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An online lecture by Dr Ruth Pullin - a Zoom link will be provided with reminder email before the session.

Of all the regions of southeastern Australia that Eugene von Guérard (1811-1901) visited none had a more profound impact on him and his career than Victoria’s Western District. His portrayals of its expansive volcanic plains, its landmark scoria cones and its crater lakes, are the defining images of this landscape, its timelessness expressed in the austere geometry of his compositions and its layered cultural narratives evoked by what is portrayed —or not.

Following his first encounter with the volcanic geology of Victoria’s Western District, at Tower Hill in August 1855, and his recognition of the region’s parallels with the geologically significant German Eifel region, von Guérard was captivated. The return journeys he made over subsequent years included an extended sketching expedition through the Camperdown region in March-April 1857 —the focus of this presentation.

The drawings made on site in his small sketchbook and the paintings produced later in his Melbourne studio reveal his acute sensitivity to the multiple narratives of this landscape: its geological history, its deep history as Djargurdwurrung country (including as the location of violent, murderous dispossession), and its reimagination as a colonized landscape, the domain of a wealthy squattocracy. The interwoven narratives of the landscape and its people underpin both von Guérard’s portrayals of the land itself and the property portraits that were commissioned by the now-established squatters.

In this presentation the singular beauty and the natural and cultural dimensions of this distinctive landscape will be explored through the informed vision of one of the greatest interpreters of the Australian landscape.

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