Photography, Painting and Sketches

Painting, Photography, and Journals: Art, Memory, and the Shaping of History

MLA Educational Series — Indigenous Visual History of Victoria

Before modern photography and digital archives, societies recorded memory through painting, drawing, and journals. These creative forms shaped not only what was remembered but how history itself was imagined. In Victoria, Indigenous artists such as William Barak (Wurundjeri) and Uncle Gavin Couzens (Wadawurrung) preserved cultural law and story through art, while later artists including Dr Deanne Gilson and Mary Gilson reassert Wadawurrung women’s presence and matriarchal knowledge on Country. This article explores how painting, photography, and journals constructed history in Victoria—how colonial art often erased Indigenous presence, and how Indigenous artists continue to restore truth, resilience, and memory through visual storytelling.

Painting and Drawing as Historical Record

For over 50,000 years, Indigenous peoples across Australia have used painting, engraving, and design to pass on law, ecology, and ancestral stories. In Victoria, rock galleries at Gariwerd (Grampians), Mount Pilot, and Buchan Caves record creation beings, ceremony, and law. These images are not simply artistic decoration—they are living archives, linking each generation to Country, kinship, and responsibility (Flood, 1997). When Europeans arrived, painting also became a colonial tool of record and ownership. Artists such as John Glover, Eugène von Guérard, and Nicholas Chevalier produced romanticised landscapes that depicted an empty, peaceful frontier—an artistic silence that justified the dispossession of Indigenous peoples (Tipping, 1982; Thomas, 2011). Through these colonial lenses, Country was aestheticised rather than understood. Indigenous custodianship disappeared beneath European light and brushwork.

The Painters of the Colonial Frontier

Nineteenth-century painters helped define how Victoria was imagined:

• Von Guérard’s Tower Hill (1855) captured volcanic wetlands in detail, yet omitted the Gunditjmara aquaculture systems that sustained that landscape.

• S.T. Gill recorded gold rush life—miners, camps, and labour—but Indigenous workers and guides were almost invisible.

• John Glover’s Tasmanian works portrayed a “lost Arcadia” of Aboriginal figures, reflecting colonial nostalgia for cultures already devastated by invasion (Sayers, 1994).

Meanwhile, Indigenous artists like William Barak and Tommy McRae (Yorta Yorta) used paper, ochre, and charcoal to preserve ceremony, law, and cultural strength. Their work challenged colonial narratives by asserting that Indigenous presence never ended, only adapted (Barwick, 1998).

Frederick McCubbin and the You Yangs: Children, Landscape, and the Colonial Gaze

By the late 1800s, painters of the Heidelberg School—including Frederick McCubbin (1855–1917)—sought to capture an emerging national identity rooted in landscape. McCubbin painted the You Yangs, Werribee Plains, and Geelong district—Country belonging to the Wadawurrung people—through a romantic lens. Works like Childhood Fancies (1894) and The You Yangs (1901) depict European children playing beneath tall gums, symbolising innocence and belonging. Yet these images, framed by settler nostalgia, present the landscape as uninhabited.
The Wadawurrung families who lived, hunted, and held ceremony there are absent. McCubbin’s art helped form what scholars call the “settler pastoral”—a genre portraying peace and progress while concealing the violent history beneath (Thomas, 2011). When viewed today alongside Wadawurrung art, these same hills and plains reveal dual histories: one of colonial idealism, the other of Indigenous endurance and reclamation.

William Barak: Painting Culture Under Colonisation

William Barak (1824–1903), ngurungaeta of the Wurundjeri-willam, painted ceremony, ancestral beings, and cultural law while living at Coranderrk Station. Using ochre, charcoal, and gouache, his works united Indigenous design and Western materials, preserving sacred knowledge while speaking to a broader world. Barak’s drawings of corroborees, initiations, and community gatherings asserted Indigenous identity in the face of colonial suppression (Sayers, 1994; Barwick, 1998). His art is now recognised as both cultural record and political statement—one of resistance, education, and leadership.

Uncle Gavin Couzens: Wadawurrung Contemporary Storytelling

Uncle Gavin Couzens, a Wadawurrung Elder, artist, and cultural educator, continues this visual lineage. His works evoke the Barwon River, Mount Buninyong, and the You Yangs, using symbolic colour, movement, and pattern to depict connection to Country and spirit. Through his paintings, Couzens acts as a cultural historian and storyteller, recording Wadawurrung identity and resilience in a post-colonial world. His art, often used in schools and exhibitions, represents the living continuation of Wadawurrung law, belonging, and artistic authority.

Dr Deanne Gilson and Mary Gilson: Wadawurrung Women Reclaiming the Canvas

In recent decades, Dr Deanne Gilson and her mother Mary Gilson, both Wadawurrung women from Ballarat, have revitalised Indigenous female representation in Victorian art.

Dr Gilson’s work examines the colonial portrayal and erasure of Indigenous women, especially through the lens of the “domestic” and the “romantic bush”.
Her paintings and installations layer ochre, clay, and acrylic with traditional motifs, combining historical research, women’s stories, and Country.
She explores how colonial artists excluded or objectified Indigenous women, reclaiming space for them as central keepers of knowledge and culture (Gilson, 2017).

Her mother, Mary Gilson, was also a painter and cultural educator, known for her depictions of Wadawurrung landscapes, flora, and spiritual forms—artworks rooted in deep respect for women’s connection to land.
Together, their work embodies intergenerational cultural continuity, where the canvas becomes a matrilineal space: teaching, healing, and reclaiming story.

As Dr Gilson has stated:

“My mother taught me that painting is ceremony — it connects us to our old people, our Country, and our women’s knowledge.”

Their combined legacy continues the long tradition of Wadawurrung storytelling through image, from ancient rock art to modern exhibitions such as Respect and Country and Reclamation (Ballarat Art Gallery, 2019).

Journals and Art in Shaping History

Explorers such as Major Thomas Mitchell and George Augustus Robinson kept detailed journals, combining sketches and writing to record new territories. Their works formed part of the colonial archive—useful for historians but deeply biased. Mitchell’s and Robinson’s images portrayed Indigenous people as background figures within a “discovered” landscape. Their sketches were acts of possession as much as observation (Clark, 1998). Against this, Indigenous art functioned as the counter-archive—recording Country through song, design, and visual law long before colonial paper.

The Rise of Photography

Photography arrived in Victoria in the 1840s, documenting settlements, ports, and gold rush expansion. Yet while celebrated for its “objectivity,” photography too was shaped by colonial framing. Early images by John Lindt and Charles Walter categorised Indigenous people through ethnographic lenses (Lydon, 2014). Today, Indigenous communities reclaim these photographs as family records and instruments of truth-telling—restoring names, stories, and connections lost in caption and archive.

International Perspectives: Art as Historical Witness

Across the world, Indigenous cultures use visual art as historical record and spiritual law:

• First Nations (North America): pictographs and hide paintings record treaties and battle histories.

• Māori (Aotearoa): carvings and painted wharenui encode genealogy and land rights.

• Sámi (Scandinavia): drum designs map songlines and herding routes.

• African and Pacific communities: murals, masks, and textiles express shared history and cosmology.

These parallels reveal art as a vessel of cultural sovereignty, sustaining identity where written archives denied Indigenous voices.

The Legacy of Image and Memory

Art, photography, and journals each shape what societies remember.
For Victoria, colonial painters and explorers defined the landscape through an imperial lens—empty, available, and newly born.
In contrast, Indigenous artists like Barak, Couzens, Mary Gilson, and Dr Deanne Gilson restore the depth of time, women’s strength, and Country’s living presence.

Through their work, the painted surface becomes a site of truth-telling, resistance, and renewal.
Together, these artists transform Victoria’s visual history—from a story of conquest into one of continuity.

References

Barwick, D. (1998). Rebellion at Coranderrk. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press.
Clark, I. D. (1998). The Journals of George Augustus Robinson, Chief Protector, Port Phillip Aboriginal Protectorate. Melbourne: Heritage Matters.
Flood, J. (1997). Rock Art of the Dreamtime. Sydney: Angus & Robertson.
Gilson, D. (2017). Researching the Colonial Gaze: Wadawurrung Women, Representation and Reclamation. PhD Thesis, Federation University, Ballarat.
Lydon, J. (2014). Photography, Humanitarianism, Empire. London: Bloomsbury.
Sayers, A. (1994). Aboriginal Artists of the Nineteenth Century. Melbourne: Oxford University Press.
Thomas, S. (2011). Colonial Vision: Landscape, Art, and the Settler Imaginary. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.
Tipping, M. (1982). Convicts Unbound: The Story of the Calcutta Convicts and Their Settlement in Australia. Melbourne: Viking.

Written, Researched and Directed by James Vegter (22 October 2025)

MLA

Sharing the truth of Indigenous and colonial history through film, education, land, and community.
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Copyright MLA – 2025

Magic Lands Alliance acknowledges the Traditional Owners, Custodians, and First Nations communities across Australia and internationally. We honour their enduring connection to the sky, land, waters, language, and culture. We pay respect to Elders past, present, and emerging, and to all First Peoples’ communities and language groups. This article draws only on publicly available information; many cultural practices remain the intellectual property of their respective communities.