Curio

State Library of New South Wales
A view of the west side of Sydney Cove

A view of the west side of Sydney Cove

c1804

Watercolour on paper
Donated by Sir William Dixson, 1930
DG V1/86

Like many images from this period, this painting is very much about the nuts and bolts of colonial buildings. It is more concerned with carefully recording the progress of the settlement than with trying to present an artistic view of the town. That buildings like churches had been built in Sydney was an important indicator of the presence of Christian influences in the penal settlement.

Also like many images of Sydney Cove from this time, the foreground includes a trace or isolated reference to the local Indigenous people – in this case a canoe (bottom right). Although their presence is literally marginalised, such references are graphic reminders that Aboriginal people continued to occupy, and live in, the Sydney district long after its colonisation by the British.

The painting once belonged to the family of the first Viscount Sydney, after whom the settlement of Sydney was named. Painted shortly after the viscount's death, it was possibly given to his only son John, and remained in the family's possession until it was purchased by Sir William Dixson.

Did Sydney really look like this?

How accurate, or truthful, a record of Sydney is this watercolour? Botanist Peter Good’s description of Sydney at this time seems to support the evidence of Evans’s watercolour. He wrote that ‘The town of Sydney has a fine appearance … though there is nothing grand or magnificent in the Construction of any the Buildings of the Town there is a degree of neatness & regularity which has a fine effect. Several of the principal houses are built with Brik and white washed’.1


A naval captain, however, writing at exactly the same time complained that ‘the buildings called Sydney Town [were] a little relief to the eye. I could compare them to no other than a miserable Portuguese settlement’.2


It is not surprising that two different people can have very different views of the same place. It is, however, a reminder that what appears to be a truthful record of a place can in fact have been created very much with other agendas in mind.


Footnotes 

1. Phyllis Edwards, ‘The Journal of Peter Good’, Bulletin of the British Museum (Natural History), Historical series no 9, London, 1981, p 79
2. Captain James Colnett to Evan Nepean, 14 September 1803, Historical Records of New South Wales, vol 5, p 209