Piper, the native who accompanied Major Mitchell in his expedition to the interior of N.S.W.

Piper (life dates unknown) was a Wiradjuri man who acted as Thomas Mitchell’s guide for his surveying expedition along the Darling and Murray Rivers into present-day Victoria in 1836. Enlisted at Bathurst at the outset of the journey, Piper's skills as a hunter, scout and interpreter proved invaluable to the success of the venture, and Mitchell came to consider him ‘the most accomplished man in the camp’. Mitchell rewarded Piper with several gifts, including ‘my own red coat, and also a cocked hat and feather which had once belonged to Governor Darling’. ‘His portrait, thus arrayed’, Mitchell wrote, ‘soon appeared in the print-shops, an ingenious artist (Mr. Fernyhough) having drawn his likeness very accurately’.
William Fernyhough (1809–1849), silhouette artist, lithographer and draughtsman, began working at JG Austin’s printing firm in 1836. His first production for Austin was a series titled Twelve Profile Portraits of the Aborigines of New South Wales, which included the lithograph of Piper. The series was released as a set in 1836 and remained in print until the 1840s. It was suggested that it would make ‘a pretty present to friends in England as characteristic of this country’. The historian Richard Neville has observed that the silhouettes were not intended as caricatures. Rather, these supposedly faithful likenesses would allow the Indigenous subjects to be considered in the light of current phrenological and physiological theories.