Indigenous Dispossession and Settler Colonial Art Galleries: Anguish at the National Gallery of Victoria

Abstract

Amongst its cargo of dried fruit, herrings and hams, printed cambrics and sateens, 'fashionable London-made jewellery' , and 'stylish Winter jackets' , was a very carefully parcelled up oil painting titled Anguish (plate 1). 2 Painted in France by the Danish artist August Friedrich Albrecht Schenck, and first shown at the Paris Salon in 1878, Anguish depicts a ewe defending her dead lamb from a circle of predatory crows. The National Gallery of Victoria's (NGV) London-based art adviser, Alfred Taddy Thomson, had purchased the painting on behalf of the Gallery, and regarded it as particularly appropriate for colonial viewers. The painting rapidly became a hugely popular image; in 1906, it was voted one of the top five most beloved in the collection, and it remains popular today. 3 This article explores how Thomson's ability to purchase Anguish, his choice of this particular painting and the excitement surrounding its display in 1880s Melbourne, relate to the violent dispossession of Aboriginal people in colonial Victoria. 4 The acquisition and reception of Anguish, I propose, provides a stimulus to rethink approaches to histories of settler colonial art galleries.The collection and display of European painting and sculpture has occupied a marginal role in recent scholarship exploring the relationships between both museums and imperialism, and visual culture and imperialism. 5 Histories of art galleries founded in colonies of white settlement tended to situate these institutions as (often failed) attempts to replicate metropolitan models in colonial settings. More recent research has drawn on post-colonial approaches to explore the impact of local colonial contexts on the formation of museums and art galleries (such as, for example, the desire to develop a new national art form), presenting settler colonial art galleries as hybridized institutions. 6 These newer histories of settler colonial art galleries have not, however, explored the role played by sovereign Indigenous peoples in the creation of these local colonial contexts. Building on the work of art historians and anthropologists who have emphasized the entanglement of settler with Indigenous cultural production, I first offer a new history of the NGV that centres Aboriginal presences. 7 The remainder of the article focuses on the acquisition of Anguish, exploring the ways in which colonial frontier violence underpinned the formation of the NGV's collections. The reception of Anguish in 1880s Melbourne reveals the way in which a painting of a sheep resonanted with and consolidated emerging ideas about white identity. A different image of the NGV emerges: not a flawed clone of the National Gallery in London, mediated exclusively by white settler Australians, but inseparable in its origins from Aboriginal Melbourne, imbricated in frontier violence, and contributing to white Australian identities.