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Whatsapp An Aborigine Climbing a Tree by Cutting Steps in the Trunk

For years an album of Australian paintings by a convicted forger languished in a second-hand bookshop in London. The artist, Joseph Lycett, was transported to NSW in 1814 and his paintings are a remarkable record of Aboriginal people during the British colony's early history. Roz Bluett reports.

Joseph Lycett was particularly skilful at forging bank notes. In the early years of the 19th century he ran a successful clandestine business in the back garret of his rented house in England's West Midlands.

But unfortunately for him, and fortunately for us, his luck ran out in 1811. He was caught, convicted and transported for his crime to the colony of New South Wales, arriving on the General Hewitt with fellow forger Francis Greenway.

Like Greenway, his eye for detail was noticed by his gaolers in Sydney and he was put to work. However, unlike Greenway, the story of Lycett's life has remained more or less untold.

He's left us a wonderful legacy of images and glimpses of how European life in the colony impacted on Aboriginal life. They're great documents. They really show us how Aboriginal people lived.

One could say that Lycett was a lucky man, however. The English forger's first job in Sydney was to illustrate the emerging colony favourably, with the hope of encouraging voluntary migration and agricultural interest.

His renditions were accurate and all was going well in his elevated position until he succumbed to the pull of the criminal underworld again. He was caught red handed in possession of a copper plate press and was put on the first boat north to Newcastle's harsh Coal River settlement.

'If you were bad in Sydney, you got sent to Newcastle,' says John McPhee, an art historian and curator who began looking into Lycett's life some years ago. 'Joseph Lycett ends up there after offending again as a forger. He was just somebody who couldn't stop.'

But luck was on Lycett's side again. He arrived in Newcastle at the same time as the ambitious Captain James Wallis, who was keen to have visual records of settlement.

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Whatsapp Fishing by torchlight

Lycett was given ample freedom. He sketched the developing township and buildings, and spent time observing and drawing the local Awabakal people

An unknown album of Lycett's work surfaced unexpectedly in a London auction house in 1972. It comprised 20 watercolours illustrating the Awabakal, Worimi and Eora people of Newcastle and Sydney around the 1820s. The Australian National Library purchased the album and it has been given highest priority in the Australia's National Archives since.

Decades after the album surfaced, McPhee felt an exhibition of Lycett's work was long overdue. In order to get explanations right, he decided to gather together present day Awabakal people, show them the album and see how they might interpret the images.

Shane Frost was part of John's gathering. Seeing Lycett's Corroboree at Newcastle, painted in 1818, Frost immediately recognised that one of the Aboriginal men in the picture had markings on his shield similar to those his father used to mark his own tools. He suddenly realised that the person in the watercolour was one of his ancestors.

McPhee was humbled: 'From then on we realised we had the most extraordinary and slightly chilling touch, right back to Lycett. More so than in any other way.'

The man in the painting turned out to be Burigon, a leader of the Awabakal people in the Newcastle area.

The detail in the pictures began revealing even more about Aboriginal life: specific tools used in hunting, food gathering practices, family dynamics and customs.

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Whatsapp Aborigines spearing fish, others diving for crayfish, a party seated beside a fire cooking ish

One of McPhee's favourite Lycett paintings is titled An Aborigine Climbing a Tree by Cutting Steps in the Trunk (pictured above).

'It shows that the Aboriginal people of the area were already using metal headed axes in 1820,' he says. The tools were one of the first things they traded with the British. In the painting, one man has made it out far onto a limb of the tree, and is shown precariously balanced, smoking the possums out, ready for them to fall into the traps below. The scene is meticulously detailed.

A three-pronged eel spear, made from the stem of the grass tree, is accurately depicted in some of the paintings, as are fishing spots, rock platforms, oysters, lobster and other seafood in abundance.

The paintings also show interaction between settlers and Indigenous people,

'In one painting, there's an officer walking along with his gun over his shoulder; he's followed by a convict with a kangaroo over his shoulder, who is followed by an aboriginal person carrying their days provisions. It shows the social order that was in existence in Newcastle and in the colony in those very early years,' says McPhee.

'It's history, it's a long time ago and it was a time when people were not writing a lot down. We have to read the watercolours and look at what's going on in them.'

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Whatsapp Aborigines Resting by a Camp Fire near the Mouth of the Hunter River, Newcastle, NSW.

Lycett was the first European artist to record many Indigenous ceremonies, including intimate initiation scenes during corroborees. He couldn't have captured what he did without having a close connection to Aboriginal people.

So just how did Lycett persuade Aboriginal people to allow him to sketch their ceremonies and food gathering expeditions? McPhee surmises that he was a con man, but also a humanist who developed a strong rapport and trust with the local people.

There's no doubt that Lycett was an exceptionally accomplished painter. His works have been included in all the significant histories of Australian art.

And according to McPhee, people have looked closer at Lycett's work over the past few decades.

'Peoples' awareness in the past 20 years of Lycett's importance has been because they have looked at the pictures for what they can tell us about the landscape, about traditional aboriginal life and the aboriginal people.

'He's left us a wonderful legacy of images and glimpses of how European life in the colony impacted on Aboriginal life. They're great documents. They really show us how Aboriginal people lived.

But despite his unique artistic skill, Lycett couldn't escape his criminal past. He was desperate to get back to England, and when pardoned by Governor Macquarie in 1824, he conned money for his and his two daughters' passage home. His plan was to abandon the criminal world and make a fortune from his published images. However sales in England didn't go as well as hoped and in desperation he returned to the copper plate press in the back garret.

In 1827 Lycett was again detained for forgery and during the arrest his throat was cut. It's presumed he cut it himself. Four months later he died in the Birmingham Infirmary, presumably from septicaemia.

There are differing accounts of Lycett's final days. McPhee has read them all, and offers a gory tale as perhaps his favourite: 'There's a wonderful and ghastly account scribbled in the back of a book saying that Lycett ripped his throat open and bled to death at the thought of being re-transported to Australia.'

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