The talk focusses on the forthcoming Founding Pairs exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. It is the first production of an ARC Linkage grant on comparative approaches to the early history of Australasia through portraiture and biography. The show will pair so-called European founding fathers with the indigenous interlocutors who made their work possible (including Banks and Tupaia, Flinders and Bungaree, and so on). It will also feature the work of European artists who took differing approaches to the representation of indigenous people. Joanna Gilmour will outline the broad approach of the gallery and the re-hang in terms of the representation of lives, focusing especially on the artists Augustus Earle and Charles Rodius. Kate Fullagar will speak on new historical approaches to indigenous biography, using the examples of Tupaia, Mai, and Bennelong.

Joanna Gilmour is a curator at the National Portrait Gallery and a doctoral candidate in Art History at the ANU. Her exhibitions and publications include Husbands & Wives (2010); Elegance in exile: portrait drawings from colonial Australia (2012); and the upcoming Cartomania (2018). She is a Partner Investigator on the ARC Linkage project, “Facing New Worlds,” and will be the lead curator for its major exhibition in 2020.

Kate Fullagar is a senior lecturer in Modern History at Macquarie University. She is the author of The Savage Visit: New World Peoples and Popular Imperial Culture in Britain (Berkeley, 2012). Forthcoming is a collection with Michael McDonnell on indigenous experiences in the age of revolution (Johns Hopkins, 2018), and a monograph, Faces of Empire: Three Eighteenth-Century Lives (Yale, 2019). She is Lead Chief Investigator on “Facing New Worlds”.