Wednesday 13 April 2011

Europeans and the Australian Environment

When considering the relationship between Europeans and the environment, the historians Andrea Gaynor and Catherine Speck have contributed greatly to our understanding of how settlers made sense of the new environment. Gaynor focuses on how settlers maltreated the land in order to form a more familiar landscape, having an attitude of replacing 'inferior' local flora and fauna with 'superior' European wildlife and landscape. By contrast, Speck focuses on the same topic through the lens of art, and how settler artists helped make sense of the new land.

Gaynor's essential point is in agreement with that of Tom Griffiths, who claims that sheep and cattle were the 'shock troops of the empire'. Gaynor suggests that the Europeans made sense of the land by moulding it into an ecology which closely resembled home, introducing European agriculture and animals, such as rabbits. She contends that Europeans basically attempted to 'tame' an Australia that to them felt threatening and foreign. Of course, the consequences of this were huge, and continue to affect the ecology of Australia today

Speck, on the other hand, focuses on how Europeans came to represent Australia through art and made sense of the landscapes through this. She goes about showing how each different culture used their own style of art, with Australian subjects, to familiarise the subjects to themselves, using John Lewin as an example. She explains that Lewin used distinctly Australian features in her paintings, such as fish or marsupials, but painted them in a Dutch still life genre, thus drawing European culture out of strange new animals. Not only this, but Speck also interprets how early settlers made sense of the native people through painting, describing how Augustus Earle's painting Bungaree in 1826, captures the changing nature of Port Jackson, and the irony of the indigenous King's lost power over the area.

The two historians show how settlers made sense of a strange place through mediums familiar to them: contemporary artistic styles and European styles of agriculture and land use. The refusal to conform to the Australian landscape and a determination to instead 'conquer' and change the land for the sake of comfort and familiarity is a common point to each of the sources.

The picture of Bungaree by Augustus Earle in 1826, which evokes the sadness of his predicament, no longer having a kingdom. The small pieces of officers clothes he wears seem ironic in their poor state in contrast with his enthusiasm. This picture is an example of how Europeans made sense of these new peoples and contexts, through the medium of European style art.
Accessed at Library of NSW: http://acms.sl.nsw.gov.au/item/itemDetailPaged.aspx?itemID=446716

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