Drawing the Unfamiliar: Recovering a History of Mark-Making in Western Australia

Peter Davidson - Fremantle 1982 

Pencil on paper

Drawing the Unfamiliar: Recovering a History of Mark-Making in Western Australia

Peter Davidson

Drawing begins as an encounter. It is a way of registering what is seen before it is fully understood—a process of translating space, form, and relation through the movement of the hand. In Western Australia, this act of encounter has a layered and complex history, shaped by vastly different ways of seeing and marking the land.

Since the establishment of European settlement in Albany in the early nineteenth century, artists—including surveyors, explorers, and naturalists—have attempted to comprehend a landscape that appeared vast, unfamiliar, and resistant to inherited visual conventions. Their drawings reflect this effort: tentative, descriptive, and often filtered through European pictorial traditions. These works form a record not only of place, but of the difficulty in perceiving it.

Long before these arrivals, however, Aboriginal peoples had already developed highly sophisticated systems of mark-making grounded in deep cultural knowledge. Across Western Australia, particularly in the north, rock art traditions extend back tens of thousands of years. These engraved and painted forms are not simply images; they are expressions of presence, law, and cosmology. They constitute a continuous and living lineage of visual knowledge that precedes and exceeds Western frameworks of representation.

The Obscured Lineage

This essay focuses on the Western European tradition of drawing in Western Australia, not to privilege it above Indigenous practices, but to acknowledge a history that has become partially obscured. This obscurity is both institutional and personal. On my mother’s side, my family arrived in Australia in the 1860s under a Scottish surname that does not appear in passenger records of the time. It is possible the name was altered or adopted—perhaps by an Irish convict seeking to detach from a former identity.

Convict transportation is often framed retrospectively as a pathway to settlement, yet contemporary accounts suggest far harsher realities. The Second Fleet of 1790, for example, arrived with extremely high mortality rates; those who survived did so in conditions of severe illness and deprivation. In this light, some early arrivals can be understood as people marked by displacement, coercion, and loss.

To acknowledge this complexity does not diminish the profound and ongoing dispossession experienced by Aboriginal peoples. Rather, it situates early colonial society as a site of unequal and intersecting histories, where different forms of dislocation coexisted—though never on equal terms.

The Archive of Perception

[Image: Peter Davidson – Road to Kanowna, eastern goldfields. Water colour, pastel and pencil, 1991]

The motivations of European artists in this context—whether colonial, scientific, or economic—are well-documented, but they are not the primary concern here. What remains significant are the traces they left behind: encounters with land registered through line, surface, and form. These drawings constitute a dispersed archive of perception, one that has yet to be fully recognized within the history of art in Western Australia.

During my early art education, drawing was understood as a foundational practice underpinning all other forms. It held a visible and valued place. Yet today, when one searches for a coherent history of drawing in Western Australia, the record appears fragmented—overshadowed by market-driven or conceptually dominant practices. While these developments have their place, they often leave quieter, more immediate forms of mark-making without sustained attention.

The Primacy of the Mark

"To draw is not to measure time, but to occupy space. It is an act of positioning—of locating oneself in relation to what is seen."

[Image: Peter Davidson – Perth 1980s. Pencil and pastel on coloured paper]

This absence suggests more than a gap in documentation; it points to the diminishing visibility of a particular way of seeing. Drawing is a direct act. It reveals the movement of thought through the hand—the searching relationship between eye and surface. Less mediated than many other forms, it retains a clarity that is both physical and cognitive. When its history recedes, so too does access to that mode of perception.

Across cultures, drawing persists as a constant. It begins with the simple act of marking—charcoal on stone, pigment on bark, graphite on paper—and continues across all levels of artistic practice. It is embedded in perception itself: an attempt to understand space, relation, and form through gesture. It is not governed by fashion or economy, but exists as a spatial articulation—a record of contact between body and surface.

The marks that result hold that position. In this sense, drawing reflects a fundamental human impulse: the need to register presence through form. From a distance, what appears as absence within the history of drawing in Western Australia is more accurately a lack of visibility. Beneath the surface lies a dispersed field of practice shaped by artists working across generations. Their work spans landscape, figuration, abstraction, and conceptual approaches to mark-making, yet remains insufficiently assembled into a cohesive account.

Conclusion - Directions: An Open Recovery

The task of recovery remains open. It requires curatorial and scholarly attention willing to look beyond dominant narratives and to recognize drawing as a discipline with its own integrity. While emerging technologies may assist in bringing overlooked material to light, the impetus must come from an acknowledgment that something essential has been neglected.

“The history of Western drawing in Western Australia is not absent; now in its third century, it remains under-recognized.”; it is waiting and should be celebrated just as Aboriginal art is in the state. It exists as a meaningful continuum that offers future generations a way to engage more deeply with questions of land, space, and perception. Drawing is not secondary or preparatory—it is a primary act, one that continues to shape how we encounter and describe the world.