Benjamin DUTERRAU

English 1767–1851

Benjamin Duterrau arrived in Hobart Town on 17 August 1832, aged sixty-five and accompanied by his daughter and daughter-in-law.1 Upon arrival in Van Diemen’s Land, Duterrau opened a studio in Campbell Street, advertised public viewings and invited portrait commissions. From the outset until the mid 1840s, Duterrau felt compelled to portray Tasmanian Aboriginal people in pencil, etching, plaster relief and oil paint. In particular he focused on the relationship between a select group of Aboriginal people and George Augustus Robinson, a lay preacher and government agent commissioned between 1830 and 1835 to remove all Tasmanian Aboriginal people to Flinders Island.2

Forerunner of an 1840 epic painting of the same name, the 1835 etching The conciliation3 is a rough (reversed) sketch that depicts Robinson, central and gesturing, amidst ten Aboriginal people with whom he travelled around Tasmania for some five years. This work suggests the exchange and tacit agreement between Aboriginal representatives and Robinson, envoy of the colonial government, as noted in Robinson’s diary four years earlier:

This morning I developed my plans to the chief Mannalargenna and explained to him the benevolent views of the government towards himself and people. He cordially acquiesced and expressed his entire approbation of the salutary measure, and promised his utmost aid and assistance. I informed him in the presence of Kickerterpoller that I was commissioned by the Governor to inform them that, if the natives would desist from their wonted outrages upon the whites, they would be allowed to remain in their respective districts and would have flour, tea and sugar, clothes &c given them; that a good white man would dwell with them who would take care of them and would not allow any bad white man to shoot them, and he would go about the bush like myself and they then could hunt. He was much delighted. The chief and the other natives went to hunt kangaroo: returned with some swan’s eggs which the chief presented me as a present from himself—this was an instance of gratitude seldom met with from the whites.4

This etching is one of the earliest known to be produced in Australia and its wide distribution also supports the cultural, political and legal importance of its subject.5

1 An engraver by trade and also working as a painter, Duterrau exhibited six portraits at the Royal Academy, London, between 1817 and 1823.

2 Other etchings from the same period include portraits of named individuals central to the story of dispossession of Aboriginal people from mainland Tasmania during the first half of the nineteenth century, these include Manalargerna [sic], Tanleboueyer [sic], Truggernana [sic] and Woureddy [sic] who are also in this composite etching.

3 Also known as G. A. Robinson with a group of Van Diemen’s Land natives and The small outline of a national picture (The conciliation).

4 Diary entry, 6 August, 1831, opposite Swan Island, north-east Tasmania. N. J. B. Plomley, (ed.), Friendly Mission: The Tasmanian Journals and Papers
(of) George Augustus Robinson, 1829—1834, Hobart, 1966, p. 394.

5 Copies are held in collections including the National Library of Australia, Canberra; Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart; the Allport Library and Museum of Fine Arts, State Library of Tasmania, Hobart; the W. L. Crowther Library, State Library of Tasmania, Hobart; and the State Library of New South Wales.

Julie Gough