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The national picture : the art of Tasmania's Black War

by Tim Bonyhady, Greg Lehman

An examination of colonial Tasmanian art, focusing on visual records of Aboriginal cultural practices and paintings of the conciliation process. It explores how large-scale imagery and visual language were used to document Aboriginal life and facilitate communication.

Accession 9780642334763 ISBN 9780642334763 Publisher National Gallery of Australia

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Topics and Themes

1. **Colonial Art as Historical Evidence**
Art is used here not merely as aesthetic object but as primary historical document. Duterrau's paintings, Frankland's Proclamation Boards, and colonial portraits are interrogated for what they reveal — and conceal — about the violent reality of the Black War. The book asks how visual art shapes, distorts, and sometimes preserves the historical record of frontier conflict.

Connect to books about: history of art, colonial visual culture, art as historical source, Australian art history.

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2. **Settler Colonialism & Frontier Violence**
The Black War was a campaign of dispossession and near-annihilation, reducing the Tasmanian Aboriginal population from thousands to a few hundred through killings, disease, and forced removal. The book situates art production squarely within this context of organised colonial violence and its political management.

Connect to books about: settler colonialism, genocide studies, frontier history, colonisation of Australia.

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3. **Representation, Misrepresentation & the Politics of Portrayal**
Colonial artists faced a charged choice in how — or whether — to depict Aboriginal people. The book examines how artists swung between sympathetic portraits and crude caricature, and how the deliberate avoidance of conflict imagery served to sanitise and legitimise colonisation.

Connect to books about: representation and power, Orientalism, postcolonial theory, visual politics.

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4. **Reconciliation, Conciliation & the Limits of Diplomacy**
George Augustus Robinson's controversial "Friendly Mission" — his attempt to pacify and relocate Tasmanian Aboriginal people — sits at the heart of the book. Duterrau's painting *The Conciliation* is read against Indigenous understandings of the same events as betrayal, making the book a meditation on the gap between colonial goodwill narratives and lived Indigenous experience.

Connect to books about: reconciliation politics, treaty-making, Indigenous-settler relations, humanitarian colonialism.

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5. **Indigenous Identity, Survival & Cultural Memory**
For contemporary Tasmanian Aboriginal people, Duterrau's paintings represent a rare and precious visual record of ancestral culture — language, ceremony, hunting, and daily life. The book engages with how surviving images become anchors of identity and cultural continuity for communities whose culture was violently disrupted.

Connect to books about: Indigenous cultural survival, intangible cultural heritage, memory and trauma, Palawa identity.

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6. **The Colonial Archive: What Is Recorded and What Is Silenced**
The book grapples with the profound unevenness of the colonial archive — Robinson's journals describe Aboriginal life in words while only Duterrau rendered it at scale in paint. The discovery that Aboriginal people had their own visual language (drawings on trees and huts) further unsettles the idea of a one-directional colonial gaze.

Connect to books about: archival theory, subaltern history, postcolonial historiography, counter-narratives.

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7. **Law, Rights & Colonial Governance**
The Proclamation Boards — issued by Lieutenant Governor Arthur in 1829 to assert equal treatment under law for Aborigines and Europeans — are examined as objects of colonial governance that made promises the system never kept. The book connects colonial art to themes of legal rights, sovereignty, and injustice.

Connect to books about: colonial law, Indigenous rights, legal history, rule of law in settler societies.

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8. **Art History & the National Narrative**
The book interrogates how colonial imagery has come to shape Australia's national self-understanding, and what it means to place this art "on the national stage." It asks whose history a national gallery tells, and how revisiting colonial imagery can challenge comfortable national myths.

Connect to books about: national identity, museums and memory, decolonising institutions, public history.

The national picture : the art of Tasmania's Black War

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