My Harvest Home

John Glover is considered to be one of the best Australian landscape painters of the early colonial period. He painted My Harvest Home in 1835 and it depicts Patterdale Farm in northern Tasmania, the farm Glover established in 1832 through a land grant from the Tasmanian Government. Historian Jeanette Hoon argues that this painting not only celebrates the Tasmanian harvest, and Glover’s own farm, but it also celebrates the absence of indigenous people in the colonial landscape. When Charles Darwin visited Tasmania two years after this Glover painted My Harvest Home, he expressed a similar sentiment, remarking that ‘all of the aborigines have been removed to an island in Bass’s Straits, so that Van Diemen’s Land enjoys the great advantage of being free from a native population’.