Hoddle Watercolours Collection

The Hoddle Watercolours Collection comprises original sketches and watercolours by surveyor Robert Hoddle, created during his expeditions across New South Wales and Victoria. These works capture expansive landscapes, pastoral scenes and early settlements, offering rare visual insight into colonial exploration and the transformation of the Australian landscape in the mid-nineteenth century.

The National Trust of Australia (Victoria) Collections of Sketches and Watercolours by Robert Hoddle was compiled from the 1830s to 1854, with one later image dated 1861. Hoddle, the artist, travelled a great deal in his younger life, before settling in Australia, and ending his days in Melbourne.

Hoddle sketched the views he saw wherever he went on his surveying expeditions in New South Wales and further south in the newer settlement of Port Phillip. The watercolours show the challenges Hoddle faced. He methodically mapped vast regions of the country, creating as he went layouts for a number of towns which gained regional importance, such as Geelong.

This collection in unique, in that it contains original works by Robert Hoddle at a particular place and date which are not duplicated in collections elsewhere. They document in a visual way the pastoral scenes and expansive landscapes he encountered so often in the places he visited in the course of his survey work. These images were recorded for his own pleasure, and not for any official purpose.

Most importantly, Hoddle’s sketches are significant in that they provide rare insight into the historic appearance of the landscape of present-day Victoria and New South Wales at a time only a few years after the advent of Europeans in this part of the world. While some of these images re simple pencil sketches, most of the pictures are more detailed watercolours which accurately capture known features of the landscape, evoking the beauty of the surroundings in a superbly accomplished fashion. The national importance of these works as part of a distributed national collection of Robert Hoddle’s works, and as valuable documents of our past is clear.

Source: Robert Hoddle Watercolours Collection. Statement of Significance
15 September 2013
Dr Dianne Reilly AM