The Road to

Wollongong

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FOREWORDThe Road to Wollongong examines the landscape of the Illawarra via a number of diverse historical and contemporary artworks. These works take us down the important paths and tracks, low roads and highways that connect the people and places of this region.

When thinking about this show over the past several months the phrase ‘all roads lead to Rome’ was one that often came to mind. This proverb suggests that different paths can lead one to the same place and, although not necessarily referring to physical paths, it does resonate strongly with this exhibition – as all roads in this exhibition lead to Wollongong, the metaphorical ‘Rome’.

The Illawarra with its magnificent escarpment and pristine sweeping coastline has attracted many artists since the first European settlements in this area in the early 1800s. This exhibition includes some well-known and lesser known images of this area and provides some new perspectives of Wollongong and Illawarra.

The Road to Wollongong is part of the Gallery’s Visiting Curator Program which brings new and interesting perspectives to our exhibition program. Wollongong Art Gallery would like to thank the curators Joe and Ione Davis for their passion and insights while developing this project and we hope that you will be both engaged and surprised by this exhibition

John Monteleone Program Director

Geoffrey Northover, Looking south west towards Unanderra, c. 1940’s, print of scanned original negative. Private Collection

Right: Ray Mills, Youth on swing looking towards Cliff Road Wollongong, late 1960’s, print of scanned original negative. Collection of the artist

The Road to

WollongongCurated by Joseph Davis and Ione Davis

WOLLONGONG ART GALLERY 26 JUNE - 1 NOVEMBER 2015

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Something comes from living in Wollongong all your life – even though that has, for me, only been 22 years. You see the same things so often that it’s uncommon to think too much about them.

But artists are different.

The best of these artists not only look carefully at what is before them, but also have the skills to represent what they see in ways that can make even locals see things almost completely anew.

And, often, the artists who surprise us the most have lived here for extended periods of time and looked long and hard at the many paths Wollongong has taken in the last 200 years.

Some visiting artists, however, just simply get it. The all-encapsulating eyes of the nineteenth century Austrian artists Eugene Von Guerard and Joseph Selleny both captured extraordinary Illawarra images after less than a week’s stay. And, breathtakingly, the wonderfully distilling gaze of

Left: Algernon Edward Thornton Winn, Main Street, Thirroul, c. 1908, printed postcard, 9 x 13.5cm, from the collections of the Wollongong City Library and the Illawarra Historical Society

Right: Adelaide Perry, Austinmer, 1926, oil on board, 35.5 x 45cm. Kiama Council Art Collection

contemporary New Zealand photographer Laurence Aberhart managed, in just three precise images (all included in this show), to highlight both the oddity and the beauty of our local landscape during his exceedingly brief visit to the area.

Bright new eyes sometimes have the power to shock by reminding us of what we so often casually ignore.

It is also true that sometimes the most pedestrian visiting artists can occasionally produce work which stands as a precious historical record of our past. Although, of course, they usually only achieve this by capturing an Illawarra that is today often almost impossible for us to imagine could ever have really existed.

Nonetheless, this exhibition most often chooses to eschew the work of the more obvious big names of twentieth century Australian art – unless they have lived here in Illawarra more or less permanently.

There are thus no works by Garry Shead or Lloyd Rees in this show – although both artists resided for long periods on the margins of Illawarra (at Bundeena and Werri Beach respectively).

Instead, this exhibition chooses to highlight a virtually unknown local artist – the Thirroul photographer Algernon Edward Thornton Winn (variously spelt) – who in 1908 took the photographic image which provided the inspiration for Shead’s now widely celebrated 1992 image.

Despite the fact that an extremely large number of Australia’s great artistic practitioners have produced at least one Illawarra image, this is an exhibition that proudly wears its regional focus.

It is the quotidian – seen in new and sometimes puzzling ways (or presented starkly in its absolute ordinariness) - which seems to me to often capture something of the essence of what it is to live in the Illawarra.

THE SHOCK OF THE ORDINARY

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Kathryn Orton’s marvellous rendering, in pencil, of Wentworth Street Port Kembla is a case in point.

It speaks to us in its stillness – and its subtle accompanying soundscape adds to its impact for those yet to experience a quiet day in what was once, at the height of European migration to the area, the busiest strip shopping centre in the district.

Much as I admire the obvious skill of Max Dupain and his powerful photographic depictions of the grandeur of Illawarra’s rotting coastal jetties, I’d trade them all for that fleeting instant when Catherine and Sam Joukador set their dog “Misty Blue” running towards the camera and Sam clicked the shutter to preserve for us a moment in time which otherwise would have been lost forever.

This marvellous image shows that great art can come from simply freezing a moment in time while, paradoxically, still managing to produce one of the most animated of all the images in this exhibition.

Above: Kathryn Orton, Wentworth Street, Port Kembla II, 2006, ink on paper, 14 x 296 x 1cm. Wollongong Art Gallery Collection. Purchased 2012

Far Left: Arthur Cratchley, photograph 1960s. Wollongong City Library Collection

Left: Alfred Coffey, Bulli (Looking down on Thirroul), 1917, watercolour on paper, 34.8 x 24cm. Wollongong Art Gallery Collection. The George and Nerissa Johnson Memorial Bequest, purchased 1995

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Other relatively unknown visiting photographers do similarly extraordinary things. Such as Geoffrey Northover who, in his startling image looking down Berkeley Hill to Lake Illawarra, succeeds in freezing a truly historic Illawarra art landscape into a powerful statement of poetic stillness and calm.

And Northover skilfully uses (like so many great artists) the device of the road to direct the eye. Yet this simplest of motifs often possesses an easy ability to provoke moments of reflection in the viewer.

In our busy lives it can often seem that only artists have the time and the leisure to sit, look and reflect – and to see deeply that which, for most of us, rushes by in a flash on the freeway.

Yet roads have long been poetic harbingers of personal journeys – and

it is not suprising that every one of Thomas Hardy’s great novels begins with a lonely figure on a country road.

But as this present show reveals, there are a great many ways to depict the roads which transformed the dreaming tracks of Illawarra’s aboriginal landscape. It is a show which places its focus on the many roads which enabled Wollongong to first become a big old early twentieth century coastal country town and then the seventh largest city in Australia.

Some artists choose to depict precisely what is before them – others, in isolating an image, see the surreal in the ordinariness of the roads we all drive upon or the paths we all walk down. And that seems to be precisely what is happening in the 1989 image of Woonona Baths by Amanda Townsend included in this exhibition.

Above: Amanda Townsend, Woonona Bathing Pavilion, pastel on paper, 1989

Left: Geoffrey Northover, Berkeley Hill looking to Lake Illawarra, c. 1940s, print of scanned

original negative. Private Collection

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Above: T.U.K Caldwell, Springhill Road Lights, 1962, synthetic polymer paint on composition board, 92 x 120cm. Wollongong Art Gallery Collection. Purchased by Wollongong City Council, 1963

Left: (detail) Frank Nowlan, Up Kennedy’s Hill (Austinmer), 2013, oil on board, 30.5 x 23cm. Collection of the artist

Redback Graphix (Gregor Cullen & MichaelCallaghan), Greetings from Wollongong, 1982, colourscreenprint on paper, 59.5 x 87.5cm. Wollongong ArtGallery Collection. Purchased with assistance from theVisual Arts Board of the Australia Council, 1987

Others like Frank Nowlan depict everyday landscapes so quirkily that one can only marvel at their idiosyncratic charm.

Surveying 200 hundred years of artistic practice in Illawarra since that fateful day in 1815 when the white invasion began has helped me to better understand the place in which I live – in all its beauty, quirks and puzzles.

I must have seen water glistening on a road in the streetlight countless times – but I will never again drive past Springhill Road near the Steelwork’s entrance without thinking of T.U.K. Caldwell’s marvellous evocation of that same scene in 1963.

There’s a mystery in the ordinary – and my great hope is that the works in this exhibition can help to reveal something of it.

Many of the images we have chosen seem to go out of their way not to make a grand statement about the place in which we live - and yet, nonetheless, somehow quietly achieve the opposite.

This is an exhibition full of absolutely ordinary rainbows. It endeavours to overcome what has been called “the anaesthetic of familiarity”. It also tries to combat what Richard Dawkins also calls “the sedative of ordinariness” – that often casual aloofness with which those accustomed to a place view the everyday and which dulls the senses and hides some of the wonder of what it is to live in Illawarra and to have walked one of the many roads which have led to making Wollongong what it is today.

Ione Davis March 2015

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THE ROAD TO WOLLONGONG1815-2015

Above: Margaret Preston, The Road to Bulli (photographed by Olive Cotton), 1944, image in book “Present Day Art in Australia (II)”, 1945. Private Collection

Left: Louis Frank, Stanwell Park, c. 1878, oil on canvas, 37 x 51cm. Private Collection

Possibly the most desirable of all images for this show would have been an original oil by Margaret Preston entitled The Road to Bulli? A work, by the way, which has not been sighted - or emerged from presumed closet captivity – since 1944.1

Sometimes an artwork needs to be forgotten before it can be remembered.

Time, never particularly kind to the living, can be particularly cruel to the dead – consigning most of us and our labours to historical obscurity and bestowing on the few a posterity that is never completely assured. Early fame can quickly fade - and even those few artists who accrue genuine celebrity at the time of their deaths can never be certain it will last.

A.H. Fullwood (1861-1930) – my personal 19th century local art hero (and he spent a lot of time in Illawarra during the years 1891 and 1892) – is a case in point. Not only was Fullwood phenomenally prolific (rivalling even Norman Lindsay in output) but he was also the most widely published of Australian artists prior to 1914 - both nationally and internationally.

When he returned to Australia in 1920 to wile away the remaining 10 years of his life he ended up painting and print-making in obscurity down on Berry’s Bay. Other antipodean artists had emerged to steal his allotted 15 minutes of fame. Today Fullwood is remembered by few – and the countless thousands of images he produced command only modest prices.2

If it’s the stupid future an artist labours to impress then the career of Fullwood suggests he or she is likely to be disappointed. Depressed? So you should be – just look at the contemporary art market. Not pretty!

Yet what is possibly little understood is that down in The Gong virtually any scabrous early lithograph depicting an Illawarra scene drawn on stone in England is an exceedingly uncommon survivor. At least it is when it is based on the original watercolours from Robert Marsh Westmacott’s 1838 series and produced by the illustrious pioneering lithographer Charles Joseph Hullmandel (1789 –1850) no less and not by W. Spreat (someone working in 1848 whose first name we do not even know) in Exeter in England.3

The 1838 lithographs after Capt. R.M. Westmacott (who purchased all of Sandon Point as well as acquiring some additional big hunks of the Northern Illawarra before he went broke with so many of the other big boys in the Depression of the 1840s) may, in some cases, exist in as little as a handful of un-coloured copies – two or more of which are usually foxed almost beyond recognition. The miraculously fine copy of one image from the 1838 series I once acquired is included in this show and may have been mis-titled during the production process in England. It may actually depict the rise once indicated on maps as ‘Mount Westmacott’ located to the north-west of Helensburgh.4

But, whatever its merits as ‘art’, Westmacott’s 1838 series of lithographs earns him the honour of producing the first ‘published’ pictorial representation of Illawarra.5

Another work expecting little valorisation in this show is a small colonial oil depicting Stanwell Park. It was painted by a now largely unregarded and mostly forgotten 19th century artist named Louis Frank.6

Louis Frank’s Stanwell Park is something of a puzzle. It possibly sits fairly comfortably at almost the precise point in that limbo of art-market worthlessness posited neatly between novelty and nostalgia.

which is the Illawarra image that keeps on giving and giving. And even Louis Frank knew this – and worked up a much more marketable image of Stanwell Park in the studio.

But the landscape of Illawarra has been doing this for a very long time – just witness Robert Marsh Westmacott’s depiction of the Woodstock Mills at Jamberoo from his later 1848 series of lithographs produced by W. Spreat. This very powerful image of Peace, Plenty and Settled Industry would seem, almost, as if it was specifically created to form the cover illustration for a company prospectus. 7

Westmacott transforms the wild Jamberoo brush into a landscape almost entirely denuded of trees: a burnished wheat-field left fallow after a most productive harvest. It is a vision of Industry Accomplished rather than Industry Striving, precariously, to make a profit. In reality, the Woodstock Mills pictured quietly smoking away in the Westmacott’s Jamberoo mid-distance was very much on the ropes and, despite constant changes of management, had never been able to pay its way. 8

Missing too in Westmacott’s depiction of an ordered and settled Illawarra landscape are the Indigenous Australians from whom the Jamberoo valley had then, in 1848, been quite recently stolen.

Yet some 30 years later, at the alternate far end of Illawarra, the puzzle is that if our boy Louis Frank is ‘advertising’ anything in his prosaic image of Stanwell Park then he seems to be going to a lot of trouble to undersell it.

A dusty road - a clichéd device some minor art teacher might have taught him. A lonely shack by the sea - which some Romantic novel may have inspired. A muddy palette – at least as worthy of some of the worst Conrad Martens liked to sometimes serve up. Yes, these all combine to produce an image of the landscape of Stanwell Park the likes of which none of us could ever expect to see again.

Instead of turning his attention to one of the most breathtaking views in all Australia just a few hundred metres to his north, Louis Frank looks only out to sea and makes a rudimentary and rather scarring road the focus of his image. Why? Well, perhaps, if - like Louis Frank – one had very recently experienced just how extraordinarily difficult it was to make one’s way down through Stanwell Park’s precipitously inconvenient geography before the coming of the roads, then a preference for depicting a broad and muddy track rather than sublime scenery might seem a not especially unusual choice.

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For almost 60 years after the early white invasions of NSW, the newly arrived Europeans found nearly all sections of what they then called “The Five Islands District of NSW” most frustratingly difficult places to get to.

Even the great navigator himself – the illustrious James Cook – had a bit of a go and then quickly gave it all up as a bad joke.

There was a big swell off Collins Rocks near Woonona that April day in 1770 - and, after dropping anchor well out to sea, the hastily attempted row-boat Cook ordered to make land was quickly signalled back on board The Endeavour. 9

And as there was clearly no nearby natural safe harbour in the vicinity – and Cook could plainly clearly see that precipitously steep escarpment to the west - he headed some eight leagues north and happened on a place

which became known as “Botany Bay”.

What was the early verdict on Wollongong then? Too dangerous for sailing vessels (and even small craft) and looking basically pretty hopeless for the wheeled vehicles of the white men when tackled from the land. And so Illawarra pretty much remained the hereditary property in perpetuity of its original owners until one fateful day in 1815.

Three blokes drifting in a tiny rowboat - with make-shift sail attached (yes, that’s right, Bass and Flinders and the boy Martin) had earlier given the place a bit of an explorative bash in 1796 but had been defeated by both the sea and a whole bunch of what Flinders termed “Five Islands Blacks”. 10

Alternatively, if you wanted to play it a little more safely, you could set sail in a much larger vessel and make for Baie Jervis - as did both Surveyor George Evans in 1812 and also the famed discoverer of the Venus de Milo statue (Jules Sébastien César Dumont D’Urville, no less) in 1826. 11

Sensibly, D’Urville walked leisurely round the shores of Jervis Bay, rested a while, got back on board and made straight for Sydney – something which the artist and surveyor George Evans, at least on the evidence of the trials and tribulations outlined in his 1812 diary, very much regretted not doing so himself. 12 And even though walking to Wollongong from Baie Jervis was the best thing Dumont D’Urville never did, Wollongong pretty much remained “No White Man’s Land” until the very dry weather of the year 1815 set in and two Indigenous men, Cookagong and Dual, led Dr Charles Throsby and his three white companions along what was presumably an ancient dreaming track near Bulli. 13

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It has almost always been true that a professional artist’s life is not a happy one.

Van Gogh’s ear, for example, is a case in point. So too is the life of Joseph Selleny, who returned to Trieste in August 1859 with his Illawarra images among his bulging portfolios of over 2000 sketches, and then spent the last years of his life in an asylum at Inzersdorf near Vienna. 14

Sketching in Illawarra caused Augustus Earle – who in 1827 became the first artist we can confidently identify as having produced an extant image of Illawarra – physical rather than mental pain. Earle made it down here OK but broke his leg while trying to scramble back up the escarpment and on to Sydney. As a consequence he was forced to spend some months recuperating at ‘Macquarie Grove’, a Farm belonging to Mr. Hassall on the Cowpastures. 15

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In 1815 there existed what the white invaders thought to be “tame blacks” and “the wild blacks”.

The Aboriginal man, Dual, was friendly with Dr Charles Throsby. The good doctor was among the most progressive and enlightened in his views about the original custodians of this continent in the early colony – although (like all the other whites who stole this country) he too was then actively engaged in the dispossession of Aboriginal people at Glenfield, near Liverpool.

‘Enlightened’ or not, Dr Throsby proved powerless to save his friend when Governor Macquarie declared Dual “hostile” in 1816 – giving the hapless

Yet there are other illustrious colonial works in this show – many now proudly part of the substantial and important Wollongong Art Gallery Collection - depicting the tracks and trails of Illawarra. Some of these would today command prices (if they ever came back on the market) way beyond the financial reach of every regional gallery in Australia.

How did they get here?

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The art of Illawarra has often been harnessed as a form of propaganda and advertising (that is if art is not almost always a form of advertising itself). In this respect, it has been the view from Bald Hill at Stanwell Park

after Robert Marsh Westmacott, Valley of Jamberoo, 1848, lithograph, hand-coloured, 18 x 26cm. Wollongong Art Gallery Collection. The George and Nerissa Johnson Memorial Bequest, purchased 2014

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fellow the dubious distinction of becoming the first Aboriginal convict in Australian history and causing him to be exiled him from his traditional domain to Van Dieman’s Land with a sentence of seven years hard labour. 16

We can only today wonder if poor Dual, in 1816, now regretted what must have seemed to many who knew him as a foolish decision to lead a small group of white males down Bulli Mountain in the previous year?

Despite the existence of nourishing cow fodder on our narrow coastal plain (picturesquely sandwiched between mountain and sea) even the whole richness of the Five Islands District wasn’t enough extra territory for the white invaders - and so it was Dr Throsby who seems to have succeeded in having Dual’s seven year sentence cut short so that he could be brought to back to the mainland in order to assist subsequent explorations of the lands to the west of Illawarra.

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Bass and Flinders and the boy William Martin’s much earlier reckless 1796 trip to Illawarra in the tiny rowboat Tom Thumb II in 1796 is the stuff of legend – and a tale which would, a century later, turn up as one of the sweet schoolbook stories of white exploratory derring-do.

The cute little story of the celebrated navigators’ skills as barbers (by the ululating shores of Lake Illawarra) - so atrociously and amusingly captured in Percy Lindsay’s fabulous 1926 watercolour in this exhibition (and featuring an amusing Percy Lindsay self-portrait on the head of Flinders no less) – is an image which I am both proud and, perhaps, a little ashamed to say I helped the Wollongong Art Gallery acquire. 17

The propaganda value of such an image, however, proved enormous and there are many people still alive who would recall it from their schooldays.

Indeed, this little watercolour is perhaps one of the forerunners of our entire national project to promote the notion of ‘Aboriginal reconciliation’ as a means of avoiding paying the very long overdue rent to the original owners of both our district and the many other traditional lands in this vast continent.

And, sadly, it is indeed fitting that there could be no more ‘barbarous’ start to white settlement in Illawarra – for in getting to Lake Illawarra the explorers encountered an individual named Dilba (whom they weren’t quite sure was either ‘wild’ or ‘tame’) and whom Bass would later, on the orders of Lt. Governor William Paterson no less, try to hunt down and kill at a location then known as ‘The Coal Cliffs’ in 1797.

Fortunately for Dilba, Dr George Bass - good though he was at finding things at sea - had no luck (or, hopefully, pretended to have no luck) with his Government-sponsored mission of murderous intent. 18

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Roads, paths, tracks, trails, roadsteads, railroads, sea-lanes, telegraph connections, airwaves and wireless interconnectivity – these are all the tracks of Illawarra’s very salty tears.

As a Kiama girl, the celebrated Australian writer Charmian Clift, once noted: “My late father, a dogmatic man and something of an armchair philosopher, used to be given to say – among other trenchant pronouncement – that the air of our hometown would be worth a quid a whiff if some quack could bottle it and get out a patent.” “And now”, she wrote in January 1965, “having just returned from a sentimental pilgrimage to my birthplace I’m inclined to think a quid-a-whiff is bargain basement prices” for air she wonderfully described as “something between tangy and sweet, such clean country air, spiced with the smells of kelp and clover, mixtures of sea-brine and loam turned in the sun.” 19

Charmian Clift – who caught the train each school day from Bombo Beach to Wollongong High School and then spent 13 years living on the Greek Isle of Hydra – performed, in reverse, the very same migration so many residents of both Hydra and other Greek Islands were themselves then undertaking.

But the artists of Illawarra – like Clift herself – have often found it much easier to sell the ‘idea’ of the Five Islands district – than to engage in the rather more difficult activity of making such a geographically blessed and challenged part of the world work for them both in situ and in practice.

One of the most widely acclaimed images in the show is Eugene Von Guerard’s virtuosic display of every root, vine and creeper being hacked from the virgin soil at ‘Brandy and Water Creek’ near Figtree. It illustrates, I think, one of the key reasons we need art: this, I guess, is the simple fact that we often tend to forget things.

The artist for me – unfashionable though such a view may be – is thus almost always foremost a historian. His or her work will often tell at least as much about the artist, their time and their place as any autobiography they are ever likely to write.

Von Guerard’s American Creek has captured and saved for us something approximating the moment when the hewing of the primeval forest of Illawarra’s spectacularly ‘saw the light’: he gives us the illusion of sensing that moment when the all-encompassing gloom of the forest seen in one of Augustus Earle’s marvellous 1827 images was finally lifted.

We today read Von Guerard’s 1860 oil on canvas, American Creek, as the most powerful of local environmental statements but cannot really know (though we can try to guess) if Von Guerard actually saw it that way. Perhaps the son of a court painter (and specialist miniaturist) to Emperor Franz Josef no less was simply demonstrating his prowess with a pencil

Left: Percy Lindsay, While the powder dried: Illustration for the book Great Events in Australian History, 1925, watercolour on paper, 19.5 x 31.0cm. Wollongong Art Gallery Collection. The George and Nerissa Johnson Memorial Bequest, purchased 1995

Below: (detail) Eugene von Guerard, Cabbage tree forest, American Creek, 1867, colour lithograph, 33.3 x 53.0cm. Wollongong Art Gallery Collection. The George and Nerissa Johnson Memorial Bequest, purchased 1993

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in a tiny sketchbook which has miraculously survived and is housed in the State Library of NSW to this very day – and, better still, is available online for all to see.

Similarly a contemporary local artist such as the celebrated Paul Ryan makes, for me at least, his local landscapes quietly (but powerfully) political. His serene Welcome to the Jungle (2010) shows the land and sea-locked natural beauty of this extraordinary place - while simultaneously encoding the very absence of the first peoples from whom it was taken.

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Only better technology was capable of opening the difficult geography of Illawarra to the forces of global capitalism.

It began in a small way with a handful of white men – some cashed-up former sea captains or ship’s doctors – who formed the Shellharbour and Illawarra Steam Navigation Companies by purchasing large English made vessels (rather than the tiny often Australian-made craft previously in use) to try and get their goods to more lucrative markets.

Unknown Designer, Street Poster (early 1980s). Private Collection

Right: Iain Whittaker, Goodness Knows Where, 2001-2014, oil on canvas, 111 x 213cm. Wollongong Art Gallery Collection

Tara Shield, Bridgework #2 (Sea Cliff Bridge), 2005, gelatin silver photograph, 45.7 x 45.7cm.Collection of the Artist

The ‘road to Wollongong’ then became a string of privately financed very expensive jetties built in unsafe poor natural harbours and subject to the cost of incessant repairs and loss of life when the weather turned nasty.

There had to be a better way and so the coal owners and newspaper editors of Illawarra set about hijacking the NSW parliament by filling its seats with the kind of people who would vote public funds to construct a rail line to Illawarra.

More effective communication had arrived with the construction and erection of telegraph poles in the 1860s but, being terrestrial structures, they too struggled with the path down the mountain.

Harnessing of the airwaves was the solution to Illawarra’s problematic geography.

The nutty kite-man and entertaining amateur historian, Lawrence Hargrave, struggled with his box-kite solution but it, more certainly, was Alexander Graham Bell’s fabulous telephonic invention that first began to properly open Illawarra to the world. Radio station 2WL followed in the 1930s, then the South Coast Trades and Labour Council pushed for a slightly wider canvas with its calls to establish a University in the 1950s – long before the internet and wireless connectivity acted as a catalyst to finally open our narrow coastal plain more fully to the world.

Today – in 2015 – it is the Sea Cliff Bridge (superbly photographed under construction by Tara Shield) which has added the terrestrial engineering solution to making the stormy Coal Cliffs of northern Illawarra slightly more navigable by wheeled vehicles and thus more firmly connecting the Illawarra to the Sydney metropolis which may one day transform Wollongong into a conurbation rather than a region.

One of the keys to this exhibition is the relative absence of the depiction of people. The obvious exception, of course, being the miraculous survival of an extraordinary image of “Warra” with which the show begins and which I, somewhat controversially, date to c.1832-1834 – and equally controversially attribute to the local police magistrate Captain Allman.20

This has been done – not in the interests of tokenistic ticking of all the politically correct boxes but to demonstrate that Illawarra was never terra nullius and that without those two aboriginal men, Dual and Cookogong, the region would have possibly remained largely closed to the European invaders for perhaps another two decades or more.

But it is possible (though, of course, it could also be entirely fanciful) that one of the reasons the people of Illawarra appear so infrequently in the images chosen for this show is that many artists seem to have instinctively sensed that this is a region that has been more acted upon than acting. Illawarra is a place that so often has been buffeted by external human influences rather than driven forward by endogamous forces. The majesty and power of the natural environment has long been a given – but it is the financial powers of the emerging 19th and 20th century coal owners and Sydney moneymen, and, today, of voices from elsewhere streaming across both the airwaves and the blogosphere which probably mattered most both then and now.

Unemployment in European villages and economic backwaters – and the need for cheap labour for the steel industry – brought new voices from across the globe to a narrow coastal plain which still lacked even basic sewerage facilities.

The waterway depicted in Von Guerard’s magnificent prospect of Lake Illawarra was turned into a cesspit and in the late 1950s and early 1960s the suburbs close to the steelworks and surrounding that lake – at Unanderra, Dapto and Shellharbour – had the honour of recording very high rates of gastroenteritis and incidences of hepatitis which ran at an alarming 25 per 1000 individuals.21

People, sadly, have sometimes mattered little in The Gong. Convict servants, coal miners, labourers, office workers, shop assistants were all seen as resources to be exploited – but with the good fortune to be trampled on while living in a place of extraordinary and sometimes uplifting beauty. European Illawarra is filled with countless silent lives and deaths. Lives full of longing for abandoned homelands, lives which have left little record of their stories or of their nostalgia – and sometimes it is only the artists (often the children of migrants) who have captured a little something of the longing and the emotion which has been lost.

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There are no images here depicting ancient Indigenous responses to our region - despite the inclusion of a single very ‘Europeanised’ response thought to have been made by a member of the Timbery family still living close to traditional lands at Hill 60 in the 1950s. Asia is only inscrutably present in Iain Whittaker’s mesmerizing depiction of the streets of Brownsville and Dapto and also as the palest palimpsest (and then only for the cognoscenti) in Tom Dion’s haunting and suitably sombre photographic requiem for the last showing at the Regent Theatre: an event which very effectively killed off some of the local communal experience of the celluloid trappings of ‘Hollywood’ on our region.

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Riste Andrievski provides another case in point. Until I’d sighted his images of Wentworth Street Port Kembla and Jarvie Road Cringila I’d never seen buildings cry.

To be sure, the world – and Wollongong in particular - is full of structures that can make you weep.

But that’s a human response. Andrievski, rather, can draw structures of steel and wood and fibro and cement that the Italians would simply call lachrymoso.

It takes some time to see it. But Andrievski is not an artist who looks and sees ugly structures and draws them accordingly.

His buildings are animate – animals almost, but incomparably sad ones. Sad, sensate be-ings.

This is an artist with eyes like antennae, responding to every change of the wind, as the haze touches steel and wood and pipe and tin; registering every vibration of the air, every sea change, every southerly buster.

Some claim (probably apocryphally) that the Inuit have thirty different words to describe the variations of snow. Andrievski can probably draw thirty different kinds of particle pollution on the same piece of paper.

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And it was Cringila, of course, which brought us the genius of Bob Sredersas - the Lithuanian migrant labouring steelworker who (in between shifts) caught the train to go to art auctions – and whose unfailing eye created the heart of the Wollongong Art Gallery collection. Sredersas willed the spoils of his supreme taste and sophistication (achieved on a shoestring budget) by purchasing – for as little as a single guinea – the artistic gold that the silvertails of Sydney often failed to either see or appreciate.

“What a country this is,” he is once reputed to have said, “where a common labourer can afford the work of its major artists!”

It would have been great to bring real examples of Aboriginal scarred trees which once lined ancient dreaming tracks into the Gallery but, of course, that would be a far too Wordsworthian task and one sometimes necessitating the murder of the very things we love. An Indigenous possum skin rug worn on such a trek might have been desirable too – but they are too rare and precious and, anyway, the geographic origin of the few surviving examples is often very uncertain. The late May Barrie’s massive stone sculptures (perhaps the ultimate road base) should have also - quite literally - filled out that show but are simply best viewed in situ while travelling on the road to Calderwood to see the grounds of her lived-in masterpiece named “Callemondah”.

At least Bert Flugelman’s stainless steel sculpture is there for you all to view at the Gallery entrance – and you can always catch (and most importantly caress) the small May Barrie stone on the gallery’s western stairs or view her “Viva Solaris” (c. 1976, angaston marble, 180 x 38 x 38 cm) in the beautiful grounds of the University of Wollongong.

Best of all, these last two instances cited above are reminders that this is (despite quite some struggle to prevent it being so) a didactic show designed to get you as much outside of the Gallery as into it.

Even as late as 1857 a work by a virtually unknown colonial artist James A. C. Willis (b? – d. 1898) depicts the then main road into Wollongong (Rixon’s Pass) as little more than a goat track.

On the evidence of a single anonymous photo of a bus on a very narrow dirt road, the road up Mount Keira in the 1950s does not appear to have been much wider than the 1850s one at Rixon’s Pass.

But you also need to experience the other paths which snake down that steep ‘dark tor’ to the west of Illawarra’s beaches – O’Brien’s Road, Macquarie and Bulli Passes and, of course, the foot of the amazingly long engineering marvel of Mount Ousley which is today signposted by Gino Sanguinetti’s totemic sculptures.

If there is a message in this show then it is a simple one: “You need to get out more!”

For Wollongong, even at its ugliest, is breathtakingly heartbreakingly beautiful.

Joseph Davis Thirroul, March 2015

Above: Artist Unknown, (Mt Keira Bus), c. 1950’s?, digital print of undated photograph. Private Collection

Left: (detail) James A.C. Willis, The Mountain Road at Woonona (Rixon’s Pass Road, Illawarra), 1857, watercolour with pencil, 29.2 x 22.2cm. Private Collection

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Few today, however, would realise that the first Baptism in the register of St Luke’s Anglican Church at Dapto in 1854 was John Chin Chi, aged about 20 – a Chinese labourer who had been in the service of the fabulously rich Henry Osborne at Marshall Mount.22 How fitting it might have been to screen an Asian film as the Regent Theatre’s swansong showing so we could more easily compare it with the knockout ambience one of what was still then Marion Hall Best’s finest – Japanese infused - interior design undertaken in conjunction with artists Janet Single and Douglas Annand.

***

The fabulous and justly celebrated posters of the 1980s also mark one of the high-points of Illawarra graphic art – a time of heightened activism when many local people literally hit the streets. And yet, for all my love of political art, it is Adelaide Perry who is for me the mid-20th century star of The Road to Wollongong. Perry – tied to the demands of private schoolgirls at MLC Burwood – seems to have spent much of her time hiding her quite dazzling light under a bushel while masquerading as an exhibiting Sunday painter of genius.

She has not achieved the fame in death (unlike Grace Cossington Smith) which eluded her in life. Yet Adelaide Perry often took one of the finest little steam engine trips in the universe from Sydney to John Young’s holiday house in the street picturesquely named “The Grove” just a hop, skip and a jump from Austinmer Railway Station. It is my hope that the handful of Perry’s works depicted in this show will provoke both a reconsideration of her skills and a gathering of the many of her south coast images which have scattered to the four winds.

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Art, as a full-time career, is hard. And, even today, the magnificent Paul Ryan is probably the only person ever to make a full-time professional – though still precarious – living solely from art while staying a full-time resident of Illawarra.

I also have a deep fondness for the work and the persistence of defiantly local female artists and printmakers like Kathy Orton and the late Joan Meats. The black and white photographic excellence of Ray Mills, Tom Dion and Joanne Saad (all possessing exceptional archives of local niche cultural time capsules) is also especially dear to my heart. Indeed, there must be fully 80 photographs by Mills taken in the 1960s and 1970s which well-nigh evoke an entire sand-blown and street-weary history of Wollongong which would make for a wonderful solo retrospective exhibition.

Yet there are others painters, photographers and digital artists (some that even connoisseurs of the truly ‘local’ may, as yet, be almost completely unaware of) capable of powerfully illuminating what we have and have not lost in developing our landscape. These include Jenny Cebockli with her nostalgic pastel of “Wilkies Walkway” at Bulli, Roz Chatterway’s cheeky image titled When you get home from work… and Amanda Hockey’s fabulous photographic panorama of the view from underneath Windang Bridge. Each of these images possesses an almost uncannily intimate sense of place and distilled emotion.

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A single image like those mentioned above can thus sometimes do very extraordinary things.

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Endnotes1 “The Road to Bulli” oil by Margaret Preston (photographed in black & white by Olive Cotton) in Present Day Art in Australia (2), Ure Smith Pty. Limited, 1945, p.56.

2 Joseph Davis, “Down on Berry’s Bay: The twilight years of A.H. Fullwood”, February 2014 – available on line at: https://uow.academia.edu/JosephDavis

3 Six lithographs from drawings by “Captain Westmacott, 4th Reg (or Kings Own)” drawn on stone by W. Gauci and printed in England by lithographer Charles Joseph Hullmandel (1789 – 1850) and published by James Tegg, Bookseller and Printer, George Street, Sydney, under the title Series of Views in Australia, Part 1. 1838 (print run unknown); eighteen lithographs titled Sketches From Drawings by Captn. R. M. Westmacott, Late 4th King’s Own Regt. Drawn on Stone by W. Spreat and Printed at W. Spreat’s Lithographic Establishment, Park Place, Exeter, England, 1848 (print run unknown).

4 “Sketch map of the Coastline from Garie to Stanwell Park, Myles J Dunphy, Mountain Trails Club, 1916”, SLNSW, M1 811.1145/1915/1 – available online at: http://acms.sl.nsw.gov.au/album/albumView.aspx?itemID=1045290&acmsid=0

5 “Illawarra Lake, New South Wales” lithograph from Series of Views in Australia, Part 1. 1838 (20 x 28.7cm.) is our first ‘published’ local image and Augustus Earle 1827 images are the earliest artworks which can be dated with confidence.

6 Louis Frank, “Stanwell Park” (title on verso), undated oil, one of three coastal landscapes titled Stanwell Park Oil on academy board, each signed “Louis Frank”. Private Collection (27 x 41 cm).

7 “Valley of Jamberroo (sic), Illawarra”, Lithograph (21 x 25.4 cm) - Image Number 10 from Sketches From Drawings by Captn. R.M.Westmacott, 1848 (print run unknown) – depicting the Woodstock Mills at right.

8 Joseph Davis, “Building A Culture: Architecture and Art in Illawarra”, in A History of Wollongong, University of Wollongong, 1997

9 James Cook, Endeavour Journal, 28 April 1770: “…we found that we no where could effect a landing by reason of the great surff [sic] which beat every where upon the shore…”

10 Matthew Flinders’ Narrative of Tom Thumb’s Cruise to Canoe Rivulet (edited by Keith Bowden with a Foreword by Anne Flinders Petrie), Victoria South Eastern Historical Association, Brighton, 1985

11 J.S.C. Dumont D’Urville, (edited and translated by Helen Rosenman). An Account of Two Voyages to the South Seas. [I]: Astrolabe, 1826-1829. [II]: Astrolabe and Zélée, 1837-1840.Melbourne University Press, two volumes, 1987.

12 George William Evans, “Journal of an expedition overland from Jervis Bay to Mr Broughton’s farm near Appin, 25 March-17 April [1812],” Manuscript, C709, State Library of NSW.

13 Joseph Davis, “Who Came Down with Dr Charles Throsby?: John Wait, Joe Wild and John Rowley as Illawarra’s 1815 White Pioneers – and the two Aboriginal Men who made it possible for them be so”, February 2012 – available online at: https://uow.academia.edu/JosephDavis

14 “Joseph Selleny”, Design & Art Australia Online – available at http://www.daao.org.au/bio/joseph-selleny/biography/

15 Jocelyn Hackforth-Jones, Augustus Earle: Travel Artist, National Library of Australia, Canberra, 1980, p. 8

16 Joseph Davis, “Who Came Down…”, February 2012; for some additional details of Dual’s life see Kristyn Harman, Aboriginal Convicts: Australian, Khoisan, and Maori Exiles, UNSW Press, September 2012.

17 Percy Lindsay’s original watercolour illustration for the story “While the Powder Dried” held by Wollongong Art Gallery.

18 Joseph Davis, Lake Illawarra: an ongoing history, Lake Illawarra Authority, 2005, pp. 19-20.

19 Joseph Davis, “The fond heart wandered: Charmian Clift & Kiama”, Illawarra Historical Society Bulletin, May-June 1991.

20 Joseph Davis, “‘Not Even Knowing What We Are Looking At’: Connoisseurship in Colonial Art and the imperatives of attribution to a single hand: the strange case of the attribution of a rare early Australian sketchbook to Edward Charles Close”, unpublished manuscript, March 2013.

21 Josie Castle, Nursing at the Wollongong Hospital, 1926-1982, University Of Wollongong, 1985, p.5.

22 Joseph Davis, Lake Illawarra: an ongoing history, Lake Illawarra Authority, 2005, p. 147.

Catalogue of Works in the Exhibition Aberhart, Laurence, House (Corimal Street, Wollongong), 1997, silver gelatin print, 40 x 50cm. Private CollectionAberhart, Laurence, Port Kembla, 1997, silver gelatin print, 40 x 49cm. Private CollectionAberhart, Laurence, Last Light, ships at sea off Wollongong, NSW, 1997, image in book, “All Gates Open: photographs by Laurence Aberhart” Fisher Gallery, New Zealand 1998. Private Collectionafter de Sainson, Louis Auguste, Naturels de la Baie Jervis - Natives of Jervis Bay, 1826, engraving, hand coloured, 11.4 x 18.3cm. Wollongong Art Gallery Collection. The George and Nerissa Johnson Memorial Bequest, purchased 2002after de Sainson, Louis Auguste, De La Baie Jervis, Nouvelle - Hollande (Cote Orientale), 1826, engraving, hand coloured, 59.5 x 42.5cm. Wollongong Art Gallery Collection. The George and Nerissa Johnson Memorial Bequest, purchased 2000after Westmacott, Robert Marsh, View from Bourkes Pass, on the Maneroo Range, New South Wales, with Mount Westmacott in the distance, 1838, lithograph, 18.8 x 29.2cm, Wollongong Art Gallery Collection, The George and Nerissa Johnson Memorial Bequest, purchased 2001after Westmacott, Robert Marsh, Valley of Jamberoo, 1848, lithograph, hand-coloured, 18 x 26cm, Wollongong Art Gallery Collection. The George and Nerissa Johnson Memorial Bequest, purchased 2014Allman, Captain Francis, Warra, c 1832-1834, print of original sketch, State Library of NSW

Andrievski, Riste, Nomad’s land, 1993, Project exhibition postcard. Private CollectionAndrievski, Riste, Cultured landscape, 1994, lithograph, 45 x 57cm. Private CollectionAndrievski, Riste, Wentworth Street, Port Kembla, 1994, lithograph, 80 x 70cm. Private CollectionAndrievski, Riste, My Backyard, 1995, etching, 35 x 56cm. Private CollectionAshton, Julian Richard, Illawarra, South Coast, NSW, c. 1950’s, poster, 101 x 75cm. Private CollectionBaum, Caroline, Black Map, 2006, photograph, 59.4 x 42cm. Wollongong Art Gallery Collection. Purchased 2006Caire, Nicholas, Bulli Mountain (panorama from near Sublime Point), 1879, vintage albumen paper photograph, 24 x 30cm. Private CollectionCaladine, Richard, Underpass between Thirroul and Bulli, 1998, colour photographic print, 31 x 45cm. Private CollectionCaldwell, T.U.K., Springhill Road Lights, 1962, synthetic polymer paint on composition board, 92 x120cm. Wollongong Art Gallery Collection. Purchased by Wollongong City Council, 1963Carey, Heather, Sandon Point Bike Track, 1997, screenprint, 40 x 45cm. Private CollectionCebockli, Jenny, Joe and Inga walk down to the sea (Wilkie’s Walkway, Bulli, off Sturdee Ave), 2004, pastel on paper, 43 x 26.5cm. Private CollectionChattaway, Roz, When you go home…., 2003, photographic collage print, 99 x 62cm. Private Collection

Clarson, William, Wollongong Panorama, supplement to the “Sydney Illustrated News”, 1887, image of the scanned original lithograph enlarged on alupanel, from the collections of the Wollongong City Library and the Illawarra Historical SocietyCoffey, Alfred, Bulli (Looking down on Thirroul), 1917, watercolour on paper, 34.8 x 24cm. Wollongong Art Gallery Collection. The George and Nerissa Johnson Memorial Bequest, purchased 1995Considine, P., Wollongong Railway Station, 1979, oil on canvas, 95 x 142cm. Private CollectionDion, Tom, Last picture show, 2004, silver gelatin photograph, 27.6 x 37.4cm. Wollongong Art Galley CollectionDuczynski, Chris, Portrait of Tanya Sandy, 1986, vintage colour photographic print, 38.5 x 48.5cm. Private CollectionFigtree, Lavinia, Corner of Crown and Church Streets Wollongong, c.1904, oil on canvas, 20.5 x 41cm. Wollongong Art Gallery Collection. Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program by Selena GriffithFizelle, Rah, Coast Road Wollongong, watercolour on paper, 34 x 44cm. Wollongong Art Gallery Collection. Purchased 2015Forster, William, S.S. Illawarra, 1883, watercolour, gouache, varnish on paper, 40.6 x 64.3cm. Wollongong Art Gallery Collection, Gift of Radio 2WL to mark its 50th year of operation, 1981Frank, Louis, Stanwell Park, c. 1878, oil on canvas, 37 x 51cm. Private Collection

Fullwood, Albert Henry, Illawarra, from Mt Pleasant, 1891, watercolour on paper, 58.4 x 94cm. Wollongong Art Gallery Collection. The George and Nerissa Johnson Memorial Bequest, purchased 1998Haefliger, Paul, Sublime Point above Bulli, re-print of 1930’s original woodcut, 48 x 56 cm, Private CollectionHill, Christine, Tom Thumb’s Journey 1796, 2005, coloured graphite pencil and watercolour on paper, 80 x 100cm. Wollongong Art Gallery Collection, Gift of private donor 2006Hockey, Amanda, (Under Windang Bridge), 1996, photographic collage, 24 x 104cm. Private CollectionJoukador, Sam, (Laver Road across the freeway to Compton Street at Mt Brown, Dapto), 1985, print of original scanned and enlarged colour photograph. Collection of the ArtistLanceley, Colin, Escarpment and the Sea (Illawarra), 2013-2014, oils on carved wood and canvas, 127 x 169cm. Wollongong Art Gallery CollectionLindsay, Percy, While the powder dried: Illustration for the book Great Events in Australian History, 1925, watercolour on paper, 19.5 x 31.0cm. Wollongong Art Gallery Collection. The George and Nerissa Johnson Memorial Bequest, purchased 1995 Meats, Joan, Conversation piece, 1974, oil on composition board, 59.8 x 85cm. Wollongong Art Gallery Collection, Gift of the Wollongong Art Purchase Committee, 1978. Purchased 1974Mills, Ray, (Youth on swing looking towards Cliff Road Wollongong), late 1960s, print of scanned original negative, Collection of the ArtistNorthover, Geoffrey, (Berkeley Hill looking to Lake Illawarra), c. 1940s, print of scanned original negative. Private CollectionNorthover, Geoffrey, (Looking south west towards Unanderra), c. 1940s, print of scanned original negative, Private CollectionNowlan, Frank, Up Kennedy’s Hill (Austinmer), 2013, oil on board, 30.5 x 23cm. Collection of the ArtistNowlan, Frank, Treetop Glen Corner (Thirroul), 2009, oil on board, 30.5 x 23cm. Collection of the ArtistO’Driscoll, June, Clifton School of Arts, 1991, pastel on paper, 73 x 102cm. Private CollectionOrton, Kathryn, Wentworth Street, Port Kembla II, 2006, ink on paper, 14 x 296 x 1cm. Wollongong Art Gallery Collection, Purchased 2012Parrella, Lucia, Dapto Dogs, 1992, etching, 53 x 40cm, Private CollectionPerry, Adelaide, (Women and children, Sharkey’s Beach, Coledale), 1929, oil on board, 34.0 x 44.5 cm. Wollongong Art Gallery Collection, The George and Nerissa Johnson Memorial Bequest, purchased 1994Perry, Adelaide, (Austinmer), 1926, oil on board, 35.5 x 45cm. Kiama Council Art CollectionPerry, Adelaide, South Coast, 1930, linocut, printed in black ink on thin ivory laid tissue, 14.1 x 19.1cm. Art Gallery of New South Wales Collection, Purchased 1975Preston, Margaret, The Road to Bulli (photographed by Olive Cotton), 1944, image in book “Present Day Art in Australia (II)”, 1945. Private Collection

Redback Graphix (Gregor Cullen & Michael Callaghan), Greetings from Wollongong, 1982, colour screenprint on paper, 59.5 x 87.5cm. Wollongong Art Gallery Collection, Purchased with assistance from the Visual Arts Board of the Australia Council, 1987Redback Graphix (Gregor Cullen & Michael Callaghan), Migrant Resource Centre Party, 1982, colour screenprint on paper, 50 x 70cm. Wollongong Art Gallery Collection, Purchased with assistance from the Visual Arts Board of the Australia Council, 1987Reid, David G., Lake Scene Dapto, 1915, oil on canvas, 87 x 113cm. Wollongong Art Gallery Collection, Donated by Doug and Marie Prosser and family, 2007Roberts, Tom, At Clifton, 1898, oil on wood panel, 12.3 x 19.2cm. Wollongong Art Gallery Collection, The George and Nerissa Johnson Memorial Bequest, purchased 1999Ryan, Paul, Smoke and Steam Coalcliff, 2004, charcoal on paper, 97 x 105cm. Private CollectionRyan, Paul, welcome to the jungle, 2010, oil on canvas, 122 x 90cm. Wollongong Art Gallery Collection, Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program by Paul RyanSaad, Joanne, Wog Boys, 1997, silver gelatin print, 30.5 x 40.5 cm. Wollongong Art Gallery Collection, Donated through the Cultural Gifts Program by the artist, 2009Saad, Joanne, Drive by Talking, 1997, silver gelatin print, 30.5 x 40.5 cm. Wollongong Art Gallery Collection, Donated through the Cultural Gifts Program by the artist, 2010Shield, Tara, Bridgework #2, 2005, gelatin silver photograph, 45.7 x 45.7cm. Collection of the ArtistSouthall, Nick, Jobs not Bombs (Hiroshima Day), 1983. A Wollongong Out Of Workers Union poster, 90 x 62cm, Private CollectionSquires, Stan, Port Kembla Billy Cart Derby, 2013, screenprint, 43 x 28cm. Wollongong Art Gallery Collection, Gift of Thomas Goulder, Duckprint Fine Art Studios, Port KemblaTerry, Frederick Casemero (Charles), View from the Bulli Pass, South Coast, 1863, watercolour on paper, 53.0 x 82.0cm. Wollongong Art Gallery Collection, The George and Nerissa Johnson Memorial Bequest, purchased 1995Townsend, Amanda, Woonona (from Bulli), 1989, pastel on paper, 66 x 94cm. Private CollectionTownsend, Amanda, Anunciation at Woonona Baths, 1993, solar print and pastel, 50 x 40cm. Private CollectionUnknown, Artist, Stuart Park Wollongong, c. 1920s, vintage photographic print, 10 x 15cm. Private CollectionUnknown, Artist, (Vintage Photographic Panorama of Electrolytic, Refining & Smelting Works ER&S), c. 1919, photograph, 24.5 x 139.8cm. Private CollectionUnknown, Artist, (Mt Keira Bus), c. 1950s?, digital print of undated photograph. Private CollectionUnknown, Artist, Double Art (Kembla Grange Race Track looking south east to Mount Warrigal), 1964, hand coloured photograph, 22 x 48cm. Private Collection

Unknown, Artist, Wollongong City Mall sign, c. 1986, metal sign, 63 x 61cm. Private CollectionUnknown, Artist, (Womens Rights in the Workforce), c. 1985, poster, 72 x 57cm. Private CollectionUnknown, Artist, (Bricks made by a serving convict or ‘Ticket of Leave’ holder uncovered during construction of Wollongong Mall in 1984), manufactured c. 1840 - 1842, fireclay, 22.5 x 10 x 8cm each. Private CollectionUnknown, Artist, 2WL Scarf, local radio receptionists’ uniform, late 1950’s early 1960s, printed polyester, 66 x 66cm. Private CollectionUnknown, Artist, A commercial Aboriginal artefact, purchased from a member of the Timbery family staying in Port Kembla, late 1950s, paint on wood, 58 x 19 x 5cm. Private Collectionvon Guerard, Eugene, Cabbage tree forest, American Creek, New South Wales, 1860, oil on canvas, 51.2 x 85.5cm, Wollongong Art Gallery Collection, Purchased with assistance from the Wollongong Gallery Society, NSW Office of the Minister for the Arts. Public subscription, 1984von Guerard, Eugene, View of Lake Illawarra with distant mountains of Kiama, 1860, oil on canvas, 51.1 x 85.3cm. Wollogong Art Gallery Collection, The George and Nerissa Johnson Memorial Bequest, purchased 1992, with assistance from The IMB and the support of WIN Television, South Coast Equipment and the Illawarra Mercuryvon Guerard, Eugene, Lake Illawarra (N.S.W.), 1867, colour lithograph, 32.0 x 53.0cm. Wollongong Art Gallery Collection. The George and Nerissa Johnson Memorial Bequest, purchased 1992von Guerard, Eugene, Cabbage tree forest, American Creek, 1867, colour lithograph, 33.3 x 53.0cm. Wollongong Art Gallery Collection. The George and Nerissa Johnson Memorial Bequest, purchased 1993Whiteley, Brett, Thirroul, 1988, pencil, gouache, pen, brush and black ink, collage, ink wash, synthetic polymer paint on five sheets of cardboard, 63.4 x 253cm. Art Gallery of New South Wales Collection, Brett Whiteley EstateWhittaker, Iain, Goodness Knows Where, 2001 - 2014, oil on canvas, 111 x 213cm. Wollongong Art Gallery CollectionWillis, James A.C., The Mountain Road at Woonona (Rixons Pass Road, Illawarra), 1857, watercolour with pencil, 29.2 x 22.2cm. Private CollectionWilson, Cate, Headlands Hotel, 1995, watercolour on card, 20 x 26cm. Private CollectionWinn, Algernon Edward Thornton, Main Street, Thirroul, c. 1908, printed postcard, 9 x 13.5cm, from the collections of the Wollongong City Library and the Illawarra Historical Society

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2Wollongong Art Gallery is a service of Wollongong City Council and receives assistance from the NSW Government through Trade & Investment Arts NSW. Wollongong Art Gallery is a member of Regional and Public Galleries of NSW

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Frederick Casemero (Charles) Terry, View from the Bulli Pass, South Coast, 1863, watercolour on paper, 53.0 x 82.0cm. Wollongong Art Gallery Collection. The George and Nerissa Johnson Memorial Bequest, purchased 1995