Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

Narrative both the compositional device of the painting (as in the reproduced etching) and the overall pathos of the subject: It was a source of continual ridicule that when gathering firewood she was compelled to bend down and collect it with her hands instead of just picking up the sticks with her toes as she went along ... Twice daily they plastered her hair with gum, fixing in it the teeth and bones of animals and fish; twice daily they rubbed fish oil into her skin and painted her body with clay .12 Nolan focuses attention on Mrs Fraser as abject victim. Her body is harshly lit at the centre of an oval format and she is offered to the spectator as if through the sharp, personal viewpoint of a telescopic lens or, as Jane Clark has suggested, 'down the barrel of a gun'.13Nolan used this framing device on several other occasions, as in his adaptation of the oval-shaped convention of the historical, family portrait in Portrait o f Barrett Reid 1347 (QAG)14Later, he made the subjective intent of this pictorial manoeuvre explicit in a studio photograph, taken in London in 1957, in which he pointedly glares at Mrs Fraser through a pair of binoculars. There is no doubt that what we are being coaxed to witness here is a vision of humanity forced down the evolutionary scale; more precisely, a woman of 'culture' descends, too hastily, into 'nature'. This is the kind of 'primitivism' made famous by the Euro-American avant-garde, a highly sexualised account of transgressive aesthetics. When Willem de Kooning's first 'Women' series was introduced to NewYork critics in the early 1950s, the images were greeted with lurid excitement. For supporters like Artnews critic Thomas Hess, de Kooning had wrestled 'his girl' on to the canvas and shown her who was boss. A similar feverishness afflicts some of the critical forays around Mrs Fraser: her plight arouses not pity but the sense of her openness to sexual assault. She is a woman liable to be taken from behind, like the women in some of the Pompeiian wall paintings, with no preference and no certainty on the part of the taker as to which passage is being penetrated. She would spit and snap like a female dingo, without offering resistance .15 This, then, was Sunday Reed's punishment — to be characterised as the savage nymph. She was so ambitious for Nolan, though, that one senses she would not have objected too strenuously to her identification with this withering masterpiece.16 And what of the real Eliza Fraser, whoever she might have been? By the time she had returned safe, but probably not all that sound, to England, several versions of the story (including her own) were appearing in the popular press as far away as the United States.17Nothing could expose what Jim Davidson has called the 'soft underbelly of imperialism' as vividly as tall tales about white women held captive in the wilderness.18Over the past 150 years, there have been many more recountings of the legend, few of which match in even the basic details. Eliza's cultural interpreters have ranged from filmmakers, to librettists, to feminist historians. Her manifestations in the more contemporary reconstructions of the story cast her as everything from ribald temptress to complex class heroine.19 Too many have claimed a piece of her, to trust any single version of her 'history'; the accretions of paint, legend, gossip, analysis, film and music are too dense to see through. But if half the stories are true — if she really did give birth to a child 'born drowned' in a long boat, up to her waist in sea water, surrounded by terrified and useless men; if, when taken into captivity by the rightfully suspicious and curious local tribes, she was forced to suckle their children with the milk her body doggedly produced for her own lost baby; and if, on her return to 'civilisation', she was treated with the prurience and morbid fascination that we have been educated to expect of nineteenth-century audiences — then it seems quite logical that she would be shrill in her demands for a free ride for the rest of her life.20 It is likely that Sidney Nolan changed his mind about her too. In interviews towards the end of his career Nolan made explicit his sense of connection with Eliza Fraser and her arduous, long-deferred journey home.21He had returned to the Fraser legend for a further two series in the mid- 1950s and early 1960s. The final images, such as the Queensland Art Gallery's Mrs Fraser and convict 1962-64 (used as the cover image for Patrick White's acclaimed historical adaptation of the subject, A Fringe o f Leaves, first published in 1976), feature an increasing lyricism; the medium and format change and the works become larger in scale. In this group of works, Eliza Fraser and her convict lover are battered and weathered, but they have endured. No longer alien, or separate, they are made of the same stuff as the landscape itself. They almost seem to belong. Lynne Seear is Senior Researcher at the Queensland Art Gallery. 'A WAVE TO MEMORY' 205