Breakfast, Alpha 1884

Here we see Harriet Jane Neville-Rolfe’s family at the breakfast table at Alpha Station — her sister Margaret and brother-in-law Charles Franklin Torrey, her brothers Arthur and Charles (Carl) and her sister-in-law Fanny Kunigunda (Kunie); a fourth male figure remains unidentified. Floor-length, white table linen, fresh wild flowers and silver tableware suggest that the Neville-Rolfe’s English lifestyle and social standing had been successfully transported to Australia. Neville-Rolfe has captured the rustic interior of the room by illustrating the corrugated iron roof, the exposed and roughly- sawn beams and the slab walls. The incongruity of outback reality overlaid with a genteel veneer is reinforced by the presence of small domestic pets. Through a wide, open window, a gentle, albeit sparse and unpopulated, landscape is visible — a somewhat English view of the Australian outback.