Encounter Bay looking south

A nineteenth-century travel artist, George French Angas completed views of significant tracts of the colonial landscape and its First Peoples in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and independent Brazil. He produced a prodigious number of on-the-spot pencil and watercolour studies and later many of his finest subjects were translated into lithographic prints and published in a series of volumes.

As the son of George Fife Angas, one of the principal European founders of the British Province of South Australia, the artist was at great advantage when he arrived in Adelaide in 1844. With many resources at his disposal, he undertook numerous painting expeditions in a short space of time. He accessed the multiple frontiers of European invasion, including this coastal area, situated around eighty kilometres south of Adelaide.

The land and its waters are significant to the Ramindjeri people. In Ramindjeri language the locality is referred to as ‘Ramong’, although some sources suggest this name may only relate to the distant headland, also known as ‘Kongkengguwar’.

The location is also known as ‘Encounter Bay’ and was so named by the British navigator and explorer Matthew Flinders, who was inspired by the accidental meeting between his ship, Investigator, and that of the French explorer Nicolas Baudin, 

Le Geographe, in April 1802. Encounter Bay, looking south, is typically further layered with deeply personal significance. Here, the artist inserts himself into the scene: he is shown on horseback, being guided towards the bayside site established for his father’s South Australian Company’s fishing station. He carefully frames the distinctive headland, Ramong or Kongkengguwar, which Angas’s father named Rosetta Head, in honour of the artist’s mother.

Tracey Lock, Curator of Australian Paintings and Sculpture