First Fleet artwork collection

Bird, with its body facing left and its head turned in profile to the right, holding a blue flower in its bill. It is perched on a tree stump which is entwined with red flowers and set in a landscape with a river and bank in the foreground and open plains and hills in the distance. The bird's head is grey with a red stripe over the eye, and an orange bill. Its upper parts are brown with a red rump, and the underparts cream-fawn to grey. The drawing is framed by a pencil border and annotated in ink and pencil.

• Thomas Watling]
• The drawing is annotated in ink at bottom "Native name Goo-lung-ag-ga. It is a very common Bird in New South Wales easily domesticated and of a most lively disposition, even when in a Cage, and in a Day or two it is perfectly reconciled".
• The drawing is signed "Thomas Watling delt", but the signature is almost obscured by the painting of the foreground landscape. It is undated.
• The drawing is inscribed at top right with the number "166.". This refers to the catalogue list compiled by John Latham c. 1801 which was acquired with the drawings, and is filed with them at the end of the Watling Drawings series.
• The drawing is annotated in pencil at top "Temporal Finch. Syn Sup 2. 211". This has been copied in ink at lower left, "Temporal Finch Latham Syn. Suppt 2. p. 211.". The page reference is to Latham's Second Supplement to the General Synopsis of Birds (1802).
• This bird was more recently identified as the Red-browed Finch Aegintha temporalis in Hindwood K. A. (1970). (ITIS gives Neochmia temporalis as the preferred taxonomic name for the Red-browed Finch.)
• A separate label is attached to the drawing at lower right. It is inscribed in pencil "Type".
• The author of this catalogue record is Suzanne Stenning.
• By permission of the trustees of the Natural History Museum (London)
• Two sets of transparencies held in the Natural History Museum (London) Zoology Library and Picture Library: Picture Library reference number 12245
• James Lee of Kensington : purchased ; 1902
• Data sheet available.
• Latham, John. Supplement II to the General Synopsis of Birds. London: Leigh, Sotheby, 1802.
• Hindwood K. A. 'The "Watling" drawings with incidental notes on the "Lambert" and the "Latham" drawings', Proceedings of the Royal Zoological Society of New South Wales for the years 1968-69 (1970).
• This drawing is reproduced in Wheeler, A. and Smith, B, The Art of the First Fleet and other early Australian Drawings. New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1988. (Plate 203, p. 190).