Through two groups of paintings: delicate watercolours of early Colonial Australia and Seventeenth century Flemish and Dutch Still Life’s the Queensland Art Gallery exhibition Plenty throws up extraordinary questions around the complexities of Australia’s colonial past. There are many shades of grey when it comes to the character and choices of the founders of modern Australia – which haunt us still today.

This interview is part of a series that explores the exhibition PLENTY at Queensland Art Gallery deftly curated by Geraldine Kirrihi Barlow featuring the work of the young British artist Harriet Jane Neville-Rolfe (from 1883) and the Gallery’s founding bequest (made in 1892) of 11 Flemish and Dutch still-life paintings from British settler the Hon. Thomas Lodge Murray-Prior MLC.

Part One of this POPSART series is an interview with Vernon Ah Kee post a panel discussion with Luke Roberts and Geraldine Kirrihi Barlow reflecting on their personal experiences in reference to Harriet Jane Neville-Rolfe’s work and where we are today as Australians.

Harriet Jane Neville-Rolfe, an aristocratic young woman who studied painting in England and Paris, was in Australia for two years living largely at Alpha Station in remote north-western Queensland whilst visiting her brothers on the newly established cattle station. With her watercolours she documented the life on the cattle stations of the region, her brothers and his family that lived there, the flora, the fauna and the First Nations people who were also living here at the time. Her work is fresh and alive with the urgency of someone hungry to capture an extraordinary personal experience. Through the eyes of this woman a unique collection of paintings were created.

Ah Kee identifies how Neville-Rolfe’s work shifts Australia’s historical relationship to Aboriginal people, one primarily full of forgetting and extraordinary denial by showing a humanitarian idea of an Aboriginal person that can be matter of fact and mundane.

In juxtaposition, the other half of this exhibition PLENTY brings to light the shocking information that QAG’s founding donor Thomas Lodge Murray-Prior was involved in the Frontier massacres of Aboriginal people, now known as the Frontier or Australian Wars. Barlow summarises this contradiction proposing, ‘ Murray-Prior’s founding bequest carries both the aspirations and the pain of this critical period of our history, which haunts us still’.

This exhibition is intensely intriguing for me as it is a doorway to a very complex conversation about a history that Australia needs to admit to and talk about if we are to move forward, even though its deeply uncomfortable.  Barlow thoughtfully and meticulously draws together of the threads of the colonial foundations of Queensland, including its documentation through the unique and humanely powerful work of the female artist Neville-Rolfe and takes a deep dive into the difficult often horrifying yet paradoxical truth of who we are through the story of Murray-Prior via the words of his daughter the writer Rosa Praed.

BEC MAC: Vernon you thought this would be great to start, can you talk us through why this is good Landing point to consider Harriet Jane Neville-Rolfe work?

BEC MAC and Ah-Kee are standing in front of a Eugene Von Guerard painting ‘Mr John King’s Station’ 1861 (featured bellow) depicting an Aboriginal family in traditional clothing standing in the front and centre of the landscape, in the background the settler landowner is supervising the gardener tending the garden. 

AH-KEE: Yes, so there are a lot of such representations, colonial representations, not as many as we should have, because Aborigines were largely erased from colonial history in Australia but this is an example of Von Guerard’s work where he's sort of photoshopped the idea of ‘the Aborigine’ into the landscape.  It's, very much a museum idea of the Aborigine. A very passive emotionless kind of presence there in the landscape, not threatening, not active, not doing anything. And the idea is that they kind of sit there as memory, not as a presence.

BEC MAC: As we move into 2023 and you’re looking back with your perspective, your learnings and understandings of what it is to be a First Nations person coming to terms with the past - images like this are still really disturbing aren't they?

AH KEE: Well I find them disturbing only because of the idea of “Aboriginality” and I know lots of black fellas who can't relate to that idea because they're static, it's kind of like a static display and they're mannequin-like, dressed up, so we literally can't relate. Whereas the images of the Aborigines in the Neville-Rolf works, you can almost completely relate as black fellas, but particularly in the context of the day in Queensland. And these black fellas they have this life that we recognize, and they're alive and they're breathing and they're sitting and standing and engaging with each other.

BEC MAC: As you were talking about (in the conversation with Luke Roberts and Geraldine Barlow), it is such a unique collection because it was in a very small period of time this woman had come here for. She trained in Paris, she'd lived in Italy, she was an Aristocrat, she came, she landed, she painted and then she left really quite rapidly so her segment of time here was very short, so it's like a snapshot. You were talking about how the work appears almost like a cinematic photographic moment can you explain a little bit more about that?

AH KEE: Well I think because of the framing and the composition of her works, I also think she was aware that she was only going to have a couple of years here and so her works are a kind of a documentation and she produced a lot, she was very productive and she wasn't going to waste her time.  But because she was here to see her family, her brothers she had access to the colonial life here and she's also landing with no idea of, well maybe some idea of, the of the actual power dynamic between the colonial settler relationship with black fellas, and so she's unaware that she should be kind of relating to the Aborigines in a certain way.  But she goes ahead and includes black fellas in the landscape and not just includes them, but very much in a matter-of-fact way, that this is who they are, this is what they're doing, this is the context of their lives. I said in the talk that they were kind of sometimes pathetic, but also there's a warmth, there's an engagement and an interaction within families that that she portrays in her works and as a black fella you relate to that. It's extraordinary that there's only 20 years that separates these works and the earlier Von Guerard work, and they may as well be 500 years, I just think it's extraordinary, actually extraordinary!

BEC MAC: Let's have a look at this one over here of the family, they're actually really small, (the paintings)  I haven't seen the work before but they're so fragile, I can't believe they still exist to be honest, I mean watercolour on paper done in the 1800s. So can you talk about what you feel when you see these images?

AH-KEE: Well they've been looked after well these works themselves. But these are from Central Queensland and my family is from Queensland from North Queensland and so there's a kind of resonance and there's some images of the homestead and Aboriginal presence around the camp and Aboriginal stockmen and that's very much part of my own history.  So there's a direct relationship, a direct resonance there that I see and feel in these works which you know feels like strange to me as well, given that these are from the 1880s.  It's a kind of strange but a little bit exciting too, certainly not comforting, there's not a lot that is actually comforting about these works but there is a curiosity because she very much sits out on her own. You know this young woman who's born in England trained in Paris and Italy to be an artist and she's also pretty skilled as an artist, but she's worked with these ideas that are kind of photographic and documentary and you just think oh well it's a snapshot and she's giving an idea that is not as Colonial as we think.

BEC MAC: Yeah and I think that's a really clear point you made, the fact she almost parachuted into this landscape and it must have been mind-blowing for her when she first arrived and I've got to say also she's so prolific to be able to paint all these paintings in that time but I think you were inferring that the fact that she was just fresh in, that she was not affected by all those really horrendous colonial concepts of Aboriginal people and so it was almost like through fresh eyes, a different kind of narrative was told?

AH-KEE: It is a little bit like that I think, she's certainly arrived with a sense of privilege and permission and access which is unusual and she's a young woman so I think in a way she was allowed a little leeway.

BEC MAC: She was probably quite charming….

AH-KEE: She was probably as you know a women of her day and because of that she was allowed a little bit of leeway to kind of say what she wanted to say or look at what she wanted to look at, but she was very much a documentarian, someone who wanted to record things and if you think of in the context of the day everything she was seeing was the first time she'd seen anything like it. She wouldn't have seen a kangaroo before and she's done drawings and paintings of lizards and insects and they’re very fine works and she's done lots of botanical drawings and paintings to establish a kind of personal record for herself. You can really get a sense of where she's coming from but her landscapes and the idea of life on the on the station is unusual, very unusual in the context of her life and why she was here.

BEC MAC: Finally for the exhibition Plenty Geraldine Barlow's done this really powerful juxtaposition of this work next to the bequest of Murray-Prior’s collection of paintings that are in the next room which is where we started this conversation, next to the Von Geurad, with the understanding that he was QAG’s founding donor but at the same time he has historically been recorded to be part of the frontier wars and in fact the massacre of Aboriginal people. What does that feel like to you, what do you see within that, and why is that so important to be acknowledged?

AH-KEE: Well I'm always interested in the relationship that this country has with black fellas but particularly Queensland it's where I am, it's where I was born, it's who I am, but this kind of dynamic, it's steeped in racism of course but it's also that there's a wilful forgetting which is very clear, but also the level of denial that Queensland maintains over its history. It is extraordinary to me I'm often dumbfounded by it and guilt has no role in it, it's just at the level of denial kind of overrides any kind of sense of guilt and you see that often actually.

BEC MAC: It's like we haven't even got to the point of guilt because we haven't even acknowledged anything happened yet.

 AH-KEE: Yeah, I kind of often feel like I have to keep on repeating myself over and over again because nothing seems to hit home but that's very clear and this kind of exhibition here mind you, it's extraordinary that it's happening at QAG given QAG’s history and legacy and heritage, but this is the kind of exhibition that raises all those complexities and invites people to kind of tease out in little bits and pieces and I find that kind of interesting, a little bit exciting too that new conversations are kind of going to be landing on the ground.   

BEC MAC: I agree absolutely and I think that's why for me personally I'm really wanting to be involved in this conversation because there is complexity and there is a dark past, the historical massacre of people, Aboriginal people that as you said we’re still in denial of. There are opportunities now to have these conversations and actually be honest about it. But we, everyone, has to be brave enough to do it, and it still feels there is sort of like oh, let's put that back we don't need to know that, we don't need to understand that, but we really do.

AH-KEE: Well yeah, you have to know yourself if you're going to kind of understand how we're going to move forward and I think that's true of everybody. But we're also, you know, we're all in this game together, and we're all complicit. Whether we think we are or not, absolutely we are. As I said in the talk, if we accept Aboriginal absence in any part of this land, then that makes us completely complicit in this process of forgetting and denial, so we all have to be in this game. There's no other way, and there's no shortcuts either.

BEC MAC: Yes, well thank you so much Vernon. It's a conversation that's just started and it's so amazing that we had this opportunity to hear both you and Luke talk today with Geraldine, and I appreciate again your insights knowledge and wisdom and thank you.

THE EXHIBITION PLENTY IS ON AT QUEENSLAND ART GALLERY NOW