Conrad Martens was the only major colonial artist to work for a considerable period of time in Queensland - he spent over four months in the south-east region of the future state between November 1851 and March 1852. During this journey Martens completed over ninety drawings which form a valuable topographical record of Queensland only ten years after free settlement. Many sketches are dated and titled, and provide an accurate account of the land in the days preceding outdoor photography; some buildings depicted in the works are still standing and it is possible to compare views of the areas then and now, which demonstrate the effects of land clearing and cultivation. Upon his return to Sydney, Martens completed around seventy commissions for watercolours, working from sketches completed in the field.

The story of Conrad Martens begins in London in the early nineteenth century, when on 21 March 1801, a third son and fourth and youngest child was born to a merchant of German origins, J. Christopher Heinrich Martens, and his English wife, Rebecca née Turner. The family lived above their premises in the crowded old trading quarter of the city in a street called Crutched Friars, near the present day site of Fenchurch Street Station. ‘Having no taste for mercantile pursuits’, as Conrad Martens put it many years later, all three Martens boys became artists, despite the family's European traditions as merchants going back to the fifteenth century. Influenced by his older brothers, Conrad, at the age of sixteen, became a pupil of the well-known English landscape painter and teacher Anthony Van Dyke Copley Fielding.

Conrad Martens' watercolours and pencil sketches constitute an unrivalled record of the landscape of south-east Queensland in the early 1850s. I can think of no other artist who so skilfully packaged and conveyed so much information, not only about what he saw on his travels but also about how he experienced it. In this article I will discuss Martens as a recorder of the landscape under three headings — artistic, scientific and historical, and to illustrate these attributes by referring to examples of his works. Many of his works display all of these attributes, but in discussing a given work I shall resist the temptation to stray from the threefold classification of artistic, scientific and historical.

At the time of Conrad Martens' painting tour of the Darling Downs in 1851–52, the Aborigines of the area were in a state of numb transition — still conscious of the dreaming before the white man, yet fearful of the time to come. In a decade of European intrusion, they had been psychologically traumatized, culturally belittled, sexually exploited, and drastically reduced in number. In the decades to come, they would become fringe dwellers, figures of fun and charity and yet, withal, demonstrating a remarkable resilience and adaptability. The few Aborigines in Martens' sketches and ‘house portraits’ from the early 1850s reflect the trauma and the uncertainty of that era.

As the schooner Toroa carried its only passenger, Conrad Martens, up the Brisbane River on 7 November 1851, he would have seen many places subsequently depicted in his art works, including the then recently erected large residences Newstead and Bulimba (both extant). Approaching the main settlement further upstream, the ship passed New Farm and North Brisbane on the right, and Bulimba and Kangaroo Point on the left, before finally berthing at South Brisbane. The most prominent landmark in Brisbane was a derelict windmill (extant) on a hill at North Brisbane overlooking the settlement. Martens' illustrations show us, through the artist's eye, Brisbane's appearance in late 1851. This, combined with other documentary evidence, enables us to paint our own mental picture of Brisbane at the time.

The work of colonial artists has provided precious insights into the nature of the Australian landscape as it was at the time immediately following white settlement. The works of Glover, Lewin and von Guérard, for example, have been employed by historical geographers and have fuelled some fascinating debates about the nature of the landscape as it was under Aboriginal management. Of course, the work of some of these artists forms more faithful historical documentation than that of others. The stylised works of J.S. Lycett, the emancipated convict turned painter, are almost certainly unreliable as accurate landscape documentation, as his criminal conviction for forgery may suggest (Plate 1). It is likely that Lycett never visited some of the locations he painted and much of his work was probably commissioned as immigration propaganda, intended to placate the fears of the Britons equivocating about a move to the awesome and intimidating southern land.

Conrad Martens visited the Darling Downs during the summer of 1851–52, where a small group of squatting families played a crucial part in the success of his journey. In the short term, they provided him with hospitality as he moved from property to property; in the longer term, he hoped, they would become the main purchasers of his paintings. In this article I shall give a brief description of the Darling Downs pastoral elite, and look at the personal connections that existed between Martens and many of these people: connections that explain why Martens was received so hospitably during his travels, and why he had a reasonable expectation that they would patronize his work. In addition, though, there were also structural reasons relating to the changing economic and social climate of the early 1850s that help explain why these families subsequently bought his paintings.

Novelist Rosa Praed's portrayal of colonial Queensland in her fiction was influenced by her social position as the daughter of a squatter and conservative Cabinet Minister, Thomas Lodge Murray-Prior, and limited by the fact that she lived in Australia for much less than one-third of her life. After she left Australia in 1876, she recharged her imagination, during her long novel-writing career in England, by seeking specific information through family letters and reminiscences, copies of Hansard and newspapers. As the decades went by and she remained in England, the social and political dynamics of colonial society changed. Remarkably, she remained able to tum sparse sources into in-depth portrayals of aspects of colonial life.