Thompson, John. Footprints on the water – in search of Lapérouse”, Wollongong City Gallery, 2005, ill. (catalogue extract)

‘[Mr de la Pérouse] … will require the artists … to draw sketches of the land and of all noteworthy sites, portraits of natives in the various countries, their dress, ceremonies, games, buildings, seagoing crafts and of all products of the land and sea … drawings of which he may consider useful to understand the descriptions provided by the scientists.’ — Instructions issued to Jean-François de Galaup de La Pérouse, 1785.

‘… in the hundred years after 1768 the Pacific Ocean became one of the finest schools for scientists in the world and stimulated European thought concerning man and nature both in art and science.’ — Bernard Smith.

In 1960 the art historian Bernard Smith published European Vision and the South Pacific 1768-1850, his pioneering study in the history of art and ideas. Smith’s great opus was offered as an inquiry into the origins of European art in Australia. Smith understood that the earliest expressions of the European making of art in Australia were achieved within a specific and singular context. In the first instance, art was made not for its own sake as a spontaneous creative endeavour. Rather it was employed in the service of scientific inquiry and investigation. Science ranked high in the great voyages of discovery that entered the Pacific in the second half of the eighteenth century and the early years of the nineteenth century. Smith’s inquiry became not a narrow examination of the origins of European art in Australia but an investigation of the connections between art and science.

Appreciation of the early European art made in this country has focused on the achievements of the draughtsmen and painters who travelled with Captain James Cook in his Second Voyage or with Mathew Flinders who made the first circumnavigation of the continent (1803-4). Here the names of Sydney Parkinson, William Hodges, Ferdinand Bauer and William Westall stand out. More recently, through exhibitions borrowed from French museums and in new scholarship, there has been a discovery of the artistic and scientific achievements of other travellers, not only the English.

For there were other European encounters with Australia. Some of the most significant were the various French voyages of the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Of these, the voyage of La Pérouse in his ships La Boussole and L’ Astrolabe (1785-88) has achieved some enduring reputation in Australia. This derives principally from an Australian landing at Botany Bay four days after the arrival of the First Fleet and a polite encounter there with the English newcomers. La Pérouse himself is commemorated in the name given to one of Sydney’s southern suburbs. A museum stands at the French landing place together with the tomb of Father Receveur, the first Frenchman to die in New South Wales. Tragedy plays a part in the fixing of memory. After his short Australian landfall, La Pérouse sailed north into the Pacific: he and his crews vanished and were never seen again. Their fate in the wreck of both ships at Vanikoro was not determined until 1826-27.

It is the voyage of La Pérouse that has provided the key historical point of reference for the meditation offered in this current exhibition by a contemporary French-Australian artist on related aspects of the larger legacy of the French explorers in Australian waters. Nathalie Hartog- Gautier has been resident in Australia since the early 1980s. Hartog-Gautier as a printmaker has varied her core practice to create a fresh and luminous body of work that echoes and reflects on the engagement of French artists with Australia and the Pacific towards the end of the eighteenth century. In this process the artist comes to interrogate her own personal sense of connection with Australia while viewing it within the larger frame of the historical ties that link France and Australia.

Hartog-Gautier’s perspective has been influenced by an appreciation of the cultural context of eighteenth century France that inspired the sponsorship and fitting out of that country’s several expeditions of exploration and inquiry. She starts with an awareness of the influential Encyclopédie issued in France between 1751 and 1772 whose great contributors — Diderot, Voltaire, Montesquieu and Rousseau among them — advanced their theories on the social evolution of mankind and pondered the question of whether the complexities of European civilisation had corrupted the innate goodness of human beings. But as well as questions of philosophy, the Encyclopédistes had an insatiable interest in knowledge itself. They were fascinated with discovery and novelty. With her use of feathers and plant specimens collected in bushwalks around her home in Sydney, Hartog-Gautier’s work in this exhibition recalls the delight she took in her own personal discovery of the ‘new’ after her first arrival in Australia from France.

The mission given to La Pérouse by Louis XVI was, in effect, the charge to complete the work left undone in the aftermath of Cook’s three great voyages. The instructions finally issued to the commander were as precise as they were wide-ranging: with notes, memoirs and associated papers, these directions defined the purpose and the responsibilities of the commander and his officers and men over a wide field of interest. The final document ran to more than 200 pages. Under the command of La Pérouse, La Boussole and L’Astrolabe sailed with a complement of 225 men including scientists, artists and other specialists. The ships carried an extraordinary cargo: bushels of seeds, quantities of trees and a mass of gifts for the native peoples — bars of iron, buttons of coloured glass, medals bearing the royal effigy, plumed dragons’ helmets, fishhooks, organs, hatchets, scissors, bells, combs and pins.

It is her contemplation of these gifts that stimulates Hartog-Gautier’s interrogation of the La Pérouse expedition. But she is interested also in the materials the artists brought with them — pigments and inks and papers for drawing and painting — and in the idea of discovery itself. She examines the voyage in a series of mixed media works that brings it back into the forefront of a modern imagining. Hartog-Gautier poses her questions on a number of levels. She makes her own paper and fabricates rope from plants she has collected herself. Just as she has taken pleasure in the ‘new’ plants and seeds of her own discoveries in Australia so she contemplates the excitement of the earliest European encounters with a new and unfamiliar world. Hartog-Gautier’s layered and textured works are rich in nuance and meaning. They ask questions about journeys and discoveries, past and present and distance and separation.

In the use she makes of an accumulation of sentimental childhood treasures of her own brought from France or items of various kinds given to her by friends from collections of their own, she has created a series of works that in their textures and colours have an immediate decorative appeal and charm while also suggesting their sentimental importance as items of personal association and memory. She recalls the childhood pleasures of collecting and counting buttons or beads of glass, not for any practical purpose but for the delight to be found in their colours, their odd irregular shapes, the play of light on their surfaces. Implicitly, more difficult meanings are present even in the most humble and homely of artefacts. In what the historian Nicholas Thomas has called the ‘tangled objects’ of imperial gift giving, there is at terrible paradox present at the heart of a noble scientific enterprise. In this darker reading of history, Hartog-Gautier’s assemblages of buttons or coloured glass stand as symbols of dominance and appropriation, of the supplanting of indigenous cultures and the erosion of human dignity.

Dr John Thompson
Canberra
June 2005