Page:History of New South Wales from the records, Volume 1.djvu/82

 IxxH ^.V INTRODUCTORY wortli sketching. What was lie doing, one is inclined to ask, during the eight days that he passed in Botany Bay? If he could see nothing worth notice about the bay itself, he had only to go in a boat up the two rivers running into it, in order to find a succession of beautiful views lying before him. But it does not appear that he went up the rivers at all ; and as for the bay, it seems to have made no sort of pleasant impression on him. There were two other artists on board the same ship — ^William Hodges and James Webber — whose portfolios were also pub- lished — (p. 595). The whole collection contains only two draw- ings referring to this country, both of which were studies of aboriginal life. One of them was painted in oil on a piece of sail-cloth, while the ship was in the Endeavour River, the artist having lost his materials when she struck the reef. No attempt was made by these gentlemen to paint a landscape during their stay on the coast ; the only source of interest they found in the country seems to have been the natives, whose " bottle-noses " were immortalised by Dampier. None of these artists having left on record any expression of opinion with respect to the character of the scenery in this part of the world, we can only look to their published sketches in order to find out what they thought about it. If they had con- sidered it worth the trouble of reproduction with brush or pencil, we may suppose that they would not have omitted any oppor- tunity in their way, seeing that they had undertaken a perilous voyage of three years' duration for the purpose of exercising their art in new fields. Their silence, therefore, sufficiently indi- cates their judgment on the subject. That it does so there can be no doubt ; and the inference is confirmed by the unhesitating statements of another artist, who came out some years afterwards on an exactly similar mission. When the Investigator sailed from. England in 1801, under the command of Matthew Flinders, who was commissioned to survey the coasts of this country, she carried a draftsman named William Westall, appointed by the Admiralty at the instance of Sir Joseph Banks. What Westall thought of Australian scenery Digitized by Google