A distant view of Port Bowen, from Mount Westall

London-based William Westall was one of the first European-trained artists to visit Australia, accompanying Matthew Flinders on his circumnavigation of Australia in 1801–03. As the expedition’s official landscape artist, he created many pencil-and-wash records of the landscape and its coast profiles, as well as portraits of First Nations peoples and the first known European depictions of Australian Aboriginal cave paintings.

A distant view of Port Bowen from Mount Westall, c.1803, is a rare finished watercolour by the artist. With sweeping washes in a limited tonal range, Westall depicts the F ormidable gorges and meandering inlets of a Queensland landscape near Port Clinton, north of Yeppoon. The artist’s fleeting impressions of hoop pines provide an ominous setting for the large sea birds flying above and the three men, accompanied by two dingoes, in the foreground.

‘Mount Westall’ in the title of this work refers to a mountain named after the artist by Flinders. It is believed that, when the party went ashore in Port Bowen, Flinders issued a challenge, whereby the highest mountain would be named after the first person to make it to the top.

Elle Freak, Associate Curator of Australian Paintings and Sculpture