Design and Art Australia Online

The Oscar Sketchbook in the collection of the National Museum of Australia is a small marbled-paper covered exercise book measuring only 207mm x 168mm. An attached label is inscribed “ Drawn by Oscar, Cooktown boy, aged 18 years”. The forty pencil and coloured pencil drawings within, together with a caption list and letter, are the only known original works by and about Oscar. Apart from these sources, Oscar’s life story appears to have escaped both the historical and oral history records and despite a careful search, the full story of his life, especially the years after he completed the sketchbook, remains a mystery.

However if you open Oscar’s little book, which you can do electronically at the National Museum of Australia’s website, and 'read’ the forty lively drawings, in conjunction with the caption list and letter, much can be conjectured. The drawings portray rich and complex scenes, and if not drawn from life, they are almost certainly drawn from Oscar’s memory and are thought to represent an autobiographical account of his life.

We can also learn much from the caption list for the drawings and the accompanying letter, both of which were written by Augustus Henry Glissan, Manager of Rocklands Station, near Camooweal in far north-western Queensland in 1899. Glissan records that the sketches were:

..executed by one of my boys named 'Oscar’, this boy I got at Cooktown in 1887 & he has been with me ever since,... he was somewhere about nine or ten years of age then ..the police got him for me.. Ever since the boy came here he has had a liking for drawing & and [sic] some of his etchings on stone with charcoal and chalk are so really well done, that I thought some day I would get him a book and some coloured pencils & let him have a good try and [sic] it (1899).

Glissan wrote this letter to accompany the sketchbook which he sent to a family friend in Melbourne, and in it he also mentions the caption list. Glissan writes, “I now enclose you the book,..... The index will give you all the information, this the [sic] boy gave me in his own way, & I have put it as well as I can”(1899).

Over one hundred years later it is difficult to assess the accuracy of the captions, some are written as though spoken in a pidgin that Oscar may have learned at Rocklands, as for example the caption for drawing number twenty Big feller Steamer longa Cooktown , but others are strongly of the colonising vernacular, such as numbers twenty-four and twenty-five, Police boys doing duty (Lynch Law) . The forty pages of drawings can be roughly divided by their visual subject matter into four groups. Sixteen drawings relate to a traditional lifestyle of hunting, ceremonies and warfare, while eleven drawings are of town people and events, mainly cited as Cooktown, Palmer River, Maytown and Camooweal, including Government Officials, Chinese miners, and two depictions of Cooktown steamships. A further nine drawings graphically relate the activities of the Queensland Native Mounted Police, with the remaining four drawings are concerned with station life, both at Cooktown and at Rocklands.

Piecing together scenes of Oscar’s images with the information penned by Glissan in the captions and other biographical details contained in the letter, it would seem certain that Oscar was born into the rapidly changing world of the Gugu Yalanji speaking people of the Palmer River area in the 1870s. This decade witnessed the discovery of payable gold and the influx of tens of thousands of miners, including Chinese, into the Cooktown, Palmer River and Maytown areas. Around the time of Oscar’s birth in 1878, the Cooktown Courier described a “state of open warfare” between miners and Aborigines in the Palmer River district. Inevitably the disputes between Aborigines and the outsiders were over land and resources, the killing of game and of stock, and reprisals for murder.

Oscar was most likely orphaned, or stolen as part of these hostilities, and being under the control of the Native Police in Cooktown he was then obtained by Glissan “this boy I got in Cooktown … the police got him for me”, and taken via steamship to Burketown in the Gulf of Carpentaria where he was then brought to Rocklands on horseback. Glissan himself had arrived at Rocklands in 1884, and he later confided to the amateur anthropologist R. E. Mathews that none of his Aboriginal stockman were local, but that they had all been “with me from small boys”.

The sixteen drawings that relate to traditional life realistically portray the animals and birds hunted on eastern Cape York Peninsula and south of the Gulf of Carpentaria. They also accurately represent artefacts, including the distinctive shell handled spearthrower, and describe complex body decorations and ornaments used in ceremonies in these regions. Oscar’s eye for detail and humour characterise his impressions of town-life with caricatures of Chinese, goldfields officials, “white ladies” and “Swells doing the block”. There is a love of detail and a sense of action and story in his drawings and they almost certainly relate to memories of real people and events, including such humorous incidents portrayed by drawings seven and forty, Cranky Billy demanding possum and Trying to catch Cranky Billy .

The nine images that refer to the nature and activities of the Queensland Native Mounted Police are the most graphic in his oeuvre and illustrate a level of horror not present in any of his other drawings. The exploits and atrocities of the Native Police, which though led by Europeans, openly used Aboriginal troopers against other Aborigines, are well documented. Oscar’s drawings appear as witness, and possibly, given the fact that he was removed from his own community to a distant station by the Native Police, appear to show approval for the crimes perpetrated by this force. In Oscar’s drawings we see not only the tall, elegant troopers with their accoutrements of office and power such as uniforms and guns, but their brutal deeds are portrayed as merely “doing duty ('Lynch law’)”, as in number twenty-six, Dispersal usual way. Some good shooting , and number thirty-two, Murderer hoppled to tree. Troopers Dispatching .

Whatever the realities of Oscar’s early experiences with the Native Police, his removal to Rocklands forced him to adapt to yet another lifestyle. We learn from Glissan’s letter that Oscar learnt to ride well, obviously identifying with the other Aboriginal stockmen who Glissan had also obtained as young boys. In drawing number thirty-five Boss ordering boys to bathe (cold weather) , Oscar is perhaps the smallest figure at the end of the line of stockmen being ordered to bath by the 'Boss’, a portrait no doubt of Glissan himself, whom we know from an 1890’s photo was tall and solidly built with a luxuriant moustache.

When Oscar was eighteen years old Glissan gave him the notebook and coloured pencils, “and let him have a good try”. The results were good enough to send to Melbourne, mainly it would seem for the amusement of his friend’s children. Thankfully their rarity and value was appreciated, for the small book and related texts were kept together and passed into the collection of Melbourne Zoologist, Sir Colin MacKenzie. Later these were brought from Melbourne to Canberra for inclusion in the Library of the Australian Institute of Anatomy. Oscar’s small book of drawings had travelled far indeed, yet its significance was only fully recognised and made public in the early 1990’s when it was rediscovered and reinterpreted by staff of the National Museum of Australia and the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies.

Writers:

Cooper, Carol

Date written:

2011

Last updated:

2011