The History Council of South Australia Wakefield Press Essay Prize is awarded to the author of an essay that deals substantially with some aspect of South Australian history. This year’s prize was awarded to Stephen Valambras Graham of UniSA for ‘Open Doors: The Art of Charity in the Promised Land’.

The judges say that ‘this essay is an intriguing re-examination of well-known images that challenges our traditional understandings of them, and our State’s past’.

We are thrilled to be able to republish Stephen’s essay here on the Wakefield Press blog. This essay was originally published in the journal of the Historical Society of South Australia in 2021 (vol. 49).

Banner image: S.T. Gill, Going To Work, undated, watercolour, 25 x 33 cm, Canberra, National Library of Australia

To give is to show one’s superiority  

Marcel Mauss, The Gift[1]

Introduction: dreaming of a new Jerusalem

Many of the pioneers instrumental in framing and financially supporting the scheme that was to usher in the colony of South Australia were Dissenters. Issuing largely from the entrepreneurial middle class, Dissenters or Nonconformists adhered to churches – Methodist, Baptist and Congregationalist – established outside the state-supported Anglican church. They dreamt of a new homeland equal to their ambitions: an industrious, prosperous country, convict-free and, above all, flushed with piety.

Approaching the study of selected artworks in their cultural and social context, this essay examines paintings and drawings by colonial artists Martha Berkeley, S.T. Gill, Alexander Schramm and Charles Hill. Settlers demonstrating charity, giving bread to those seeking relief at the door of their home or, in Berkeley’s image, as a civic duty, was a persistent subject in South Australian art from the early colonial period. Whilst unravelling the techniques these artists use to resolve and display representations of charity and alms giving, we can observe how, in different ways, the performance of charity in these images contributes to a settler narrative preoccupied with the portrayal of Aboriginal people as exclusive recipients of relief. The essay investigates Aboriginal and colonial cross-cultural exchanges and Aboriginal economic engagement during a period that witnessed the rapid dispossession of their land. 

Long tenants of the browsy moor

The Reverend Samuel Gill was a Baptist minister and school teacher who migrated to the newly established colony of South Australia with his family in 1839. Shortly after their arrival, Gill built a home and school in Coromandel Valley where he held Dissenting services. His eldest son, Samuel Thomas (S.T.), has left us a precious document, a juvenile sketchbook from his years growing up in Plymouth, England. The Reverend collaborated on the sketchbook, writing poetic riders to the boy’s collection of drawings. The tone and material of Reverend Gill’s writing shifts easily from humorous anti-clerical sketches to poems of village life and rural pursuits. In one fine example, written beside the pen and ink drawing of a farmer shown seated on a stile near his cottage feeding geese, the Reverend Gill shares an Aesopian moment:

Old Mother Goose, and Gaffer Gander
Long tenants of the browsy moor,
Come share my morsel, while you wander,
Hard by my humble cottage door.[2]

A number of artists working in colonial South Australia explored the activity of charity in their practice. Many of these images follow a common trope within the heritage of art historical traditions: the open door. Images of doorways have often been ʻsites of benevolenceʼ, places of ʻsudden and unsolicited contact between the affluent and the indigentʼ.[3] Doorways as a threshold, Georgina Cole observes, were where the ʻrich and poor made contact through charitable exchangeʼ.[4] The appearance, in particular, of the cottage door as a rhetorical device in British art was made popular by Thomas Gainsborough. In his series of cottage-door paintings (1772–88), he depicted the figure of Charity, surrounded by her progeny, on the steps of a cottage nestled in a rural setting.

S.T. Gill would return to the image of the humble cottage door in several drawings and watercolours he produced during his long career in Australia. In one small sketch, most likely produced in the early 1850s, shortly before Gill relocated to the Victorian goldfields, he records the moment an elderly Aboriginal man and two boys have stopped by a rural cottage, seeking food. Demonstrating his gentle wit in Hut Door c.1850 (Figure 1), Gill satirises the transparent charity of the frontier family. A young child, guided by her mother, extends a slice of bread to a boy of similar age. The slack posture and bored expression of the Aboriginal child puncture the affected piety of their Christian act; the artist captures Aboriginal people – tenants suddenly of their country – exercising their own, often comic, destabilising logic and indifference to the harsh frontier economy.

Figure 1

S.T. Gill, Hut Door, c. 1850, pencil drawing, 22.7 cm (diam.), Canberra, National Library of Australia

From the late 1830s into the mid-1850s, when the exodus to the goldfields across the border drained South Australia of vital human capital, Aboriginal people worked in return for food supplies and for money on the growing number of rural properties. While this loosely paternalist model was perceived by the colonial administration as clear evidence of the success of its assimilationist policies, in reality it was often a means to ensure economic survival for both Aboriginal people and European settlers. Chopping and stacking firewood, tree felling, stripping and collecting bark for tanning, and agricultural labour: reaping, hay-cutting, bullock-driving as well as tending sheep, were all forms of employment taken up by Aboriginal people.[5]

Figure 2

S.T Gill, Bushman’s Hut, published 1864, chromolithograph, image 17.6 x 25.1 cm (page 28.1 x 41.5 cm), Canberra, National Library of Australia

Three works from S.T. Gill illustrate this period. In his 1864 lithograph, Bushman‘s Hut (Figure 2), an Aboriginal labourer, shouldering a heavy log, approaches a slab hut while the settler, his arms crossed, leans against his hut, adopting the part of the uncouth country squire. An Aboriginal couple is seated on the ground, close to the open doorway. The lithograph captures a moment of unhurried sociability combined with evidence of the economic relationship between settlers and Aboriginal people. The equestrian watercolour Going to Work c.1850s (Figure 3) portrays two stockmen in moleskins and cabbage-tree hats, one black, one white, hastening purposefully across a landscape, horses in full gallop, their spirited dog, legs extended, leading the way. The image points to the existence of camaraderie in cross-cultural social relationships and to the potential for equality of labour in the frontier economy.

Figure 3

S.T. Gill, Going To Work, undated, watercolour, 25 x 33 cm, Canberra, National Library of Australia

Like Hut Door, Gill’s strength as a humourist emerges in another work, The Colonized c.1860 (Figure 4). The Aboriginal labourer, whose displeasure can be read in his stony eyes peering over the burdensome load he is carrying, glances at the settler lounging against his rough-hewn shanty proferring a pipe; an allusion, perhaps, to payment for his labour in the form of a pouch of tobacco. He has been engaged in tree felling and brings in a log to chop for firewood; an axe waits in the foreground. His young partner is equally occupied, and the settler’s wife regards him indulgently as he approaches the hut carrying a full pail of water. Gill has an astute eye for social chronicle and the title he gave the work is an ironic judgement on the price of colonisation for the Aboriginal inhabitants. A price paid also by the settlers, as one observer has noted, whose fall from grace on the frontier has led to a life ‘devoid of the fine trimmings of civilized societyʼ.[6] In Gainsborough’s The Woodcutter‘s Return c.1772–3 (Figure 5), we see the woodcutter approaching home, his kinsfolk gathered on the steps of the cottage. In a variation on this theme, Gill’s lithograph The Colonized, shows us the breadwinner by default, the Aboriginal provider bringing home the wood fuel.

Figure 4, Figure 5

Left: S.T. Gill, The Colonized, c. 1860, watercolour, 21.8 x 14.8 cm, Sydney, State Library of New South Wales, Call Number DL Pd 135;
Right: Thomas Gainsborough, The Woodcutters Return, c. 1772-3, oil on canvas, 147.3 x 123.2 cm, Leicestershire, Belvoir Castle

The discriminatory and insecure working conditions Aboriginal people often experienced, meant that poorly paid employment was not always the most effective strategy for survival. Receiving alms, as we see in Hut Door, was often perceived as a more reliable, independent and less humiliating means of subsisting or, as Lynette Russell describes it, a ‘justifiable form of economic engagement – a kind of reciprocity for what they had lost.ʼ[7] Since the rapid cultivation of land by settlers had seriously depleted traditional food sources, Aboriginal people in rural areas were forced to seek provisions at stations, farms and settlers’ camps. Traditional owners regarded soliciting food as a form of exchange for their dispossession and considered it a right to ask for food and clothing from Europeans who, as the Lutheran missionary Christian Gottlieb Teichelmann recorded in Adelaide in 1841, ‘had taken and driven away their food, and ought now to give them other foodʼ.[8] While deploring the ‘inevitable manners and habits [that] cannot be changed by any splendour of civilization,ʼ Teichelmann hinted at deeper notions of reciprocity consistent with Aboriginal custom: ‘It is their opinion, that Missionaries and Protector [of Aborigines] must build them houses [and] give them provisionsʼ.[9] Inga Clendinnen reflects that this new social contract–demonstrated by begging–amounts to a persistent reminder of the ‘usurpersʼ obligations to take responsibility for Aboriginal welfare.[10] In a report from the Protector of Aborigines in 1839, Mathew Moorhouse reinforces these observations when he complained that inhabitants of the Adelaide Plains were adept at asking for money and already ‘well initiated into the habits of beggingʼ.[11]

King of the Park Lands

Artist Alexander Schramm, son of a Berlin bookseller, was active in Adelaide in the 1850s and early 1860s. A Scene in South Australia c.1850 (Figure 6), an example of rural genre painting, pivots, like S.T. Gill’s Hut Door, on a display of alms giving and the tensions and responses triggered by the exchange.

Schramm has painted a plain pisé or wattle-and-daub cottage with a high-pitched, straw thatched roof, adjoined by a post-and-rail fence.[12] The neatly plastered home and tidy appearance of the settlers in dress belonging to the German rural class, emphasise private virtues of thrift and industriousness. It is washing day: the iron pot is boiling and while the farmer’s wife attends to the clothes in a steaming tub, her husband enjoys a moment of domestic harmony.

On a formal level, the painting has a tightly organised structure. A small group occupies each corner of the foreground: on the right, an Aboriginal woman squats, stoking the open fire under the cast-iron pot to light her pipe, a couple of dogs beside her; to the left, a European woman sits languidly and a child, gesturing at the large Aboriginal group, kneels beside a pet dog.

A row of figures, standing at an oblique angle to the picture plane, extends across the middle ground. The balance of black and white, established and framed by the groups flanking the scene, is now reversed in the first pair from the left, also women: the settler’s wife, with her back to the viewer, is distracted for a moment from her domestic chores, while a visitor leans casually against a tree. The central pair in the painting repeats the juxtaposition of colour and culture: the German settler, framed by the darkened door, holds an infant in his arms, while the Aboriginal woman in a possum skin cloak has a child secured to her back, and a loaf of bread under her arm. Behind her, another member of the group is silhouetted against the whitewashed wall. The crisp white shirt worn by the tall figure holding a spear contrasts against his skin. Ironically, the donned shirt only highlights the subversive manner of its appropriation – worn without trousers.

Figure 6

Alexander Schramm, A Scene in South Australia, c. 1850, oil on canvas,
25.7 cm x 31.8 cm, Adelaide, Art Gallery of South Australia

The visual symmetry is reinforced by metonymic examples of social difference. The healthy looking pet owned by the settlers is chained up (symbolising ownership) and well-fed – the bony remains of a recent meal lie nearby. The visitors’ dogs, on the other hand, while unfettered, are thin and weary. The neatly dressed German family contrasts with the Aboriginal group, whose garments are ragged and their appearance unkept: the trim straw hat with a shiny blue band on the farmer’s head, can be compared to an identical yet neglected version worn by the man at the rear of the group; the red-cheeked, robust European child is opposed to the scruffy-haired, naked Aboriginal boy. The post-and-rail fence and meandering path behind the Aboriginal group gives way to a stand of eucalypts and open land, while the white picket fence on the left abuts the cottage; a spatial contrast which alludes to a division between town and country, between industry and the pastoral.    

Schramm was certainly acquainted with a number of local Aboriginal people who reappear in his paintings. Several figures in A Scene in South Australia, including the tall, white haired figure, the woman beside him, and the younger man standing behind them in the blue shirt, feature in Schramm’s portrait group Aborigines on a Walkabout c.1850 (Figure 7).

Figure 7

Alexander Schramm, Aborigines on a Walkabout, c. 1850, oil on canvas,
55 x 69 cm, Canberra, National Library of Australia

From a letter written on the verso of a lithograph of A Scene in South Australia printed by Penman and Galbraith, we learn one of their names, one given, that is, by the colonists. Signed by a Mr D. Liston, he describes with enthusiasm the various figures in the lithograph: ʻthe characters are all Portraits, I know them all … The principal character is “Old King William”. The woman on his right his Lubra (ie wife), the others his family.ʼ[13] From Liston’s description we can glean precious and fascinating insights into ʻOld King Williamʼ and his attitude to begging:

Old King William is well known in Adelaide and is so named from his resemblance to that Monarch, he came to town every morning in a clean white shirt and carried his spear, his hair white and gait stately … the countenance of the ‘old king’ is a little severe – in begging he never takes less than a silver sixpence, if less be offered, it is given to his lubra or children.[14]

Could this be the same William, also referred to as Williamy, who gave testimony at a coroner’s inquest in Adelaide in April and May 1853? The press report, describing Williamy as ʻa venerable looking copper-coloured nativeʼ, reveals his Aboriginal name, Tairmunda; his wife went by the name Mary.[15] While genre painting is invariably peopled with stock figures or stereotypes, Schramm’s controlled composition embeds a family portrait that our eye-witness Liston, ʻcan avouch for its correctness.ʼ[16]

The German farmers and families, who first arrived in 1838, were generally more self-reliant than their English-speaking neighbours, and were not severely affected by the economic depression of the early 1840s.[17] They associated less with the local Aboriginal population, who worked mainly for the dominant English-speaking farmers. As a result, fewer reports of hostilities occurred between the two communities and by the 1850s, when this work was painted, cross-cultural contact was at a minimum.

As early as 1839, only three years after the foundation of the colony, good relations between settlers and the native population had become strained. Because the people of the Adelaide Plains peacefully accepted the colonisers’ division of land, this equalled, in the eyes of the Europeans, giving tacit consent to their occupation. Hostility flared when Aboriginal people became increasingly frustrated by the alienation of their land and the destruction of resources. The rapid depopulation of Aboriginal communities through disease and violence diminished the threat to settlers, and intensified the general disillusionment among Aboriginal people.[18] When Aboriginal people did attempt to assert their rights and resist occupation, the official rhetoric of the founding administration, based on humanitarian intentions, was swiftly abandoned. As Alan Pope argues: ʻThe accumulation of wealth turned out to be a stronger force in early colonial South Australia than humanitarianism, and the key to wealth in the colony was land.ʼ[19] Co-habitation on terms determined by the colonial administration was a cascading failure and the traditional owners were inevitably sequestered from the settler colonial narrative. The initial, fragile equilibrium would be dislodged, replaced by paternalist authority and the expansion of state-funded welfare. Although some settlers would regret the loss of a cheap labour force, many believed the Aboriginal inhabitants were an intolerable nuisance. After the breakdown in relations, only charity remained.

A Scene in South Australia encapsulates this stage of black/white relations. Schramm’s work merges the traditions of genre and history painting, and reminds us that images are as much social, or even political statements, as they are products of certain aesthetic conditions. The picture subtly examines the anxiety concealed in such an encounter, discreetly symbolised by the bleak gaze thrown to the viewer by the bonneted Aboriginal woman, Tairmunda’s wife Mary, which ripples out from the centre of the picture.

While the German family appears to treat the visitors with bemused tolerance, some members of the itinerant group regard the encounter with muted apprehension. The regal Tairmunda or Old King William looks on, slightly aloof from the exchange, ʻa little too severeʼ wrote Liston in his description, and the couple standing behind him wait uncomfortably–a furtive, sidelong glance from the man in the battered straw hat guides the viewer’s gaze back to the centre of the painting. The veiled tensions are registered by the chained dog growling and the cat arching its back on the woodpile. On the other hand, the relaxed stance of the young Aboriginal woman standing under the sloping tree and the cheerful demeanour of the bare-breasted mother in conversation with the woman at the washing tub, provide ballast to the troubling undertow. A German farmer, writing home in 1851, responds to his correspondent: ʻWhat do the blacks do here? If they live near a village they beg for bread, tobacco, clothing and food.ʼ[20] One might imagine the author is our farmer in the doorway.

Figure 8

Alexander Schramm, Bush Visitors, 1859, oil on canvas,
68.5 x 91.5 cm, private collection

Schramm repeated the subject in a painting titled Bush Visitors 1859 (Figure 8). This later work, much larger than the original version, has lost the qualified cheerfulness and highly chromatic Biedermeier colouring of A Scene in South Australia. The lighting has become muted, contrasts flattened, brushstrokes looser. As evidence of its popularity, a lithograph (Figure 9) was also produced after A Scene and, like the later oil Bush Visitors, conveys a brooding quality absent in the earlier version.

Figure 9

Alexander Schramm, A Scene in South Australia, 1850-1858, lithograph, image 24.9 × 35.7 cm (page 57.2 × 39.1cm irreg.),
Melbourne, National Gallery of Victoria

A Scene in South Australia is a cross-cultural audit, effectively arranged by the balance of black and white pigment. The painting remains the legacy of a social exchange, a historical moment that was to evaporate by the following decade. Revealing in its subtle expression of social categories circumscribed by colour, Schramm’s painting nevertheless invests dignity and stoicism in the Aboriginal group in the midst of their radically altering circumstances. Choosing not to record the moment of alms-giving, but rather a scene immediately following it when the parties are in conversation, the artist has avoided an impression of cloying sentiment or overt display of the unequal distribution of power.

Charity appearing on Pulteney Street

The First Lesson (Figure 10), painted by Charles Hill in 1857, contrasts strikingly with A Scene in South Australia. Hill’s instantly intelligible composition represents a morality tale as well as a portrait of the artist’s wife and children. We have shifted from the cottage or slab hut in a rural setting we saw in Gill and Schramm, to the open door of a middle-class home in the prospering township of Adelaide. Charles Hill, who migrated to South Australia in 1854, was living with his family on Pulteney Street between North Terrace and Wakefield Street when he painted this scene.

A visitor at the door, an Aboriginal woman, is hunched low, bending forward. The upright, shawled woman standing in the doorway, a portrait of his wife Eliza, is elevated, her head tilted slightly towards the woman begging, a gentle, sympathetic expression on her face. Social structures are underpinned by the painting’s formal composition: the Aboriginal woman performing a role below the artist’s wife who holds a newborn baby (their son Charles, born in June of that year), embodying the benevolent symbol of Christian motherhood. Hill has taken the allegorical image of Charity represented by an idealised mother with her children, reconciling it in terms of secular genre painting: mother and children have become a family portrait; the beggar, an Aboriginal Australian.[21] 

Figure 10

Charles Hill, The First Lesson,  1857, oil on canvas, 59 x 48.7 cm,
Adelaide, Art Gallery of South Australia

A child, the Hill’s daughter Henrietta (it is her first lesson, we are led to understand), steps on to the threshold and, assisted by the guiding hand of her mother, cautiously gives a thick crust of wheaten bread to the woman, who stares blankly off to one side. The Hill’s second daughter Georgina, eager to catch a glimpse of the visitor, yet afraid to venture too close, peers out from the safety of her mother’s dress. The china plates and decanter on the shelf, the clock and passionflower vine – a horticultural favourite in the Victorian era – climbing the latticed arbor framing the group, all reinforce an image of gentility. Even the woman begging has been stripped of any distressing elements. The tone of her skin is rich and smooth; her hair is neat and her attire, a voluminous cast-off blanket and colourful satchel, quaint. A well-groomed dog accompanies the hunched woman, waiting obediently. The painting’s semantic possibilities have been cemented to a pictorially accessible setting that viewers in colonial South Australia would have recognised. 

Clear parallels to Hill’s work can be seen in paintings by contemporary British artists William Mulready and Thomas Jones Barker. In Mulready’s didactic genre piece, Train Up a Child in the Way He should Go 1841 (Figure 11), a child is gently encouraged by his relations to offer a coin to a huddled group of Lascars on the roadside. The work’s title is taken from the Book of Proverbs 22:6 ʻTrain up a child in the way he should go, And when he is old he will not depart from itʼ. And in Barker’s hymn to the merits of British colonialism, The Secret of England’s Greatness (Queen Victoria Presenting a Bible in the Audience Chamber at Windsor) c.1863 (Figure 12), a work that adopts an identical structure to The First Lesson, Queen Victoria, the head of the imperial hierarchy, performs an act of goodwill: the spreading of the Gospel.[22] Hill’s audience would have been familiar with the significance of the passionflower associated, as the name suggests, with Christ’s Passion, with His sacrifice and unconditional love. Of particular relevance to this painting is the symbolism attached to the trellised vine: like the passion vine requires support to flourish, Divine assistance will come to the aid of the faithful.[23] These examples suggest Hill’s composition and iconography have a rich genealogy.

Figure 11, Figure 12

Left: William Mulready, Train Up a Child in the Way He should Go, 1841, oil on panel, 66 x 79.4 cm, Paris, Musée du Louvre;
Right: Thomas Jones Barker, The Secret of England’s Greatness (Queen Victoria Presenting a Bible in the Audience Chamber at Windsor), c. 1863,
oil on canvas, 167.6 x 213.8 cm, London, National Portrait Gallery

The painting has become a vehicle for the illustration of private virtue, where the emotional tone is engineered to invite a sympathetic response from the viewer. This is the era after all, Bernard Smith reminds us, where the art object has become an active moral agent.[24] A moment is captured when two hands, like those of Queen Victoria and the East African ambassador in Barker’s painting – one slender and black, the other white and plump – together hold the bread. A symbolic bond is created and yet, paradoxically, it is a bond, not of equality or even friendship, but one premised on the rationalisation and redefinition of power and privilege as protection and pity. As Cole writes, charity moved in the Industrial Revolution from aristocratic benevolence to the preoccupation of ʻa morally anxious middle class that aimed to improve the health and condition of the distressed, and fortify moral sentimentʼ.[25]

Hill’s work is an example of Victorian morality. The painting’s sentimental appeal has ultimately become its weakness and, while it explores the theme of begging and charity, it does so less ambiguously than do the works of Gill and Schramm. Hill was a founding member of the South Australian Society of Arts and although his relationship with the Society was not always smooth, he nevertheless reflected their convictions of taste. While Schramm’s work was admired, his subtler examination of contemporary social ills may have been overlooked by a cultural elite more familiar with the transparent and edifying conventions of conservative art of the period epitomised by The First Lesson.

Voluntaryism versus the State

While the artists S.T. Gill, Alexander Schramm and Charles Hill offer us examples of individual charity and private virtue, another work announces the role of the State in providing succour. Reflecting the optimism and mutual curiosity that existed in the very early years of the colony, a dinner was given on 1 November 1838 for the Aboriginal people residing on the Adelaide plains. Celebrating the occasion, artist Martha Berkeley produced a detailed, sepia-toned work on paper displaying the scene of civic charity. The watercolour, The First Dinner given to the Aborigines 1838 (Figure 13), documents Adelaide society’s determination to build relations with Aboriginal Australians based ʻupon a kind and Christian procedureʼ.[26] Governor Gawler declared at the event, ʻ[w]e wish to make you happy. But you cannot be happy unless you imitate good white men. Build huts, wear clothes, work and be useful. Above all things you cannot be happy unless you love Godʼ.[27] Gawler’s edict illustrates the conscience of post-Enlightenment thought: the duty-bound belief among many early colonists of ensuring that Aboriginal inhabitants benefit from the domain of knowledge possessed by European culture. As Leigh Boucher and Lynette Russell contend, discourses of evangelical protection were indeed at the very heart of the moral foundations of the British imperial mission in the 1830s.[28] The Governor’s prescriptive dream fragmented, however, as lawmakers and missionaries alike woke to realise ʻthat they could not control the destinies of others, or indeed of themselves’.[29]

Figure 13

Martha Berkeley, The First Dinner given to the Aborigines 1838, 1838, watercolour, 37.5 x 49.5 cm, Adelaide, Art Gallery of South Australia

Below a tea stained sky, a dusty arena in the Adelaide Park Lands is occupied by local dignitaries distributing food and provisions. Surrounded by well-dressed onlookers, Governor Gawler in full military costume with cocked hat and ceremonial sword, Maria Gawler, his wife, and William Wyatt, Protector of Aborigines, take centre stage. To the right, three Aboriginal men, Kadlitpanna, Mullawirraburka and Ityamaiitpinna are standing with dignified gravitas, surveying the distribution of goods to the seated Aboriginal public, many of whom can be seen doing ʻample justice … to the huge platters of roast beef … and copious libations of teaʼ on offer.[30] The event, reported the Colonial Register, ʻafforded another gratifying evidence–not only of the friendly disposition of the natives themselves towards the settlers, but of the great forbearance and consideration with which they have been treated by them.ʼ[31] It is possible to imagine today the terrible significance of these proceedings for the three Aboriginal elders: lean compensation for their community’s concessions.[32]

State-funded relief in early colonial South Australia was not, however, the privileged domain of its Aboriginal inhabitants. Despite the forward planning of South Australia’s economy in the shape of the Wakefield scheme, by 1841, at the height of South Australia’s first economic crisis, the Emigration Agent John Brown was employing assisted migrants, unable to find work on the labour market in the new colony, on government works.[33] The Emigration Agent was also responsible for the ʻdeserving poorʼ: the sick, the blind, the deserted wives and children unable to support themselves.[34] It was, writes Brian Dickey, the ʻmost complete and centralized form of government engagement in the administration of social welfare in colonial Australiaʼ.[35]

In a colony without convicts to support, another factor may have contributed to the extent of the Stateʼs welfare provisions. In the 1830s, the Dissenting intelligentsia, resentful of the Church of England’s still dominant role in Britain, sought religious liberty and independence in the new colony. Many from this ʻaffluent, respectable but discontented stratum of British societyʼ, as Eric Richards describes the first colonists who had seized the opportunity to migrate to South Australia, were resolutely against State aid for religion.[36] The Voluntaryists – Dissenters and Anglican allies who rejected the policy of State subsidies to churches – campaigned hard in South Australia’s first exercise in self-government, the election of a Legislative Council in 1851. Their crusade was successful in separating church from State, cutting the purse strings of financial aid for religious organisations.[37] The voluntary principle and its goal of religious independence translated to fewer financial resources available to congregations caring for the poor. Voluntaryists, the pious settlers bereft of state funds yet filled with a sense of moral obligation, unanimously supported government measures to assist the destitute.

Berkeley’s First Dinner illustrates the desires of the ʻmorally anxious middle classʼ–the local press reported that almost all of ʻaffluent and respectableʼ Adelaide turned out to view the event–that set in motion the wheels of state-funded charity and system of rations distribution administered by the Protector and Sub-Protectors of Aborigines. 

Yet where are the images of white poverty? Picturing the poor was popular in Victorian Britain, however South Australia is remarkable for the absence of such imagery in its colonial art history.[38] Did the aspiring colonists resist tarnishing their foundation story of courage and resilience with the spectre of ʻpauperismʼ? By 1846, the depression years behind it, the press could optimistically report:

In South Australia the poor are few and poor laws unknown; sufferers from calamitous visitation and those who are otherwise in circumstances of destitution are relieved and provided for at the public expense.[39]

No society is immune from ʻcalamitous visitationʼ and, as evidenced by the establishment of the Destitute Board three years later and accommodation in quarters that became the Destitute Asylum on Kintore Avenue from 1851, poverty was very much a material part of life in the young colony. By 1855 the number of people – many of them recent migrants – applying for assistance had risen to over 3000.[40] Legislation was introduced to criminalise begging and vagrancy.[41] Begging is a voiceless yet uncomfortably visible activity and the Police Act 1844 and Vagrancy Act 1847 were routinely employed to remove destitute vagrants from the streets of Adelaide.[42]

At a conference in 2017 addressing homelessness, academic Cameron Parsell analysed the way homelessness smothers an individualʼs identity to the point that, as he expresses it, a ʻperson becomes the embodiment of their deprivation.ʼ[43] Such an ontological characterisation washes through colonial perceptions of Aboriginal people: as they appeared to surrender agency in the face of sequestration of their land, Aboriginal society per se came to be regarded as the embodiment of deprivation. Marketing the new colony to prospective immigrants was of critical importance and, for the expression of its moral virtues and benevolence, Adelaide society gazed beyond its own edifice-building, conveniently overlooking fractures within. Images of alms giving to the poor were  effectively confined to portraying Aboriginal destitution. As we observe in Hill’s painting, this pattern ultimately exoticised poverty and preserved it as a non-settler experience.

Visions of charity

S.T. Gill, the son of a Baptist preacher, Schramm the Lutheran outsider, the spiritually nonconformist Berkeley and Hill, the sober Anglican, present different visions of charity at the open door; four interpretations of a Christian theme linked by the motif of bread-giving. The pictures all represent giving and receiving this staple commodity in colonial South Australia.[44] In multiple biblical sources, bread provides nourishment for the bodily and spiritual frame. While in the celebration of the Eucharist bread becomes the flesh of Christ (ʻAnd Jesus said unto them, I am the bread of lifeʼ, John 6:35), sustaining life and providing access to the spiritual world, bread is also an important symbol of charity fostering social bonds. In Genesis 18:5, Abraham, exhibiting hospitality and generosity, fetches bread to comfort the hearts of three travellers. Like Abraham and his wife Sarah, the German farmer, the frontier settler and the urbane city dweller, are all seen to offer bread to their visitors at the door.

Adelaide society during the 1840s and 1850s was clearly distressed at the existential threat to Aboriginal people occasioned by the colonistsʼ arrival in the Gulf St. Vincent. A well-attended public meeting convened by the Governor Richard MacDonnell in August 1858, saw the creation of the Aboriginesʼ Friendsʼ Association. A month later, when the Association petitioned the Legislative Council for funds, the Attorney-General admitted to ʻan emotion of shame in considering the way in which the Aborigines had been treatedʼ.[45] Yet by the late 1860s the doors had begun to close when the passing of the Police Act No. 15 1869–70 (s 62) made vagrancy and having no lawful means of subsistence a criminal offence, effectively curbing the presence of remnant Aboriginal communities in town centres.[46]

In drawing on visual conventions of charity and the cottage door, the artworks discussed in this essay express multi-layered social meaning; from Gill, where assumptions about Aboriginal agency are undermined, to art as moral force in Hill’s painting, where stereotypes perform like empty ciphers to arouse sentiment. We can, however, observe in all these images produced by Europeans, shrewd glimpses of Aboriginal determination revealed in the brittle relationships unfolding at the door of settler society. Using artworks as primary sources in history writing allows us to enrich our understanding of the texture of the past. Besides betraying moral complexity, the cross-cultural nature of the encounters examined here reveals a fragile dialogue between permanence and transience, between reciprocity and relief.

Postscript

Today, the homeless – regardless of colour or ethnicity – have returned to the city streets and byways where a greater number of community services offer support. Occupying part of a refitted ex-warehouse in the inner suburb of Bowden, between rows of serried worker cottages, industrial estates and concrete frontages adorned with spray paint art, the Open Door community service provides relief to individuals and families in financial stress. Bowden was once a working class suburban village dotted with factories: candle works, gas works, boot factory, brick kilns, tannery and flour mill; today, stylish apartments are progressively colonising vacant industrial sites, transforming the cultural and socio-demographic landscape of Adelaide‘s inner-west. Gentrification creep.

The Open Door, under the auspices of the non-government agency Uniting Care Wesley Bowden, can trace its roots back to the first Wesleyan Methodist chapel in Bowden built in the 1840s. The Methodist Church numbered among the Dissenting and Nonconformist churches whose members swelled the ranks of passengers migrating to South Australia in its foundation years.

Most days to and from work in Bowden, I walk under an arterial overpass on the edge of the Park Lands. A train line hugs one side of the path and, on the other, a concrete embankment climbs to meet the road. At the summit of the steep slope, just below a rumbling concrete canopy, a man has made his home, his sheltered nest. He looks old and wizened but stands tall and gaunt. His hair, his beard are white, unruly, and he wears an incongruous hi-vis vest. Sometimes, down on the path, we talk. To my questions, his responses are always laconic, stoic. ʻYeh, I’m alright, I’m kicken’ along just fineʼ, he says. I have never asked him his name, but I always think of him as Williamy.

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Jane Lydon, Tom Gara, Maria Zagala and Samantha Littley for their encouragement, suggestions and comments. I would also like to thank the two peer reviewers from the Journal of the Historical Society of South Australia for their insightful observations – I hope to have done justice to their advice. Part of the title of this essay references the formative work by Alison Carroll on South Australian printmaking, Graven Images in the Promised Land.

Stephen Valambras Graham

Trained as an art historian and librarian, Stephen has spent most of his working life between France, Germany and Australia, employed in education, communications, libraries and the welfare sector. He is a passionate researcher, scholar and published writer in the field of Australian art history. Stephen is currently reference librarian at the University of South Australia.

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[1] Marcel Mauss, The Gift: the form and reason for exchange in archaic societies, Routledge Classics, London and New York, 2002, p.95.

[2] S.T. Gill, Sketchbook, 1835-1838, Art Gallery of South Australia; the drawing in the Sketchbook is numbered 59 – Untitled [Rustic Scene with man and geese], pen and ink, 3 Dec. 1835. Reprinted in Geoffrey Dutton, S.T. Gill’s Australia, Macmillan, Melbourne, 1981, p.10.

[3] Georgina Cole, ‘“A beautiful assemblage of an interesting nature”: Gainsborough’s Charity Relieving Distress and the reconciliation of high and low artʼ, British Art Studies, vol. 1, 2015, p.17.

[4] Cole, p.17.

[5] Alan Pope, ‘Aboriginal adaptation to early colonial labour markets: the South Australian experienceʼ, Labour History: A Journal of Labour and Social History, no. 54, May 1988, pp.3–7; John Summers, ‘Colonial Race Relationsʼ, in Eric Richards (ed), The Flinders History of South Australia: Social history,  Wakefield Press, Adelaide, 1986, pp.299–300; Robert Foster and Amanda Nettelbeck, Out of the Silence: The history and memory of South Australia’s frontier wars, Wakefield Press,Adelaide, 2012, pp.97–98.

[6] Henry F. Skerritt, ‘Not-so-Marvellous Melbourne: Anxiety on the urban frontier in the art of S.T. Gillʼ, Henry F. Skerritt, <henryfskerritt.com/2015/05/01/not-so-marvellous-melbourne-.anxiety-on-the-urban-frontier-in-the-art-of-st-gill/#_edn28>.

[7] Lynette Russell, ‘“Tickpen, Boro Boro”: Aboriginal economic engagements in early Melbourneʼ, in Leigh Boucher and Lynette Russell (eds), Settler Colonial Governance in Nineteenth Century Victoria, ANU Press, Canberra, 2015, p.27; Pope, ‘Aboriginal adaptationʼ, p.8.

[8] Christian Gottlieb Teichelmann, Aborigines of South Australia, Committee of the South Australian Wesleyan Methodist Auxilliary Society, Adelaide, 1841, p.6.

[9] Teichelmann, p.11; Robert Foster, ‘The Aborigines Location in Adelaide: South Australia’s first “mission” to the Aboriginesʼ, Journal of the Anthropological Society of South Australia, vol 28, nos 1 and 2, December 1990, p.16.

[10] Inga Clendinnen, True Stories: history, politics, aboriginality, Text Publishing, Melbourne, 2008 (first ed. 1999), p.58.

[11] Mathew Moorhouse, ‘Quarterly reportʼ, 9 October 1839, in Papers Relative to South Australia, William Clows and Sons, London, 1843, p.321 cited in Skye Krichauff, ‘“They seem much pleased with us and very friendly”: explaining cordial relations between the people of the Adelaide Plains and early colonists, 1836-1839ʼ, Journal of the Historical Society of South Australia, no. 48, 2020, pp.16–17.

[12] Gordon Young, ‘Early German settlements in South Australiaʼ, Australian Historical Geography Bulletin, no. 2, February 1981, pp.56–66. Compare with works by G.F. Angas, Klemsic, A Village of Germann Settlers near Adelaide, 1844, watercolour on paper (AGSA) and Bethany, A Village of German Settlers at the foot of the Barossa Hills, 1844–5, watercolour, pencil on paper (AGSA). See also Lothar Brasse, ‘Architecture: an expression of German cultureʼ, Journal of the Historical Society of South Australia, no. 41, 2013, p.48.

[13] National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), Collection Online, <www.ngv.vic.gov.au/explore/collection/work/60949/>. Jane Hylton identifies the correspondent as David Liston in Jane Hylton, South Australia Illustrated, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 2012, p.134 fn.189.

[14] NGV, Collection Online.

[15] SAR, 11 May 1853, p.3; SAR, 8 April 1853, p.3. This may be a misspelling of the Kaurna name Tainmunda (Robert Amery, personal email communication, 27 February 2018). A reference to ‘King Williamyʼ is also in the South Australian Gazette and Mining Journal, 14 February 1850, p.3. Williamy died in custody the 10 September 1853 after being committed to the Adelaide gaol the 27 July 1853 ‘suffering from mental derangementʼ: Adelaide Times, 28 Jul 1853, p.2; SAR, 13 September 1853, p.3. Philip Jones offers an equally plausible interpretation of Old King William’s identity in the catalogue text for Bush Visitors in Deutscher and Hackett, Important Australian and International Fine Art (Lot 28), auction cat., Sydney, 29 August 2018.

[16] NGV, Collection Online.

[17] Ian Harmstorf, Some Information on South Australian German History, South Australian College of Advanced Education, [Adelaide], 1985, p.2.

[18] Alan Pope, Resistance and Retaliation: Aboriginal-European relations in early colonial South Australia, Heritage Action, Adelaide, 1989, p.10; R. Gibbs, ‘Relations between the Aboriginal inhabitants and the first South Australian colonistsʼ, Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society of Australasia (SA Branch), vol. 61, December 1960, pp.61–78.

[19] Pope, Resistance and Retaliation, pp.143–4.

[20] Harmstorf, p.2. The Englishman William Mann wrote a travelogue of his experiences in Australia in the 1830s. He recounts here an anecdote in the Adelaide Park Lands which supports a nuanced approach to different European attitudes to alms giving in colonial Australia: ‘I gave him [an Aboriginal man] a shilling, which they call white money, and pointed out some German emigrants to his notice, who were passing at the time. He shrugged his shoulders, and said, “De be no good–no money but black money; ” by which they mean pence.ʼ William Mann, Six years‘ residence in the Australian provinces ending in 1839, Smith, Elder and Co., London, 1839, p.285. I am grateful to Tom Gara for bringing this passage to my attention.

[21] For a discussion of the gradual secularisation of the pictorial tradition of Charity, from Michaelangelo to Reynolds, see Edgar Wind, ‘Charity: The case history of a patternʼ, Journal of the Warburg Institute, vol. 1, no. 4, April 1938, pp. 322–330. Hill’s painting also echoes the formal arrangement of Madonna and Child and the kneeling Magi in the popular biblical subject, the Adoration of the Magi.

[22] For analyses of the paintings, see David Bate, ‘Train up a child in the way he should goʼ, Third Text, vol. 10, Spring 1990, pp.53–59; Linda Nead, ‘The secret of England’s greatnessʼ, Journal of Victorian Culture, vol. 19, no. 2, 2014, pp.161–182.

[23] Nicole Bevans and Allison Mayer, Divine Horticulture: A survey of the windows of Tabernacle Methodist Church, Binghamton, NY, Cornell University, New York, 2003, p.5.

[24] Bernard Smith, Place, Taste and Tradition: A study of Australian art since 1788, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 2nd ed., 1979, p.104. See also Catherine Speck and Lisa Slade, ‘Art History and Exhibitions: same or different?ʼ, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, vol. 14, no. 2, 2014, p.145.

[25] Cole, p.14.

[26] Jessie Mitchell, In Good Faith? Governing Australia through God, Charity and Empire 1825-1855, ANU Press, Canberra, 2011, p.29.

[27] South Australian Gazette and Colonial Register (SAGCR), 3 November 1838, p.4.

[28] Leigh Boucher and Lynette Russell, ‘Introduction: colonial history, postcolonial theory and the “Aboriginal problem” in colonial Victoria’, in Boucher and Russell (eds), Settler Colonial Governance, p.3. Pierre Clastres refers to the process of assimilation or “re-education” as ethnocide. See his penetrating discussion of the theological discourse underpinning colonisation: Pierre Clastres, ‘On Ethnocideʼ, Art & Text, no 28, May 1988, pp.51–58.    

[29] Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: metropole and colony in the English imagination, 1830–1867, Chicago University Press, Chicago, 2005, p.21.

[30] SAGCR, 3 November 1838, p.4.

[31] SAGCR, 3 November 1838, p.4. See Anne OʼBrien, Philanthropy and Settler Colonialism, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2015, pp.10–35 for a discussion of gift-giving as philanthropy and obligations implicit in the beneficiaries behaviour.

[32] For biographies of the Aboriginal men see Tom Gara, ‘The life and times of Mullawirraburka (“King John”) of the Adelaide tribeʼ, in J. Simpson and L. Hercus (eds), History in Portraits: biographies of nineteenth century South Australian Aboriginal people, Southwood Press, Sydney, 1988, pp.101–104. The European names given to the men were King John, Captain Jack and Rodney of Willunga.

[33] Brian Dickey, Rations, Residence, Resources: A history of social welfare in South Australia since 1836, Wakefield Press, Adelaide, 1986, pp.6–8. Unskilled labour was brought to South Australia at public expense, the costs being met by the proceeds from the sale of land in the colony with the further measure of wages set at a rate that would inhibit labourers from purchasing property for a number of years. Government works included breaking gravel for building construction, tree felling and cutting wood.

[34] The British Poor Law Amendment Act 1834 (‘New Poor Law’) generated much debate regarding the eligibility for aid, particularly in the context of entry to workhouses. For a discussion of the ‘deservingʼ (the vulnerable, ill, etc) versus ‘undeservingʼ (able-bodied) poor and how moral character became a measure of poverty, see Megan Groninger, ‘Deserving and undeserving: representations of the moralization of poverty in the British press during the passing of the new poor law’, MA thesis, University of West Georgia, 2016, esp. pp.22–43.

[35] Dickey, p.4; O’Brien, p.66.

[36] Eric Richards, ‘The peopling of South Australiaʼ in Richards, The Flinders History of South Australia, p.121; Dickey, p.xx.

[37] See Douglas Pike, Paradise of Dissent: South Australia 1829–1857, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2nd ed., 1967, pp.421–437. Today, the landscape looks very different: the vast majority of social services are outsourced to NGOs, and many of these are faith-based agencies.

[38] For a discussion of poverty in Victorian art, see Julian Treuherz, Hard Times: social realism in Victorian art, Lund Humphries Publishers, London, 1987.

[39] Quoted in Dickey, p.14.

[40] Dickey, p.33; see also Pike, pp.319–322.

[41] Begging alms is still a criminal offence in South Australia under s12 of the Summary Offences Act 1953. The maximum penalty is $250.

[42] For the Vagrancy Act as deterrent for Aboriginal people, see the discussion in Christine Lockwood, ‘Early Encounters on the Adelaide Plains and Encounter Bayʼ, in Peggy Brock and Tom Gara (eds), Colonialism and its Aftermath: a history of Aboriginal South Australia, Wakefield Press, Adelaide, 2017, pp.71 and 81.

[43] Don Dunstan Foundation Homelessness Conference, Adelaide Convention Centre, 17 August 2017.

[44] Until the 1890s South Australia was the largest wheat producer in the Australian colonies.

[45] South Australian Parliamentary Debates, 29 October 1858, p.476 cited in Cameron Raynes, ‘A Little Flour and a Few Blanketsʼ: an administrative history of Aboriginal affairs in South Australia, 1834–2000, State Records of South Australia, Adelaide, 2002, p.17.

[46] Raynes, p.22.