Exiles and Emigrants - National Museum of Australia

C onclusionEarly in the unit you were asked to look at the Ford MadoxBrown painting, The leaving of England. Below are someobservations by Patricia Tryon Macdonald, the curatorof Exiles and Emigrants, and some extracts from Brown’sdiary about the painting.1 Read these, then look back at your own response to thepainting at the start of the unit. Would you now changeany aspect of your response?2 Add any new ideas to your summary table on page 3.3 How successful would you now say Emigrants and Exilesis as a representation of British migration to Australiain the Victorian period? How successful is it as arepresentation of more general migration to Australia inthe nineteenth century?4 Imagine that you have been asked to write a briefsummary of the exhibition. Draft out the key points youwould make.The last of England … [with its] conflicting message ofhope, foreboding and desperation is direct and powerful. Thepicture is the synthesis of Ford Madox Brown’s experienceand emotion when witnessing the departure of an emigrantship. The artist had been to the port to bid farewell to hisclose friend, the sculptor Thomas Woolner*, who left for thegoldfields in 1852. Bitter, depressed by the lack of appreciationof his work and gloomy about his prospects at home, Brownwas himself considering emigration …Brown’s brooding eyes stare past us as he sits in reverie. Heholds Emma’s right hand while her left clasps that of the baby,completing the ‘circle of love’ which Brown said ‘moves withher’. This shape is echoed in her bonnet and gentle face, as wellas the shape of the painting itself.In his diary … Brown wrote:To insure the peculiar look of light all round, which objects have on a dull day at sea, it waspainted for the most part in the open air on dull days, and when the flesh was being painted oncold days. I have tried to render this scene as it would appear. The [minute] detail which wouldbe visible under such conditions of broad day-light, I have thought it necessary to imitate, asbringing the pathos of the subject more home to the beholder … In the background, an honestfamily of the green-grocer kind, father (mother lost), eldest daughter, and younger children, makesthe best of things with tobacco-pipe and apples, etc., etc. Still further back a reprobate shakes hisfist with curses at the land of his birth, as though that were answerable for his want of success;his old mother reproves him for his foul-mouthed profanity, while a boon companion, withflushed countenance, and got up in nautical togs for the voyage, signified drunken approbation… The picture is in the strictest sense historical. It treats of the great emigration movement,which attained its culminating point in 1852. The educated are bound to their country by quiteother ties than the illiterate man, whose chief consideration is food and physical comfort. I have,therefore, in order to present the parting scene in the fullest tragic development, singled out acouple from the middle classes, high enough, through education and refinement, to appreciate allthey are giving up, and yet depressed enough in means, to have to put up with the discomfortsand humiliations incident to a vessel ‘all one class’.Patricia Tryon Macdonald, Exiles and Emigrants, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne 2006 page 26(*Note: Woolmer returned to Englandafter a few years in Australia and becamea successful sculptor.)You now have a good background knowledge to startinvestigating other aspects of immigration to Australia,OR a museum display, OR your own family migrationhistory. Good luck, and enjoy your investigations!© 2006 National Museum of Australiaand Ryebuck Media Pty Ltd© 2006 National Museum of Australiaand Ryebuck Media Pty Ltd13