In King Bungaree at the Bottle Tree, the central figure is taken from Augustus Earle’s Portrait of Bungaree, a native of New South Wales c.1826. Bungaree (d. 1830) lived in colonial Sydney, although he was originally from Broken Bay, and became highly adapted to life in the settlement, maintaining good relations with a number of governors and serving as an intermediary between Indigenous people and the white settlers.
He is shown wearing European dress, including a cocked hat (echoing a boomerang) and a breastplate, presented to him in 1815 by Governor Lachlan Macquarie, with the invented title ‘Bungaree: Chief of the Broken Bay Tribe’. Bungaree accompanied Matthew Flinders on his 1801–02 circumnavigation of Australia, the first Aboriginal to do so. Flinders’ cat, Trim, is shown in the lower left of the image. The image, somewhat wooden in appearance, is taken from a bronze sculpture that sits on a window ledge of the Mitchell Library in Macquarie Street. Sydney’s Royal Botanic Gardens has a few specimens of bottle tree; in its branches are flying foxes, which have infested trees in the Gardens since 1900, destroying many valuable plants. As they are protected, humane methods of removing them have been the subject of much public controversy
-Anne Ryan
King Bungaree at the Bottle Tree, 2010
$2,000 – $2,900
In King Bungaree at the Bottle Tree, the central figure is taken from Augustus Earle’s Portrait of Bungaree, a native of New South Wales c.1826. Bungaree (d. 1830) lived in colonial Sydney, although he was originally from Broken Bay, and became highly adapted to life in the settlement, maintaining good relations with a number of governors and serving as an intermediary between Indigenous people and the white settlers.
He is shown wearing European dress, including a cocked hat (echoing a boomerang) and a breastplate, presented to him in 1815 by Governor Lachlan Macquarie, with the invented title ‘Bungaree: Chief of the Broken Bay Tribe’. Bungaree accompanied Matthew Flinders on his 1801–02 circumnavigation of Australia, the first Aboriginal to do so. Flinders’ cat, Trim, is shown in the lower left of the image. The image, somewhat wooden in appearance, is taken from a bronze sculpture that sits on a window ledge of the Mitchell Library in Macquarie Street. Sydney’s Royal Botanic Gardens has a few specimens of bottle tree; in its branches are flying foxes, which have infested trees in the Gardens since 1900, destroying many valuable plants. As they are protected, humane methods of removing them have been the subject of much public controversy
-Anne Ryan
