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State Library of New South Wales
Hara-o & Karadra in Drawings and etchings of Nepean and Springwood Aboriginal m

Hara-o & Karadra in Drawings and etchings of Nepean and Springwood Aboriginal m

1819
PXD 923/7
Sepia wash drawing

Alphonse Pellion was a topographical painter, draughtsman and mid-shipman aboard the French vessel l'Uranie. In 1817 the ship set sail from France on an around-the-world voyage of exploration and science. Its professional scientists, naturalists and artists were charged with making scientific and ethnographic observations of the Indigenous people encountered.

In November 1819 the vessel landed at Sydney, and the crew was sent to explore the colony. Pellion and two of his companions set out across the Blue Mountains to visit the newly established town of Bathurst. During this trip he made a number of sketches, including views of Cox’s Pass, Cox’s River, and the local Indigenous people.

This sepia wash drawing was created by Sebestian Leroy, who was most likely a French commercial artist employed to devise an original pen and ink drawing by Pellion and prepare it for publication.This scene depicts two Aboriginal men Pellion met on the lower Blue Mountains on his way to Bathurst.

Preparing for the mission

The accomplished French navigator Louis de Freycinet (1779-1841) was no stranger to Australia after all he published the first map that illustrated the full outline of the continent as part of Nicolas Baudin’s expedition in 1811.  In 1817 he set sail from France in command of the l’Uranie on a three year voyage to circumnavigate the world and explore in particular, the Pacific region.
Despite de Freycinet making a name for himself in Napoleon’s forces fighting against the British, he was welcomed in Sydney by Governor Macquarie with open arms. The end of the Napoleonic Wars had taken the heat out of much of the earlier conflict and competition between the English and the French.
Macquarie recruited the explorer William Lawson to guide the surgeon-zoologist Quoy and the botanist Gaudichaud-Beaupré on an expedition over the Blue Mountains to Bathurst along Cox’s road. De Freycinet had intended expedition artist Jacques Arago to accompany them, but his place was taken by Alphonse Pellion 'whose zeal, activity and courage never failed him in dangerous enterprises, and whose talents as a draughtsman rendered him equally proper for this mission’.*
* Design and Art Australia Online 
http://www.daao.org.au/bio/j-alphonse-pellion/biography/