Native Going to Fish with a Torch and Flambeaux

This image is from the Watling Collection, a collection of 512 numbered drawings depicting natural history and ethnographic subjects from eighteenth-century Australia. Thomas Watling, an artist from Dumfries, Scotland, created a large portion of the collection. Some of the collection's images are by at least one other artist or artists known as the Port Jackson Painter. Watling was a part of the First Fleet, an eleven-ship flotilla carrying around 1,500 people that landed in Australia in 1788 and established the penal colony of New South Wales. Like many pictures painted by members of the First Fleet, this painting, titled A Native going to Fish with a Torch and flambeaux, while his Wife and children are broiling fish for their supper, depicts a Europeanized view of Australia's Aboriginal people using the land and its resources.