Design and Art Australia Online

painter and naval officer, may be Robert Jocelyn Otway, son of Rev. Samuel Otway and nephew of Vice-Admiral Sir Robert Waller Otway, who entered the Royal Navy in 1821. On 17 August 1836, Robert Jocelyn Otway married Anne Digby, the youngest daughter of the late Sir Hugh Crofton, Bt., of Rohill House, County Leitrim. Otway was first lieutenant on board the Castor under Captain Charles Graham and served in Australasian waters. In December 1845 he landed at New Zealand in command of 188 officers, seamen and marines from the Castor and, on 11 January 1846, 'assisted, and was officially mentioned for his conduct, at the storming and capture … of a strongly fortified pah belonging to a rebel chieftain named Kawiti’. He was promoted commander in 1846 for this exploit. At the end of the year he was back in England on half-pay.

An unsigned, undated oil-on-cardboard painting of an Aboriginal man about to spear one of the kangaroos he is observing from behind a clump of trees (NLA) is inscribed verso, 'Captain Otway R.N. Kooranbond, NSW’. This is a version of the aquatint 'Charley’ spearing Kangaroos by the pseudonymous artist 'Tufts’ published in Frank Kennedy the Australian Settler , the work of the equally pseudonymous 'Yarra-Guinea’. Otway may have been the original artist – he might even be Tufts – or he may just have copied the painting from Tufts’s illustration. The latter seems the more likely, even though Otway was back home in Britain when James Grocott published the book at Sydney in 1847. The painting, however, could have been made many years later, if and when Captain Otway returned to Australian waters in the Kooranbond .

Writers:

Staff Writer

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

2011