[MURRAY RIVER] UNKNOWN WATERCOLOURIST.
"Blacks [sic] Fellows Grave, Cobram Creek, River Murray SA".
South Australia, circa, 1845.
Original pen & ink and watercolour sketch, 148 x 203 mm.; small tear to margin, otherwise very good, laid down on a leaf from an album, titled in ink bottom left, framed.
A skilfully rendered watercolour of a scene of the Murray River from the mid-nineteenth-century.
This evocative image records an encounter, by an early traveller along the Murray, of an Aboriginal grave marker. One of the earliest pioneers along this river, Thomas Mitchell, reported very frequent meetings with local tribes along the Murray and, thanks to his Aboriginal translator Piper, gave numerous interpretations of local customs he found of interest.
This scene of a shallow creek which feeds into the Murray at Cobram, shows a four-posted Aboriginal grave marker with a canopy of leaves shading the burial site. What appears to be a dog - maybe a dingo - stands on its hind legs to inspect the grave, whilst birds circle overhead.
Cobram, which lies on the Murray River north of Shepparton in northern Victoria, was the name of a pastoral station taken up by Octavius Phillpotts in 1845. It is thought that the name was derived from an Aboriginal word meaning "head", and that Cobram was the head pastoral station in the district. Cobram is now a rural township.
