History

Settler colonial dreamings

Item: Visions of Nature
Author: Gary Werskey

Handmaidens of imperial and settler aspirations

by Gary Werskey •

July 2022, no. 444

Visions of Nature: How landscape photography shaped settler colonialism by Jarrod Hore

University of California Press, US$29.95 pb, 352 pp

History

Settler colonial dreamings

Handmaidens of imperial and settler aspirations

by Gary Werskey •

July 2022, no. 444

Taken less than five miles downriver from the 1836 grid, this photograph frames a harmonic interaction of settlement, agriculture, and geography on the lowlands along the Derwent River. John Beattie, Hop Garden, New Norfolk, 1895–98. Albumen print. Collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney. Accession number 202.1989.

‘Country’ – the land of Indigenous peoples (minus their Dreamings) – is the great subject of settler-colonial art, an act of appropriation in which the dispossession of its original custodians is rendered invisible. As Jarrod Hore establishes beyond doubt in Visions of Nature, it was landscape photographers who proved to be one of the more significant cultural agents of settler colonialism across the Pacific Rim in the second half of the nineteenth century. What his important study reveals even more clearly is just how much they and their images were shaped by the times and societies in which they worked.

Gary Werskey

Gary Werskey is a Harvard-trained biographer and cultural historian who has held academic positions at Edinburgh University, Imperial College, and the University of New South Wales. For the past decade, he has promoted the study of Australian history to a wider audience as a co-founder of the Blackheath History Forum. He is currently an Honorary Associate in the University of Sydney’s Department of History. His latest publication is Picturing a Nation: The art & life of A.H. Fullwood (NewSouth, 2021). He also co-curated with Natalie Wilson (Curator of Australian & Pacific Art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales) the National Library of Australia’s recent exhibition A Nation Imagined: The Artists of the Picturesque Atlas.