PEASE 2008.113
By Australian Art team
March 2026
Pease’s disarming painting meticulously reproduces an early nineteenth-century lithograph of Albany Harbour by French artist Louis Auguste de Sainson (1800–74). As the official artist aboard the French surveying vessel L'Astrolabe, de Sainson first documented the Western Australian landscape, environment and people of the area for potential settlement in 1826. However, on learning of this surveillance, British forces fast-tracked the establishment of Albany themselves in 1827.
In his contemporary rendering, Pease traps de Sainson’s image within a dark frame painted with balga (grasstree) resin, a traditional Nyoongar medium for decoration and toolmaking from the artist’s Country. Looking into this vista is a white rabbit, referencing Lewis Carroll’s 1865 famous tale, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Pease’s rabbit dons a coat clad in two-toned ochre. On his use of material, the artist states:
The ochre was collected from an ochre pit at Wilson’s Inlet, Denmark [in Western Australia]. This ochre pit has been used by my family for generations and was formed by both tidal and meteorological influences that moved sediment within water.
These artistic choices provide evidence of persistent Aboriginal occupancy prior to settlement, rebutting the historical competition for land between two European colonial powers.
