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Clip description
A staged scene in which a landscape painting of Thomas Watling, a convict indentured as the colony’s artist, is superimposed on the photographic image. An actor plays Watling on assignment under guard in the countryside. The actor reads an extract from Watling’s letters on the soundtrack.
Curator’s notes
Watling was ordered to provide a vision of the new English possession ‘that is comprehensible to the king and his subjects’. His letters, published subsequently as a book, have been described by Gibson as the most underestimated of all the early books that resulted from ‘the Europeans’s experiences of the first decade of life in white Australia’. This clip conveys, in words and images, something of the pressures placed on Watling as both a convict and an alien presence in the landscape who nevertheless ‘attains a history’ through his painting and writing.
Ross Gibson published 'A Commentary on Thomas Watling’s Letters from an Exile at Botany-Bay' in his essay collection South of the West: Postcolonialism and the Narrative Construction of Australia (1992).
