Richard BROWNE

Irish 1776–1824
worked in Australia 1811–24

Richard Browne was commissioned by Lieutenant Thomas Skottowe to depict Australian fauna in pencil, ink, gouache and watercolours during his seven-year sentence at the penal station in Newcastle. Despite scientific inaccuracies, these works are strangely lyrical and consistent in design. By 1817 and having found freedom, Browne embarked on studies and commissions that included Aboriginal people.

The writer Geoffrey Dutton proposes that this period reveals Browne’s hostility towards Aboriginal people whereby local identities including Hump Back’d Maria, Magill, Killigrant, Wambella, Burgon, Cobbwan Wogi and a family group are depicted as grotesque caricatures in positions of extreme exoticised discomfort; crouching, leaning, hoisting various implements including spears, nets, bags and fishing lines.1 Browne’s contemporary, the Reverend M. Walker, forwarded to the London Missionary Society a portrait by Browne of a mother, Wambella, and child as a ‘representation of female wretchedness’;2 the genre of early colonial portraits of Aboriginal peoples generally supported the evangelical missive to ‘civilise’ the savage. Andrew Sayers suggests, however, that Browne was not satirising or denigrating Aboriginal people but that his work was ‘rather an attempt, albeit clumsy, to depict the Indigenous lifestyle of the Aborigines of New South Wales’.3

Killigrant portrays an Aboriginal woman carrying a fishing line and basket with a net bag slung traditionally around her forehead to stretch down her back. The work emphasises her arm, neck and waist bands and body and facial markings in an ethnographic imperative that also, arrestingly and unselfconsciously, reveals the subject, Killigrant, wandering away from the artist and the viewer’s scrutiny. Versions of this work exist in many collections with various spellings or different names for the same subject. It has been suggested that to meet demand Browne created each watercolour from a traced template, hence the inexact similarities between a limited portfolio of identities that he drew from over a concerted five-year period.

Browne’s portraits were immensely popular. Their exceptionally stylised form may have contributed to their success in that they semi-accurately portray the body markings, implements and stances of local Aboriginal people, but otherwise are sufficiently distanced from reality to provide a non-threatening engagement with the local, much in the way that Browne and artists before and since isolated endemic flora and fauna on an otherwise blank page.4

1  G. Dutton, White on Black: The Australian Aborigine Portrayed in Art, South Melbourne, 1974, p. 27.

2  ibid.

3  A. Sayers, Drawing in Australia, Melbourne, 1989, p. 29.

4  Positioning his subjects floating in space, significantly without geographical markers and usually neglecting to add tribe or country identifiers after the name that was otherwise carefully inscribed under each subject, also ensured that those owning the drawings were not reminded of complicity in the spectre of dispossession.

Julie Gough