Pastoral Works

Wall text

1. Carl Hampel

Born c. 1887, Kulin Country/Bendigo, Victoria. Died 1942, London, England.

"(landscape)"  n.d.

oil on artist’s board

Collection of The University of Queensland. Gift of the Estate of Mrs B. L. Buttner, 1972.

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2. Frederick McCubbin
Born 1855, Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung and Bunurong Boon Wurrung Country/West Melbourne, Victoria. Died 1917, Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung and Bunurong Boon Wurrung Country/South Yarra, Victoria.

"View Near Fisherman’s Bend"  c. 1880

oil on paper on cardboard

Collection of The University of Queensland. Gift of the Estate of Dr. Freda Bage, through her friend, Miss Hughes, 1971. 

3. Frank Kane

Born 1916, Naarm/Melbourne, Victoria. Date and place of death unknown.

"The Bush Inn, Flowerdale, Victoria"  1944

oil on plywood panel 

Collection of The University of Queensland, purchased 1944.

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4. Louis Buvelot 

Born 1814, Morges, Switzerland. Died 1888, Naarm/Melbourne, Victoria.

"Yarra Farm"  1882

oil on canvas

 The Stuartholme-Behan Collection of Australian Art. The University of Queensland holds the collection on loan from Sacred Heart Education Ministry, which acknowledges the kind support of the Behan Family and The University of Queensland.

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5. Lloyd Rees

Born 1895, Yuggera and Turrbal Country/Brisbane, Queensland. Died 1988, nipaluna/Hobart, lutruwita/Tasmania.

"Untitled (Horse and Cart)"  n.d.

oil on cardboard

Collection of The University of Queensland. Gift of the Estate of Mrs B. L. Buttner, 1972.

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6. William Bustard

Born 1894, Yorkshire, England. Died 1973, Yugumbeh Country/Labrador, Queensland. 

"Pastoral"  n.d.

oil on canvas board

Collection of The University of Queensland. Gift of Mrs Brenda Hughes through the Australian Government's Cultural Gifts Program, 2004.

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7. Louis Buvelot 

Born 1814, Morges, Switzerland. Died 1888, Naarm/Melbourne, Victoria.

"Near Macedon"  1874

oil on canvas board

The Stuartholme-Behan Collection of Australian Art. The University of Queensland holds the collection on loan from Sacred Heart Education Ministry, which acknowledges the kind support of the Behan Family and The University of Queensland.

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8. John Glover

Born 1767, Leicestershire, England. Died 1849, Launceston, lutruwita/Tasmania.

"(English Landscape)"  n.d.

watercolour on paper

Collection of The University of Queensland. Gift of Dr Norman Behan through the Australian Government's Cultural Gifts Program (previously known as Taxation Incentives for the Arts), 1979.

9. Lance Solomon

Born 1913, Gandangara Country/Liverpool, New South Wales. Died 1989.  

"Along the Fence"  c. 1943

oil on board

Collection of The University of Queensland. Gift of Miss Pamela Pennycuik (Mrs Pamela Reisner) in memory of her parents, Mr Ronald Stewart Pennycuik and Mrs Dorothy Lucinda Pennycuik, through the Australian Government's Cultural Gifts Program, 1983.

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This salon hang apprehends and rethinks a selection of nineteenth and early twentieth-century paintings from the UQ Art Collection. Landscape painting was not a neutral pursuit, but one inseparable from, and implicated in, the construction of Australian identity and the perpetuation of the violence of terra nullius—propaganda for imported colonial agendas, which reverberates today.

Acting as portals to the past, this series unveils the ideologies driving early settler-colonial land-management practices. They evidence the transformation of Country into landscape: a resource to be instrumentalised, extracted, and monetised through the conversion of native bush into ‘timber’, carbon into ‘coal’, and animals into ‘livestock’. Picturesque scenes of introduced cattle harmoniously grazing and work horses toiling the land are evident in Louis Buvelot’s Yarra Farm, and Lloyd Rees’s Untitled (Horse and Cart).

Cleared green pastures and sublime agricultural vistas convey a tamed, deforested, and idealised vision of nature that has been put to work and is under control—a move perfected by the introduction of chemical agriculture into soil in the mid-century. This transformation of Australia into a farm for Great Britain finds echoes in John Glover’s bucolic (English Landscape). Glover influenced the next generation of Australian Impressionists, such as Frederick McCubbin, a key founder of the Heidelberg School of plein air painters.

McCubbin’s View Near Fisherman’s Bend depicts a romanticised colonial settlement, which belies an occupied custodial Country that has been morphed into paddocks delineated by fences. His later works contributed to the formation of a mythic national iconography reflecting the growing nationalism of the 1890s leading up to Federation. A similar sentiment can be seen in Louis Buvelot’s Near Macedon, which offers a heroic portrayal of a lone Australian pioneer worker on horseback and his dominion over nature. Works such as these played a role in inscribing the great Australian narrative story: one contingent on the dispossession of First Nations people and the deployment of nature in the interests of nation building.