The NSW State Library has just paid $915,000 for an exceptionally rare sketchbook, a treasure trove of watercolours by the colonial artist Edward Close, painted in and around Sydney between 1817 and 1840. The paintings not only give us delightful early views of Sydney and its Harbour, they also allow us, for the first time, to come face-to-face with the people of the convict settlement in the early years of the 19th century. Bruce Stannard reports.

   Before Lieutenant Edward Close joined the barque Matilda, bound for Sydney with His Majesty’s 48th Regiment in 1817, he went to the London art materials and fancy good supplier, Rudolph Ackermann, and there purchased a blank morocco-bound sketchbook, a set of watercolour tablets and a clutch of fine sable brushes, the means by which the soldier and amateur artist intended to record his voyage to the far side of the world. But Edward Close did much more than that.
   In Sydney, the Illawarra and in the Hunter Valley over the ensuing 20 years, he was to be an eye-witness to some of the earliest years of Australia’s history and it’s through the detailed and close observation of this talented amateur artist that we now have a unique and invaluable record of colonial life in the age of Governor Macquarie.
   Having just paid close to a million dollars for the sketchbook with its 26 watercolours, wash drawings and pencil sketches, the State Library of NSW is now preparing them for a special exhibition in 2010, which will be the first time they’ve ever been on public display.
It’s one exhibition no Australian and certainly no Sydneysider will want to miss. Why? Because through these painted images we enter a time machine, one that allows us not merely to journey back to the infant settlement at Sydney Cove but one which also brings us face-to-face with its earliest inhabitants.
   Close’s watercolour Sydney Cove in all its Glory has been described as “polished and spatially convincing” – the kind of topographical rendering one would expect from a trained military man – but it’s his portraits of the denizens of Sydney Town that is, I think, the most spectacular and compelling image.
   In his watercolour entitled The Costume of the Australasians we see an extraordinary cross-section of the citizenry – 10 figures including everyone from gentlemen to soldiers, sailors and convicts, all portrayed amiably going about their business on the same bustling piece of ground. It’s a picture I could look at for hours.
   Richard Neville, the Mitchell Librarian, who acquired the sketchbook on behalf of the State Library, describes it as “a precious, informative and delightful record of colonial culture”.
   “Edward Close gives us a glimpse of Sydney at a time when there was not much record of it,” Neville said, “so it fills in a gap in the pictorial record which is just unrivalled. One of the things that particularly intrigued me about the volume is that these pictures convey a very optimistic view of the colony.
   “When people imagine the very early years of the colony they tend to think of the Robert Hughes view, the despair and depravation and so on, but if you look at these drawings you see people who appear to be very optimistic.
   “They’re also interested in things going on around them. It just provides a completely different view to those we’ve been accustomed to seeing in works by the professional artists working in the colony. So in one sense it’s the amateur verses the professional. The amateur often shows a different side of things to one who has been trained to look in a particular way.”
   It was Richard Neville who coined the phase “the faceless society” in lamenting the lack of early colonial portraits, but here, he says, “we’ve got the most wonderful cast of characters.”
   “There wasn’t much portraiture going on in the colony at the time,” he said. “It was mostly the conventional head and shoulder variety and not much of it has survived, but here we have a wonderfully vivid cross-section of what the colonists looked like from convicts through to military officers and all on the one page.
   “There’s Sydney society condensed to a page. It’s an extraordinary thing and very exciting.”
Paintings from the Edward Close Sketchbook are expected to go on public exhibition in March next year as the centrepiece in the Mitchell Library’s centenary year.