Parramatta in the 1830s

Conrad Martens painted Parramatta from the river in 1839 and signed and dated it in the lower left. A eucalypt and flowering shrubs frame the foreground above a bend of the water; a two-storey house sits up on the rise. Martens had come out to Sydney in 1835 after sailing as the *Beagle*'s official artist, and he spent the rest of his life being paid by the colonial gentry to make their houses and their landholdings look like England with better weather. He is generally reckoned the finest landscape painter working in the colony at the time.

What surrounds that view is the reason it was worth painting. Parramatta in the 1830s was still the governor's town — the country seat, its house and grazing domain running up the slope — and simultaneously a piece of real estate being sold off. A subdivision poster from the period offers six "villa portions" for auction on the ground by Mills, Pile & Gilchrist, the lots laid out in two rows between Government Road and Carriage Road. That is the whole story of the decade in one sheet of printing: land that had belonged to the office of Governor, drawn up in rows and sold to whoever turned up on the day.

A watercolour of November 1838 shows Old Government House from the surrounding grounds — the two-storey house at the right, a long low range of outbuildings running off to the left, a church spire in the middle distance, open sloping ground in front of all of it.

The gentlest of these images is a document of a town changing hands.