Design and Art Australia Online

sketcher and pastoralist, anonymously published Reminiscences of Australian Early Life by a Pioneer at London in 1893, illustrated with drawings by Hume Nisbet after sketches Phillips made many years earlier. In the book, Phillips states that he was influenced to settle in Victoria after reading Thomas Livingstone Mitchell 's 'The Discovery of Port Phillip’ (i.e. Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia ) especially Mitchell’s

“pictures well delineating and graphically describing the beautiful, undulating and park-like scenery for which parts of Port Phillip are so well known especially to the westward of that colony, interspersed with its numerous rivers and lagoons, at that time covered with black swans and wild-fowl. These scenes, with mobs of kangaroo and tribes of black fellows, so inflamed my mind that I determined, come what would, to get out there the first opportunity that offered and so I became one of its earliest pioneers.”

Phillips left England for Victoria in May 1840. He squatted for a while, then was employed on a station about 30 miles north of Mount Macedon. A few months’ ill treatment led to him becoming a shepherd on an adjoining property. His flock died of catarrh and he moved to a station on the Goulburn River. Some two years later he received money from England, purchased a flock of old ewes at £1 a head, and established himself on a nearby run. These sheep mostly died too, but a successful lambing increased the flock to 800 and allowed him to take up another run with a friend. Selling out their interest at a profit, they moved to Warbreccan Station over the border in the Riverina district of New South Wales, which became their head station (now the site of the town of Deniliquin).

When the bushranger Daniel ('Mad Dog’) Morgan was shot on McPherson’s neighbouring station, Pechelbar, in April 1865, the corpse was carried to the woolshed. It was there, Phillips records, 'with the aid of a flickering tallow candle stick in a bottle, that I took a rough sketch of the face of this notorious bushranger, and sent it home with a short account of his death…’. Although apparently not published at the time, a small, crude, inset portrait of Morgan and The Death of Morgan are in his book. Soon after the Morgan episode, Phillips sold out his pastoral interests and returned home, having spent 25 years in the colonies. He died in England in 1902.

Nisbet’s illustrations are quite faithful to the original drawings, yet despite retaining a certain crudity of expression lack Phillips’s naive charm. Some of his drawings (and photographs of others) on which the illustrations were based are in the Mitchell Library and Dixson Galleries (SLNSW), including a photograph of the original from which Nisbet’s Native Fight was taken. It shows the large number of Aborigines involved in the fray, watched by a lone caucasian man standing under a tree in the bottom right-hand corner, and is annotated:

'A fight witnessed in 1845 at Sherbourne Shepherd Station on the junction of the Lower Goulbourne [sic] River. Some young men of different Tribes were playing a game of football when some young Lubras joining in caused jealousy and originated the fight.’

The figure of an old man with a branch in his upraised hand is annotated: 'The old Doctor came and stopped the fight’.

Other drawings by Phillips include Sheepwashing at Warbreccan Station, Edward River, N.S. Wales (pencil, pen-and-ink, unsigned) and Cobran [sic] Station. Waakool [sic] Creek N.S. Wales (pencil and ink, signed and dated December 1856). The latter shows Aborigines camped in the foreground, just beyond the station’s boundary fence.

Writers:

Staff Writer

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

2011