Watercolor and graphite on paper, 33.1 × 48.4 cm. British Museum, London. Donated by Tom Roberts 1922.

In Group of Six Men, Roberts captures the drama of a dance performed at night through the white glow of fire, setting the row of men in near silhouette. Movement is expressed in whorled strokes that fall from the dancers’ waists and the arrested energy of lifted legs and torsos angled forward. As in his painting of A Break Away!, Roberts’s translation of action across the canvas may have been influenced in part by a knowledge of Eadweard Muybridge’s series of time-lapse photographs of people and animals in motion. Roberts, who had also worked in photographic portrait studios during the 1880s, had attended a lecture on Muybridge’s work at the Buonarotti Club in Narrm/Melbourne in September 1886.59 Gael Newton, “A Photo-Literate Generation,” in Gray, Tom Roberts, 67–71. In both works, Roberts echoes a photographic aesthetic of repeating forms to create a decentred rhythm, blurring at the verge.

It is likely the dance depicted is the one described by Roberts in the essay “Going North.”60 While an 1892 exhibition reviewer noted “a sketch of an aboriginal dance jotted down at Somerset Island,” it is more likely that the dance depicted is the one described in the four-part essay published in the Argus, “Going North.” Sydney Morning Herald, November 1, 1892, 4. The “kup’ kup’—a great dance partly in our honour and on account of the weddings, and still more for their own delight” is performed by men: “heads with the white masks move fish like from one side to the other. . . . Sometimes the gestures seem to be an imitation of the action of diving or hunting, or fighting, but nearly all like nothing one is familiar with. The firelight rises and falls, the dancers come and disappear, always with different step and changing time, the dark skins begin to shine and the muscles show out in clear lines as then legs move to the quick time.”61 Tom Roberts, “Going North III,” Argus, December 3, 1892, 13. It is not uncommon for people from across the Torres Strait to come together for ceremony and celebration, and the dance on Mer/Murray Island would have provided Roberts with the opportunity to engage with people from islands farther out across the archipelago.

In three full-length, black-and-white watercolor figure studies, donated to the British Museum by Roberts in 1922, the artist recorded ceremonial costumes and headdresses from Nagi/Mount Ernest Island and Mori/Mount Adolphus Island.62 While there is little information surrounding Roberts’s donation of the four watercolors to the British Museum, it is interesting to consider the decision to place the works in a museum collection, and thus the positioning of them as ethnographic material alongside a group of seventeen objects collected in the Torres Strait. In the portrait of Genai, the Kulkagal man from Nagir Island stands in half-profile (fig. 7). He wears a skirt and armband made from “narrow strips of the Pandanus” and holds a long spear and club.63 See a similar description of a man in costume in Tom Roberts, “Going North II,” Argus, November 19, 1892, 4. The headdress represents a crocodile’s head, connecting the dancer to the important totemic animal.64 A similar example of a crocodile mask, collected from Mer Island, is held in the Australian Museum. See Stan Florek, “Crocodile Mask from the Torres Strait,” Australian Museum, https://bit.ly/3heBRSq. Roberts’s concern for visual detail is echoed in “Going North,” in which the artist includes an extended description of another man in costume wearing what is likely a Dhari headdress:

Round his waist is a light coloured waistcloth, which has now taken the place of the petticoat of narrow strips of the Pandanus; white anklets show out on the dark legs. On the upper arm is the mat armlet sewn with small cowries, and into it at the back is stuck a bunch of foliage. . . . The very striking part of the dress is the Greek Omega-like head piece frilling on the head, leaving the face exposed. It consists of a light flat framework bound with coloured fibres, like an inverted capital U turned upside-down.65 Roberts, “Going North II,” 4. For an example of a Dhari headdress, see Queensland Museum, “Dhari,” https://bit.ly/2WElhDB.

Roberts was interested in the variety of ethnic groups he encountered on this journey, writing that he had seen “something of this extra-littoral Australia, whose inhabitants, speaking more or less different languages and differing more in type from the mainlanders as the islands lie further south.”66 Roberts, “Going North II,” 4.

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Description: Portrait of Genai, a 16 year old Kulkalgal man from Nagi, Mount Ernest Island,...

Fig. 7. Tom Roberts, Portrait of Genai, a 26-Year-Old Kulkalgal Man from Nagi (Mount Ernest Island), Torres Strait, Wearing a Ceremonial Costume Consisting of a Plant Fiber Skirt, a Fish-Shaped Mask Made from Bark Cloth, and Holding a Spear and Club, 1892. Watercolor and graphite on paper, 27.3 × 17.8 cm. British Museum, London. Donated by Tom Roberts 1922.

While there is little record of Roberts’s specific ideas on race, his friendship with anthropologist Baldwin Spencer is notable. Spencer accompanied the 1894 Horn expedition to the Country of the Arrernte and Luritja people, the first major scientific expedition to central Australia, and he undertook anthropological field trips to central and northern Australia to research and photograph Aboriginal communities. Roberts was commissioned by Spencer to paint Alfred William Howitt, co-author of the major work Kamilaroi and Kurnai (1879), which had a significant impact on modern anthropology in Australia, and author of The Native Tribes of South East Australia (1904), one of the only contemporaneous scientific studies of central Australian Aboriginal people. There are few sources that indicate whether Roberts attended lectures or followed contemporary anthropological debates, though he cites “Professor Haddon’s Folk-lore of the Torres Straits.”67 Roberts, “Going North II,” 4. See Alfred C. Haddon, The Ethnography of the Western Tribe of Torres Straits (London: Harrison, 1890). Roberts’s exposure to Spencer and Howitt may have therefore influenced his position on the “passing race.” Both held a general understanding of Aboriginal people as having significant cultural and social structures, yet being unable to survive the impact of inevitable colonial progress.

The extent of Spencer’s and Howitt’s influence on Roberts’s engagement with the field of social anthropology in Australia may have been curbed by the ethnographic inclinations of an artist concerned primarily with the materiality of culture. It is likely Roberts attended or was aware of local intercolonial expositions and the 1888 Centennial International exhibition, which included ethnographic displays of Aboriginal art and objects. In 1891 Roberts decorated his studio with “spears, clubs, boomerangs” alongside other items of exotica and militaria.68 The “spears, clubs, boomerangs” were likely brought back to Narrm/Melbourne from the Riverina region. McQueen, Tom Roberts, 341. In 1922 Roberts donated to the British Museum a group of seventeen objects collected from the Torres Strait, including combs, ear ornaments, and needles for making fishnets. References to such objects appear in “Going North,” and the British Museum has identified a majority of them as coming from Mer/Murray Island. In June 1906 the Catholic Press, reporting on “Australians in London,” described Roberts’s South Kensington studio as decorated with portieres, Persian rugs, portraits, and Australian landscape paintings: “There is also a collection of South Sea curios which Mr. Roberts collected in Australia. . . . A quaint hat-stand is in one corner, and is no other than a South Sea idol.”69 “Amongst the Australians in London,” Catholic Press, June 7, 1906, 8. That these objects and the black-and-white watercolors remained in the artists’ possession for thirty years, moving with him from Australia to England, suggests the value he placed on the documentation of cultural practice and these examples of material culture from the Torres Strait. The use of an “idol” as a hatstand, however, tempers this argument.

THE PORTRAIT OF LAHNDRIGAN PAINTED AT YULGILBAR STATION

In 1894 Roberts traveled to Yulgilbar Station on the Clarence River in northern New South Wales to commence work on a commissioned portrait of settler and station owner Edward Ogilvie. While staying at the property he also painted Aboriginal Woman (Maria, Yulgilbar) (1895), a portrait of Lahndrigan, a Wahlubal woman of the Bunjalung Nation, also known by the European name Maria Charles (née Little) (fig. 8).70 See Jeanette Hoorn, “Aboriginal Woman (Mariah, Yulgilbar),” in Gray, Tom Roberts, 219. For further information on the use of English names, see Jane Simpson, “Personal Names,” in History in Portraits: Biographies of Nineteenth-Century South Australian People, ed. Jane Simpson and Luise Hercus, Aboriginal History Monograph 6 (Sydney: Southwood, 1998), 221–29. Looking over a bare shoulder in half profile, her sensitively modeled features are brought into focus by a shallow backdrop of warm, creamy yellows. The horizontal grain of the canvas becomes more apparent in areas around the mouth and nose, where thinly applied paint allows the artist to navigate subtle variations in the tonal range of her skin. Lahndrigan worked in the laundry at Yulgilbar Station, one of a number of Bunjalung people from the Baryulgil community indentured as stockmen and laborers on the vast pastoral property. Yet Lahndrigan was strong in her culture, her “first language was the Wehlabul dialect of the Bundjalung language, and she was known to sing when the Wehlabul clans would hold their corroborees.”71 John Patten, “Lahndrigan,” Patten: Genealogy, August 17, 2009, https://bit.ly/2WGic64. Note there are variations in the spelling of “Wahlubal”/“Wehlabul.” When the portrait was exhibited at the Society of Artists in Warrang/Sydney as “Maria, Yulgilbar” in September 1895, a critic, providing an overview of the offerings, briefly described the portrait of “an aboriginal” as a “clever likeness.”72 “Society of Artists,” Evening News, September 27, 1895, 3. Another anonymous reviewer noted, “In portraiture, the artists of the new society show us something better than we have seen before . . . Tom Roberts, with Maria Yulgillah [sic], claiming, perhaps, first place.”73 “The Art Society’s Exhibitions,” Australian Star, September 27, 1895, 6.

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Description: Aboriginal Woman (Maria, Yulgilbar) by Roberts, Tom

Fig. 8. Tom Roberts, Aboriginal Woman (Maria, Yulgilbar), 1895. Oil on canvas, 38 × 34.5 cm. State Library of New South Wales, Sydney. Presented by Sir William Dixson, March 1943.

A preparatory pencil drawing for Aboriginal Woman (Maria, Yulgilbar) is inscribed with Roberts’s phonetic transcription of Wahlubal words.74 Topliss, Tom Roberts 1856–1931, 135. At the time of British invasion in 1788, more than 250 Indigenous Australian languages were spoken, with many dialects within each language group. Many of these languages were severely impacted by the forced displacement and dispossession of Aboriginal people from their lands and culture. While some dialects of Bunjalung were active up to the 1950s and the Wahlubal dialect is now in resurgence, in the 1890s Aboriginal languages were “actively suppressed” by governments, schools, and missions across Australia.75 Muurrbay Aboriginal Language and Culture Co-Operative, “Bundjalong,” https://bit.ly/2WJ0oal; see also Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, “Indigenous Australian Languages,” https://bit.ly/3jm9vHT; and Common Ground, “Indigenous Languages,” https://bit.ly/39i4GdV. Roberts’s recording of Bundjalung language reveals an engagement with Lahndrigan that went beyond that of observer/subject. The words are testament to their interaction. In “Going North” Roberts also included phonetic transcriptions of language from the Torres Strait Islands such as “gutta-percha baby” and “Debele kup’ kup’” (good dance).76 Roberts, “Going North II,” 4. The recording of language is not known to have been undertaken by Roberts’s non-Indigenous artist contemporaries.77 The closest engagement with language by late nineteenth-century non-Indigenous artists appears in the use of Kriol or Pidgin English in titles of works by B. E. Minns and Julian Ashton, such as Ashton’s Aboriginal Family Group (c. 1886), formerly exhibited as Give Blackfellow Tobacco Boss and Gib It Bacca Boss.

Roberts often recorded details about the Indigenous people he painted, including information on the front of the canvas or paper to form part of the work. This captioning may be read as part of a process of classification such as those applied in ethnography, with its documentation deemed to be of historic value. It also recalls inscriptions made by artists working in Australia from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century who were attached to European voyages and scientific expeditions, such a Sydney Parkinson and Ludwig Becker. Inscribed on a portrait of an Aboriginal woman he painted in 1892 while on his way to the Torres Strait is: “A young married lubra [offensive settler word for Aboriginal woman] / painted at Mr Jardine’s / place in Somerset / Cape Yorke [sic].” On the three Torres Strait figure studies, he recorded the name and age of each man, the island he lived on, and in one case his clan: “Tamari [?] / native of / Morè / (mt. Adolphus / age. 28”; “Tetera / naghir / 26”; and ““Genai” /—Naghir island/ (mount Ernest / tribe / Kulkalaig / age 26.” Two years later, on the portrait Peanahgo Billipimbah: Billie Millera (1894), Roberts includes the extensive explanation: “Billie Millera / was a grown man / in 46 when Ed. Oglivie / of Yulgilbar was the / first white to / see him.” Margaret Maynard notes that such inscriptions were common throughout the nineteenth century and were “clearly done for historical purposes.”78 Margaret Maynard, “Projections of Melancholy,” in Seeing the First Australians, ed. Ian Donaldson and Tasmin Donaldson (Sydney: George Allen and Unwin, 1985), 102. This desire to document, record, and capture does not appear on Roberts’s portraits of non-Indigenous people.

ROBERTS’S “FAMILIAR FACES AND FIGURES”

Throughout the 1890s, Roberts painted a series of twenty-three informal, full-length, standing portraits of men, entitled “Familiar Faces and Figures.” He did this with the aim of creating a representative gallery of notable non-Indigenous Australian types. While the paintings and works on paper depicting Indigenous people were described by the artist as documents of a “passing race,” the fashionable identities of Warrang/Sydney and Narrm/Melbourne were constructed as representatives of the new Australia on the eve of federation.79 Roberts, “Then and Now,” 11. The modestly sized panels portray musicians, theater personalities, a pastoralist, business and military men, and politicians. They reveal Roberts’s dedication to producing a record of Australian character as a complement to his iconic narrative paintings of masculine labor.80 See L. Astbury, Sunlight and Shadow, 194–97; Terry Smith, Transformations in Australian Art: The Nineteenth Century—Landscape, Colony and Nations (Sydney: Craftsman House, 2002), 1:66–106.

In 1896 part of the series hung as a group in the artist’s studio in Warrang/Sydney, and twenty-three panels were exhibited as a set in Warrang/Sydney in 1900.81 D. J. Quinn, “Artists and Artistic Taste in Australasia,” Review of Reviews (November 20, 1896): 514. Positioned as a response to the sociopolitical and cultural energy of the period, they formed part of the artist’s strategy of promoting “home grown” culture and reveal the British-born artist’s pride in his adopted country.82 Angus Trumble, “Colony and Capital in Australian Impressionist Portraiture,” in Lane, Australian Impressionism, 181–99. The group shared similarities with portraits by Whistler and Édouard Manet and the caricatures of Leslie Ward. Roberts’s ambition that the works form a national gallery of representative figures likely stemmed from the twelve “Hall of Fame” portraits by George Frederic Watts shown at Narrm/Melbourne’s Centennial International exhibition over the summer of 1888 to 1889. Roberts’s portraits project spontaneity, with lively brushstrokes of often thinly applied pigment leaving the wood grain of the panel to show through as the mid-tone. The neutral background also produced a floating effect, whereby the figures seem to exist within their own space. Painted on pine, Professor G. W. L. Marshall Hall (1899) was the last of the series (fig. 9). Roberts’s rich characterization of his friend is achieved in lightly worked modeling. The composer and former chair of music at the University of Melbourne stands with his legs set wide and fisted hands at his hips, looking directly out to the viewer with cocked assurance. When examined alongside Roberts’s three figure studies of men from the Torres Strait, the artist’s intentions are amplified. There are clear differences in both approach and execution.

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Description: Professor G. W. L. Marshall Hall by Roberts, Tom

Fig. 9. Tom Roberts, Professor G. W. L. Marshall Hall, 1899. Oil on pine panel, 61 × 33.7 cm. Australian Performing Art Collection, Arts Centre Melbourne. Purchased 1980.

While the portraits of Indigenous peoples positioned Roberts as an amateur ethnographer, the “Familiar Faces and Figures” were motivated by the idea of creating a gallery of notable non-Indigenous Australians to be enjoyed and reflected upon by generations of colonial settlers to come. The “Familiar Faces and Figures” were understood by critics to be portraits of recognizable Australians, whereas the portraits of Indigenous people were so removed from their cultural and geographical context that when they were exhibited at various times in Warrang/Sydney and Narrm/Melbourne, neither critics nor the public responded to them as individual people. When both groups were exhibited in 1900 at the Society of Artists in Warrang/Sydney, a reviewer for the Sydney Morning Herald wrote that “Mr Roberts is offering at 100 guineas a collection of 23 character paintings on panels.” These paintings of “well-known people,” many of whom were listed in the article, were described as “full of life and individuality.” The focus given to this series contrasts with the brief comment that follows: “Many aboriginal heads should also be noted.”83 “Sale of Mr. Roberts’s Paintings,” Sydney Morning Herald, November 14, 1900, 5. A critic for the Daily Telegraph noted: “A series of character sketches of Australian notabilities should find a ready purchaser from among those who realise how this particular class of work grows in value as an artistic asset with the passage of the years; and for the same reason, if for no other, the small series of portraits of aborigines should be bought. There are but few blacks left, and still fewer artists who can paint them well.” “Mr. Tom Roberts’ Pictures,” Daily Telegraph, November 14, 1900, 9. For the critic, the Indigenous subjects were an afterthought.

ALWAYS WAS, ALWAYS WILL BE

Roberts maintained that “by making art the perfect expression of one time and one place, it becomes art for all times and all places.”84 Roberts, “Mr. Tom Roberts’s Picture ‘Sheep-Shearing,’” 10. His narrative paintings were thus proffered as universalized histories of empire. Works such as his A Break Away! and Streeton’s Golden Summer, Eaglemont, remain iconic declarations of Australian nationhood and settler colonial progress at a time when sheep farming represented 60 percent of the economy. Yet these “empty” landscapes were witness to the violence of the colonial frontier, to the dispossession of Aboriginal people, to the loss of community, culture, and language. In painting the pastoral landscape in drought, absent of indigenous fauna, these artists capture the devastation wrought on a land once carefully managed by Aboriginal people since time immemorial.

Read alongside his major narrative paintings, Roberts’s two series of portraits form part of the same histories that bolstered the mythology of a new Australia on the cusp of federation. The reception of Roberts’s portraits of Indigenous people reinforced their role as memorials to a “dying race” within the colonial project, and his recording of language and ceremony was in line with this racial positioning. The colonial project is ongoing and needs to be acknowledged in the reading of Australian art history. To disrupt the hold of settler colonial images as speaking for “all times and all places,” the powerful agency of Indigenous people must be recognized. This challenge is found in the work of senior cultural men William Barak and Tommy McRae. It is in the Wehlabul words spoken by Lahndrigan, a Bunjalung woman who remained strong in her culture. It is in the performance of ceremony on the Torres Strait, and in the land of the Bangerang people on which Roberts stood as he made those first pencil drawings for A Break Away!. These are assertions of sovereignty and ongoing cultural knowledge and practice on Country. Always Was, Always Will Be.85 “Always was, always will be Aboriginal land” is an assertion of Australian Indigenous sovereignty and a statement of acknowledgment and recognition that Indigenous people have occupied and cared for Australia since time immemorial (over sixty-five thousand years). See Jackie Huggins, “Always Was Always Will Be,” Australian Historical Studies 25, no. 100 (1993): 459–64. “Always was, always will be” was set by the National Aboriginal and Islanders Day Observance Committee as the 2020 theme for NAIDOC week. See NAIDOC.org, “2020 Theme,” https://bit.ly/2WH450q.

1 “Bangerang” has various spellings in English, and this is the version used by the Yorta Yorta National Aboriginal Corporation. The Bangerang people occupied lands in Victoria and New South Wales that included the region known as Corowa since European settlement. »

2 “A pastoral lease is a title issued for the lease of an area of Crown land to use for the limited purpose of grazing of stock and associated activities.” See Australian Trade and Investment Commission, “Land Tenure,” www.austrade.gov.au/land-tenure/Land-tenure/pastoral-leases. »

3 See Rowan Nicholason, “Yes, This Continent Was Invaded in 1788—An International Law Expert Explains,” The Conversation, January 27, 2020, https://bit.ly/3fOFEpf. »

4 For debates concerning terminology, see Gerard Vaughan, “Some Reflections on Defining Australian Impressionism,” in Australian Impressionism, ed. Terence Lane (Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2007), 16–19; and Ann Galbally, “National Life and Landscape: The Heidelberg School as Mythmaker 1880–1905,” in The Cambridge Companion to Australian Art, ed. Jaynie Anderson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 71–83. »

5 See Gerard Vaughan, “Director’s Foreword,” in Tom Roberts, ed. Anne Gray (Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 2015), 8–9; Gabriele Finaldi, “Director’s Foreword,” in Australia’s Impressionists, ed. Christopher Riopelle (London: National Gallery, 2016), 7. »

6 William Moore, “Tom Roberts’ Service to Australian Art: The Man Who Blazed the Track,” Sydney Mail, September 30, 1931, 10. »

7 Narrm/Melbourne was established by colonists on land taken from the Boon Wurrung and Woiwurrung (Wurundjeri) peoples of the Kulin Nation. Warrang/Sydney was established by colonists on land taken from the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. »

8 “The Art of Arthur Streeton,” Sydney Morning Herald, November 22, 1919, 9. »

9 See David Hansen, “National Naturalism,” in Lane, Australian Impressionism, 281–87; and Sarah Thomas, “Creating a National Identity: Australia’s Impressionist Landscapes,” in Riopelle, Australia’s Impressionists, 43–49. »

10 The Australian impressionists championed James McNeill Whistler, who developed a unique form of impressionism based on harmonious and evocative arrangements of broad areas of color and tone. Roberts was responsive to his use of tonal contrasts and decorative details derived from Japanese art. Roberts also employed musical titles, as in Allegro con brio, Bourke St. W. (1886) and Andante (c. 1889). This was likely in reference to Whistler’s common use of titles alluding to music. »

11 Associated with the National Gallery of Victoria, the National Gallery of Victoria Art School was a private fine arts college founded in 1867. Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation are custodians of the area now known as Melbourne and its surrounds. In 1863 Wurundjeri people, including artist William Barak, were moved to Coranderrk Station near Healesville and forcibly resettled off their lands. »

12 James Stuart MacDonald, “Arthur Streeton,” Art in Australia 3, no. 40 (October 15, 1931): 19. »

13 Tom Roberts, “Mr. Tom Roberts’s Picture, ‘Sheep-Shearing.’ To the editor of the Argus,” Argus, July 4, 1890, 10. »

14 “Mr. Tom Roberts’ New Picture,” Table Talk, July 17, 1891, 16. »

15 “Mr. Tom Roberts’ New Picture.” »

16 Bruce Pascoe is a Bunurong, Yuin, and Tasmanian Aboriginal scholar. See Bruce Pascoe, Dark Emu: Black Seeds—Agriculture or Accident? (Broome: Magabala, 2014); and Bill Gammage, The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2012). »

17 Bruce Pascoe quoted in Lorena Allam, “Dark Emu’s Infinite Potential: ‘Our Kids Have Grown Up in a Fog about the History of the Land,’” Guardian, May 24, 2019, https://bit.ly/3fQ3y3t. »

18 Virginia Spate, “Where the Sun Never Set: Tom Roberts and the British Empire,” in Tom Roberts, ed. Ron Radford (Adelaide: Art Gallery of South Australia, 1995), 80. »

19 “Mr. Tom Roberts’ New Picture.” »

20 James Smith, “An Impressionist Exhibition,” Argus, August 17, 1889, 10. »

21 Tom Roberts, Charles Conder, and Arthur Streeton, “Concerning ‘Impressions’ in Painting: To the Editor of the Argus,” Argus, September 3, 1889, 7. »

22 Jane Clark and Bridget Whitelaw, Golden Summers: Heidelberg and Beyond (Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 1985), 104–5. »

23 “Mr. Arthur Streeton,” Table Talk, May 10, 1889, 6. »

24 Ancestral memory is an Indigenous history of connection to Country (as distinguished from non-Indigenous understandings of country/place/landscape), in this case relating to the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. It is knowledge passed from generation to generation, often through aural traditions such as storytelling and song. It encompasses the ongoing practice of culture through story, ceremony, and art, and Indigenous agriculture and aquaculture practiced since time immemorial. For example, the farming of eels and murnong yams and the construction of eel traps and yam-digging tools before European invasion forms part of the ancestral memory of this region. See City of Darebin, “The Story of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Darebin,” https://bit.ly/2CBrxoT. See also Shaun Canning and Frances Thiele, Indigenous Cultural Heritage and History within the Metropolitan Melbourne Investigation Area (Melbourne: Australian Cultural Heritage Management, 2010). »

25 See Koori History, “Modified Trees (Scar Trees),” March 7, 2016, https://bit.ly/32E7bG1. »

26 Gammage, Biggest Estate on Earth, 34. »

27 Gammage, Biggest Estate on Earth, 34. »

28 Edward M. Curr quoted in Gammage, Biggest Estate on Earth, 34. »

29 Arthur Steeton, letter to Tom Roberts, undated [early 1891], cited in Mary Eagle, The Oil Paintings of Arthur Streeton in the National Gallery of Australia (Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 1994), 26. See also Gammage, Biggest Estate on Earth, 34. »

30 William Barak quoted in Jonathan Jones, “Murruwaygu: Following in the Footsteps of Our Ancestors” (PhD diss, University of Technology, Sydney, 2018), 189; see also Judith Ryan, Carol Cooper, and Joy Murphy-Wandin, Remembering Barak (Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2003). »

31 By the end of the nineteenth century, Australia’s Indigenous population had been decimated by violence, disease, and dispossession from land and family resulting from colonization. Many surviving Aboriginal people were forcibly removed from their lands and made to live on missions or reserves. Australia was claimed to be terra nullius (no one’s land) by Lieutenant James Cook during his 1770 voyage around the coast of Australia. Following the invasion of Australia and the commencement of European settlement in 1788, the claim of terra nullius dismissed native title and Aboriginal sovereignty. The 1992 Mabo High Court decision overturned the doctrine of terra nullius in Australia, and was followed by the Native Title Act in 1993. See John Gardiner-Garden, “From Dispossession to Reconciliation,” Research Paper 27 1998–99 (Parliament of Australia, June 29, 1999). »

32 For further information on how colonial settlers responded to Australia’s indigenous animals, see Ken Gelder and Rachel Weaver, “Friday Essay: The Art of the Colonial Kangaroo Hunt,” The Conversation, August 31, 2018, https://bit.ly/30ww2Jp; Des Cowley and Brian Hubber, “Distinct Creation: Early European Images of Australian Animals,” La Trobe Journal, no. 66 (Spring 2000): 3–32; and Steven White, “British Colonialism, Australian Nationalism and the Law: Hierarchies of Wild Animal Protection,” Monash University Law Review 39, no. 2 (2013), https://bit.ly/2OFxCmG. »

33 For the impact of introduced species in Australia, see Pascoe, Dark Emu: Black Seeds. »

34 McRae was an Aboriginal artist who spoke Wiradjuri and was either of the Kwat Kwat people or the Wiradjuri Nation. Jones, “Murruwaygu,” 210–11. »

35 Humphrey McQueen, Tom Roberts (Sydney: Pan Macmillian, 1996), 293. »

36 For further information on McRae’s depictions of ceremony and body-paint design, see Jones, “Murruwaygu,” 218–19. »

37 Judith Ryan, “Tommy McRae’s Sketchbooks,” Art Journal 42 (June 2, 2014), https://bit.ly/2DZUefn. »

38 Jones, “Murruwaygu,” 228. See also Andrew Sayers, Aboriginal Artists of the Nineteenth Century (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1994). »

39 “Victorian Artists’ Society,” Argus, April 5 1890, 6. »

40 Ian G. Malcolm, Australian Aboriginal English: Change and Continuity in an Adopted Language (Boston: De Gruyter, 2018), 180. »

41 Helen Topliss, Tom Roberts 1856–1931: A Catalogue raisonné (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1985), 1:116. »

42 This was a commonly held view among non-Indigenous Australians during this period. See Angela Woollacott, “‘All That Is the Empire, I Told Myself’: Australian Women’s Voyages ‘Home’ and the Articulation of Colonial Whiteness,” American Historical Review 102, no. 4 (October 1997): 1017–18; see also Leigh Astbury, Sunlight and Shadow: Australian Impressionist Painters 1880–1900 (Rushcutters Bay: Bay, 1989), 198. »

43 Tom Roberts, “Then and Now: Changes in Art,” Daily Telegraph, June 8, 1926, 11. »

44 See Museum of Australian Democracy, “Aboriginal Protection Act 1869 (Vic),” https://bit.ly/30C6Zo2 and, https://bit.ly/2CoTr7B. “This document made Victoria the first Colony to enact a comprehensive scheme to regulate the lives of Aboriginal people. This Act gave powers to the Board for the Protection of Aborigines which subsequently developed into an extraordinary level of control of people’s lives including regulation of residence, employment, marriage, social life and other aspects of daily life.” See also Greg Lehman, “Regarding the Savages,” in The National Picture: The Art of Tasmania’s Black War, ed. Tim Bonyhady and Greg Lehman (Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 2018), 23–70. »

45 See Bringing Them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families (Sydney: Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, 1997), 23, https://bit.ly/2CoYh4M. »

46 Roberts, “Then and Now,” 11. »

47 Arthur Streeton quoted in “An Artist on Art. Mr. Arthur Streeton’s First Lecture,” Register, July 29, 1921, 8. »

48 See Beth Fowkes Tobin, Picturing Imperial Power: Colonial Subjects in Eighteenth-Century British Painting (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999); and Tim Bonyhady and Andrew Sayers, eds., Heads of the People: A Portrait of Colonial Australia (Canberra: National Portrait Gallery, 2000). »

49 “Lady’s Letter from Sydney,” Leader, September 24, 1892, 30. »

50 Frances Fraser, “A King at Coranderrk,” Australasian, December 25, 1897, 25. »

51 See W. E. H. Stanner, W. E. H. Stanner: The Dreaming and Other Essays (Collingwood, Victoria: Black Inc. Agenda, 2009); Geoff Gray, A Cautious Silence: The Politics of Australian Anthropology (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies, 2007); A. P. Elkin, “R. H. Mathews: His Contribution to Aboriginal Studies,” Oceania 46, no. 1 (September 1975): 1–24. »

52 Jeanette Hoorn, Australian Pastoral: The Making of a White Landscape (Fremantle: Fremantle, 2007), 177. »

53 Anna Gray et al., Face: Australian Portraits 1880–1960 (Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 2010), 52. »

54 Humphrey McQueen, “An Association of Natives,” in Bonyhady and Sayers, Heads of the People, 104. »

55 Gray et al., Face: Australian Portraits, 52. »

56 Steve Rattle, “Ada Crossley: The Forgotten Australian Contralto,” On Stage, Theatre Heritage Australia, 10, no. 3 (Winter 2009): 24; “Miss Ada Crossley,” Evening Post, November 18, 1903, 5. »

57 “Art and Artists,” Table Talk, July 26 1889, 7. »

58 Hoorn, Australian Pastoral, 177. »

59 Gael Newton, “A Photo-Literate Generation,” in Gray, Tom Roberts, 67–71. »

60 While an 1892 exhibition reviewer noted “a sketch of an aboriginal dance jotted down at Somerset Island,” it is more likely that the dance depicted is the one described in the four-part essay published in the Argus, “Going North.” Sydney Morning Herald, November 1, 1892, 4. »

61 Tom Roberts, “Going North III,” Argus, December 3, 1892, 13. »

62 While there is little information surrounding Roberts’s donation of the four watercolors to the British Museum, it is interesting to consider the decision to place the works in a museum collection, and thus the positioning of them as ethnographic material alongside a group of seventeen objects collected in the Torres Strait. »

63 See a similar description of a man in costume in Tom Roberts, “Going North II,” Argus, November 19, 1892, 4. »

64 A similar example of a crocodile mask, collected from Mer Island, is held in the Australian Museum. See Stan Florek, “Crocodile Mask from the Torres Strait,” Australian Museum, https://bit.ly/3heBRSq. »

65 Roberts, “Going North II,” 4. For an example of a Dhari headdress, see Queensland Museum, “Dhari,” https://bit.ly/2WElhDB. »

66 Roberts, “Going North II,” 4. »

67 Roberts, “Going North II,” 4. See Alfred C. Haddon, The Ethnography of the Western Tribe of Torres Straits (London: Harrison, 1890). »

68 The “spears, clubs, boomerangs” were likely brought back to Narrm/Melbourne from the Riverina region. McQueen, Tom Roberts, 341. »

69 “Amongst the Australians in London,” Catholic Press, June 7, 1906, 8. »

70 See Jeanette Hoorn, “Aboriginal Woman (Mariah, Yulgilbar),” in Gray, Tom Roberts, 219. For further information on the use of English names, see Jane Simpson, “Personal Names,” in History in Portraits: Biographies of Nineteenth-Century South Australian People, ed. Jane Simpson and Luise Hercus, Aboriginal History Monograph 6 (Sydney: Southwood, 1998), 221–29. »

71 John Patten, “Lahndrigan,” Patten: Genealogy, August 17, 2009, https://bit.ly/2WGic64. Note there are variations in the spelling of “Wahlubal”/“Wehlabul.” »

72 “Society of Artists,” Evening News, September 27, 1895, 3. »

73 “The Art Society’s Exhibitions,” Australian Star, September 27, 1895, 6. »

74 Topliss, Tom Roberts 1856–1931, 135. »

75 Muurrbay Aboriginal Language and Culture Co-Operative, “Bundjalong,” https://bit.ly/2WJ0oal; see also Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, “Indigenous Australian Languages,” https://bit.ly/3jm9vHT; and Common Ground, “Indigenous Languages,” https://bit.ly/39i4GdV. »

76 Roberts, “Going North II,” 4. »

77 The closest engagement with language by late nineteenth-century non-Indigenous artists appears in the use of Kriol or Pidgin English in titles of works by B. E. Minns and Julian Ashton, such as Ashton’s Aboriginal Family Group (c. 1886), formerly exhibited as Give Blackfellow Tobacco Boss and Gib It Bacca Boss. »

78 Margaret Maynard, “Projections of Melancholy,” in Seeing the First Australians, ed. Ian Donaldson and Tasmin Donaldson (Sydney: George Allen and Unwin, 1985), 102. »

79 Roberts, “Then and Now,” 11. »

80 See L. Astbury, Sunlight and Shadow, 194–97; Terry Smith, Transformations in Australian Art: The Nineteenth Century—Landscape, Colony and Nations (Sydney: Craftsman House, 2002), 1:66–106. »

81 D. J. Quinn, “Artists and Artistic Taste in Australasia,” Review of Reviews (November 20, 1896): 514. »

82 Angus Trumble, “Colony and Capital in Australian Impressionist Portraiture,” in Lane, Australian Impressionism, 181–99. »

83 “Sale of Mr. Roberts’s Paintings,” Sydney Morning Herald, November 14, 1900, 5. A critic for the Daily Telegraph noted: “A series of character sketches of Australian notabilities should find a ready purchaser from among those who realise how this particular class of work grows in value as an artistic asset with the passage of the years; and for the same reason, if for no other, the small series of portraits of aborigines should be bought. There are but few blacks left, and still fewer artists who can paint them well.” “Mr. Tom Roberts’ Pictures,” Daily Telegraph, November 14, 1900, 9. »

84 Roberts, “Mr. Tom Roberts’s Picture ‘Sheep-Shearing,’” 10. »

85 “Always was, always will be Aboriginal land” is an assertion of Australian Indigenous sovereignty and a statement of acknowledgment and recognition that Indigenous people have occupied and cared for Australia since time immemorial (over sixty-five thousand years). See Jackie Huggins, “Always Was Always Will Be,” Australian Historical Studies 25, no. 100 (1993): 459–64. “Always was, always will be” was set by the National Aboriginal and Islanders Day Observance Committee as the 2020 theme for NAIDOC week. See NAIDOC.org, “2020 Theme,” https://bit.ly/2WH450q. »

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