The Anglo-Australian School of Faux Naive Fusionism

A hundred years after what historian W.K. Hancock in 1930 termed ‘The Invasion’ of Australia by European settlers in 1788, two-thirds of the nearly three million non-Aboriginal inhabitants were Australian born. Virtually all the third million were born in Britain; at the time of federation in 1901 barely 2 per cent of white Australians were not of British stock. But the painters and artists of the late nineteenth century were far less likely to have been born in Australia or even Britain.

Enterprising American publishers spent more than £60,000 commissioning 1000 etchings for the three-volume Picturesque Atlas of Australasia that was published on the centenary of first settlement. Most of these were necessarily sketched en plein air, in which Australia abounds.