Mullet Creek, Illawarra 1853
Conrad Martens: Archive | Beagle Journal 1833-4 | Brush Scene, Illawarra 1850-1 | Campbell House 1838-9 (2) | Four bridges? | Illawarra, 1835 | Mullet Creek, Illawarra 1853 | The Picturesque |
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| Conrad Martens, Mullet Creek, Illawarra, 1853, watercolour on paper, 30 x 43 cm. Collection: Wollongong Art Gallery. |
In July 1835 the visiting British landscape artist Conrad Martens (1801-1878) took a brief journey on horseback south of Sydney to the Illawarra district, noted for its distinct, picturesque landscape and lush mix of sub-tropical and rainforest vegetation. His aim was to produce a series of pencil and watercolour sketches of the area for use in the production of watercolours and oils for sale to local and overseas clients. One of those finished works was the exquisite 1853 watercolour entitled Mullet Creek, Illawarra, based around a pencil sketch taken on 14 July 1835. Martens' sketches from the Illawarra visit were often heavily annotated with references to colour, light, the scientific name of plants, and local landmarks, including their Aboriginal names. This enabled him to recall the specific elements of the landscape when producing a version often decades later, rather than having to revisit the area, which he would nevertheless do on occasion. The majority of these sketches are to be found in the State Library of New South Wales collection, and include the following:
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| Conrad Martens, The Brush at Illawarra, July 14 [1835], pencil on paper, 18.8 x 29.2 cm. Source: State Library of New South Wales PXC296 f.32. |
The sketches are a mix of landscape views and studies of individual plants. It is interesting to note that the last sketch cited above is one of the few occasions on which Martens took the portrait of an Aboriginal person. Perhaps this was his guide as he traveled from Appin, down the mountain at Mount Keira, and on to Wollongong and beyond. Martens was most at ease with landscape and elements of the natural environment such as geographical features and flora, rather than the human form, though he did include both Indigenous and non-Indigenous figures in his pencil sketches and major works. They were usually small scale and placed in the foreground, supposedly to provide a sense of scale and context. It is also possible that his inclusion of Aborigines in both original sketches and finished works was Martens' way of commenting upon the effect of the British invasion of 1788 on the Indigenous population, thereby connecting his landscapes, in some small way, with the Aboriginal concept of Country and deep attachment to land.
Following his return to Sydney, and decision to stay in the colony, Martens began developing his local client base and working up his sketches. At some point he produced a variant of the Mullet Creek sketch (reproduced below), applying watercolour touches and adding new elements, such as low lying vegetation to cover the stumps in the foreground.
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| Conrad Martens, Bushland scene, possibly in the Illawarra district, watercolour & pencil, 20.3 x 30.5 cm [black and white copy]. Source: State Library of New South Wales PX*D307-8 f.4. |
According to Martens' two volume manuscript account book, at present in the State Library of New South Wales collection, between 22 August 1853 and 13 January 1855 alone he sold, or received commissions each to the value of between 5 and 15 guineas (£5.5. - £15.15.), for seven works entitled Mullett Creek, Illawarra or Brush, Mullet Creek. They were likely based around his sketch The Brush at Illawarra, 14 July 1835. An 1854 version of the finished watercolour is also known, having been sold by Goodmans Auctioneers, Sydney. Unfortunately a clear image of the work is not available. It nevertheless bears a striking resemblance to the 1853 version, though without the tree stumps in the left foreground.
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| Conrad Martens, Mullet Creek, Illawarra, 1854, watercolour on paper, 28.5 x 42.5 cm. Signed and dated lower right. Source: Goodmans Auctioneers, Sydney. |
Martens utilised his small, exquisitely drawn pencil sketches as templates for fully worked paintings in watercolour and, less commonly, oil (Organ 1987). The first Illawarra examples appeared in August 1835 with two works - Boat Harbour and Illawarra Lake - sold to Governor Richard Bourke. It is possible that he had visited the Illawarra at the behest of Bourke who had recently visited the area and christened it the 'garden of New South Wales, perhaps due to its Garden of Eden like, largely pristine and exotic natural environment. This use of the original 1835 pencil sketches by Martens continued through to February 1877 with a View at Dapto, the last of his Illawarra works and completed just prior to his death the following year. Martens' clients for the Mullet Creek works produced during the early 1850s included Lord Schomberg Kerr, the Reverend Henry Stobert, the Reverend Henry Bowles, O. Browne, John Reeve and Louis Barker. During this period Martens also completed a number of works featuring other Illawarra localities, such as Lake Illawarra, the view from Mount Keira, and Dapto. Localities such as Sydney Harbour, the Blue Mountains and the Illawarra remained popular with the artist and his patrons throughout his life.
Precise location
Many of Conrad Martens' pencil sketches have an almost photographic quality, remembering that photography did not exist in 1835. They are highly detailed and can often be lined up with the modern-day landscape. A good example of this is his coastal scene Wollongong Point looking north July 8th / 35. The scene has not changed in any substantial way over the almost two centuries that have passed since Martens put pencil to paper, apart from the effects of a pounding surf and coastal erosion of the rocks and cliff faces. Others, however, display a somewhat artificial view, being the result of the artist's Picturesque eye in bringing to bear modification of the scene before him so as to present one that is compact and most pleasing to the eye (Organ 1993). Unfortunately, the Mullet Creek, Illawarra watercolour, displaying as it does a dense forest scene, has no readily identifiable geographical landmarks apart from a small section of Mullet Creek, making it almost impossible to place with any accuracy. An attempt was made in 2015 by the University of Wollongong-based Walking Upstream group and reported upon by Vince Bicego (Bicego 2015). Urbanisation, flooding and alteration of the associated landscape is noted therein, such that little evidence of the original subtropical natural of the vegetation remains. At the time of Martens' visit to the Illawarra in July 1835, the road from Wollongong south through to Dapto, Terry's Meadows (Albion Park) and on to Kiama was being formed by convict road gangs, based on the map and route determined the previous year by Surveyor General T.L. Mitchell (Williams 2019).
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| T.L. Mitchell, Map of Illawarra 1834 [extract showing Mullet Creek]. Collection: State Library of New South Wales |
A bridge over Mullet Creek was yet to be built, as it was the last creek to be crossed on the Dapto road. Looking at the finished 1853 watercolour, it is possible that the view was taken looking west up the waterway toward the Illawarra Escarpment, and in a forested location adjacent to, or in close proximity to, the road. The winding of the creek can be seen in the lower left section of the painting, whilst within the original pencil sketch the banks of the creek are slightly steeper and rougher. The approximate intersection of the road with the creek can be determined from the 1834 map, though we have no idea how far Martens strayed from there in order to locate a view by the creek that he was happy with. As this is on of the few surviving sketch we have from that day, it is possible he walked a fair way up the creek, prior to getting back on his horse and sketching areas further south around the Albion Park area, then known as Terry's Meadows or Johnson's Meadows. We can also note the three tree stumps in the foreground, indicative of road-forming or farming. Unfortunately, due to the richness of the soil in that area, this was one of the first sections of the Illawarra to be cleared, though the creek lines may have been spared from these initial forays. This began in 1816 with the allocation of the first official land grants to European settlers. The rights of the local Aboriginal people who stated their claims to, and connection with, the land were never recognised, and remain so to this day.
Lady Jane Franklin, wife of the governor of Tasmania Sir John Franklin, visited the Illawarra region during 1839 whilst engaged in an overland trek from Melbourne to Sydney. At the time she traveled south from Wollongong to Kiama, and in her diary noted the following of the area about Mullet Creek:
Tuesday, 14th May [1839] Set off for Kiama - a distance of 25 miles. We get from Mr Plunkett's onto the road and pursue it into the forest. As we proceed there is a low, wet part - muddy and deep. We come to a large clearing on the right, and on the left, on a green eminence bare of trees, there are 2 white cottages and some other buildings belonging to Mr Gerard. A little further on we come to the Stockade, or Road Party, which is building a bridge over the adjoining Mullet Creek. The stockade buildings are arranged in a square, along with 2 lamp posts and a bell in a stand. There are about 33 men here and 9 or 10 soldiers under the same superintendence of Captain Rait. Beyond we crossed the forced and natural channels of Mullet Creek and found about half a dozen men, with soldiers with pistols in hand standing over them, hoisting up piles to sink into the bed of the river. (Franklin 1839)
Even in 1839 the road about Dapto and Mullet Creek was surrounded by both forest and cleared land. Four years earlier Conrad Martens had encountered this same variation in the natural landscape. Due to his artistic sensibilities he was attracted to the more picturesque elements, favouring a scene encompassing lush vegetation as against open, ploughed fields. As a footnote, there was a great deal of similarity between the vegetation encountered by Martens during July 1835 at the Illawarra and further north in September at Brisbane Water, today known as Broken Bay near Gosford. In both areas, the dense, subtropical, coastal vegetation was rich in figtrees, ferns, palms and vines, perhaps reminding the artist of the forests he encountered in South America whilst attached to HMS Beagle between 1833-4. This is evident by the fact that during the 1840s and 1850s there was a similarity between some of Martens' works featuring those two localities. There was even evidence of overlap in the motifs Martens utilised for his final works in watercolour and oil. This is most noticeable in the 1848 oil painting Brush Scene, Brisbane Water, which was initially confused with his Illawarra works by some observers, including the present author, and catalogued simply as Illawarra by the State Library of New South Wales through to the 1980s.
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| Conrad Martens, Brush scene, Brisbane Water, 1848, oil on canvas, 63 x 76 cm. Collection: State Library of New South Wales. This was formerly catalogued as Illawarra. |
Adding to this confusion is the fact that the Mullet Creek, Illawarra watercolour under discussion includes a section at the base of the large tree in the central foreground which strongly resembles a pencil sketch taken at Wyoming, Brisbane Water, in September 1835. Similarly, elements of the Brush Scene, Brisbane Water oil includes elements reminiscent of some of the Illawarra pencil sketches, such as Fern tree, Illawarra, July 16 / 35.
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Adaptations
The Conrad Martens Mullet Creek, Illawarra 1853 watercolour was acquired by the Wollongong Art Gallery through auction from the sale of the Alan Bond collection in 1992. Prior to this it had sold at auction on 16 April 1985 for $45,000, with a catalogue entry View of the Queensland Jungle, and The Property of an English Nobelman (Sotheby's 1985). Since then it has been on public display a number of times, and reproduced in various publications (viz. Orchard et al. 1994). It is also readily discoverable on the internet. As such, it has become a regionally iconic work, displaying the lushness of the Illawarra rain forest and subtropical vegetation during the colonial period, prior to large scale land clearing of the Dapto plain for farming and, later, residential and commercial development. This notoriety has given rise to adapted works and reinterpretations by noted artists such as Colin Lanceley and Anne Zahalka.
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| Anne Zahalka, Stranger in a Strange Land, 1992, Type C print, 16.5 x 24 cm. |
Zahalka's collage print has superimposed an African Zebra upon the Mullet Creek landscape. The black and white stripes of the animal are linked with the similarly striped vegetation hanging from the adjacent large tree, which in turn is being fed upon by two brightly coloured blue and red parrots. The beauty of this artificial scene betrays the danger to the delicate rainforest ecosystem through the introduction of hooved animals such as horses, cows and sheep. The greater degree of destruction brought by humans and their machines is not addressed here. The real danger is the introduced deer which frequents the Illawarra Escarpment from the back of Dapto north to the Royal National Park and has long been identified as a pest, alongside foxes, rabbits and domesticated animals such as cats and dogs. A phantom black panther also roams the area, though its spirit nature poses no threat (Thompson 2017).
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| Colin Lanceley, Mullet Creek, Illawarra. After Conrad Martens, 2011, oil on carved wood on canvas, 123 x 169 cm. Collection: Australian Galleries. |
Noted Australian artist and former Illawarra resident Colin Lanceley (1938-2015) interpreted the Martens work in 2011. Utilising carved wood and oil paint on canvas, Lanceley, in one of his last major works, brings a typically bright palette of pale green, orange, yellow and blue to the scene. The dried up, pebble-encrusted creek bed on the left is a telling reminder of the fate of many of Illawarra's local creeks, decimated and starved of fresh, free flowing waters due to diversion through stormwater drainage systems and the alteration of landforms in the creation of residential subdivisions and infrastructure such as roads, bridges and railways. Mullet Creek remains in Lanceley's work, as a thin blue, slightly curved extension of a sawn tree, though it is therein lined with dark, polluted elements on the right, and green algae on the left. The near complete removal of the once pristine natural environment seen in the 1853 watercolour is represented in Vince Bicego's 2015 collage Mullet Creek Revisited (After Martens).
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| Vince Bicego, Mullet Creek Revisited (After Martens), collage on paper, 2015. Source: Bicego 2015. |
Buildings, concrete containers and people dominate the view, with the forested landscape a decimated, diaphanous shadow, as in a partial, painted stage backdrop. The experience is now two-dimensional or virtual, and no longer real. That moment in time captured by Conrad Martens in July 1835 and some two decades later, attains new significance as we suffer the effects of Climate Change, see our native forests decimated by fire, and consider the untold loss of wildlife, property and people. As Joni Mitchell sang in Woodstock, we seek to get "back to the Garden", with Conrad Martens' exquisite watercolour representative of that journey's end.
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References
Bicego, Vince, Mullet Creek, 18 September 2015 - Reminiscences of a self-confessed misanthrope [webpage], Walking Upstream - Waterways of the Illawarra, University of Wollongong, 2015. Available URL: http://walking-upstream.net/2015/11/13/mullet-creek-18-sept-2015-reminiscences-of-a-self-confessed-misanthrope/.
Franklin, Jane, The Illawarra Diary of Lady Jane Franklin, 10-17 May 1839, Illawarra Historical Publications, 1988, 51p. Available URL: https://ro.uow.edu.au/asdpapers/34/.
Lanceley, Colin, Mullet Creek, Illawarra. After Conrad Martens, Australian Galleries [webpage], 2020. Available URL: http://australiangalleries.com.au/product/mullet-creek-illawarra-after-conrad-martens/.
Orchard, Ken, Organ, Michael, and Walsh, John, Illawarra - The Garden of New South Wales [exhibition catalogue], Wollongong City Art Gallery, 25 November 1994, 52p.
Organ, Michael, Conrad Martens and Illawarra 1835-1878: In search of the Picturesque, Illawarra Historical Publications, Wollongong, 1987.
-----, Conrad Martens & the Picturesque: Precursor to Australian Impressionism, unpublished manuscript, 1 July 1993. Available URL: https://documents.uow.edu.au/~morgan/graphics/cmpicturesque.pdf.
Martens, Conrad, Account of Pictures 1835-1878, 2 volumes, unpublished manuscript, State Library of New South Wales.
-----, View of the Queensland Jungle, Sotheby's, Melbourne, 16 April 1985, catalogue entry no. 29.
Thompson, Angela, Paw print proof of Austinmer panther?, Illawarra Mercury, 25 April 2017. Available URL: https://www.illawarramercury.com.au/story/4619272/paw-print-proof-of-austinmer-panther/.
Williams, Annette, The Dapto Road: 1815-1844, Master of Arts (Research) thesis, School of Humanities and Social Inquiry, University of Wollongong, 2019. Available URL: https://ro.uow.edu.au/theses1/601.
Zahalka, Anne, The Landscape Re-presented 1983, Anne Zahalka - Photomedia Artist [website], 2015. Available URL: http://zahalkaworld.com.au/gallery/the-landscape-re-presented/.
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Conrad Martens: Archive | Beagle Journal 1833-4 | Brush Scene, Illawarra 1850-1 | Campbell House 1838-9 (2) | Four bridges? | Illawarra, 1835 | Mullet Creek, Illawarra 1853 | The Picturesque |
Michael Organ, Australia
Last updated: 3 March 2020.
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