The pristine past rediscovered

[duane]

The pristine past rediscovered
by Steve Meacham
SMH., November 7, 2007

FOR 145 years, the world's art experts did not know the whereabouts of Cabbage Trees Near the Shoalhaven River by the great Vienna-born colonial Australian artist Eugene von Guerard.

It has only been publicly displayed once before, at the London International Exhibition in 1862, before disappearing into a private collection. Although it resurfaced at an auction in 1960, it immediately went to ground again - until this year, when it came up for auction at Paddington Town Hall.

Sitting in the Sotheby's audience that night, desperate not to betray her interest, was the Mitchell librarian, Elizabeth Ellis. The State Library had decided the painting - one of von Guerard's rare scenes of NSW - would close a gap in its pictorial collection and had given her permission to make the work its most expensive painting acquisition.

The library already owned the sketchbook that von Guerard used during a short visit north of the Victorian border in 1859, plus an elaborate study of the same scene in the Illawarra that he drew before embarking on the oil painting. So the painting itself would complete an important suite.

There has to be another reason for paying $400,000 for one painting - especially when the buyer is not an art gallery, but a library.

For Ellis that vital factor was the team of woodcutters dwarfed by the massive gum trees and the towering escarpment.

"The painting depicts a very well-known part of NSW, a picturesque location, on the verge of being developed and changed," Ellis says. "It shows the landscape and vegetation before any great degradation occurred.

"Relatively soon afterwards, this temperate forest was felled for coalmining and diary farms. Von Guerard captures the scene just before it is about to change forever."

This month von Guerard's lush depiction of cabbage tree palms, ferns, figs and eucalypts will go on show for only the second time in its history - the centrepiece of a new exhibition called Impact: A changing land.

The curator, Steve Martin, has mined the library's collection, using paintings, photographs, maps and manuscripts to chart the way white Australians have embraced, engaged with and altered the landscape since 1788.

By and large it is a depressing story - a tale of extinct animals and birds, ruined vistas, unfettered exploitation.

"The priority for the state was develop, develop, develop," Martin says. "There was a feeling that resources were inexhaustible. Water is the prime example: rain would always fall, rivers would always flow. Now we're learning that isn't true."

But there were still individuals - some of them artists - who issued warnings. "I don't want to call them eco-warriors or environmental heroes but that is basically what they were," Martin says.

People such as the national parks pioneer Myles Dunphy and the environmentalist Marie Byles - and von Guerard.

Born in Vienna in 1811, von Guerard travelled extensively around Italy with his artist father and studied landscape painting in Dusseldorf before travelling to Victoria in 1852 to try his luck in the goldfields of Ballarat.

He proved an unlucky miner and fell back on painting, mainly around Victoria, although his best-known work is probably North-East View from the Northern Top of Mount Kosciusko, painted in 1863, which hangs in the National Gallery of Australia.

"Von Guerard's painting style and his philosophy led him to a really close affection for what he was painting," Martin says.

"His German romanticism left us with an accurate portrayal of what the landscape looked like at that time by someone who was really beginning to look at Australia with a concern that went deeper than commerce and development."

Impact: A changing land is at the State Library of NSW, November 10 to February 24, 2008.

I would urge everyone to go and see this exhibition so we can see how we have altered the landscape functionality of this country inexorably.