Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

'HJ SKETCHES THE SCENE' Harriet Jane Nevrlle-Rolfe in Queensland Susan Herbert Facing page Harriet Jane Neville-Rolfe England/Australia 1850-1928 Breakfast, Alpha 1884 Watercolour over pencil on wove paper 25.3x35.4cm Gift of the artist's son in her memory 1964 Queensland Art Gallery Right Harriet Jane Neville-Rolfe, C.1884. Photograph courtesy Neville-Rolfe Family Archives All works discussed in this essay are from the Queensland Art Gallery Collection. T T IL ■ arriet Jane Neville-Rolfe, an English gentlewoman -JL. JL. who lived in Queensland from 1883 until 1885, offered an alternative view to the prevailing attitude that the frontier was 'all right for men and dogs, bu t... hell on women and horses'.1Her visual recordings of life on an outback cattle station at the end of the nineteenth century suggest that, no matter how startling the conditions, the appropriation of this land by her peers was accomplished by an almost seamless transposition of the trappings of British society. Neville-Rolfe was born in 1850, the fourth child in a family of nine, and grew up on the estates of Heacham and Sedgeford in the county of Norfolk, England. As a member of a privileged family she was educated by a governess, tutored in Latin by the local vicar and spent much of her childhood in Italy, a country which exerted a deep cultural influence on Harriet Jane and her siblings.2During her early twenties, in an era when John Ruskin's 'angel in the house' presided over aworld in which class and gender were strictly defined, she defied Ruskin's decree that 'no woman could paint', and studied at the Slade School in London before 1874 and at L'Ecole Nationale de Dessin de Jeunes Filles in Paris from 1874 until 1877.3She continued to live between England and the Continent until 1883 when she travelled to Australia to stay with her elder brother Charles. The intrepid Harriet Jane Neville-Rolfe sailed to Australia in early 1883, when the usual length of the voyage to the colonies lasted about four months. She joined her brother Charles William Neville-Rolfe on Alpha Station in central Queensland, a property he had managed since 1871. During that period, Neville-Rolfe's younger sister Margaret and husband Charles Franklin Torrey were also visitors to Queensland, and Arthur, the youngest in the family, had followed the lead of his brother by taking up shares in an outstation at Clermont, some miles from Alpha.4 The town ofAlpha, created as a small service depot by the Central Railway in 1884, is the central point between Emerald and Barcaldine, five hundred kilometres west of Rockhampton. Squatters in this region had taken advantage of the Unoccupied Land Act passed by the newly founded Queensland Government in 1860. As a result, prime territory was annexed by the white settlers who, since they were dependent on natural water, always selected land with the best supply. By 1884, most of the available country had been claimed, leading to the complete displacement of the local Indigenous population.5 In 1872, one of these huge land accumulations became known as Alpha Station, the largest original holding in the district, and the one from which the town of Alpha took its name. The cattle station covered over sixteen hundred square miles, extending north of the Tropic of Capricorn and encompassing almost the entire area that formed the valley of the Belyando south of the Tropic. In 1876, Town and Country Journal published a sketch of Alpha Station6and described it as 'one of the prettiest spots that could be 46 BROUGHT TO LIGHT: Australian Art 1850-1965