Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Melbourne, Dept. of Fine Arts, Classical Studies and Archaeology, 1999.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 239-255).

Contents:
Introduction -- Chapter one: landscape and identity: signifying 'Australia'; Seeing a different Australia; Australian identity and landscape; representing the landscape; Enstellung and the European vision of Australia; the iconography of 'Australia'; a scientific way of seeing; painting Aboriginal icons -- Chapter two: Aboriginal people in the landscape; the uncolonised wilderness; perceiving the wilderness; the colonial wilderness; an Aboriginal wilderness; the romantic indigene; the precolonial landscape; painting a colonial reality; seeing colonial space; creating colonial space; the settled landscape; the pastoral landscape; settlement -- Chapter three: white but not quite; the civilising mission; mimetic portraiture; the colonised in coloniser's clothing -- Chapter four: painting the nation: Aboriginal people and the nationalist re-invention of Australia; fading Aborigines; constructing national difference; thinking nations; fear, hatred, and the representation of absence; Aboriginality, nationality and the Heidelberg School; paintaing a eucalypt Olympia; Tom Roberts' Aboriginal portraits -- Chapter five: conclusion.

"This thesis examines the representation of Aboriginal people in Australian painting between 1850 and 1900. In particular, the thesis discusses and seeks to account for the decline in the frequency with which Aboriginal people were represented in mainstream academic art in the decades preceding Australia's Federation in 1901. In addition, this thesis investigates the ways in which a visual discourse of Aboriginality was realised in mid- and late nineteenth-century Australian painting. The figures of Aboriginal people formed a significant presence in Australian painting from the moment of first contact in the late eighteenth century until well into the nineteenth century. I argue that in paintings of the Australian landscape, as well as in portraiture and figure studies produced in the second half of the nineteenth century, images of Aboriginal people were used to signify the primordial difference of the antipodean landscape. In these paintings, Aboriginality emerged as a motif of Australia's precolonial past: a timeless, arcadian realm that preceded European colonisation, and in which Aboriginal people enjoyed uncontested possession of the Australian landscape. This uncolonised landscape represented the antithesis of colonial civilisation, both spatially and temporally distinct from the colonial nation."--Abstract