JOHN WILTON FRANKLAND BLUNDELL

By descent from the artist to his great grandson
Private collection, Queensland

“Rottnest” Island. W.A.
Watercolour on paper
Salt Lakes, Rottnest. W.A.
Watercolour on paper

Light House, Rottnest W.A.
Watercolour on paper
Perth Water & Melville Water, Swan River
Watercolour on paper

(Entrance to the Swan) Port of Swan River. W. Australia [Fremantle]Watercolour on paper
Carnac, an Island. W.A.
Pencil on paper

Western Austn. Natives
Watercolour on paper
28.2 by 42.6 cm

“Woongan”, near Perth. W.A.
Watercolour on paper
“Woongan”. W.A.
Watercolour on paper

Meeting of Natives for a Dance
Watercolour, gouache and scratching out on paper
27.3 by 41.2 cm

The Short tailed Guana Lizard – W. Australia
Watercolour and gouache
Common Tree Lizard – W.A.
Watercolour on paper

Western Australia.
Grass Tree Snake, Length 13 ½ In, Circumference ¾ of an In;
Carpet Snake, Length 6 ft, 4 In. Circumference of body 7 Inches;
Name unknown. Length 2 ft, 3 In. Circumference 5 Inches. This snake was found gorged with a Lizard about 9 Inches in length [“Death adder (probably)” added in pencil]
Watercolour on paper
Looking over Perth & Melville Waters
Watercolour on paper

“Moorgenup”, Murray District. W..A.
Watercolour on paper
“Moorgenup”
Watercolour on paper

“Oakfield”, Toodyay – W.A.
Watercolour on paper
“Ergoline”, Toodyay – W.A. [“Grass Tree” added in pencil]
Watercolour on paper

“Auburn”, York. W.A.
Watercolour on paper
“Tipperary” Farm. W.A
Watercolour and pencil on paper

Copper Mine. Canning District. W.A.
Watercolour on paper
Copper mine. adit.
Watercolour on paper

The Album is offered with biographical notes and copies of Blundell’s writings on Western Australia, compiled by his family.

Dr John Blundell’s Album comprises twenty-two previously unknown views of the earliest years of European settlement in Western Australia. Blundell recorded not only Perth and Fremantle, but also especially rare depictions of the pastoral hinterland in the Avon, Canning and Serpentine districts and two unique mages of encounters between local Aboriginal people. As well, there are studies of native reptiles, views of Rottnest and Carnac Islands and documentation of Western Australia’s earliest mining activity.

John Wilton Frankland Blundell arrived in Western Australia, via the Cape of Good Hope, aboard the barque ‘Ganges’ in January 1844, at the age of twenty-three.¹  The Swan River Settlement had been founded only fifteen years before, when Britain declared possession of all Western Australia. The son of a London physician, Blundell had been contracted in September 1843 by Frederick Mangles & Co., ship-owners and merchants of New Broad Street, London, to serve as the Company’s book-keeper and General Clerk at the Swan River Settlement.  During his three years in the colony, he travelled quite extensively on horseback, staying overnight at various farmhouses, presumably with his sketching materials and notebooks to hand. Much that he saw is described in a series of articles he published later, back in England; but even more can be seen here in his Album of watercolour paintings.

Writing in the New Monthly Magazine and Humourist in 1849, he reminded prospective settlers that the hardest pioneering work had already been done in Western Australia: ‘The country is well surveyed, its capabilities and resources pretty generally known; and energy and  perseverance are become the agents of success’. ² Again for the information of would-be emigrants he says: ‘As a vessel from England approaches the Swan River, the principal port of the colony and seat of its government, the eyes of passengers are greeted by the sight of three very white and scrubby-looking islands; these are Garden Island, Carnac and Rotnest [sic]’. ³

His Album contains a detailed pencil drawing of Carnac, named by Captain Stirling in honour of the Second Lieutenant on HMS Success, and three watercolours of Rottnest Island: both are nowadays nature reserves. Rottnest Island was named in 1696 when Willem de Vlamingh landed there and saw the numerous small marsupials now called quokkas. Vlamingh described these as a 'kind of rat, as big as a common cat' and called the island Rottnest – literally 'Rats Nest'.

Characteristically, Blundell chooses subjects for his art that demonstrate progress and ‘civilization’. He does not dwell on the fact that the colony had been gripped by steadily worsening depression for several years. By 1839 Rottnest had been proclaimed a penal establishment for Aborigines – although Blundell does not mention this in his captions. Offences included spearing livestock, burning bush and digging vegetables on what had been their own land.⁴  Most of the early development on Rottnest was around Thomson Bay, notably the ‘Quod’, which was the Aboriginal men’s prison barracks (and is now holiday accommodation). Salt Lakes at Rottnest shows the series of natural salt lakes on the island used by a local settler, Robert Thomson, from 1830 for harvesting and refining salt to be sent to the mainland for food preservation (very important in the pre-refrigeration era); but resumed by the Crown in 1839. The lighthouse on Wadjemup Hill is shown unfinished, with living quarters for the lightkeeper at the base, and was only completed in 1849 having taken nine years to build using Aboriginal convict labour.  It was the first lighthouse built of stone in Western Australia, locally quarried from Nancy Cove, and, although twenty metres tall, was left three metres shorter than originally planned.  The revolving lamp and clockwork mechanism was finally fitted in 1851.⁵

Blundell depicts Fremantle – possibly from the deck of one of Mangle & Co.’s vessels – and then Melville Water, where the Canning River joins the Swan. The wide shallow expanse of Perth Water is shown with a margin of neatly farmed land along the nearer shore. In Blundell’s opinion, ‘No era in the history of these fine colonies has proved so auspicious as the present, in which we find the zeal and energy of men of rank and influence in this country united with an earnest desire, among all classes, to avail themselves of the sterling benefits of emigration – of a territorial but not a social change – of a new mode of existence, full of hope and reward, surrounded by their countrymen’.⁶ The only serious shortages in the Colony were labour and capital: Blundell became a strong advocate once he returned to England for both British government support through a Land Fund and the introduction to Western Australia of transported convict workers.⁷

He approved of the ‘salutary and humane laws’ by means of which which most of the local Aboriginal tribespeople had already been subjugated, noting their ‘inoffensive nature and powerless condition’.⁸ According to his observations, ‘They are kindly regarded by the settler; well treated and protected by the government; so that the once-dreaded savage has become a valuable and useful ally in the labour-market of the colony’. His superb double-page watercolour study of two Aboriginal men seems to mark this moment of transition. The two warriors, long-limbed and well-built, their hair and skin ochre-tinted, stand tall before a twilit landscape and a group of local Aboriginal  huts on the river flats beyond. One of them, carrying a spear, combines a traditional headdress with a tunic-shirt of European design; the other wears a kangaroo-skin cloak, fastened on the right shoulder with a bone or sinew, and holds a boomerang and other implements. Their interaction is apparently peaceful, if somewhat tentative.  However, Blundell comments somewhat ominously, ‘they are never permitted to escape punishment for crimes committed even against each other’.

Blundell’s second large Aboriginal subject appears to depict a meeting of tribes, possibly one of the ceremonies held for visiting Aborigines from other areas. One such event took place on Mount Eliza (now King’s Park) in 1833 and was described by Captain T. T. Ellis who mentions numerous fires shining like stagelights around the dancers. Similarly, one of the seasonal highlights in the Murray district  was a great gathering of normally dispersed tribes on the Serpentine River to fish for mullet, prawns and crabs.⁹

Blundell was ‘vastly astonished at the beauty of the flowers and shrubs’ and ‘the size of the trees’, even in the sandiest areas near Perth. Then once across the Darling Range, he wrote, ‘the sandy soil is gone; indeed it in part ceases at the town of Guildford, about fifty miles inland from which commence the rich lands of York and Toodyay’. ‘Surely’, he declared, ‘there can be nothing more deeply soothing to the mind than the sight of a dwelling rising from out the primeval forest, surrounded by those contrasts which speak of man’s dominion and his necessary presence’.¹⁰ In ‘Auburn’ he depicts the home of the Resident Magistrate at York, R. G. Meares. ‘Tipperary’ was a property of 5,600 acres at the foot of Mount Bakewell, in the Avon Valley between York and Northam, held by three Irish  brothers, Samuel, William and Lockier Burgess: ‘The dwelling house was of superior construction; it had its detached kitchen, store, granary, and barn; together with a substantial stock-yard and stabling’.¹¹   ‘Oakfield’ was nearby. Blundell described the ‘wattle and dab’ method of construction used for many of these early farm buildings: ‘nothing more nor less than a mixture of stiff clay, in which the small leaves and fibres of the wattle tree are plentifully mingled. This being finished, a common rafter roof of extraordinary pitch is then raised upon the walls, and the whole thatched with straw or reeds. If the walls be tolerably thick, nothing can surpass the coolness of these dwellings… The floors are usually those which Nature provided.’¹²

In the Serpentine district south of Perth, ‘Woongan’ was purchased by George and John Armstrong in 1844 – but all the farm buildings depicted by Blundell were destroyed by bushfire four years later.¹³  His Copper Mine, Canning District,  WA and Copper Mine show diggings that became Cole’s Shaft, the earliest mining shaft in Western Australia, and thus marks the start of an industry of enormous importance to the state. Blundell may not have been an academically trained painter but he was careful and accurate: the large boulder behind the central tree trunk in Copper Mine, Canning District,  WA is still there today. First sunk in 1846 into the western face of Bedfordale Hill in the Darling Range, Cole’s Shaft at first yielded lead ore; then on Boxing Day the Western Australian Mining Company announced in the Perth Gazette that copper had also been discovered.¹⁴ Blundell was also impressed with the forest resources of the colony and depicts both diggings and great stands of tall timber in his views  in the Murray District captioned 'Mooregenup' (probably an Aboriginal word phonetically transcribed, rather than an actual place name). Sandalwood had already been exported in considerable quantities to China, he wrote; and Tuart, endemic to the south west, had been found ideal for shipbuilding .¹⁵

According to an obituary published in Brisbane, Blundell ‘three times circumnavigated the globe and visited most of the countries of the world’. He is believed to have departed from Perth in June 1848. Certainly by January 1849 he had commenced medical training at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London; was issued a passport to France and Germany in 1851; and was in practice by Christmas. He visited America in September-October 1853. Blundell returned to Australia in June 1870 aboard the Indus with his wife and seven children and settled in South Brisbane. Working for the next as a doctor, ‘outside his professional pursuits Dr. Blundell was more a journalist than anything else’ and served as a leader writer for both the Telegraph and Courier in Brisbane.¹⁶ After one final trip to England as a ship’s medical officer, via Callao, Panama and the West Indies, in about 1880 he undertook ‘an extended journey’ in western Queensland on behalf of  a life assurance society. Unfortunately his health failed and he died at Southport in November 1883. 

1. Western Australian shipping records. See also The Bicentennial Dictionary of Western Australians, vol. II, p. 246 which lists 'James Blundell’ and may confuse two different people; we are grateful to Mr Laurie Fraser, a great-grandson of the artist, for this reference and for sharing other information with the album’s owner.
2. Blundell, J. W. F., ‘The Emigrant in Western Australia’, New Monthly Magazine and Humorist, London, 1849, vol. 86, p. 361.
3. ‘Western Australia’, New Monthly Magazine and Humorist, London, vol. 86, 1849, p. 169.
4. See Appleyard, R. T. and Manford, T. (1979). The Beginning: European Discovery and Early Settlement of Swan River Western Australia, University of Western Australia Press, Perth, 1979.
5. See www.lighthouse.net.au.
6. ‘Western Australia’, New Monthly Magazine and Humorist, London, 1849, vol. 86, p. 166.
7. See especially items in The Swan River News and The Western Australian Journals, for the year 1849, edited by J. W. F. Blundell, Esq., vol. V, nos 49-60, London, 1849. Convicts were brought to Western Australia 1850-70.
8. Op. cit., p. 167.
9. See Tilbrook, L. J., Ffarington’s Folio: South West Australia 1843-1847, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, 1984, pp. 29-30; Richards, R., Mandurah and the Murray : a short history of the Old Murray District of Western Australia 1829-1900, the author, Perth, rev. edn 1990; Hammond, J., Winjan’s People: The Story of the South West Australian Aborigines, facsimile edn, Hesperian Press, Perth, 1980. p. 17.  Another intertribal meeting place, Bailup, is discussed by James Turner in ‘The Swan River natives and the Walyunga site’, Anthropological Journal (Canada), 1969, vol. 7, no. 3, pp. 19-24; thanks to Wally Caruana for these references. Mr Noel Nannup, an Aboriginal Elder, told Laurie Fraser that the event would have been to teach Aboriginal children, held five days before and after the full moon.
10. ‘Western Australia’, New Monthly Magazine and Humourist, London, 1849, vol. 86, p. 169; ‘The Eastern Settled Districts in Australia’, New Monthly Magazine and Humourist, 1849, vol. 87, p.  87.
11. ‘The Eastern Settled Districts’, pp. 90-91. Blundell only met two of the brothers when he stayed at Tipperary; the original homestead still exists, but in ruins. Some of the settlements visited by Blundell are also described in Irwin, F. C., The State and Position of Western Australia: commonly called the Swan-River Settlement, Simpkin, Marshall, London, 1835.
12. ‘The Eastern Settled Districts’, p. 88.
13. Coy, N. J., The Serpentine: a History of the Shire of Serpentine-Jarrahdale, Shire of Serpentine-Jarrahdale, Mundijong, 1984, p. 19.  Mr Laurie Fraser kindly drew this and numerous other topographical and local history references to the attention of the vendor. Woongan was run as a farm until 2000, when it was sold for housing development.
14. Register of Heritage Places – Assessment Documentation, Heritage Council of Western Australia.
15. ‘Western Australia’, New Monthly Magazine and Humorist, London, 1849, p. 167; Blundell knew of a shipment of tuart (E. gomphocephala) was sent to the Admiralty on the Unicorn in 1846. Thanks to Laurie Fraser for researching 'Mooregenup'.
16. For Blundell’s later years in Brisbane, see the Brisbane Courier, 24 November 1883, Telegraph, 26 November 1883 and notes by his son.