In 1770, Lieutenant James Cook sailed to the east coast of Australia and named it New South Wales. He claimed possession of the region for the British Empire under the doctrine of Terra Nullius. Terra Nullius is Latin for land belonging to no one. It was used to describe Australia, a land that was legally deemed to be unoccupied or uninhabited. He then sailed the whole coastline of Australia and declared to the British government that it would make a good place for a settlement.

A decade later, Britain had lost its colonies in America as a result of the American War of Independence (1775-1783). The British saw colonisation of Australia as an opportunity to expand their territory and trade in the South Pacific, and a solution to growing social and political problems such as unemployment, crime rates and incarceration. Britain founded a penal settlement in New South Wales and shipped their convicts to Australia.

European settlement began when the First Fleet sailed into Botany Bay in January 1788. Their arrival watched by the Aboriginal owners of the land, the Gweagal and Kamaygal people. The 11 ships which made up the First fleet carried more than 1300 Europeans, comprising officers, marines and 780 convicts. To the new arrivals this new land and everything within it was unfamiliar and excited intense curiosity

In Landing of Captain Cook at Botany Bay, 1770, 1902, Australian artist, E. Philips Fox (1865-1915) has depicted the moment Cook arrived in New South Wales. Fox shows Cook ceremoniously coming ashore to claim the land for Britain. The colonisers are presented as powerful figures, the bearers of learning and civilisation in a land thought to have been empty of culture. In images such as these, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are often absent or relegated to the background.

Since Fox was born almost a century after Cook’s arrival, he wasn’t there at the time so he painted the scene using his imagination. He created the work in celebration of the Federation of Australia, when the six separated colonies united to form the Commonwealth of Australia on the 1st January 1901.

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Read more about depictions of Aboriginal people in Colonial Australian art

Aboriginal people have occupied the Australian continent for more than 65,000 years. In pre-contact times, shields were used to protect warriors during intertribal battles. They were also used in ceremonial dance and traded as valuable cultural objects between clan groups. This shield is from around 1800. Like most shields, it was designed to tell the story of its maker. The painted and incised designs are signifiers of the identity and place of the artist. Its medium, shape and surface ornamentation are characteristic of shields collected from coastal areas in New South Wales.

The artists’ names, language groups and precise locations were not recorded by European collectors so it is unlikely that we will ever know the name of the person who made this shield or their individual story – who they were, the name of their tribe, how they lived or died. However, through the survival of this special object, the legacy of this maker will be remembered.

The arrival of the First Fleet in 1788 marked the beginning of a period of sustained conflict between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people that continued for over a century. After which time, shields functioned more as the armature of war.

A similar style shield to this one was collected near Port Jackson at the time of first contact in 1770. It’s currently housed in the British Museum, but we now know that it was owned by a Gweagal warrior named Cooman. Cooman’s ancestor, Rodney Kelly, is trying to have the shield returned to his people. Because of its similarity to the shield held at the British Museum, the design of the shield from the NGV Collection is symbolically linked with the trauma of British invasion.

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Gordon Bennett (1955-2014) was an Australian artist of Aboriginal and Anglo-Celtic descent. Growing up in the 1960s, Bennett’s Aboriginal heritage was repressed. Society perpetuated the belief in Australia as Terra Nullius and celebrated British colonisation of Australia. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples weren’t recognised traditional custodians of the land. Bennett’s understanding of the nation’s history was partly shaped by images commonly found in history books like Fox’s painting Landing of Captain Cook at Botany Bay 1770.

In his painting Terra Nullius (Teaching Aid) As Far As The Eye Can See, 1993, Bennett questions the role that white, Western culture and ideas have played in constructing our history and identity as a country. Splashes and drips of red, yellow and black paint reflect the colours of the Aboriginal flag. Two thirds of the canvas is covered with a dense black mass of handprints. The land has been cleared for infrastructure; figures lie on the ground trapped in a grid like structure while an axe wielding man points in their direction. Dots acknowledge the iconic Aboriginal white dot painting of the Western Desert.

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Extended Gordon Bennett teaching resource

Immigration underpins the post-colonial history of Australia. During the reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901), almost 1.75 million people came to Australia as wealthy visitors, assisted passengers, indentured labourers and convicted prisoners known as exiles. Some people were fleeing the potato famine in Ireland, the Industrial Revolution in England and the Highland clearances in Scotland – these are called ‘push factors’. Others left countries such as China for a better life, seeking their fortune in the gold rush or purchasing cheap land for farming – these are called ‘pull factors’. Whatever the reason, the choice to emigrate to Australia was a difficult one to make.

From 1815 and 1840, the majority of the 58,000 passengers who voluntarily came to Australia in search of a better life were male. Furthermore, around 85% of the 160,000 convicts transported to the Australian colonies between 1788 and 1868 were also male. As a result, from 1815 the Colonial Government subsidised migration for single women aged between 18–30 years to balance the population and to encourage the development of families We know this from primary sources such as newspapers like the Illustrated London News from 1844, which says:

… a Government grant was made to assist families and single men, agricultural labourers, shepherds, carpenters, smiths, wheelwrights, bricklayers, and masons, being of good character, to emigrate to Australia … Amongst these were to be included a certain portion of single women and girls, between eighteen and thirty years of age, who had been in domestic and farm service.

In Marshall Claxton’s An emigrant’s thoughts of home, 1859, the central figure is leaving home for a new country. She is standing on a ship, looking outwards over the water. Art historian Pamela Gerrish Nunn describes her as ‘clearly belong[ing] to the Victorian moralists’ category of ‘poor but honest’.

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Read more about An emigrant’s thoughts of home

During their approximate four-month journey, emigrants faced many challenges and varied conditions on board the sailing ships to Australia. These included:

• potential for shipwreck,
• lack of fresh food and water
• risk of disease
• sweltering tropical heat and bitter cold
• overcrowding

With high rates of debilitating diseases and deaths, the ships were nicknamed “coffin ships”. For a time, surgeons were paid more if emigrants arrived alive, encouraging better health standards.

In Coming South, 1886, Tom Roberts depicts how different classes of emigrants occupied their days to overcome the boredom of the long journey. In 1885, Roberts was on a return journey to Australia after four years in Europe. He made sketches of the crowded deck of the ship and used them as the basis for Coming South. All saloon passengers paid extra for the luxury of space, comfort and privacy. To relieve the monotony of shipboard life, the passengers spent their daytime in conversation, sketching, writing letters and diaries, playing cards and games and even shooting seagulls. Their evenings were spent enjoying formal meals in splendid dining rooms, and amusing themselves with music and dancing. The length of the journey for these passengers would have been reduced by the dual sources of power, steam and sail, which can be seen in the background of Coming South.

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Having survived the long sea journey, passengers got a hint of their arrival through the smell of the land carried on the wind, then through birds and butterflies landing on the deck and later by sightings of land on the distant horizon. Many arrived uncertain of their future and without anywhere to stay, in Melbourne the land around St Kilda Road and Elizabeth Street was overcrowded with many living in tents.

After the gold discoveries of 1851, Melbourne’s port accommodated ships from all over the world and gave them access, via the Yarra River, to the very heart of the city. This is depicted in Thomas Robertson’s Hobson’s Bay, 1860, which records the port during ‘the first decade of gold’. Robertson identifies the scene by the distinctive square lighthouse at Williamstown on the far left. Most of the impressive array are sailing ships, but the vessel in the foreground with its topsails and mainsail reefed up is an innovative hybrid which sailed under both sail and steam.

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One of these migrants was silversmith and goldsmith Ernest Leviny. Originally from Hungary, Leviny moved to Paris and then to London where he started a jewellery business. In 1852, Leviny travelled to Castlemaine to seek his fortune with the plan to stay for three years. However, the machinery he brought with him didn’t work properly and his four labourers immediately deserted him. So he started a jewellery and watchmaker business in Castlemaine in 1854 and never left.

Standing cup and cover, c. 1859, is one of Leviny’s masterpieces. The silver cup is a metaphor for the flourishing colony of Victoria. Many symbols are used to depict both the flora and fauna of the landscape, as well as important industries represented by individual figures. A figure of the goddess Victory, representing Queen Victoria, with a gold nugget at her feet overlooks the four images of colonial life around the base:

• ‘Commerce’ with a winged staff and a chart
• ‘the Farmer’ with scythe and sickle
• ‘the Miner’ wearing a battered hat and displaying a gold nugget in his pan
• the Indigenous Australian throwing a spear represents the original state of the colony
• Kangaroos and emus decorate the lid of the central lobed bowl and griffins form the handles – a strange mixture of European and Australian motifs
• An inscription on the outside of the lobed bowl says that the piece was “presented 31st Dec., 1863 to Chas. Abraham Saint by his Friends and Fellow Citizens in recognition of many services rendered as Editor of the Mount Alexander Mail to the Town & District of Castlemaine.”

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International behaviour depicts an enlarged newspaper photograph from the 1980s of a Vietnamese boat in Australian waters, packed with immigrants. This image floats across a modernist, almost psychedelic-patterned ground. Jan Nelson describes her work as the

slippage between fact and fiction … between the boat leaving its country of origin and its destination, between the audience and the art world or, as in my recent work, between another person’s memories and my own. In International Behaviour my work turned to concerns of culture. I wanted to create a space between the desire for populist culture, as in the modernist pattern, reminiscent of such magazines as Wallpaper and the emotional resonance of the Vietnamese boat. This image not only has personal significance to me but I believe to the essence of our Australian culture. I was very pleased that members of the Vietnamese community found the painting quite moving and felt pleased that someone had given their story significance.

Jason Smith, Curator, Contemporary Art (in 2002).

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The increased arrival of free settlers from the 1820s onwards saw the colony of Van Diemen’s Land (now known as Tasmania) evolve from a brutal penal settlement into an economically sound and vibrant cultural centre. With its pleasant climate, few droughts and floods, and open grassland, Van Diemen’s Land seemed pre-prepared for aspiring pastoralists. By 1830, almost a third of the arrivals to Australia settled in the south, and the small island experienced economic prosperity. One of these free settlers was British artist John Glover (1767-1849). Developing an interest in drawing from nature from an early age, Glover became highly successful as a landscape artist known for his oil paintings and watercolours. As was popular at the time in England, his landscapes are picturesque and idyllic.

Glover moved to Australia with his wife and son in 1831. He arrived in Van Diemen’s Land on his 64th birthday and settled in Patterdale, south of Launceston. Upon their arrival, the trio were reunited with two of Glover’s other sons who had previously immigrated. He received many commissions within the colony and was able to send work back to London for exhibition and sale. He died at Patterdale in 1849.

John Glover was fascinated with the Tasmanian landscape. He observed it very closely, recording detailed impressions with his paintbrush and paint palette. The style reflects the traditional, idealised aesthetic of his background; while he visually documented the landscape as he saw it, some elements are also exaggerated and constructed. This might have been to venerate its natural splendour or to evoke feeling and emotion in his artwork.

The River Nile, Van Diemen’s Land, from Mr Glover’s farm, 1837, is based on the view from John Glover’s farm. The scene is picturesque and pristine, featuring Tasmanian Aboriginal people enjoying an idyllic life in harmony with nature. When he painted this work, Glover’s aim might have been to record a rare and vanishing way of life since the reality for Tasmanian Aboriginal people was very different. Encounters between early colonisers and the original inhabitants of Tasmania were often characterised by violent conflict. Since colonial settlement the Aboriginal population had decreased significantly.

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Moulting Lagoon and Great Oyster Bay, from Pine Hill, c. 1838, presents the view south from the head of Moulting Lagoon, looking past Great Swanport down Great Oyster Bay on the east coast of Tasmania. It corresponds to that from the top of Pine Hill, the highest point above Apsley Marsh, a property which was owned by John Lyne, one of the first settlers in the district. A man, possibly one of Lyne’s shepherds, stands atop a lush knoll overlooking fertile pastures dotted with flocks of grazing sheep. With a commanding posture, staff in one hand, and a loyal dog at his side, he appears to be the master of a seemingly endless landscape void of any native fauna or people.

When this landscape was painted in the 1830s, the wool industry was beginning to dominate the local agricultural economy. So, John Glover could have painted this work to document the history of the settlement of Van Diemen’s Land. However, artists at the time would often change, exaggerate or enhance the visible world in their paintings. Glover was no exception to this temptation and has made significant changes the landscape. He exaggerated the size of Mt Freycenet and the Hazzards, compressed the spread of Oyster Bay and eliminated the Aspley Marsh which enabled him to render Moulting Lagoon clear and blue in colour.

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Australia became a nation on 1 January 1901 when 6 British colonies—New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, Western Australia and Tasmania—united to form the Commonwealth of Australia. This process is known as Federation. It was a political accomplishment that took many years of planning and several referenda to achieve, impacting all facets of Australian society.

Julie Dowling (b.1969), an artist of Badimaya, Irish and Scottish Catholic heritage, was born in Subiaco in Western Australia. Dowling draws on diverse art traditions including European portraiture and Christian icons, mural painting, dotting and Indigenous Australian iconography. She produces artwork to record personal histories and instances of injustice and racism suffered by Indigenous people as a form of resistance.

Julie Dowling’s Federation Series 1901-2001, 2001, was created at the time of the centenary of Australia’s Federation. Indigenous Australians people were not consulted on the Australian constitution at the time of Federation, nor did the document include any reference to them.

Each of the ten panels in the series features a family member who was affected by policies and events in successive decades after Federation. Their tormented, proud and resilient faces are surrounded by images, symbols and words which reference events that specifically impacted Indigenous people. In the artwork, Dowling celebrates the survival of her family and the growth of the Indigenous political movement throughout the twentieth century when, as she states, ‘five generations of our family have had children taken away’.

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Activity sheet

Frederick McCubbin (1855-1917) was born in Melbourne during the Gold Rush. A key figure in the development of Australian Impressionism, he is considered one of Australia’s most important painters from the late nineteenth century. From the 1890s, he created large-scale landscapes which showed recent history in colonial Australia, often celebrating pioneering narratives as heroic and an emerging sense of national identity.

Fred McCubbin’s The pioneer, 1904, reflects Australian nationalism in the years immediately following Federation. It presents history through the life of a pioneering family, rather than through heroic incident or ceremonial occasion. Some viewers have suggested that the city in the distance is Melbourne, identifying the tall, protruding dome as the Royal Exhibition Building. This is the location where the first Federal Parliament was opened on May 9, 1901.

The first panel shows a young couple in an area of undisturbed bush. The horse and wagon suggest they have recently arrived and are setting up camp for the first night in their new surrounds. While the man is lighting a fire to boil the billy, the woman sits quietly and pensively, perhaps contemplating an unknown future or lamenting her past. The second panel appears to depict the same couple and setting but several years later. There is evidence of the land being cleared for a modest house and the woman is holding a baby. In the final panel, a man has happened upon a grave or memorial in the bush. A well-developed city in the distance suggests that several more years have passed. It is uncertain who has died and whether the male figure is the original pioneer, his son or a stranger who has visited the site to pay their respects to the hardworking, persevering pioneers that came before him.

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Read more about Frederick McCubbin