Description (Physical description)
Interview, 2016 by Greg Lehman and Tom Nicholson. Off-set printed multiple composed of two A1 posters, 1 double-sided, one single sided (Unlimited edition), to take away. The double side includes half of John Webber’s drawing 'An Interview between Captain Cook and the natives' on one side and on the reverse of one, the interview by Greg Lehman and Tom Nicholson. The single side features the second half of Webber's drawing.
Event Date
Author: Rachel Hand

Context (Display)
Exhibited during the Antipodes exhibition at MAA, 22 June – 26 September 2016. The 24 artworks of 'Lines that could be scars' were exhibited in the Maudslay Gallery. Framed in white wood, they were placed angled in the drawers below the Introductory display cases. At the right hand end of the cases, a stack of the two-part poster of Webber's image sat on the floor (the unfolded version of the artwork, 2016.159.1-2). Sat on the front right corner, sat a stack of the folded version (illustrated in 2016.160.1-2), with the fragmentary image of the folded section (featuring trees and rocks), tallying with the printed image on the base.

The display text for the artwork noted
'Free digital artwork Interview, 2016
Greg Lehman/Tom Nicholson Off-set printed multiple; two A1 posters, 1 double-sided, one single sided, to take away Unlimited edition Design: Ziga Teston
Please take one pair
Courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery
The Interview accompanied this series of etchings, Lines that could be scars, consisting of 24 prints, produced as part of the Museum’s collaborative Antipodies Project (2015 -2016) with the Australian Print Workshop. The prints respond to John Webber’s drawing An Interview between Captain Cook and the natives; the earliest known European image of contact between Europeans and Australian Aboriginal people. Webber's drawing shows cook meeting a group of Australian Aboriginal men at adventure bay on Bruny Island, Tasmania, in January 1777, at the beginning of Captain Cook's final pacific voyage.
The lines on the print, one of which is exhibited in the Australia case in MAA's main anthropology gallery, isolate a significant detail of Webber's drawing: the handful of single lines that seem to designate scarification on the bodies of the Australian Aboriginal men. The prints were created through a process of mark making and erasing through incision and burnishing, repeating this process to mark the fate of Tasmanian Australian Aborigines.
The print is displayed alongside the earliest known objects of contact from Australia in this Museum; fishing spears taken by Captain Cook at Botany Bay in Australia 1770. The sharp tips of those spears - points from the beginning of a history of invasion, contact, interchange - were the origins of Nicholson's decision to work with the incising processes of drypoint etching, during his initial visit to Cambridge in 2015.

Event Date 22/6/2016
Author: Rachel Hand

Context (Analysis)
This is the earliest known European image of contact, and the collaboration with Greg Lehman, printed in part on the reverse is both a type of “interview” and a deliberation on Webber’s drawing and its site.
Event Date 30/9/2016
Author: Rachel Hand

Context (Analysis)
Webber's illustration is the earliest known European image of contact and shows Cook meeting a group of Aboriginal men at Adventure Bay on Bruny Island, Tasmania, in January 1777, with Cook's landing party of officers and sailors on the left and on the right, a group of about 20 Aboriginal people.
Cook's outstretched arms suggest he is about to place a medal around the neck of an Aboriginal man. While medals were among the earliest gifts given by Europeans to Aborigines and symbolise both the idealism and the reality of these pre-colonisation encounters, the Webber drawing is the only known record of Aboriginal people being presented with medals.
The scale of the drawing suggests Webber made the picture back on the ship with a large-scale history painting in mind, but the drawing is more or less the only Webber drawing of its kind that did not become an engraving in the voyage’s official published account.
Event Date 30/9/2016
Author: Rachel Hand

Context (Production / use)
Tom Nicholson (b. 1973) was born and lives in Melbourne and is represented by Milani Gallery, Brisbane. Nicholson trained in drawing at the Victorian College of the Arts, a tradition that greatly informs his practice, which also includes performance and interdisciplinary projects was trained in drawing at the Victorian College of the Arts. His artwork explores the visual languages of politics and propaganda with a focus on the relationship between actions and their traces. .
Event Date 30/9/2024
Author: Rachel Hand