Rare and attractive view of Vaucluse, from Wallis's Historical Account of the Colony,the first view book engraved in Australia. This work was an extraordinary collaboration between Major James Wallis, then commander of the convict settlement at Newcastle, and the convicts under his command, notably the artists Walter Preston and Joseph Lycett.

Rare and attractive view of Vaucluse, from Wallis's Historical Account of the Colony,the first view book engraved in Australia. This work was an extraordinary collaboration between Major James Wallis, then commander of the convict settlement at Newcastle, and the convicts under his command, notably the artists Walter Preston and Joseph Lycett.

Two of the central figures in the creation of the views were Preston and Lycett; Preston had earlier worked with Absalom West on his famous views of Sydney, while the latter had only recently been sent to Newcastle after his involvement in the forging of bank drafts in Sydney. At the time, Newcastle enjoyed a fearsome reputation for brutal secondary punishment and was described by Lieutenant Purcell as "the Hell of New South Wales."

Wallis had arrived in the colony in 1814 and proved a successful commandant at Newcastle, transforming the rough convict outpost into an ordered town, mirroring on a smaller scale what Macquarie had achieved in Sydney. Wallis focused the considerable artistic skills of the forgers to produce this series of skilled and remarkable views, created with great difficulty on the only copper sheets available in the colony, the softer sheets intended for sheathing the hulls of ships.