not titled [Corroboree]

Like his 19th-century contemporaries, little is known of artist Mickey of Ulladulla. Few of his drawings survive and the artist remains elusively out of reach for the present-day viewer, apart from a brief self-reference, as Andrew Sayers has stated: ‘From such inscriptions [by the artist on his drawings] we learn little except for one important thing: that the man supporting himself with two sticks who appears in many of the drawings is the artist himself.1

However, Mickey’s vignettes of rural Aboriginal life on the south coast of New South Wales reveal the shared experience of hundreds of traditional south-eastern Indigenous communities on the cusp of irretrievable change. Non-Indigenous influences are apparent in the apparel of the artist and in other scenes not pictured here: sailing ships, sawmills and government rations, which replaced the bountiful native flora and fauna as portrayed in his drawings.

The ephemeral nature of these drawings reflects their rarity, with so few represented in public collections today. Yet, almost two decades after the artist’s death, these works of art were considered extraordinary enough for a selection of them – drawn from government and judicial collections, including ironically, the New South Wales Aborigines Protection Board – to be exhibited at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago in the United States. Following this, they remained for a century relatively unknown to an audience that became increasingly engaged with Indigenous visual art until, in 1994, Mickey of Ulladulla’s work was addressed in Sayers’s publication and accompanying exhibition.

The contemporary viewer can only imagine whether the artist’s depiction of the abundant native fauna portrayed in the Ulladulla region was a true representation of available bush tucker at the time, or whether it depicted a scene already past. Whilst seemingly idyllic on the surface, this and similar scenes must be considered in a more poignant light when the present-day viewer is aware that they portray a way of life denied Indigenous people of this region through the impact of over two centuries of colonisation.

The luminosity of the watercolours, the azure blues and brilliant whites, gives the drawings a fresh tactility that still shines from the surface over a century after their execution: bittersweet cameos onto a not-so-distant, yet long-vanished past.

Brenda L. Croft

1Andrew Sayers, Aboriginal Artists of the Nineteenth Century, Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1994, p.51.

Text © National Gallery of Australia, Canberra 2010

From: Anne Gray (ed), Australian art in the National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2002