ABSTRACT
Long planks of pine packing crates hang in the Hobart and Cambridge museum galleries. All transportations of goods, convicts and wood around 1830 began here in Hobart, the capital of Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania). In the early years of the British colony in Tasmania the colonial government produced a series of pine-board paintings (Figure 2.1). They were painted by convict artists incarcerated in the island penal colony off the southern tip of the mainland of Australia for the governor, who planned to nail a hundred of them to trees around Tasmania to explain the principle of the rule of law.1 Figures were painted on pine boards to impart ideas of equality between black and white, Aboriginal, convict and settler. The boards were then circulated again after the Black War of 1828-1830 in which martial law was declared.2 At different moments the boards have reappeared at world’s fairs and in international anthropology collections.
