As the colony developed, and the Aboriginal people were decimated or pushed further away from the townships, the colonists set their minds to the expansion of their pastoral horizons. The crossing of the Blue Mountains and the push onto the great plains beyond, the exploration of the coast and great river systems, and the continued growth of the white population consolidated and expanded the settlements in New South Wales and Tasmania into substantial footholds on the continent.
The growing native-born white population, changes to the landscape made by the colony, and a security derived from a degree of agricultural success and self-sufficiency, meant that more and more people were slowly becoming accustomed to the land. As the land itself was adapted to the needs of the colonists, a number of settlers began to find themselves drawn to the landscape of the eastern coastline and its rapidly expanding inland settlements. Colonists now found time to tour the country-side, visit the waterfalls in the mountains or the beaches along the coast, create gardens and dwellings which made them feel as if they were, if not at home, at least not simply visiting.
In March 1791, Elizabeth Macarthur reported that the soil was “most wretched and totally unfit for growing any European productions”. (Day, 1996: 56) Seven years later, she had changed her mind:
We enjoy here one of the finest Climates in the world. The necessaries of life are abundant, and a fruitful soil affords us many luxuries. Nothing induces me to wish for a change.
(Day, 1996: 72)
The gradual change to acceptance and even grudging regard for the landscape took many years (indeed, generations), and a great deal of this shift was to do with the changes made to the landscape itself. This process of claiming the land with labour, and physical markings of ownership, included fencing and the presence of herds of cattle or flocks of sheep, removal of indigenous plants and the establishment of European style gardens and vegetable plots, and the construction of roadways and houses.
David Day claims that, “By working this virgin and foreign soil, Europeans became familiar with its ancient rhythms and developed links to the landscape that would, in some cases, come to outweigh the links to landscape from which they had come. Similarly, the taking of Aboriginal names deepened those links to the new landscape while at the same time according a superficial respect to the Aborigines whose name it was.” (1996: 67)
The claiming of the continent, through changing its very nature, was a process involving the many layers of colonial society, from its farmers to the landscape painters who took on the role of documenting that process:
The motif of ‘improvement’ that guided image-making on each continent [Australia and North America] was undergirded by a faith in progress. It called for evidence that economic, social and political order was being established in the new world. Just as the images of towns anchored the touring landscape, whether literally or by implication, through the presence of the tourist, so the early images that anchored settlement and improvement were of proper (that is, old world) homes.
(Johns, 1998: 29)
Eventually greater numbers of settlers and visitors began to echo the words of Elizabeth Macarthur. In 1861, fifty years after the crossing of the Blue Mountains, Rachel Henning wrote to her sister Etta of her visit to Sydney:
That north shore is most beautiful, in some places wild bush goes down to the water’s edge, or cliffs and water-worn rocks, with clear blue water washing over them, and the houses have such lovely views from all the windows.
I do not know how to give you any idea of the beauty of Sydney Harbour. I certainly underrated the Australian scenery.
(Henning, 1951: 64)
She also described her own crossing of the mountain range which had hemmed the colony for so many decades:
I wish I could give you the least idea of the beauty of the scenery here. It was a lovely morning ... I had forgotten how magnificent those Blue Mountains were. ... We went down Mount Victoria just at sunrise, and some of the views were lovely. You looked down on seas of forest and fold after fold of mountains covered with wood. (1951: 66)
Still, those who veered away from settled areas or approached the west and northern coasts were, it would seem, in for a nasty shock. The redoubtable Mme Rose de Freycinet echoed Dampier’s words, after a visit to Shark Bay:
It has been without a single regret that I left that hell on earth, the coast of New Holland ... I found myself cast upon so horrible a coast without the least resource. My courage forsook me utterly, and I could see nothing but horror about me.
(Bassett, 1962: 95)
Even on the east coast, the same vista proffered different visions to different people. When Governor Macquarie made a progress into the Blue Mountains in 1815, he and his party were tremendously impressed by the sweeping views. The Sydney Gazette reported their reactions:
... an opening presents itself to the SW side of Prince Regent’s Glen, from which a view is obtained particularly beautiful and grand Mountains rising beyond mountains, with stupendous masses of rock in the foreground, here strike the eye with admiration and astonishment. The circular form in which the whole is so wonderfully disposed induced the Governor to give it the name of Pitt’s Amphitheatre.
(Smith, 1960: 229)
Ten years later, Justice Barron Field published his Geographical Memoirs of New South Wales (published in London in 1825), including an account of his own trip into the Blue Mountains in 1822. He was less than impressed by the same vistas that had so astonished Macquarie:
The King’s Tableland is as anarchical and untabular as any His Majesty possesses. The Prince Regent’s Glen below it (if it be the glen I saw) is not very romantic ... Blackheath is a wretched misnomer. Not to mention its awful contrast to the beautiful place of the name in England, heath it is none. Black it may be when the shrubs are burnt, as they often are. Pitt’s Amphitheatre disappointed me. The hills are thrown together in a monotonous manner, and their clothing is very unpicturesque mere sea of harsh trees; but Mr Pitt was no particular connoisseur in mountain scenery or in amphitheatres. (1825: 429)
He claimed that it was these “harsh trees” which rendered the landscape so “unpicturesque” that it would be impossible for landscape painting to be a successful pursuit. “New South Wales is a perpetual flower garden,” he wrote, “but there is not a single scene in it of which a painter could make a landscape without greatly disguising the character of the trees”. (1825: 425)
Field pinpointed, here and elsewhere, precisely the problem the colony’s artists were having in rendering the trees, and particularly the leaves, of the eucalypts and myrtles that were so vastly different from the shade trees of Europe. It was not just that the trees were not deciduous, although that fact mightily offended Field: their very colour was too far from the rich forest greens of England, and the leaves were just not normal!
“No tree, to my taste,” complained Field, “can be beautiful that is not deciduous. What can a painter do with one cold, olive green? There is a cold harshness about the perennial leaf, that does not savour of humanity in my eyes. There is no flesh and blood in it: it is not of us, and is nothing to us.” (1825: 423)
Charles Darwin agreed, and was one of the few who noticed what it was about the leaves which made the trees, and also the light and shade, so very different.
The trees nearly all belong to one family, and mostly have their leaves placed in a vertical, instead of, as in Europe, in a nearly horizontal position: the foliage is scanty, and of a peculiar pale green tint, without any gloss. Hence the woods appear light and shadowless.
(Elliott, 1967: 19)
This indeed was to become a central preoccupation in colonial landscape painting, and one that is most obvious to the modern observer. “If you can paint one leaf,” observed John Ruskin, “you can paint the world”, but it was many decades before the painters of the colony found a way of painting either the leaves or the world of New South Wales.