Fire-Stick Picturesque: Landscape Art and Early Colonial Tasmania

Abstract

Drawing from scholarship in fire ecology and ethnohistory, this paper suggests new approaches to art historical analysis of colonial landscape art. British artists in the colony of Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) relied not only on picturesque landscape conventions to codify their new environments, but were also influenced by local vegetation patterns and Indigenous landscape management practices. Describing the meeting ground of two cultural systems in the representation of Tasmania’s geography, this paper highlights how British-born artists such as John Glover (1767–1849) and John Skinner Prout (1805–1876) responded to the Tasmanian environment. In drawing attention to artistic developments in the aftermath of frontier violence of the 1830s, and the dispossession of Tasmania’s first peoples from their homelands, the paper suggests that colonial landscape imagery was problematically invested in a paradoxical task: of both ordering and of “rewilding” Tasmania’s landscape. Woodland, trees, and natural resources—in both material manifestation and iconography—would play a fundamental role in the formation of colonial identity in the wake of the island’s violent appropriation.

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