From the first watercolour sketches in 1777 to the sombre photographic scenes from the Oyster Cove mission in 1858, European colonial artists struggled to capture a visual understanding of Tasmanian Aboriginal people. Instead they left a record of the limits of their own imaginations and a testament to the ideologies that they sought to impose on a landscape whose stories are still resisted today. In this lecture, Professor Greg Lehman—a well-known Tasmanian art historian and curator on Indigenous history, identity, and place—will explore pathways to truth telling through a better appreciation of an extraordinary art history. His lecture is presented as part of Mandy Quadrio: Kukunna Wurraweena.
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Greg Lehman is a descendent of the Trawulwuy people of northeast Tasmania and an Adjunct Professorial Fellow at the University of Tasmania’s Institute of Indigenous Knowledges. He holds a Master of Studies in the History of Art and Visual Cultures from Oxford University and a PhD in Art History from the University of Tasmania. As consultant curator, he led the development of First Tasmanians, the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery’s first permanent Indigenous gallery. With Tim Bonyhady, he curated The National Picture: The Art of Tasmania’s Black War, which won the 2019 Museums and Galleries Australia Award for Travelling Exhibitions. He is a published poet and librettist, whose work has been performed at Hobart Theatre Royal and Sydney Opera House. He is developing Australia’s first history of colonial art from a First Nations perspective and continues research on Aboriginal fire management and its influence on Tasmania’s landscape.
Greg Lehman.
