Monte Scott and the graphic construction of an Australian identity

Abstract

The basis for this investigation is an archive of several thousand images, mostly reproduced in the nineteenth-century Australian popular press. It is notjust the scope of this archive, spanning a fifty-year period, that makes this output of a single Australian artist unique but also the fact that the artist, Eugene Montagu Scott (I 835 -1909), left almost no other documentary evidence of his thoughts, attitudes or intentions. Apart from a small nwnber of his paintings and photographs along with the massive nwnber of published illustrations and cartoons, no notebooks, letters or other personal papers by Scott can be located and virtually no original drawings have survived.1 What is more, although Scott was indisputably one of the most prominent artists working in Sydney in the 1870s, there is little reference to him in the secondary literature on Australian art or history. Much of the biograpnical material that exists is incomplete or incorrect. This thesis proposes that the body of published graphic work by Montagu Scott maps the prevailing socio-cultural domain in the second half of the nineteenth century in Eastern Australia.2 Through an exhaustive survey of this archive and concentrated analysis of selected images using a range of established methodologies that include a close reading of their material properties, iconographic, ideological and semiotic analysis, the thesis charts the formation of a characteristically Australian identity in the last half of the nineteenth century.3 More specifically, the profiling of typically Australian attitudes and sentiments in this study constructs the identity of an artist, born in England, who self-consciously made himself an Australian through the expression or articulation of particular characteristics that he believed defined such a fictive type. While this is not a conventional art historical study of Montagu Scott or an attempt to retrieve his historical identity or personality, one outcome is inevitably the construction of a convincing fictional character to give agency to the images discussed. The Australian identity that emerges from this fifty-year survey of changing beliefs, developing nationalistic attitudes, prejudices and eccentricities is ineluctably Monte Scott.4 What makes this particular hermeneutic recreation possible is the particular nature of the majority of the images used as evidence in the analysis.5 These images are mostly cartoons or caricatural illustrations from the popular press and therefore escape the usual polysemy associated with reading images as signs to map the cultural domain in which they were produced.