Y-erran-gou-la-ga

The portrait of the Eora man Y-erran- gou-la-ga was made by Nicolas- Martin Petit (1777–1804), an artist who accompanied the voyage of exploration to Australia conducted by Nicolas Baudin between 1800 and 1803. Having participated in two scientific expeditions during the 1790s, in 1800 Baudin (1754–1803) was commissioned by the French government to survey the Australian coast. The expedition, endorsed by Napoleon, was also tasked with studying natural history and making detailed scientific observations of Indigenous people, the world’s first anthropological society having been established in Paris in 1799. Consequently, Baudin’s vessels, Le Géographe and Le Naturaliste, were lavishly equipped, with twenty-two scientists among the expedition’s company. Petit and another artist, Charles Alexandre Lesueur, embarked as gunner’s mates, but were elevated to official artist roles when the men initially appointed to those posts quit six months into the expedition. In company with François Péron – the assistant zoologist who, on the deaths of his superiors, became Baudin’s primary naturalist – Lesueur collected countless specimens of land and marine life and later documented them in meticulous drawings and watercolours. With Lesueur focussed on the recording of landscape and species, the depiction of the people encountered fell largely to Petit, a Paris-born draughtsman who’d had some training in the studio of Jacques-Louis David. After surveying the western and southern coats of the continent throughout the latter half of 1801, in early 1802 Baudin’s ships called at the D’Entrecasteaux Channel, Bruny Island and Maria Island in Tasmania, where Petit made several portraits which have subsequently come to be considered important records of Indigenous life in the period prior to permanent European colonisation. From June to November 1802, the expedition was delayed in Sydney while its two ships were repaired. During this time, Petit completed portraits of people of the Cadigal, Dharawal, Gweagal, Kurringai and Darug language groups of the Sydney Harbour region. Baudin died during the return voyage to France in 1803, following which Peron and cartographer, Louis-Claude Desaulses de Freycinet, took responsibility for the completion of the official account of the expedition. First published in Paris in 1807, Voyage de découvertes aux terres australes included coloured engravings of many of the portraits that Petit had made in Australia. While the sitters’ names appear to be noted on the works, it is possible that the inscriptions merely reflect French misinterpretation of the sitters’ communications with them. There is no other known historical record of the individuals portrayed.