Members of the US exploring expedition visit the Hunter River

Members of the US exploring expedition visit the Hunter River and Rev Threlkeld’s mission on Lake Macquarie to see and draw “the natives” (artist, Alfred Agate; ethnologist and linguist Horatio Hale, and comparative anatomist, Charles Pickering). During Agate’s and Hale’s orientatory walks around Newcastle they meet a group of “several blacks” seated around a little fire “begrimed with dirt and red paint”. The women are dressed in “loose ragged gowns” and the men in a “strip of blanket wrapped round the middle, or a pair of tattered pantaloons”. This is probably prison issue clothing.