Rediscovered treasures The Sydney Punchbowls
For the next six months, visitors to the museum will have a rare opportunity to see two treasures of early Sydney on display, reunited for only the second time in their history. By Dr Kimberley Webber.
IN ABOUT 1820, someone familiar with Governor Lachlan Macquarie’s Sydney commissioned Chinese artists in Canton (now Guangzhou) to paint a pair of large punchbowls with panoramic views of Sydney Cove. One was to show the view from the east, and the other from the west. The punchbowls are a ‘harlequin pair’ – similar but not identical – and there is some overlap between the two panoramas. The commissioner must have provided the artists with engravings or drawings of the relatively new town, as the results were surprisingly accurate. A highlight of this exhibition, which features both bowls, is the use of large-scale digital imagery to reveal the fine details of the panoramas and to identify significant buildings. First Nations people are present on the foreshores at Tallawoladah (Miller’s Point) and Tubowgule (eastern Circular Quay), in fishing canoes on the harbour and in the centrepiece inside each bowl. This was intended as a surprise reveal once the contents were drunk. Depicting a traditional Aboriginal marriage ceremony, it may have been meant to convey to a European viewer the pitfalls of marriage. Historian Elizabeth Ellis OAM has traced the image to an 1802 drawing by Nicolas-Martin Petit, an artist on Baudin’s expedition of 1800–1803, who made some of the earliest ethnographic studies of Australia’s First Nations. 10
Signals 141 Summer 2022–23