A surprise discovery in Tasmania of a historic sculpture may also be the country’s first example of political – and quite rude – protest art.
Tasmania’s Maritime Museum has released images of a 1.3-metre sandstone statue of a well-dressed colonial gentleman, apparently designed as part of a fountain to show him behaving in a decidedly ungentlemanly way.
The statue, created by a convict in the 1830s, depicts what researchers say is very probably Lieutenant Governor George Arthur, the fourth governor of Van Diemen’s Land (as Tasmania was then known) and creator of the notorious penal settlement Port Arthur.
His penis protrudes from his button fly and evidence of 19th-century internal plumbing suggests the artist’s original brief was to create colonial Australia’s first urinating human fountain.
But Chris Tassell, the museum’s president and a former managing director at the National Trust of Australia (Tasmania), insisted this was by no means a mere whimsical – and somewhat crude – garden ornament.
“We’re talking about a most extraordinary political statement here,” he said. “The first freestanding western-style sculpture created in Australia, and what is it but a statement about the contempt held towards the government of the day? It’s pretty amazing. There’s nothing to compare it with.”
The statue, nicknamed George by museum staff, has been dated to about 1836 and predates what had been thought to be colonial Australia’s oldest full-length statue – that of General Sir Richard Bourke, a contemporary of Arthur’s and governor of New South Wales in the 1830s. That bronze statue was cast in England and erected in 1842. It stands to this day outside the State Library of NSW in Sydney.
George, with his disproportionately large caricaturesque head and slightly alarmed looking facial expression, possesses none of Bourke’s imposing dignity.
When the museum took possession of George in 2023, little was known about the statue’s origins or age. The piece was donated by “a prominent Hobart family” who wished to remain anonymous, Tassell said. It is believed the family had held the statue for seven decades.
A year on, research has established that the sandstone used for the sculpture was quarried in Ross, in Tasmania’s midlands, and the style of dress George sports – carved in intricate detail by the artist – dates the work to between 1820 and 1840.
Two convict master stonemasons were known to have worked on Ross’s famous bridge around this time. By matching the style of the bridge carvings and another work known to have been created by one of these artists, George’s creator has been identified as Daniel Herbert, an English stonemason whose death sentence for highway robbery was commuted to transportation for life in 1827.
“The style is totally consistent with Herbert’s in terms of the absolute exquisite detail that you find on the sculpture,” Tassell said. “When you start to get to the folds and creases in the clothing, the detail is just quite remarkable.”
Researchers have concluded that the benefactor most likely to have commissioned the work was William Kermode, a wealthy Tasmanian maritime merchant and midlands landowner.
He had the financial means – and the technical nous to make George pee. Kermode was a prominent pioneer of irrigation in Australia and one of the few landholders in the midlands operating a pressurised water system large enough to supply a fountain with George as its outlet.
Kermode also had a motive – he loathed Arthur. Soon after the latter took up his posting in Van Diemen’s Land in 1823, the pair clashed over land ownership and the use of convict labour.
So deep and public was Kermode’s animosity that he petitioned London to have the governor recalled, and when Her Majesty obliged in June 1836, the landowner announced in The True Colonist: Van Diemen’s Land Political Despatch that he would gift land at Hobart’s Battery Point for the erection of “a substantial public memorial of the joy of the Colonists at the recall of Colonel Arthur”.
“Given the depth of ill-feeling between Kermode and Arthur, it is feasible to consider that Kermode might commission a functioning statue of Governor Arthur urinating over the people of the colony,” Tassell concluded in a recent article published in the heritage magazine Australiana.
“He had ready access to the most accomplished stone masons of the day, and a reliable supply of water.”
And, it appears, an insatiable need to have the last laugh.
The statue is now on display in the museum’s Carnegie Gallery. Museum staff have invited anyone who might shed more light on the statue’s provenance to contact them.
• This article was amended on 2 February 2024 to clarify that Chris Tassell is a former, not current, managing director at the National Trust of Australia (Tasmania).
