The well-travelled, Düsseldorf-trained landscape painter Eugen von Guérard arrived in the colony of Victoria (Australia) in 1852. He was fired by a deep curiosity about the ‘new’ world and committed to a practice based on the empirical methodology and the rejection of racial hierarchies espoused by Alexander von Humboldt, all of which informed his first depiction of Aboriginal people in Australia. Over the following years, the contradictions on which Victoria’s colonial society was built played out in his art practice. The visual conceit of ‘noble savagery’, according to which Aboriginal presence was imagined in primordial, pre-contact landscapes, coexisted with works in which Aboriginal people were erased from portrayals of colonised territory. In response to his direct encounters with Aboriginal people – including a remarkable and significant exchange with the Gunditjmara artist, Johnny Dawson – as a travelling artist in the colonies, and informed by his friendships with the colony’s most enlightened ethnological thinkers, von Guérard produced a group of unconventional and enigmatic compositions that speak enduringly of the impacts of colonisation on the colonised and on the colonisers. In the visual archive they are rare records of co-presence and of the lived realities of First Nations people in the colony of Victoria in the 1850s and 60s.