Sea stories and sea pictures: George Gordon McCrae and late nineteenth-century maritime Australia

From the 1850s through the early 1900s, the Victorian artist George Gordon McCrae kept a close eye on the shipping entering Port Phillip Bay near Melbourne. In addition to merchant vessels and private pleasure craft, McCrae recorded the visits of foreign warships in hundreds of lively pen, ink and watercolour sketches. But McCrae was a writer as well as an artist, whose mind was as much concerned with the past as the present. McCrae juxtaposed images of modern vessels with written and visual descriptions of ships central to the European discovery of Australia. This essay explores McCrae's representations of both contemporary and historical maritime scenes in sketches, with some attention to poems and historical articles, to illuminate how the sea influenced the cultural imagination of nineteenth-century Australian settlers. While the scope of McCrae's response was perhaps unique, the themes he developed (awareness of the ongoing relevance of the sea as a means of both actual and imaginative transport, reverence for British and other European discoverers of Australia as role models for the new nation) were shared by his contemporaries. McCrae's images help us to understand the maritime dimension of late nineteenth-century Australia and its importance for settler society.