Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

imagined, on the border of extensive rolling downs, with a wide expanse of plain and forest and a fine sheltering ridge in the background'. As the single sister of the station manager, Neville-Rolfe would have been expected to play a role in the running of the homestead. Both her sister Margaret and sister-in-law Kunie gave birth during her visit, and it is likely that she was specifically on hand in Australia to offer 'womanly support and assistance. However, she also clearly spent a lot of time producing watercolour impressions of the colony. On the strength of this lively body of work, revisionist historians have recently claimed the academically trained Neville-Rolfe as a colonial artist, disputing her relegation to 'that special subdivision of the amateur class, the genteel Victorian lady painter'.7In fact Neville-Rolfe aligns quite neatiy with the original definition of the amateur or dilettante: 'one who cultivates the fine arts for the love of them rather than professionally for money'.8 Her family were obviously tolerant about what they termed her 'natural gifts. She was an artist by temperament and by intuition, and had she been able to follow her vocation she might well have made a name in art'.9Watercolours, which demanded 'little in equipment other than paper, blocks or tubes of colour, pencil and brushes', were the obvious medium for Neville-Rolfe to carry with her on her travels.10 48 BROUGHT TO LIGHT: During the nineteenth century, diarising, journal-keeping and sketching to record daily experiences and observations were common pastimes, particularly for middle- and upper-class women. In Neville-Rolfe s case the inclusion of handwritten pencil inscriptions along the bottom edge of her watercolour paintings adds a personal value to works that might otherwise be classed as generic. These jottings do not, however, reveal the dreams and fears often recorded by the written word in diaries and journals. Rather, the sketches and inscriptions function as spontaneous impressions of station life, rather like nineteenth-century 'holiday snapshots'. In Harriet Jane's Australia, women ride side-saddle, there is always time for afternoon tea, for acts of charity, for music and cultivated company. Unlike the many emigrant women who adapted to conditions in the bush over whole lifetimes (many of whom could neither read nor write), Neville-Rolfe had a privileged 'voice'. She was free to choose both her arrival and departure. The suite of eighty-seven watercolours held in the Queensland Art Gallery Collection comprises domestic tableaux, local and station Aborigines, the ritual of horse breaking, a kangaroo shoot, and sketches of 'exotic' specimens — the fauna and flora of the Alpha district. These include charming studies of wildflowers and fruit — native pomegranates, cherries, apples and limes, field flowers, native fuschias and blue cornflowers; and others depicting birds, lizards and oversized cockroaches. Several accurately chronicle the working life at Alpha Station and its outstations and neighbouring properties. Scattered throughout the images is the artist herself, sketching the landscape (en plein air, as was the fashion, and sometimes with her back to the viewer), astride a horse, participating in station chores and enjoying family picnics. The best known and arguably the most accomplished of the watercolours is Breakfast, Alpha 1884, a softly hued vignette which allows an intimate glimpse into the family's lifestyle in outback Queensland. Seated at the breakfast table are Neville-Rolfe's sister Margaret and Left Sketch of Heacham Hall, from A. E. Gunther's Rolfe Family Records, Litho Developments Ltd, London, 1962 Sketch of Alpha Homestead, 1886, attributed to Charles William Neville-Rolfe, courtesy John Oxley Library, Brisbane Right Harriet Jane Neville-Rolfe Native pomegranate and wild jasmin 1883 Watercolour over pencil on wove paper 22.8 X30.4cm Gift of the artist's son in her memory 1964 Queensland Art Gallery Harriet Jane Neville-Rolfe Native rose, King George's Sound, last sight of Australia 1885 W atercolour over pencil 35.5x25.5cm Gift of the artist's son in her memory 1964 Queensland Art Gallery Australian Art 1850-1965 her husband Charles Torrey, her brothers Charles and Arthur, and Charles's wife, Kunigunda Clive Keppel (Kunie). Elegant, finely crafted chairs, fresh wildflowers,1 a floor-length white table-cloth and silver tableware (straight from the dining table at Heacham Hall) suggest that the style and social standing inherited in England had been successfully reapplied to the colonies. Breakfast, Alpha emphasises the incongruity of the nineteenth-century Australian outback reality overlaid with aveneer of English gentility. These travellers and part-time settlers seem suspended somewhere between the customs, conventions and luxury of'home' and the precarious conditions in this strange territory.12The rustic interior of the room, with its rough-hewn beams, wild bullock horns and guns hanging on the slab walls, contrasts starkly with the formally dressed men in coats and the women wearing morning gowns. Even the fashionable pets in the foreground seem out of place when cattle dogs or dingo-cross pups would