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Out of the Frying Pan: Voyaging to Queensland in 1863 on Board the Fiery Star
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 February 2016
Extract
This article had its genesis in a family photograph of my paternal grandmother's parents, Rowland and Rebecca Walton (see Figure 1). I knew little about them apart from their English origins, but their appearance was intriguing: definitely stalwart pioneers, but what kind of pioneers? Popular cultural knowledge in Australia provides one central image of the pioneer, summed up concisely by Katharine Susannah Prichard: ‘It will be a nation of pioneers, with all the adventurous, toiling strain of the men and women who came over the sea and conquered the wilderness.’ Prichard's notion was directly inspired by a painting, The Pioneer (1904) by Frederick McCubbin (1855–1917), described by Tim Bonyhady as ‘one of the most influential paintings of the emigrant experience in Australia’. Utilising a triptych fonnat, it recounts (in the words of a contemporary reviewer) ‘its own legend of the useful toil, the homely joys, and destiny obscure of the pioneer, who does not live, as the rude cross in the third panel indicates, to see the growth or share in the prosperity of the fine city seen in the background of the panel’.
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References
Notes
1 A version of this article was presented at ‘Oceanic Passages’, Centre for Colonialism and its Aftermath conference, University of Tasmania, held in Hobart, 23–25 June 2010.Google Scholar
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