Curio

State Library of New South Wales
Morning at the 'Heads' of Port Jackson, or the Pilot's Look Out

Morning at the 'Heads' of Port Jackson, or the Pilot's Look Out

1850
Oil on board
Bequest of Sir William Dixson, 1932
DG 204

With its dramatic rock formations and spectacular views back down the harbour and out to sea, South Head was a popular spot for tourists. It was also used as a lookout post by pilots, whose job was to guide ships safely into the harbour.

By the 1840s, Sydneysiders had embraced the harbour as a place of pleasure, associated with picnics and parties rather than with trade and commerce. Its beauty was proudly celebrated as a counterpoint to the slurs that Europeans liked to throw at the city’s convict origins. Around this time Peacock’s works began appearing on the market, with attractive harbour bays and the exclusive private villas on its foreshores his dominant subject. The number of his works to survive suggest that he was a prolific and therefore a reasonably successful artist.

At his trial in 1836, Peacock complained that the cost of ‘maintaining that respectability of appearance without which business connexions do not acquire confidence’ drove him to defraud his brother. Peacock argued that his crime had been honourable, committed so that his wife and child could be saved from the disgrace and social oblivion of poverty.

Peacock was sentenced to death, but this was commuted to transportation to NSW for life. At the time, the press noted that Peacock’s trial marked the end of the punishment of execution for forgery.

Peacock’s wife and son followed him to Australia. However, she refused to live with him and, much to his distress, settled down with another man.

Peacock’s well-connected wife, Selina Wilmer, brought many letters of introduction to Sydney, including one to Governor Bourke recommending her as a woman with ‘courage enough to delight you as a soldier and quite enough attraction to interest you as a man’.*


Footnotes

* Lord Monteagle to Governor Bourke, 13 May 1837, Bourke Papers, A1736 Item 36

When this painting was made, the pilots who guided ships into Sydney Harbour worked freelance: the first to spot a ship that was about to enter the Heads and get to it, won the job.