sketcher, amateur photographer(?), lithographer and settler, was born in Scotland. He occupied the property Terrinallum, near Mortlake, Victoria, between 1839 and 1845. His original sketch (1845, private collection) of the sparsely-furnished interior of the original single-room hut at Terrinallum provided the basis for his lithograph, initialled on the stone Life in the Bush: The Squatter’s First Home and also issued as The Squatter at Home 1839: Bad News from the Outstations . It was published in 1847 by McLean & Co. of St Martin’s Lane, London, in aid of the Famine Relief Fund of the Highlands of Scotland ('and of Ireland’ in the variant), being one of a pair of coloured lithographs bound into a volume titled Scenes in the Bush of Australia. By a Squatter . Lang himself is in the image, seated in a chair reading a letter one evening after work. The second plate, An Exploring Party, Looking for a Sheep Run , is unsigned but is justifiably assumed to be Lang’s since he also appears in it, seated at a camp-fire with his travelling companion and a young Aboriginal guide. Wantrup calls the publication of this pair of images one of the two earliest illustrated books of Victorian subjects (the other being by John Skinner Prout ).
The La Trobe Library holds Lang’s sketchbook containing scenes at Terrinallum, while a pencil drawing, Scene at Terrinallum 1845 , is in a private collection. Another of his sketchbooks (private collection) contains a pencil drawing of Yeermany and Gorngminny, two Port Phillip Aborigines. Lang also compiled an album of photographs of Aborigines (La Trobe Library), at least some of which were taken by Richard Daintree and E. Montagu Scott .
Lang and his family later went to Fiji, where he died. He was survived by his wife Sophia, née Cooper, a son and two daughters.
- Writers:
- Staff Writer
- Date written:
- 1992
- Last updated:
- 2011
