Representing Colonial Estrangement: Depictions of Unreal Architecture in the Painting A Direct North General View of Sydney Cove, 1794
- Publisher:
- Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand
- Publication Type:
- Conference Proceeding
- Citation:
- Distance Looks Back, Proceedings of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand 36, 2020, 36, pp. 388-401
- Issue Date:
- 2020-03
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This essay examines depictions of unreal architecture in the painting A Direct North General View of Sydney Cove 1794 (1793-5) (or Sydney Cove 1794),
contestably authored by the convict artist Thomas Watling. By comparing this painting to three of Watling’s topographic drawings of the same period, this essay demonstrates the repeated use of familiar architectural objects in the work. It suggests that, as an assemblage of discontinuous architectural objects in the landscape, this painting fulfils picturesque aesthetic principles by fragmenting accurate representations of place. By considering various claims of the accuracy of topographic drawings—widely accepted as the authentic other to the picturesque—this essay challenges their assumed compositional neutrality. Instead, it argues that the same mechanism of addition/omission of visual information is apparent in both picturesque and topographic depictions of architecture at Sydney Cove. Both methods of image production depart from how buildings appear in order to satisfy familiar, although unreal, illusions of the civility of architectural space. Underlining this argument is the suggestion that space itself was not a neutral concept during the early colonial occupation of Sydney Cove, and that this painting demonstrates the manipulation of the image in order to culturally assimilate a completely unknown reality. By linking these practices of image production to the emergent eighteenth-century culture of imitation, this painting is described as the consequence of an attempt to meaningfully represent unfamiliar land, using ideas of space and methods of depiction at a distance from their context. The result is a collapse of distance between metropole and antipode depictions of place, accompanied by an equivalent collapse between the mediums of image production and concepts of space. Sydney Cove 1794 portrays the experience of colonial estrangement by representing a space neither familiar nor foreign but dispelled from its centre through the endeavour of colonisation.
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