Curio

State Library of New South Wales
The natives that were sent from Hobart Town to Great Island 1832

The natives that were sent from Hobart Town to Great Island 1832

1832
Pencil, pen, ink and wash drawings on wove paper
Bequest of Sir William Dixson, 1952
DL PX 46

In 1831 the highly successful English landscape artist John Glover emigrated to Tasmania (then Van Diemen’s Land) to join his two sons already living there. Arriving on his 64th birthday, he looked forward to a ‘new beautiful World – new landscapes, new trees and new flowers, new Animals, Birds, etc. etc. is delightful to me’ [1]. Yet he also arrived at a time when the conflict between Aboriginal Tasmanians and the colonists was at its height.

John Glover has been described as a charming man of excellent spirits: cheerful, mischievous, eccentric, even-tempered, gregarious, energetic and adventurous. Glover appears to have been eager to make contact with the Palawa, the Tasmanian Aboriginal people. He made efforts to learn and record the names of those he met, and in his paintings he depicts them as peaceful, happy people: a catalogue note to one of his Corroboree pictures comments: ‘one seldom sees such gaiety in a Ball Room, as amongst these untaught Savages’ [2].

Before emigrating to Australia, John Glover was one of England’s most commercially successful professional artists. 

The son of a farmer, as a boy John Glover worked in the fields near Ingarsby in Leicestershire, where he developed a passion for nature and a love of drawing, particularly birds.

Glover was highly prolific in watercolour but later turned increasingly to oil painting. 

Within a few years of Glover ’s arrival in Van Diemen ’s Land, most of the last free Palawa, or Aboriginal Tasmianians had been removed to Flinders Island. When Glover died in 1849, there were only about 40 Palawa still alive.

Europeans thought Tasmania was attached to mainland Australia until 1802, when Matthew Flinders and George Bass charted the southern coast of Australia and through Bass Straight.

The island of Tasmania was named Van Diemen’s Land in 1642 by the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman. A British colony was established there in 1803, which retained that name until 1856, when the colony was granted responsible self-government and changed its name to Tasmania.