Richard Wastell

Whalers' Camp

Depot Gallery, Sydney
8 to 20 October 2007

Mostly of this world...¹

With huge pronged poles they pitched hissing masses of blubber into the scalding pots, or stirred up the fires beneath, till the snaky flames darted, curling, out of the doors to catch them by the feet. The smoke rolled away in sullen heaps. (Herman Melville, Moby Dick)

200 years ago, there were so many black (Southern Right) whales in the estuary of the Derwent that the Colonial Chaplain, Rev. Bobby Knopwood, complained to his diary that he could not sleep for the noise of their calling and blowing. There were so many whales migrating and feeding and calving around the coast of Van Diemen's Land that they could be hunted easily from the land, harpooned from longboats and then simply towed into shore for processing. By the end of the 1830s an army of 1,000 men was employed at 35 bay whaling stations spread around the Tasmanian coastline, nine stations in and around Hobart Town and others at Oyster Bay, Bruny Island, Recherche Bay, Swanport, Oyster Bay and Launceston. As the killings increased and as the whales became fewer in number and rather more cautious, bigger investment and larger vessels came into play, and the Pacific whaling fleet came into town; in the 1840s you could find as many as 60 American and French whalers laying over in Hobart Town harbour at the one time. Men got stinking rich from boiling stinking fat. Whales overtook wheat as Van Diemen's Land's primary export earner. In 1840 the colony made almost £100,000 from whale oil and other whale products, from lighting the parlours and corseting the waists of Britain and the United States.

Richard Wastell is a literary artist. His paintings and drawings are rich not only in palette and in texture, but also in the metaphorical power of their imagery. He has an instinct for the motif that signifies, and a Vandiemonian, imaginative-antiquarian taste for trans-historical sights. During a recent period of house-sitting at Tranmere, on Hobart's Eastern Shore, he found himself walking out on weekends to the end point of the cleared, grazed, bald promontory of Droughty Point, to the place where one of those whaling try works had been located, to the site where mountains of blubber had been flensed from hundreds of big mammal bodies and rendered down in iron cauldrons.

Exploring this history through the contours and colours of the earth, Wastell has created an extended sequence of drawings which present the world as a place of natural joy and fear, of dreams, memories and imaginings which turn a physical space into 'a landscape of the mind.'

The ground is unstable. Droughty Point's shelly strand is a thick, shifting, crunchy stumble zone. This is where Wastell places his motifs, on this abstract colour-field, on these pointillist-neo-impressionist dapplings and poxings. He reads and re-presents the beach in relation to other mottled grounds: the charcoal and bone mounds and strata of Aboriginal middens, or the broken bricks and concrete of archaeological excavations in Rome, where he spent some months in 2005 - 'all that stuff in the ground…all that history in the dirt.' He makes the tesserae of broken shells, the tiles of pigment marks blur into other piebald patterns: the glister of light on a choppy sea; the rainbow of scales on trout or flathead; lichen on a tree trunk; burned bark. Heaped up, the speckled earth becomes a tumulus tomb, a pile of autumn leaves or a dragon's hoard. Burning embers, glowing charcoal. Mulch. Inevitably, woodchips.

Then on this variegated ground Wastell displays a catch of icons. Out of the littoral environment, the heavy metal waters of the Derwent, come spiralling abalone, teardrop mussels, oysters, lobster. His shellfish signify Aboriginal staples; the quarry of children's adventure-hunts; poor man's meat in the early 20th century; export luxuries in the early 21st. Out of the long-ago whaling come other organic architectures: whale vertebrae, jawbones, ribcages. Even more potent, more disturbing are the try-pots, their dumb, dark roundness suggesting the upturned helmet of a medieval knight or a Victorian diver. The kettle's odd shape is actually quite familiar. Where did we last see one? Was it in a museum, perhaps, or a regional tourism office? Maybe it was in the buffalo grass picnic area and playground of a coastal holiday village, slowly filling with lazy visitors' litter. In any event, we've not seen one in use, and certainly not like this. From the reality of 1830s industry, Wastell spins off Gehenna images of other tragic, smoking reductions: the 1967 Hobart bushfires; fire-bombed clear-fell forest; Iraqi oilfields.

And weirdest of all is the surreal image of terrestrial fluking, of the whale's tail rising out of the solid earth. The leviathan-muse of history dives down deep then resurfaces and blows. In the poetic-prophetic imagination of Richard Wastell, out of her head comes not water, not spray, but fire and brimstone.

David Hansen
Melbourne, September 2007

¹ 'Mostly of this world but not all of this world." Richard Wastell, text written on studio wall, August 2007

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