Facing new worlds

Facing New Worlds moves away from a focus on significant individual Europeans in the colonization of our region. Instead, it highlights the way that Europeans had to negotiate with Indigenous interlocutors to achieve anything. The portraits here illustrate those negotiations in their pairings of Europeans and Indigenous people. They also remind us that all portraiture is a representation of a relationship between sitter and artist. Indigenous people were not passive victims of European force, but fought, engaged, and shaped European intentions all through the so-called Age of Exploration. They also faced more than just the British during this era; they had to face French incursions quite as often. European exploration in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries opened up new worlds for everyone involved.

Exhibition held: National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, 15 November 2018 - 22 April 2019.