Fishing on Sydney Harbour 1789 Drawing

Over the past several years I’ve created an extensive series of oil pastel drawings depicting scenes from the first years of the Sydney colony and focusing on the interactions between the British and the indigenous inhabitants of that region. These energetic works engage with the historical narrative, representing stories and scenes distilled from contemporaneous accounts. I’ve called the series ‘How to Draw Ghosts’, reason being that all the figures represented in the pictures are long gone, yet, although conjured up from scraps of the past, they still have an insistent presence. Given the tragic history of the relations between black and white Australia this is to be expected. Ghosts are not at rest, they are fiercely intent on communication with the living. So it follows that they may well insist on being drawn, perhaps that is why they are such good subjects for this kind of restoration. Inga Clendinnen, award winning Australian historian; “ Damian presents human actions and emotions at the moment of their happening, so restoring people from the past to their existential present. He gives them back their lives as they happened, before they are parsed and analysed as historians start writing about them. A Broomhead drawing has the quality of emotional immediacy we usually associate with music.”