In 1829 Lieutenant Robert Dale arrived in Australia from England on board the HMS Sulphur. As an ensign in the British Army, Dale assisted the Surveyor General and partook in expeditions through King George’s Sound in Western Australia, creating numerous drawings of the landscape. One result was Panoramic View of King George’s Sound, Part of the Colony of Swan River, a three metre print assembled from eight etchings.
Dale’s image of King George’s Sound and its romanticised depiction of harmonious relations between settlers and natives, is a major reference for Christopher Pease’s new paintings in Minang Boodjar. A Minang/ Noongar man from Western Australia, Pease creates multi-layered paintings combining traditional Indigenous stories with 19th-century colonial narratives, powerfully subverting images like those produced by Dale and his contemporaries.