The University of New South Wales Doctor of Philosophy Degree

READING RUSKIN: ARCHITECTURE AND SOCIAL REFORM IN AUSTRALIA, 1889–1908

2010

MARK DOUGLAS STILES

ABSTRACT

This thesis examines the reception of John Ruskin’s work in Australia between 1889 and 1908, and seeks to answer two questions: what Australians made of Ruskin’s ideas at a critical moment in their history, and what we may make of Australia a century ago with Ruskin as our guide. The period covered here spans the decades before and after the federation of the Australian colonies in 1900, and the quest for political unity forms the background to the thesis. What Ruskin’s perspective adds to this account is his search for unity in diversity, a search paralleled in Australia in the struggle to establish the foundations of a just society. Because Ruskin thought that art, and especially architecture, was the true expression of national life and character, the thesis uses a study of Australian architecture to reflect on the search for social justice in this period. This study is developed by comparing the experiences of the progressive architects influenced by Ruskin with those of leading figures in the early Australian labour and feminist movements. Their contrasting perspectives fill out the account given here not only of the understanding of Ruskin’s work in Australia, but also of the hopes of Australian reformers in a turbulent period marked by economic distress and political unrest. Ruskin was not the only writer to find eager readers in Australia as it moved closer to Federation, but he was read by more people, and his opinions cited on a wider range of issues, than almost any other contemporary figure. This thesis shows that what his readers looked for in Ruskin was what he himself sought throughout his life, the moral unity of a fragmenting world.

iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I thank my thesis supervisors, Peter Kohane and Catherine De Lorenzo of the University of New South Wales, for their support and encouragement over many years. Tough-minded critics and experienced guides, they were also the most knowledgeable and patient of tutors, and I owe them a very considerable debt. For help of a different kind I thank my colleagues at the University of Technology Sydney, George Verghese, Rod Hayes and Susan Sherringham, for their support of my work outside the rigours of teaching a very full program. I also wish to thank Mick Carter, Paul Hogben, Peter Phillips and the late Joan Kerr, scholars, architects, or both, for useful conversations along the way. My primary debt is to my family for their forbearance in the writing of this thesis, and for their practical help. My daughter Alice was one of the earliest, and most insightful, readers of the thesis and it benefited from the thoughtful discussions I had with her about it. My son Harry solved many computing problems for me, always with good humour, and I valued the warmth and steadiness of his companionship. My sister Janet gave up her holidays and made the long journey to Australia to scrutinise my presentation and help make the bibliography. In her expert hands this gained considerably in rigour and comprehensiveness to become the essential scholarly apparatus it is now. Two people in particular deserve special thanks: my brother-in-law Kent Whitmore, for the elegant formatting of the final text and for his meticulous attention to detail, both of which enhanced the thesis in no small degree; and my wife Lee. Her part in my work goes well beyond the photographs she took for Chapter Two and organising the final production of the text. Her help and support at every stage was crucial to the writing of the thesis, and I willingly share credit for its achievement with her. I could not have done the work without her, and this thesis is dedicated to her.

iv TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract — iii Acknowledgements — iv List of Tables — x List of Illustrations — xi

INTRODUCTION — xvii 1. Summary of Thesis — xvii 2. Trends in Ruskin Scholarship — xviii 3. Ruskin Scholarship in Australia — xviii 4. Methodology — xx 5. “A Rudderless Democracy” — xxvi 6. “The Order of Things” —xxvii 7. “A Great Englishman” — xxviii 8. Overview of Thesis — xxxiv endnotes for introduction — xxxvii

CHAPTER ONE WHO READ RUSKIN? — 1 a. introduction — 1 b. the written word — 2 1. Readers — 6 2. Books and Libraries — 8 3. Parliamentary Libraries — 11 4. Mechanics’ Institutes — 12 5. Sydney Mechanics’ Institute — 13 6. New South Wales Mechanics’ Institutes — 14 7. Periodicals — 16 8. The Art Journal — 17 9. Booksellers — 17 c. the living voice — 18 1. Ruskin as Lecturer — 18 2. Lectures and Debates as Entertainment — 19 3. Lecture Tours — 21 d. some literary ruskinians — 22 1. John Woolley — 22 2. James Smith — 25 3. James Green — 29 4. Thomas George Tucker — 33 5. Ruskin in Australian Textbooks — 35 e. conclusion — 37 endnotes for chapter one — 38

CHAPTER TWO RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE — 47 a. introduction — 47 b. the three phases of ruskinism — 53 c. phase one: visual ruskinism and the gothic revival — 54 1. The Gothic Revival in Australia — 55 2. Visual Ruskinism in Sydney — 56 3. Visual Ruskinism in Melbourne — 83 d. phase two: ruskinism and honest building — 93 1. The Arts and Crafts Movement in Australia —93 2. The Ruskinian Moment in Australia, 1889–1894 — 98 3. E Wilson Dobbs — 99 4. Harold Desbrowe-Annear — 100 5. Debating Ruskin — 102 6. Early Arts and Crafts Work in Sydney — 105 7. The Vernon Office 113— e. phase three: ruskinism and the nature of work — 129 1. Architects versus Engineers — 130 2. Architects versus Builders — 131 3. An Open Profession? — 132 4. The Architecture and Engineering Association of Victoria — 140 5. The Sydney Architectural Association — 142 6. The Sydney Arts and Crafts Exhibition, 1892 — 146 f. the ruskinian moment in australia, 1894–1900 — 148 g. the ruskinian moment in australia, 1900–1908 — 152 1. John Barlow — 163 2. George Sydney Jones — 170 3. John Horbury Hunt — 173 h. the argument from drawings — 185 i. conclusion — 213 endnotes for chapter two — 217

CHAPTER THREE RUSKIN AND THE AUSTRALIAN LABOUR MOVEMENT — 233 a. ruskin and the labour movement in britain — 234 b. ruskin and the labour movement in australia — 240 1. “This Pernicious Theory” — 240 2. “The Workers Are a Reading Class” — 241 3. Radical Readers — 243 4. Recommending Ruskin — 246 5. Was Ruskin Actually Read? — 247 6. “Mighty Poet Without the Name” — 249 c. ruskin and the sydney building world of the 1890s — 257 1. The Building World Described — 257 2. “The Reunion of Art and Labor” — 262 3. Masters and Men — 265 4. Unto This Last and the Prince Alfred Hospital Project — 267 d. “go to, vain prophet” — 270 endnotes for chapter three — 275

CHAPTER FOUR RUSKIN AND THE AUSTRALIAN FEMINIST MOVEMENT — 285 a. introduction — 285 b. ruskin on women — 288 c. women on ruskin — 293 d. art and politics — 295 1. Art — 295 2. Politics — 298 e. women and reform — 302 f. respectability — 305 1. Ruskin on Respectability — 306 2. Respectability in Australia — 307 3. Women and Respectability in Australia — 308 g. temperance — 310 h. home — 314 1. The Socialist Challenge to Home — 316 2. The Feminist Challenge to Home — 317 3. Australia and the Home — 319 4. Three Feminist Utopias — 323 i. conclusion — 329 endnotes for chapter four — 332

CHAPTER FIVE RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN READERS — 347 a. ruskin as authority — 349 b. ruskin as protest — 352 1. “Faces in the Street” — 352 2. “Too Amusing to Be Dangerous” — 355 3. “A Counsel of Perfection” — 357 c. ruskin as utopian — 361 1. Ruskin on Utopia — 361 2. The Working Man’s Paradise — 362 3. Village Settlements in Victoria — 365 4. The Pitt Town Settlement in New South Wales — 367 5. Spiritual Ideals and Generous Virtues — 372 d. ruskin as companion — 374 endnotes for chapter five — 376 EPILOGUE — 383 1. The Light of the World, 1906 — 383 2. The Dinner Party — 394 endnotes for epilogue — 397

APPENDIX — 401

BIBLIOGRAPHY — 405 a. ruskin — 405 1 Books by Ruskin — 405 2 Books on Ruskin — 406 b. social history — 411 1 Contemorary Australian Social Periodicals — 411 2 Contemporary Foreign Social Periodicals — 412 3. Contemporary Australian Newspapers — 413 4. Government Publications on Australian Social History — 414 5. Archival Sources for Australian Social History — 415 6. Contemporary Australian Poetry and Prose — 417 7. Stories by Ruskin in Contemporary Australian Schoolbooks — 418 8. Books on Social History — 418 9. Journals on Social History — 424 c. architectural history — 425 1. Contemporary Australian Journals — 425 2. Contemporary Foreign Architectural Journals — 431 3. Archival Sources for Australian Architectural History — 431 4. Books on Architectural History — 432 5. Journals on Australian Architectural History — 435 d. labour history — 436 1. Contemporary Australian Labour Periodicals — 436 2. Archival Sources for Australian Labour History — 436 3. Books on Labour History — 437 4. Journals on Australian Labour History — 439 e. feminist history — 440 1. Contemporary Australian Feminist Periodicals — 440 2. Archival Sources for Australian Feminist History — 440 3. Books on Feminist History — 440 4. Journal Sources for Australian Feminist History — 444 LIST OF TABLES

CHAPTER ONE WHO READ RUSKIN?

table 1 Illiteracy Rates in Australia 1861–1901, as measured by entries in the Marriage Register — 7

table 2 Number of Post Office Deliveries in Australia, 1851–1901 —7

table 3 Number of Public Libraries in Australia by State — 8

table 4 Number of Ruskin Titles in Sydney Mechanics’ Institute, 1862–1901 — 13

table 5 Number of Ruskin Titles in New South Wales Mechanics’ Institutes, 1875–1910 — 15

APPENDIX

table 6 Arts and Crafts in Public Practice: The Vernon Office, 1895–1908 401—

table 7 Australian Careers of Principal Figures in the Vernon Office — 402

x LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

CHAPTER TWO RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE

POLYCHROMY IN SYDNEY figure 1 Exterior perspective for proposed building for Mutual Life Insurance Company, Sydney. Howard Joseland, architect, 1892, unbuilt — 57

figure 2 “Heidelberg”, Chatswood, Sydney. Architect and date unknown — 59

figure 3 North Annandale Public School, Annandale, Sydney. New South Wales Government Architect’s Branch, 1907 — 59

figure 4 All Saints Anglican Church, Petersham, Sydney. Benjamin Backhouse, architect, 1872 — 61

figure 5 House, 188 Forbes Street, Darlinghurst, Sydney. Benjamin Backhouse, architect, 1872 — 61

figure 6 Entrance, 188 Forbes Street, Darlinghurst, Sydney. Benjamin Backhouse, architect, 1872 — 63

figure 7 Illustration of polychromatic brickwork by G E Street, in Brick and Marble in the Middle Ages (1855) — 63

THOMAS ROWE figure 8 Nightingale Wing, Sydney Hospital, Macquarie Street, Sydney. Thomas Rowe, architect, 1869 — 67

figure 9 Entrance, St Joseph’s Catholic Church, Newtown, Sydney. Thomas Rowe, architect, 1869 — 69

figure 10 Capital detail, St Joseph’s Catholic Church, Newtown, Sydney. Thomas Rowe, architect, 1869 — 69

figure 11 Façade, former Primitive Methodist Church, Annandale, Sydney, 1891. (Stone carvings on façade transferred from premises of Henry Bull & Co, Pitt Street, Sydney, Thomas Rowe, architect, 1871) — 71

xi figures 12 & 13 Façade details, carvings of Australian fauna and flora, former Primitive Methodist Church, Annandale, Sydney — 71

figure 14 Shadow detail, former Primitive Methodist Church, Annandale, Sydney — 73

figure 15 Drawing of shadow detail, San Michele, Lucca by Ruskin (1845) — 73

figure 16 Interior perspective, Great Synagogue, Elizabeth Street, Sydney. Thomas Rowe, architect, 1878 — 75

figure 17 Exterior, Great Synagogue, Elizabeth Street, Sydney. Thomas Rowe, architect, 1878 — 75

figure 18 Entrance detail, main building, Newington College, Stanmore, Sydney. Thomas Rowe, architect, 1881 — 77

figure 19 Capital detail, carving of Australian flora, main building, Newington College, Stanmore, Sydney. Thomas Rowe, architect, 1881 — 77

figure 20 Oxford University Museum of Natural History, Oxford, England. Deane & Woodward, architects, 1855–1868 — 81

figure 21 Model of Newington College, Stanmore, Sydney. Thomas Rowe, architect, 1881 — 81

WILLIAM WARDELL figure 22 Queen Street façade, former E S & A Bank, Collins Street, Melbourne. William Wardell, architect, 1887 — 85

figure 23 Ducal palace, Venice, nineteenth century photograph — 85

figure 24 Interior ceiling detail, former E S & A Bank, Collins Street, Melbourne. William Wardell, architect, 1887 — 85

WILLIAM PITT figure 25 Rialto Building, Collins Street, Melbourne. William Pitt, architect, 1889 — 87

figure 26 Old Melbourne Stock Exchange, Collins Street, Melbourne. William Pitt, architect, 1891 — 89

xii figure 27 Olderfleet Building, Collins Street, Melbourne. William Pitt, architect, 1889 — 91

figure 28 Melbourne Safe Deposit Building, Collins Street, Melbourne. William Pitt, architect, 1890 — 91

VICTORIAN ECLECTICISM figure 29 Illustration of alternative elevations by James Fergusson, in Handbook of Architecture, 2nd edn (1859) — 95

figure 30 “Tudor House”, College Street, Drummoyne, Sydney. Architect unknown, 1897, demolished 1970 — 95

SYDNEY TECHNICAL COLLEGE figure 31 Exterior, main building, Sydney Technical College, Ultimo, Sydney. William Kemp, architect, 1892 — 107

figure 32 Exterior detail, polychromatic brick, main building, Sydney Technical College, Ultimo, Sydney. William Kemp, architect, 1892 — 107

figure 33 Façade detail, carving of Australian fauna (goanna), main building, Sydney Technical College, Ultimo, Sydney. William Kemp, architect, 1892 — 109

figures 34 & 35 Façade details, carvings of Australian fauna (possum and platypus), main building, Sydney Technical College, Ultimo, Sydney. William Kemp, architect, 1892 — 109

SYDNEY ARTS AND CRAFTS figure 36 “Hollowforth”, Kurraba Road, Neutral Bay, Sydney, nineteenth century photograph. Edward Jeaffreson Jackson, architect, 1892 — 111

figure 37 “Highlands”, Highlands Avenue, Waitara, Sydney. John Horbury Hunt, architect, 1893 — 111

NEW SOUTH WALES GOVERNMENT ARCHITECT’S OFFICE THE VERNON OFFICE AND THE CLASSICAL REVIVAL figure 38 & 39 Model of the exterior and drawing of the interior for proposed scheme for Houses of Parliament, Macquarie Street, Sydney — 115

xiii figure 40 Federation Pavilion, Centennial Park, Sydney. New South Wales Government Architect’s Branch, Walter Liberty Vernon, architect, 1901 — 117

figure 41 Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney. New South Wales Government Architect’s Branch, Walter Liberty Vernon, architect, 1909 — 117

NEW SOUTH WALES GOVERNMENT ARCHITECT’S OFFICE THE VERNON OFFICE AND THE ARTS AND CRAFTS figure 42 Old Engineering School, University of Sydney. New South Wales Government Architect’s Branch, John Barr, design architect (attributed), 1906 — 121

figure 43 Edwardian butterfly plan for Refreshment Kiosk, Hyde Park, Sydney. New South Wales Government Architect’s Branch, designer unknown, 1907 — 123

figure 44 Fire Station, Glebe, Sydney. New South Wales Government Architect’s Branch, 1907 — 123

figure 45 Façade detail, Fire Station, Darlinghurst, Sydney. New South Wales Government Architect’s Branch, 1910 — 125

figure 46 Burke Ward Public School, Broken Hill, New South Wales. New South Wales Government Architect’s Branch, Edward Jeaffreson Jackson, design architect, 1906 — 127

figure 47 Interior, “Harken Vale” woolshed, Blandford, New South Wales. Architect unknown, 1906 — 127

MELBOURNE ARTS AND CRAFTS figure 48 Elevations, Truby Williams House, Toorak, Melbourne. Butler and Bradshaw, architects, 1906 — 155

figure 49 House, Eaglemont, Victoria. Harold Desbrowe-Annear, architect, 1903 — 155

SYDNEY ARTS AND CRAFTS figures 50 & 51 Elevation and interior, Collins House, Hornsby, Sydney. Roscoe Collins, architect, c. 1905 — 159

figure 52 Gullett House, Wahroonga, Sydney. Edward Jeaffreson Jackson, architect, 1901 — 159

xiv figure 53 Exterior perspective, Fairfax House, Bellevue Hill, Sydney. M B Halligan, architect, c. 1905 — 161

figure 54 Exterior perspective, Royal Sydney Golf Club, Rose Bay, Sydney. M B Halligan, architect, 1908 — 161

JOHN BARLOW figure 55 Façade detail, St Canice’s Catholic Church, Sydney. John Barlow, architect, 1888 — 165

figure 56 Interior detail, St Canice’s Catholic Church, Sydney. John Barlow, architect, 1888 — 165

figure 57 Elevation, Ideal House project. John Barlow, architect, 1906 — 167

figure 58 Interior perspective, Ideal House project. John Barlow, architect, 1906 — 167

GEORGE SYDNEY JONES figure 59 Exterior perspective, “Bickley”, Strathfield, Sydney. George Sydney Jones, architect, 1894 — 171

figure 60 Exterior perspective, Ideal House project. George Sydney Jones, architect, 1906 — 171

JOHN HORBURY HUNT figure 61 Victoria House, premises for Farmer & Co, Pitt Street, Sydney. John Horbury Hunt, architect, 1874, demolished 1910 — 175

figure 62 Exterior perspective, City Markets project, Haymarket, Sydney. Thomas Sapsford, architect, early 1880s, unbuilt — 175

figure 63 “Booloominbah”, Armidale, New South Wales. John Horbury Hunt, architect, 1888 — 177

figure 64 Hamilton House, Moss Vale, New South Wales. John Horbury Hunt, architect, 1891 — 177

figure 65 West front, St Peter’s Cathedral, Armidale, New South Wales. John Horbury Hunt, architect, 1875 — 181

figure 66 Elevation, west front, St Peter’s Cathedral, Armidale, New South Wales. John Horbury Hunt, architect, 1875 — 183

xv figure 67 Detail, drawing of ornament and shadow, Cathedral of Lisieux, by Ruskin (1849) — 183

THE ARGUMENT FROM DRAWINGS figure 68 Tracing floor, York Minster, England, c. 1360 — 187

figure 69 Façade detail, Cathedral of St Lo, Normandy — 187

figure 70 The Vine Angle, Ducal Palace, Venice, 14th century — 189

figures 71 & 72 Working drawings, St Peter’s Cathedral, Armidale, NSW, John Horbury Hunt, architect, 1874 — 193

figure 73 Working drawing, St Peter’s Cathedral, Armidale, NSW, John Horbury Hunt, architect, 1874 — 195

figures 74 & 75 Elevations, Great Synagogue, Sydney, Thomas Rowe, architect, 1874 — 199

figures 76 & 77 Sections, Great Synagogue, Sydney, Thomas Rowe, architect, 1874 — 201

figures 78 & 79 Conservation work on the Great Synagogue, Sydney, Peter Phillips, architect, 2001 — 201

figures 80 & 81 Elevations, main building, Newington College, Stanmore, Thomas Rowe, architect, 1878 — 205

figures 82 & 83 Working drawings, St John’s College, University of Sydney, William Wardell, architect, 1861 — 207

figure 84 Detail, General Post Office, Sydney, James Barnet, architect, 1882 — 211

EPILOGUE THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD figure 85 William Holman Hunt’s painting The Light of the World (1851–1853). Engraving from original — 385

figure 86 The third version of The Light of the World, painted fifty years after the first, was the one that toured the world in 1905–1906 — 387

xvi INTRODUCTION

1. summary OF THESIS

John Ruskin knew little about Australia, but he was widely known, and widely read, in Australia in the late nineteenth century. This thesis examines the reception of his work in the period 1889– 1908; its emphasis is on the decades before and after Federation in 1901, when the Australian colonies were united by distance from England but little else. Against this background I explore two themes: what nineteenth century Australians made of Ruskin, and what we might make of nineteenth century Australia with Ruskin as our guide. The result is a more vivid picture of that unstable and perilous world, and Ruskin’s place in the search for social justice within it. My interest in Ruskin is as an early critic of modernism, and more specifically I am interested in the connection between his social and his artistic theories. Architecture is one such link, and so I have concentrated on how Ruskin was read by architects and social reformers. This core study is framed by an introductory examination of the patterns of colonial reading, and some conclusions regarding the roles Ruskin played for his Australian readers in this period. An immediate practical problem, faced by all writers on Ruskin, is the vast range of Ruskin’s interests, and in particular the impossibility of separating Ruskin’s thought into tidy chapters.1 Ruskin did not recognise the division of academic labour we take for granted today, which is why reading Ruskin on art leads to reading him on economics, or why reading him on architecture leads to thinking about politics, or reading him on geology leads to a discussion of ethics. He saw the world whole, as an indivisible unity made by God; it made no sense to dissect it by the artificial methods of science. Writing about Ruskin on one point thus leads inevitably to writing about him on many others. The nineteenth century verdict on Ruskin was that he was “not consecutive”, but his method, discursive and digressive at worst, brilliantly insightful at best, is now recognised as an early example of interdisciplinary thinking. Thus to follow Ruskin’s trail in Australia, even in the limited way described above, I have had to use Ruskin’s own methods, drawing on multiple fields in a single text. In

INTRODUCTION xvii my examination of how Australians read Ruskin I have used material from social history, architectural history, labour history, and feminist history. What I offer here are the insights reading across these disciplines brings.

2. TRENDS IN RUSKIN SCHOLARSHIP

This thesis takes its place in the quickening stream of writing about Ruskin a century after his death. Reviewing this literature, several aspects of Ruskin’s thought appear little examined.2 Three areas in particular suggest themselves for attention. While Ruskin’s relationship with modernity has recently been examined, scholars have concentrated on Ruskin as a proto-modernist, especially in regard to literary figures such as Eliot, Joyce and Pound, and to some extent to his relationship to architects such as Sullivan, Wright and Le Corbusier. In contrast my own interest in Ruskin has been in his opposition to modernity, the “mad dog creed” he saw possessing all around him. This critique is more than the blind refusal to acknowledge the benefits of industrialism, the standard line on Ruskin’s social thinking for 150 years, and is worth revisiting in detail. Related to this is Ruskin’s writing on nature, and the urgent environmental issues of today suggest that Ruskin’s anticipations of the consequences of modernity may have been more prescient than would have been acknowledged even forty years ago. Lastly I think there is considerable work to be done on Ruskin’s influence abroad, and this in particular is the gap this thesis tries to fill for one part of the world at the end of the nineteenth century.

3. RUSKIN SCHOLARSHIP in australia

There are scattered mentions of Ruskin in the existing architectural literature, but these belie the considerable interest Australian scholars have taken in Ruskin over the past twenty years.3 Most of this work has addressed various aspects of Ruskin’s thought without reference to Australia: for example Peter Kohane has described the different perspectives of Fergusson, Cockerell and Ruskin on architecture, labour and the human body;4 John Macarthur has discussed notions of sympathy and disgust in Ruskin’s aesthetics;5 Karen Burns has

xviii considered notions of tourism and photography in the Stones of Venice;6 John Moore and Michael Ostwald have written on Ruskin and St Mark’s and the sources of delight in the Lamp of Sacrifice;7 and Anuradha Chatterjee has investigated notions of the feminine in Ruskin’s theory of architecture.8 Considering the literature on Ruskin and Australian architecture, some scholars have mentioned Ruskin in passing while discussing other figures: Katrina Place has written about the Melbourne career of the Arts and Crafts architect Walter Butler, but though she mentions Ruskin briefly, she places more weight on the influence of William Morris;9 Ursula De Jong, an authority on the architect William Wardell, refers to Wardell’s interest in Ruskin as well as in G G Scott and G E Street;10 Anne Neale mentions Ruskin briefly in her discussion of Edward LaTrobe Bateman;11 and that a fuller investigation of Bernard Hall’s archives might be rewarding is suggested by a recent paper by Gwenyth Rankin.12 Deborah van der Plaat has written extensively on William Lethaby, and some of this work mentions Australia, in particular her finding that Walter Burley Griffin andM arion Mahony Griffin took a number of ideas from Lethaby in the planning of Canberra.13 It is odd that Harriet Edquist, the leading authority on the Arts and Crafts movement in Australian architecture, has so little to say about Ruskin. He is mentioned in her biography of Harold Desbrowe-Annear, but Ruskin barely appears in her definitive study Pioneers of Modernism: the Arts and Crafts Movement in Australia (2008); he is dismissed in one paragraph as one of the theoretical founders of the movement with A W N Pugin. William Morris and Phillip Webb are noticed, but only later figures like Voysey, Baillie Scott and John Sulman get a fuller discussion. Nevertheless any study of this period in Australian architecture must begin with her work.14 The only unequivocal study I found that focuses on Ruskin and Australian architecture is a short paper by Brigid Cassidy that traces Ruskin’s influence in some Melbourne buildings built at the height of the boom.15 Cassidy discusses the work of William Pitt and William Wardell in designing some distinctive examples of commercial Venetian Gothic, with clear Ruskinian touches, in such buildings as the Rialto, the Melbourne Stock Exchange and the E S & A Bank in the period 1883–1890. But the work surveyed here does not exhaust the discussion of Ruskin’s influence on Australian architecture, and I explore this further in Chapter Two.

INTRODUCTION xix 4. methodology

My original intention had been to write about Ruskin and Australian architecture in the nineteenth century. But the standard histories, though they might occasionally mention him, had little to say about Ruskin. Was he therefore invisible? Unimportant? This seemed unlikely – Ruskin was the greatest art critic of Victorian England, with decided views on architecture, and Australians tended to follow English opinion in such matters. This suggested further investigation, but existing indexes and catalogues proved no help when I began. Thinking about Ruskin’s reputation, and the problem of how to reconstruct something so ephemeral at the distance of a century, led to one answer. I went to look at Ruskin’s Australian obituaries, and I found over thirty. Ruskin’s death was announced within two days in the colonial capitals, and within two weeks in major provincial centres. The death notices told me that Australians in 1900 clearly knew who Ruskin was, and that thoughtful ones had mourned his passing, and had something to say about him. The obituaries also showed me that interest in Ruskin was not confined to a professional or even a middle class readership; in fact the longest and warmest notices were in the labour press. Curious, I followed Ruskin’s trail through the nineteenth century newspaper world. The labour obituaries suggested looking for evidence of Ruskin’s influence on the early Australian labour movement, and posed the question of Ruskin’s possible role as a mentor for Australian reformers. One reason the 1890s in Australia have attracted so much scholarly attention is because reformers were in plentiful supply – anarchists, socialists, Single Taxers, temperance bodies, and suffragists all competed for public attention. I chose two such groups, feminists and utopians, to add to my original two, because these four groups – architects, labour men, feminists and utopians - correspond with the evolution of Ruskin’s social thought, from the Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) through Unto This Last (1862) to Of Queen’s Gardens (1865) and Fors Clavigera (1878 onwards). While each of these groups had been written about before, there was nothing on their connection with Ruskin, and even more importantly, very little on the connections between them, though overlapping interests and personalities clearly existed. This approach suggested there might be something new to say.

xx Looking at the influence of Ruskin within these groups, and the connections between them, gave me many leads. Architecture and Labour gave me the idea of writing about the Sydney building world, while Architecture and Utopianism gave me the Pitt Town experiment and Benjamin Backhouse, and Architecture and Feminism gave me the idea of writing about the home. Architecture and Reading pointed me towards the earliest architecture critics such as James Green and E Wilson Dobbs, while Reading and Feminism led me to the feminist journalists Louisa Lawson and Maybanke Anderson. Reading and Utopianism led me to progressive reading lists that were headed by Edward Bellamy and Henry George but always included Ruskin. The advantages of this method were the connections it threw up and the lacunae it identified.16 The disadvantages are obvious too : a broad approach meant a constant effort to keep the writing under control and to avoid digression, issues Ruskin struggled with himself. To keep an expanding thesis to a manageable length, I thus had to set severe limits to its scope, not only in time but in space. I have studied the way Ruskin was read in the two most populous colonies only, New South Wales and Victoria. That there is more to be found in Tasmania, where there is an important link with A W N Pugin, or in South Australia, with its links to the William Morris firm, I do not doubt. Queensland at this time, despite its small population, was at the forefront of political change in Australia, but it too must await treatment elsewhere. I also had to set limits to the aspects of Ruskin that I examine. He was the greatest art critic of Victorian England, but I have reluctantly had to set aside a study of Ruskin and Australian art; there are sporadic mentions in what follows, but this remains to be discussed by others. I do not look at his religious thought, essential to understanding his work, except as it helps to explain his reception by the early labour movement. Similarly Ruskin’s lifelong devotion to the study of Nature, worth a thesis by itself, goes unexamined here. Ruskin mentions in the Australian press increase throughout the 1880s, in line with Tim Hilton and Brian Maidment’s conclusion that the 1890s were the peak of Ruskin popularity while he was alive, a kind of critical mass fuelled by the increasing availability of his books in cheap editions. So I have started my account in 1889, at the peak of the post-gold rush boom, and continued it through the economic disasters of the 1890s and the debates

INTRODUCTION xxi that led to Federation. Ruskin’s death in 1900 suggested a natural end point, but I thought I should consider the immediate afterlife of his reputation; in British histories this extends to 1914 and the First World War, but I chose to stop my account in 1908 because it was clear by then that Ruskin’s influence was on the wane, not only in architecture. Altogether this gave me a time frame that roughly comprised the decades either side of Federation in 1901, a time of great social and intellectual ferment, in which reading Ruskin played its part for Australian reformers. Having established the scope of my investigation, I used three main sources to write my account. For each group I examined I began with a survey of the secondary literature; I then read the periodical press for that group; and then a variety of other sources particular to the group. As far as the secondary literature goes, while I could not hope to master four such diverse areas in one thesis, I read as deeply as I could, until I came to the archives (and even there I went in a little way, in the architecture chapter) or to controversies only a specialist could adjudicate. Nonetheless I tried to use new sources, new illustrations, and unfamiliar references wherever I could, always looking for Ruskin, and looking for connections. After this I read a sample of the specialist press for each group. One of the greatest critics of the Victorian period, G M Young, said in Portrait of an Age (1936) that “history is the history of opinion”, and argued that “the real, central theme of History is not what happened, but what people felt about it when it was happening”.17 Nowhere is nineteenth century opinion better represented than in the periodical press, a rich source in Australia as well. Because I wanted to address what Australians of the nineteenth century thought about Ruskin in their own words, I have made full use of this material. The modern investigator is first delighted to discover how large and how vital this ephemeral material is, then dismayed to discover how few guides exist to this uncharted territory. Thus all students of colonial Australia owe a considerable debt to Lurline Stuart’s Nineteenth Century Australian Periodicals (1979) and H J Gibbney’s Labor in Print (1975), as well as to the anonymous makers of such indexes of newspapers, magazines and trade journals as there are. The periodical sources had their disadvantages too. Journalistic inaccuracy and bias were not the greatest problems I found; these faults were easy to see and, as long as I did

xxii not rely solely on any one such account, easy to correct for. Such problems were superseded by the inaccessibility of many of the titles I wanted, particularly for the reform press. Refreshing and insightful as these dissenting voices could be, publication would cease at just the wrong moment, or libraries would have incomplete runs, or they would be available only on poor microfilm copies. A second major problem was attributing the pieces I found to the journal, or writer, in question: the nineteenth century convention of anonymous journalism could mask the source of many a useful piece, and even its national origin, so I had to tread carefully.18 Following the periodical press, I then looked at specific sources for each of my four groups. I would try and read, as G M Young recommended, “until I could hear the people talking”.19 This meant including imaginative writing in several instances: the stories of Henry Lawson, Joseph Furphy and Barbara Baynton are still our best guides to the emotional world of late nineteenth century Australia, while the feminist utopian fiction I consider in Chapter Four brings the hopes of Australian feminists of the time vividly alive. This is not a poetry thesis, but I have also made some use of the poetry of the time, especially from working class sources. While much of this, as its compilers point out, belongs in anthologies of Worst Australian Poetry, its extent is remarkable; and though its quality is variable the insights it offers, and the colour it gives to dry discussions of theory, enrich any discussion of nineteenth century Australia, and so I have included it here. My thesis thus became an interdisciplinary project, though I didn’t realise it at the time. The Australian historian Greg Dening writes about the importance of “the other side of the beach”, which in his work means including the experiences of indigenous peoples in writing the history of European settlement in the Pacific; this is also a metaphor for including a wider range of responses in any historical account.20 It is also in the spirit of Ruskin himself, the great interdisciplinary thinker of the Victorian age. As critics such as John Rosenberg have long pointed out, “the wonder of Ruskin is both his disorder and one-ness – the triumph of a unified vision over an often divided and ravaged mind”.21 The French critic Robert de la Sizeranne spoke a century ago of Ruskin’s “marvellous maze” which we enter willingly, because “although the whole is confused, each particular idea to be distinguished therein shows clearer

INTRODUCTION xxiii and sharper cut than in any ordinary treatise”.22 Similarly Elizabeth Helsinger, writing of Ruskin’s Fors Clavigera letters, remarks on “the still looser and often more whimsical links between subjects in any single number of Fors”; for her tracing these links “is as stimulating an exercise in active reading as Ruskin ever designed”.23 Helsinger here summarises Ruskin’s approach neatly: it is deliberate (“designed”), uses a clear method (“active reading”) in pursuit of a definite goal (“tracing links”) with a positive result (“stimulating”). Robert Hewison makes the most important point when he describes Ruskin’s “all-consuming mental appetite”, which, though it sometimes:

overwhelms the line of argument in a wealth of details and associations [is also] the distinctive quality that makes reading him rewarding. It is precisely his refusal to distinguish between the normally accepted divisions and compartments of thought – aesthetic, ethical, social, economic, philosophical and personal - that is the source of his most important insights.24

This brings the discussion of my approach full circle. The “distinctively political art of Architecture” is the point around which this discussion revolves, for Ruskin’s theory of architecture became a social theory of how to achieve a just society as well: in The Flamboyant Architecture of the Somme (1869) Ruskin wrote that “We shall never make our houses for the rich beautiful, till we have begun by making our houses for the poor beautiful.” 25 Architecture was not only a means but a metaphor for the just society Ruskin sought, telling his readers that “You must not build for pleasure in front of the house, while there is despair at the back of it”. 26 Such a view was as controversial then as it is now, as an early architectural reader of the Stones of Venice (1851) perceived, warning readers that “Ruskinism is violently inimical to sundry existing interests”. To his biographer W G Collingwood “A more comprehensive answer to Mr Ruskin’s critics was never given”.27 As for feminists, labour leaders and utopians being irrelevant to the understanding of architecture, Ruskin explained in an 1882 lecture on Cistercian architecture that: Those who knew his writings would know that to him “the stones of Citeaux” would be interesting only as they expressed the minds and souls of their builders, and so it ought not to surprise some of his hearers to find a lecture by him on “Cistercian Architecture” dealing mainly with the Cistercians themselves.28

Cistercians, yes, and Australians too.

xxiv Thus an important point to make is that my thesis is a first map of some uncharted territory. As such it is necessarily incomplete, and often suggestive where I would wish it definitive. Peter Novick faced the same problem in writing his account of the American historical profession, concluding “in casting my net as widely as I have, in exploring so many complex interactions, I have inevitably raised more questions than I have answered. This is as it should be in a work which attempts to open rather than close a subject”. The boundaries I have drawn for my topic out of practical necessity exclude many things essential to a full understanding of Ruskin’s reception in Australia, and I hope that other scholars will address these topics in due course. Following Novick, my aim has been to “stimulate others to inquire into areas on which I have touched lightly, and to reconsider and revise my conclusions”.29 In writing this thesis I have found more than once that my thinking has been anticipated by Bernard Smith (b 1916), the most distinguished art critic of his generation in Australia. A youthful reader of Ruskin and Morris, his conception of the critic as advocate owes much to Ruskin: in a paper from 1964 he writes “criticism at its best … is … a kind of advocacy, a faith in certain artists or kinds of art, the desire to help win a public towards a new vision, a new way of seeing”.30 What Smith wants his readers to see in the visible world are the social connections as well as the artistic ones. A century before Ruskin had similarly spoken of the importance of cultivating the power of sight: “on my word, we should soon make it a different world, if we could get a little – ever so little – of the dervish’s ointment in the Arabian Nights, not to show us the treasures of the earth, but the facts of it”.31 Ruskin saw no conflict between the roles of art critic and social critic, and neither did Smith; and this link is a major point of departure for this thesis. The English critic is Peter Fuller (1947–1990), who was a prominent figure in the upsurge of critical interest in Ruskin in the 1980s. Fuller had a personal interest in Australia: he visited it several times, and met his future wife here. Before his untimely death in 1990 he had written of the importance of Australian landscape painting to any true history of late modern art, and his ideas about art and post-industrialism owed something to his Australian experiences.32 In his Ruskin lecture, repeated in various forms throughout the decade, Fuller argued that “what [Ruskin] says, and the way he says it, is all of a piece – that kind of unity

INTRODUCTION xxv in profusion and contradiction which one finds in the Gothic cathedrals whose beauties he did so much to popularise”.33 This idea, of the search for unity in diversity, is also a point this thesis seeks to make about Australia in the years immediately before and after Federation. In Fuller’s full-length study of Ruskin, he sets out to redress the modernist dismissal of Ruskin’s views on work and architecture. It is no accident that Fuller’s book is entitled Theoria, since Fuller recognised the importance this idea, derived from Aristotle, had for Ruskin. Aristotle definestheoria as the faculty of contemplation, “which surpasses all other activities in blessedness”, such as overt deeds (prattein) or productivity (poiein); among human activities it is the closest to God, and therefore to perfect happiness.34 The pursuit of happiness is famously a right enshrined in another constitution, and this quest underlies the account I give here of Australia in the late nineteenth century.

5. “A RUDDERLESS DEMOCRACY”

We are all walking along the shelving edge of a precipice; any one of us may go at any moment, or be dragged down by another. And this is as it ought to be.

Tom Collins, Such Is Life, 1902

The period I examine here, with Ruskin’s help, is one of the most vital in the short history of European Australia. In 1889 Australia was still a loose collection of English colonies, groping towards self-government; the first stirrings towards some kind of federation were still five years away. There was little sense that colonial governments were in control of their own destiny, particularly in economics. Australia at this point was a laissez-faire society, marked by booms and busts; the eighties are boom years, but the nineties are a spectacular bust, marked by bank failures and devastating droughts. In The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, one of the best novels to be set in this period, H H Richardson shows how mining shares make her hero’s fortune and embezzlement destroys it.35 The speculative frenzy of the eighties affects governments as well as individuals: public debt rises five hundred per cent in twenty years, the interest being met with further loans; prominent members of the colonial legislatures are personally implicated in the rash of financial scandals that follow the inevitable collapse. Men who succeed in this atmosphere

xxvi are grudgingly admired, no matter what their crimes: “He’s had thousands of mine,” said one observer when a prominent speculator was led from court, “but I could cry to see such an ending to such a man”.36 An unfriendly visitor described Australia in 1892 as a “rudderless democracy”, but he was not only referring to financial instability.37 There were sharp debates over Free Trade versus Protection, Chinese immigration, the role of government, and over Federation itself. Men looked for direction wherever they could find it, and as historians of the period have shown, the political ferment and economic uncertainty drove a quest for answers that affected everyone except the most indolent. If the Australians of the eighties and nineties sought direction, they also sought the basis for unity. Ruskin’s objections to a laissez-faire society, as no society at all, put him at odds with prevailing economic and political opinion in England; his famous denunciation of the division of labour, that it is not the labour that is divided but the man, follows from this. For R H Tawney what Ruskin recognised was the moral unity of the world, in which art and industry were “not specialisms, but the expression in different forms of the faith which rules in men’s minds”.38 The quest for unity, not only of the political kind symbolised by Federation, is also a marked feature of Australian life in this period. As a friendlier visitor, Josiah Royce of Harvard, said in 1891:

This vast, weird continent, where nature is the most primitive and unexpected in her desolation and barbarism, is fast filling with men whose thoughts are daily fuller of elaborate political schemes and social theories … TheA ustralian leader is nowadays thinking … of nothing so much as of some new social tie by which he may persuade the population to bind itself.39

Thus unity in diversity, Ruskin’s own quest throughout his long life, is also a quest that marks the groups I study here: ordinary readers, architects trying to build a New Jerusalem, working men seeking a new order of things, and suffragists seeking a wider sphere.

6. “THE ORDER OF THINGS”

What we learn about Australia with Ruskin as our guide is that it was not a foregone conclusion that Australia would turn out to be a prosperous middle class society a century

INTRODUCTION xxvii later. Seen from below, the Australia of the late nineteenth century was more isolated, and its ordinary people more desperate and more vulnerable, than is usually acknowledged. It was a very unstable world, where there was money to be made but little else; what that something else might be is Ruskin’s gift to his Australian readers. And there is another thing: the unity Ruskin sought throughout his life parallels the search for social unity in Australia, and this thesis will show how provisional that unity really was at the turn of the twentieth century. This thesis will also show how Ruskin’s work took its place is the catalogue of books read by ordinary readers hungry – it is not too strong a word – for direction and inspiration. It will show that architects and building workers both read Ruskin, but that they read different books and came to very different conclusions. And it will show how Australian suffragists, faced with Ruskin’s contradictory views on women, chose like their English and American counterparts to emphasise the good and ignore the bad. Of the many roles Ruskin was said to play in his lifetime, critic, teacher, guide, prophet, and more, this thesis will show that Ruskin was accepted in all of them here, but that one role was unique. Australians of the period did not want another master, and only one Australian, a farm worker in Victoria, ever joined the Guild of St George. But in their isolation and uncertainty Australians wanted companions, and for them Ruskin is a companion, often an unlikely or even a contradictory one, but a companion, as one writer said, “invigorating and ennobling in the highest degree”. Ruskin took little interest in Australia, but Australians took a great deal of interest in him at a crucial point in their history. Anthony Trollope famously said that Ruskin had taught no man or woman any useful lesson as to the conduct of life. The following chapters will show that, for some Australians at least, this was not so.40

7. “A GREAT ENGLISHMAN”

Ruskin died, in an influenza epidemic, on 20 January 1900. His death was widely reported in Australia, in both the metropolitan and the provincial press, and there were follow-up mentions in magazines and journals for two or three months afterwards. The death notices are interesting on many levels – for what they said, for what they did not say, for who

xxviii wrote them and who did not. Collectively they give us a snapshot of Ruskin’s reputation in Australia at the end of his long life. To The Australasian, Ruskin was the son of a wealthy wine merchant “who left his boy so well off that he was placed beyond the necessity of working for his living [and] devoted himself to art”.41 To the Melbourne Argus, Ruskin was a famous writer and art critic, a “master of English style, largely at war with the spirit of his times”, a man of “extraordinary temperament [who] abhorred the smoke and the noise and the bustle which typify the modern commercial England”.42 To The Bendigo Advertiser, Ruskin was “one of the foremost men of his time” whose writings on art had “so important an influence, not merely on the English school of painting, but on the formation of public taste”. Its readers learned that Ruskin was a “popular and widely-read writer” whose work was “distinguished by a remarkable purity of language [with a] graceful style and classic English”. Despite being primarily an art critic, Ruskin had “strayed into other fields” which included writing stories for children and conducting a controversy with the Bishop of Manchester on usury.43 To The Sydney Morning Herald Ruskin was “one of the greatest art critics of the century” with “a wonderful power of the music of language, and a rare power of describing the varying impressions of scenery”. His social interests were reflected in theFors Clavigera letters, which were “very discursive, and contain delightful bits of autobiography, art criticism, science, history, and almost everything”.44 Many obituaries referred to his humanity and religious feeling, though the mainstream Protestant papers like The Anglican and The Protestant Banner conspicuously ignored his death. The Nonconformist, specificallyM ethodist, ones did not, especially The Leader, which compared Ruskin to another recently-deceased great man, the American evangelist Dwight Moody:

The theme of each was identical. Both lived and worked for the love of righteousness … Where one thousand people know Ruskin, ten thousand are moved by the name of Moody. Yet the former lives in and influences circles that never heard of the latter … Moody and Ruskin were human channels, well worn by God in His operations through them … Their characters abide with us, and will yet influence many thousands.45

Surprisingly, given Ruskin’s early Protestant bigotry, the Catholic papers were equally sympathetic. The Freeman’s Journal described him as “that great apostle of culture in its highest

INTRODUCTION xxix secular form”, and, perhaps even more surprisingly, compared him to Cardinal Newman. Both had the courage of their convictions and treated difficulties with contempt, and “what Newman endeavoured to do through the heart of his generation Ruskin endeavoured to do through the senses of his [but] while Newman gave practical evidence … Ruskin was theoretical and visionary”. Both had made the world better for their presence, Ruskin by his preaching of the beauty of Nature.46 Some obituaries however sounded a note of realism amidst the praise. In the Brisbane Courier Mail we read that “the works on which his fame rests were written many years ago”,47 while to The Freeman’s Journal Ruskin’s death was not unexpected, since “the weight of over eighty years had for some time past told of death from the head downwards”.48 The obituaries, read together, offer a full and largely sympathetic account of Ruskin’s life and work. His troubled personal life was treated with respect: the Melbourne Age wrote that “it cannot be doubted that his tortured and pensive mind sought to derive consolation in the aesthetic studies, which probably saved him from a confirmed melancholia … His domestic life was unhappy, and the melancholy cast thus given to his mind frequently manifests itself in his works”.49 The Sydney tabloid Truth reported that “Ruskin found that he could not perform his marital obligations, hence he unselfishly proposed and brought about [his] divorce. Delicacy forbids us to enlarge on the episode, but let it be clearly understood that, instead of in any way detracting from his character, it illustrates his unstained honor and pureness of life”.50 For another paper Ruskin’s charity was boundless. “ ‘Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends,’ says the Christian scriptures. But John Ruskin showed greater love when he gave his wife to a friend, crushing his heart and abasing his pride so that others might not suffer”.51 But by far the warmest tributes came from the labour press. A front page story in the Sydney Worker headlined A GREAT ENGLISHMAN said: If it be greatness to influence mankind for good and to leave the world distinctly bettered by one’s life, the greatest Englishman has gone. John Ruskin … has long outlived his physical and mental vigors, but the simple and eloquent English in which he poured out the purest and most fearless thoughts will doubtless be among the active forces of human progress when the name of Ruskin is forgotten, even when England itself has sunken again under the sea.

xxx It says something for our common humanity that this trenchant critic of what man does and sweet-voiced pleader for what man ought to do won in his life the esteem of every class wherever the language is spoken … the master, to whom rich and poor, cultured and uncultured, alike were living, breathing, yearning human souls … In his old age, the affectionate regard of a whole world has united to remember only that even through his errors shone the glow of a ceaseless faith in the justice of God and the future of man … As a scholar, Ruskin ranked with the highest; as an art critic, his fame stands alone. As a writer, he is in the foremost rank; as a teacher, no Englishman has ever compared with him.52

This paragon, The Worker concluded, was one of us – of common birth. By comparison The Charters Towers Mining Standard acknowledged Ruskin’s middle class background but thought that the Ruskins had “all the virtues of their rank and were remarkably free from its vices”. For this paper “radicalism was the essence of his doctrines, while he acknow­ledged to having communistic tendencies of no uncertain color … Ruskin may not have been the greatest man of his century, but he is the greatest amongst those who form an environment in which the greatest men find opportunity to do their grandest work”.53 Truth, whose editor was the notorious John Norton, was unusually charitable:

Above all, Ruskin was a reformer, and consequently an epoch maker. At first a reformer of Art, later on a reformer of religion, and last, but not least, a great social reformer … In all his work as well as in his life, the artistic and social elements cannot be separated.54

The Brisbane Worker was the warmest of all: “By the death of John Ruskin the world has lost a mighty intellectual force, and labour one of its most philosophic champions. His early literary endeavours simply staggered the Conservative classes”. Ruskin was a modern Plato, whose “lofty morality [is] a reproach to bishopdom. He lashes the hypocrite and scourges the oppressor; meanness and injustice fall back from his terrific onslaught”. Ruskin was, the Worker concluded, a “true philosopher; mighty poet without the name; prophet, too; not a visionary, but one who sees the very truth. A great teacher [whose] brilliant and powerful language [was] the fitting conductor of original and valuable thought”.55

INTRODUCTION xxxi Ruskin was a great writer for most people, but his writing presented a problem to several obituarists:

As a writer Mr Ruskin, like most men full of their subject, frequently falls into the fault of prolixity, enlivened, it is true, by sparkling gems of thought, and by passages among the finest in the English language. [Despite this] it cannot be denied that Mr Ruskin was occasionally betrayed into writing egregious nonsense. Mr Ruskin could not only land with effect but condemn with vigor, as is proved by his denunciation of Mr Whistler.56

Similarly the Sydney Bulletin: Ruskin wrote rhetorically, oratorically: his prose style is too continually in the clouds where his head was. The energy of it is remarkable; the beauty of it is sometimes remarkable; it is frequently turgid, and its artifices are monotonous. Every intelligent reader of Ruskin must pine for a diminished torrent, and a greatly-diminished spout.57

Almost all obituaries agreed on his eminence as an art critic, though the Brisbane Courier Mail had doubts: “the authority of Ruskin as an art critic has been considerably shaken of late years. A numerous host of once-devout believers in his theories on that subject have become sceptical and scoffing. It has even been questionable whether the apostle himself had preserved his original creed intact”.58 But serious divisions appeared when it came to his social interests:

The sympathies of his gentle and philanthropic disposition were democratic, and he had greatly at heart the elevation of the working-classes, to which end was devoted Fors Clavigera, a curious and piquant serial, in the form of letters to working-men, and more particularly the working-men of Sheffield, from whom he expected better results than were derived from the Oxford undergraduates … It was through a fear that in the rush of modern life too little account was taken of the feebler brothers who fell by the way that Ruskin uttered many of those indignant protests which hard matter-of-fact people were so apt to laugh at as foolish attempts to clog the wheels of modern progress.59

And the conservative Brisbane Courier Mail continued: In Ruskin the artist and the humanitarian were almost equally balanced from the beginning, while in his latter years the enthusiasm of the social reformer eclipsed all other feelings, and led a fine spirit into strange paths of effort and sloughs of futility … To many of his readers the writings of Ruskin, when in the first flush of this new fervor, before the hopelessness of

xxxii one man’s best endeavor became apparent to him, and his enthusiasm wasted itself in mere formless rebellion against existing things, seems the best work of his genius.60

The sharpest and most cogent obituary was written by the literary critic of The Bulletin, A G Stephens – the only signed obituary I found.61 This is worth quoting at length:

His head was always in the clouds, like his writing … a literary Gladstone, an aesthetic Whitefield – a vast wave of emotion which dashed suddenly upon you from a vague expanse, retreated, and then lost itself in the expanse again. The wave had no particular intellectual reason or justification: its cause was as obscure as its consequences; but it made a furious noise, shone with prismatic colours in the sunshine, and, in a general way of speaking, was an impressive natural object.

Stephens thought that most of Ruskin’s work was “imaginative gibberish”, though he was prepared to make exceptions: “when his theories did not come in the way [Ruskin] was a shrewd critic of art, and he was for a long time the chief appreciator of art in England. The emotion he felt he could often give”. But Stephens did not pull any punches in his conclusion:

Nobody nowadays pays any intellectual attention to Ruskin. He was a fine emotional force in his day and generation: for emotional people he is still an emotional force. But intellectually he does not count: he never did count. How was it possible that Ruskin should count? He referred everything to the Glory of God. That was the end of all art, the aim of all human effort. Ruskin did not know what God is, or the glory of God. All that he could do was to marry the Hebrew Scriptures with a Turner sunset and decide that the Glory of God was the offspring. Then he described the offspring in an ecstasy of sonorous alliterations, and invited you to worship. You might worship; but you were doubtfully convinced.

For Stephens and the Bulletin, the Ruskin wave had spent itself; Ruskin was a “senile veteran”. Yet to the Brisbane Worker, and many others, he was a “mighty poet without the name”, and even the Sydney Daily Telegraph thought he was “one of the most gifted and kindly natures that ever tenanted a feeble body”.62 In the pages that follow I explore some of these contradictions in more detail.

INTRODUCTION xxxiii 8. OVERVIEW OF THESIS

In Chapter One, I trace how Ruskin’s ideas spread through the Australian colonies in the second half of the nineteenth century, a period which coincides with the establishment of state education, public libraries, universities and art galleries. Ruskin’s ideas are carried by disciples and proselytisers but above all by his books; therefore I make use of surveys of literacy, reading habits and the book trade, and I follow these by a consideration of the growth and importance of public libraries, especially the mechanics’ institutes, in making Ruskin’s ideas available to ordinary readers. In Chapter Two, I consider the use made of Ruskin’s ideas by Australian architects of the period, drawing on the professional press, especially the Building and Engineering Journal, the nearest Australian equivalent of the London Builder or Building News, as my sources. I also use Michael Brooks’ analysis of the different phases of Ruskin’s reception by British architects to make a comparison with developments in Australia. I argue here that more than his support for the adoption of any one style, Ruskin’s importance to Australian architecture is his use as an authority in the professionalization debates of the period. In Chapter Three, I make use of the labour press and labour memoirs, along with the reports of government inquiries and royal commissions, to consider how the early Australian labour movement made use of Ruskin’s work. I supplement this account with insights drawn from the imaginative literature of the period, both poetry and prose, and especially the work of Henry Lawson and Joseph Furphy; and I compare these results with those from surveys of the reading habits of ordinary Australians of the time. In Chapter Four, because of the status of Sesame and Lilies as Ruskin’s most popular book, I examine the reaction of the first wave of Australian feminists to his work, drawing on memoirs and the feminist press of the day, including The Dawn, Woman’s Voice, The Parthenon and the Woman’s Sphere, as well as essays on Ruskin by prominent women in other journals. In this chapter I use Ruskin to look at how some related topics were treated at the time, particularly notions of temperance, respectability, and especially the home.

xxxiv In Chapter Five, I conclude this study by reviewing Ruskin’s influence in Australia under three headings, Ruskin as protest, Ruskin as authority, and Ruskin as utopian. I discuss this last aspect in relation to the strong utopian stream in early Australian socialist thinking, manifested in the labour and feminist movements and in a number of experiments in founding self-supporting agrarian colonies in Victoria and New South Wales. The result is a fuller picture, seen from below, of the “order of things” in Australia on the eve of Federation in 1901. In an epilogue to this thesis I give an account of the reception in Australia in 1906 of Holman Hunt’s painting The Light of the World, sent on a global tour by its new owner to boost Imperial solidarity. I use this moment to review what happened to Ruskin’s reputation and ideas in Australia in the six years after his death, and to the search for unity in diversity among the four groups of readers considered here.

INTRODUCTION xxxv ENDNOTES FOR INTRODUCTION

1 see for example John D Rosenberg in his preface to The Darkening Glass: A Portrait of Ruskin’s Genius, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1963, pp. xi–xii. In Modern Painters V (1860) Ruskin told his readers “do not think that I am irreverently comparing great and small things. The system of the world is entirely one; small things and great are alike part of one mighty whole” (Modern Painters V, part IX, ch. XII, sec. 10). 2 The areas of Ruskin’s thought that have not received much attention recently are his views on science, nature, religion and, surprisingly, gender. The exceptions are as follows: on Ruskin and science, see Dinah Birch, “Ruskin and the Science of Proserpina”, in Robert Hewison (ed.), New Approaches to Ruskin, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1981, pp. 142–156, Anthony Lacy Gully, “Sermons in Stone: Ruskin and Geology”, in Susan Casteras and others, John Ruskin and the Victorian Eye, Harry Abrams, New York, 1993, pp. 158–183, Michael Wheeler (ed.), Time and Tide: Ruskin and Science, Pilkington Press, London, 1996, and Francis O’Gorman, “Ruskin’s Science of the 1870s: Science, Education, and the Nation”, in Dinah Birch (ed.), Ruskin and the Dawn of the Modern, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1999. On Ruskin and nature, see Raymond Fitch, The Poison Sky: Myth and Apocalypse in Ruskin, Ohio University Press, Athens, 1982, C Stephen Finley, Nature’s Covenant: Figures of Landscape in Ruskin, Penn State University Press, University Park, Penn., 1992, and Michael Wheeler, Ruskin and Environment: the Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1995. On Ruskin and ethics, see David M Craig, John Ruskin and the Ethics of Consumption, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, 2006. On Ruskin and religion, see Michael Wheeler, Ruskin’s God, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999, and Dinah Birch, “’Who Wants Authority?’”: Ruskin as a Dissenter”, in the Yearbook of English Studies, 1 January 2006. On Ruskin and gender, see Sharon Aronofsky Weltman, Ruskin’s Mythic Queen: Gender Subversion in Victorian Culture, Ohio University Press, Athens, 1998, Dinah Birch and Francis O’Gorman (eds), Ruskin and Gender, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2002, and Deborah Epstein Nord (ed.), Sesame and Lilies, Yale University Press, New Haven, Conn., 2002. On Ruskin abroad, a very unexplored area, see Roger B Stein, John Ruskin and Aesthetic Thought in America 1840–1900, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1967, and Linda S Ferber and William H Gerdts, The New Path: Ruskin and the American Pre-Raphaelites, Brooklyn Museum/ Schocken Books, Brooklyn, New York, 1985; and Edith Wharton’s brilliant short story “False Dawn”, in Wharton, Old New York, Four Novellas, Washington Square Press, New York, 1998 [originally published 1924]. Ruskin’s views of Italy are well known, as is Marinetti’s furious rejection of them in 1913, but there is no up to date account of his reception in Italy, apart from some hints in Toni Cerutti, Ruskin and the Twentieth Century, Edizioni Mercurio, Vercelli, 2000, and Giovanni Cianci and Peter Nicholls, Ruskin and Modernism, Palgrave, London, 2001, both drawn from a Ruskin conference at the University of Milan in 1997. In this connection see Mark Stiles, “Deplorable Ruskin and the Mad Dog Creed: John Ruskin and Filippo Marinetti on the Destruction of the Past”, in Adriano Cornoldi (ed.), Gli Interni nel Progetto sull’ Essistente, Universita IUAV di Venezia, Venice/ Il Poligrafo, Padova, 2007, pp. 43–46. The same applies to Germany: see Werner Oechslin (ed.), John Ruskin: Werk und Wirkung, gta Verlag, Zurich, and Gebr. Mann Verlag, Berlin, 2002, which collects papers from a German conference in 2000. There is no recent work on Ruskin’s reception elsewhere in Europe, particularly in France and Scandinavia. For France there is Jean Autret, Ruskin and the French Before Marcel Proust, Droz, Paris, 1965, and Marcel Proust, On Reading Ruskin, trans. Jean Autret, William Burford and Phillip Wolfe, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1987; and see Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, Ruskin and Viollet-le-Duc: Englishness and Frenchness in the Appreciation of Gothic Architecture, Thames & Hudson, London, 1969. Elsewhere in the world there is only Toshio Watanabe, Ruskin in Japan 1890–1940, Tokyo, 1997, and Masami Kimura, Japanese Interest in Ruskin: Some Historical Trends, in Robert Rhodes and Del Ivan Janik (eds),

xxxvi Endnotes for Introduction Studies in Ruskin: Essays in Honor of Van Ikin Burd, Ohio University Press, Athens, 1982. For India, and the influence readingUnto This Last had on the young Gandhi, see Zaheer Hasan, The Relevance of Ruskin and Gandhi, Shree, Delhi, 1985, Elisabeth McLaughlin, Ruskin and Gandhi, Bucknell University Press, Lewisburg, Penn., 1974, and Gandhi’s own Autobiography. 3 Some non-architectural theses on Ruskin by Australian scholars also exist: they include Shirley Richardson, The Political and Social Economy of John Ruskin, MLetters thesis, University of New England, 1988; J R Griffiths, Ruskin on Education, PhD thesis, University of Melbourne, 1991; Garry Heterick, Dethroning Jupiter: E M Forster’s Revision of John Ruskin, PhD thesis, Monash University, 1998; Ross Eddington, The Alterity of the Imagination: the effect of John Ruskin’s imaginative usage of classical sources on his participation within the politico-economic discourse, PhD thesis, University of Queensland, 1999; Patrick Rogers, John Ruskin’s Bitter Play: the critique of the modern in “Fors Clavigera”, PhD thesis, LaTrobe University, 1999. 4 Peter Kohane, Architecture, Labour and the Human Body: Fergusson, Cockerell and Ruskin, PhD thesis, University of Pennsylvania, 1993; Ruskin is also mentioned in Peter Kohane and Michael Hill, “Decorum in Architectural Theory, 15th–19th Century”,SAHANZ Conference Proceedings 2000, pp. 39–50. 5 John Macarthur, “The Heartlessness of the Picturesque:S ympathy and Disgust in Ruskin’s Aesthetics”, in Assemblage, October 1997, pp. 126–141. 6 Karen Burns, “Topographic Tourism: ‘Documentary’ Photography and the Stones of Venice”, Assemblage, October 1997, pp. 22–44; these ideas are further developed in her Urban Tourism 1851–53: Sightseeing, Representation, and the “Stones of Venice”, PhD thesis, University of Melbourne, 1999. 7 R John Moore and Michael J Ostwald, “The Lamp of Sacrifice: Sublime and Picturesque Delight”, SAHANZ Conference Proceedings 1998, pp. 263–268; ——, “The Transcendent Image: John Ruskin and St Mark’s”, SAHANZ 1999, pp. 241–246; ——, “Choral Dance: Ruskin and Daedalus”, Assemblage, October 1997, pp. 88–107; ——, “Ruskin and the Interdisciplinary Migration of Ideas”, in Stephen Cairns and Philip Goad, eds, Building Dwelling Drifting: Migrancy and the Limits of Architecture, University of Melbourne, 1997, pp. 230–235. R John Moore, “ ‘Sermons Out Of Stone’: John Ruskin’s Historical Method in the Stones of Venice”, SAHANZ 2000, pp. 489–498. 8 anuradha Chatterjee, “The Body of History in John Ruskin’s Theories”, SAHANZ 2003, pp. 56–61, “Dress as the Sexualised Limit of the Body: John Ruskin and the Walls of St Mark’s”, SAHANZ 2004, pp. 99–104, “John Ruskin’s ‘Wall Veil’: Celebrating the Dressed Body in Architecture”, SAHANZ 2005, pp. 73–78, “Ruskin and the Female Body: the Feminine as the Theoretical Precondition forA rchitecture”, Fabrications, June 2009, pp. 140–161, The Troubled Surface of Architecture: John Ruskin, the Human Body, and External Walls, PhD thesis, University of New South Wales, 2008. 9 Katrina Place, “An Englishman Abroad: the Arts and Crafts Gardens of Walter R Butler”, SAHANZ 1999, pp. 267–274, “Arts and Crafts Architects in Melbourne: Utopian and Practical”, SAHANZ 2000, pp. 517–526, Walter Richmond Butler: an English Arts and Crafts Architect in Australia, MArch thesis, University of Melbourne, 2002. 10 Ursula De Jong, “TheA rchitectural Legacy of William Wilkinson Wardell 1823–1899”, SAHANZ 1999, pp. 41–50. 11 anne Neale, “Decorative Art and Architecture: Owen Jones and Bateman in Australia”, SAHANZ 1998, pp. 269-276. 12 Gwenyth Rankin, “L Bernard Hall and the ‘Art’ of Architecture”, SAHANZ 2009. 13 Deborah van der Plaat, Architecture Mysticism and Myth (1891): William Lethaby and the Foundation of

INTRODUCTION xxxvii Syncretic Modernism, PhD thesis, University of New South Wales, 2000, p. 198; and see van der Plaat, “Desire Not Delight: William Lethaby’s Architecture Mysticism and Myth (1891)”, SAHANZ 1998, pp. 405–412, “Beyond Ruskin: Arnoldian Themes in Willam Lethaby’s Conception of Architecture”, SAHANZ 1999, pp. 359–366, “ ‘Would you know the new, you must search the old’: William Lethaby’s Architecture Mysticism and Myth (1891) and The Hyperotomachia Poliphil (1499)”, Fabrications, June 2002, pp. 1–26. More recently van der Plaat has begun to look at some of the figures mentioned in this thesis: see “Architectural Ignorance and Public Indifference: Harold Desbrowe-Annear’s Lecture on ‘Some Problems of Architectural Criticism’ (1893)”, Fabrications, June 2009, pp. 162–175. 14 Harriet Edquist, Harold Desbrowe-Annear: A Life in Architecture, Miegunyah Press, Melbourne, 2004; Pioneers of Modernism: the Arts and Crafts Movement in Australia, Miegunyah Press, Melbourne, 2008; also see her papers “TheA rts and CraftsM ovement and the Legacy of Nineteenth Century Theory on the Early Architecture of Harold Desbrowe-Annear”, SAHANZ 1999, pp. 57–64; “Harold Desbrowe-Annear, the Springthorpe Memorial and the Arts and Crafts Movement in Australia”, Fabrications, August 1999, pp. 62–78; “He Who Sleeps in Philae: Walter Butler’s Tomb for David Syme at Kew”, Fabrications, June 2003; “Celebrating the City: the Urban Architecture of Robert Haddon”, SAHANZ 2005. 15 Brigid Cassidy, “Venice in Melbourne: a Visual Examination of the Influence of Venice via John Ruskin”, in Heritage Australia, Spring 1989, pp. 17–18. 16 While there is a voluminous literature on Australian labour history, there was nothing on the building world in the manner of John Summerson or Brian Hanson, a gap I have tried to fill in Chapter Three. Important unions like the stonemasons lack a detailed history, and there is nothing in Australia to compare to the history of the British building trades written eighty years ago. The radical poet Francis Adams also deserves a more full-length study. Feminist history seems to have stopped being written. There are biographies of major figures like Rose Scott and Vida Goldstein but little or nothing on Jesse Ackermann (apart from her own work), Nellie Martel or Dora Montefiore, or on the connection between English, American and Australian feminism; or on the existence of a strong anti-suffrage movement among women during this period. As for architecture, the forthcoming Encyclopedia of Australian Architecture is forty years overdue. Perhaps then the nineteenth century might finally get some more attention, and Sydney architects like Roscoe Collins, E J Jackson, M B Halligan and Benjamin Backhouse receive fuller study. A detailed account of the Vernon Office that extends the story told in Chris Johnson’s Shaping Sydney (1999) would also be welcome. If we look for connections between these groups, we find even more gaps in the record: there are some hints in contemporary accounts that the relationship between progressive labour men and the early Australian suffragists was not always smooth, as I mention in Chapter Four, but there is no Australian study to match the English Equivocal Feminists (1996) by Karen Hunt. Similarly investigating the connection between reading and feminism suggests a more detailed study might be made of female reading habits in the nineteenth century, or of muckraking female journalists like Eliza Ashton, the “Faustine” of the Sydney Daily Telegraph in the 1890s. Architecture and socialism I have tried to deal with in Chapter Five, but there is more to be said; as for architecture and feminism, the full story of women in Australian architecture remains to be told, though Julie Willis and Bronwyn Hanna have made a beginning with Women Architects in Australia 1900–1950 (2001). But there is nothing so far on women as clients, following Alice Friedman in the USA, or critics, apart from Florence Taylor, or educators. There also seem to be no studies in the manner of Dolores Hayden of female preferences in housing, or of buildings specifically built for female users, from schools to hospitals to girls’ reformatories. 17 G M Young, Victorian England: Portrait of an Age, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1936, p. vi. 18 There is a vivid picture of a bush editor at work, cannibalising other papers to make up his own, in A“ n Australian Mining Township”, in All the Year Round, London, 22 February 1873, pp. 332–357, see p. 356.

xxxviii Endnotes for Introduction 19 young, Portrait of an Age, op cit, p. 136. 20 Greg Dening, Beach Crossings: Voyaging across Times, Cultures and Self, Miegunyah Press, Melbourne, 2004, p. 12. 21 John Rosenberg, The Darkening Glass: a Portrait of Ruskin’s Genius, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1963, p. xi. 22 Robert de la Sizeranne, Ruskin and the Religion of Beauty, George Allen, London, 1899, p. 75. 23 Elizabeth Helsinger, Ruskin and the Art of the Beholder, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass, 1982, p. 283. 24 Robert Hewison, John Ruskin: the Argument of the Eye, Thames & Hudson, London, 1976, p. 192. Ruskin valued insight above all else, which explains his remark in 1879 that “the feeblest myth is better than the strongest theory” (Deucalion, I, introduction). 25 Ruskin, Works, XIX, p. 266 26 ibid. 27 W G Collingwood, The Life and Work of John Ruskin, Riverside Press, Cambridge, 1894, p. 174. 28 Ruskin, Works, XXXIII, p. 227n. 29 Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1988, p.17. 30 Bernard Smith, “Art Criticism”, in The Critic as Advocate, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1989, pp. 184–188, see p. 184. 31 Ruskin, “Inaugural Address to the Cambridge School of Art, October 1858”, in Time and Tide, J M Dent & Sons, London, n.d. [1903?]. 32 The relevant Fuller titles here are The Australian Scapegoat: Towards an Antipodean Aesthetic, University of Western Australia Press, Nedlands, 1986, and Theoria: Art and the Absence of Grace, Chatto & Windus, London, 1988. After his death John McDonald edited a collection of his papers entitled Peter Fuller’s Modern Painters: Reflections on British Art, Methuen, London, 1993. See especially “The Ruskin Lecture”, pp. 3–20. 33 Fuller, “The Ruskin Lecture”, op. cit., p. 9. 34 aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book X, as translated by Philip Wheelwright in Aristotle, Odyssey Press, Indianapolis, 1951, p. 268, cited in Finley, op. cit., p. 201, note 16. 35 The best introductions to the economics of the period areM ichael Cannon, The Land Boomers, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2nd edn, 1967, and Edward Shann, An Economic History of Australia, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1930, especially ch. XVII. 36 Randolph Bedford, Naught to Thirty Three, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1976, p. 308 [originally published 1944]. 37 Charles Fairfield, “State Socialism in the Antipodes”, in Thomas Mackay (ed.), A Plea for Liberty, John Murray, London, 1892, pp. 124–172, see p. 129. 38 R H Tawney, “John Ruskin”, in The Radical Tradition, Minerva Press, London, 1964, pp. 40–46, see p. 40 [originally published 1919]. 39 Josiah Royce, “Impressions of Australia”, Scribner’s Magazine, January 1891, pp. 75–87, see p. 86. 40 anthony Trollope, review of “The Crown of Wild Olive”, Fortnightly Review, London, 15 June 1866, pp. 381–384, see p. 382. On Ruskin’s multiple roles, see Elizabeth Helsinger, “Millennial Ruskins”, in Victorian Studies, vol. 44, no. 2, Winter 2002, pp. 275–286. 41 The Australasian, Melbourne, 27 January 1900, p. 218. 42 The Argus, Melbourne, 22 January 1900, p. 6.

INTRODUCTION xxxix 43 The Bendigo Advertiser, 23 January 1900. 44 The Sydney Morning Herald, 22 January 1900. 45 The Methodist Leader, 3 February 1900, p. 4. 46 The Freeman’s Journal, 27 January 1900, p. 16. 47 The Courier Mail, Brisbane, 23 January 1900. 48 The Freeman’s Journal, op. cit. 49 The Age, Melbourne, 22 January 1900, p. 5. 50 Truth, Sydney, 11 February 1900, p. 7. 51 The Worker, Sydney, 3 February 1900. 52 ibid. 53 The Charters Towers Mining Standard, 24 January 1900. 54 Truth, Sydney, op. cit. 55 The Worker, Brisbane, 3 February 1900, p. 5. 56 The Age, Melbourne, op. cit. 57 The Bulletin, Sydney, 10 February 1900. 58 The Courier Mail, Brisbane, op. cit. 59 ibid. 60 ibid. 61 The Bulletin, Sydney, op. cit. 62 The Daily Telegraph, Sydney, 23 January 1900.

xl Endnotes for Introduction CHAPTER ONE WHO READ RUSKIN?

A. INTRODUCTION

Ruskin is read by educated people in Australia from the beginning, and by the less educated in quick succession. His books are not hard to find, the journalist Marcus Clarke for example buying his copies second-hand in Melbourne in 1863–1864, and they start to appear in public libraries, especially those of the mechanics’ institutes, around the same time. His work is referred to by popular lecturers from the late 1850s and by leading critics and journalists in greater frequency from the late 1870s. By this time extracts from Ruskin’s work have begun to appear in colonial editions of school texts written in England, and by the late 1890s in school texts written in Australia. From Ruskin’s death in 1900 until the First World War his work is kept alive by school readers, school prizes, penny editions and the mechanics’ institute libraries. Thus we can agree with Sydney Punch in 1883 when it said that “a man who has not read The Stones of Venice, or [the] Seven Lamps of Architecture, is deemed so ignorant that he is worthy to be pelted with Venetian metal, and left to escape into outer darkness with no lamp at all”.1 In this chapter I examine in detail how Ruskin was read in Australia, in particular in the decades before and after Federation in 1900.

WHO READ RUSKIN? 1 B. THE WRITTEN WORD

My friends, I do not know why any of us should talk about reading. We want some sharper discipline than that of reading; but, at all events, be assured, we cannot read. No reading is possible for a people with its mind in this state. No sentence of any great writer is intelligible to them. It is simply and sternly impossible for the English public, at this moment, to understand any thoughtful writing, so incapable of thought has it become in its insanity of avarice.2 Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies, 1865

Ruskin was a writer before anything else, and the written word was sacred to him. His most famous discussion of this appears in Sesame and Lilies (1865). This consists of two lectures Ruskin had given in Manchester the year before;3 in the first, “Of Kings’ Treasuries”, Ruskin discusses what and how to read, and in the second, “Of Queens’ Gardens”, why. “Of Queens’ Gardens” is really a long exposition of Ruskin’s views on women, and I return to these in Chapter Four. “Of Kings’ Treasuries” is Ruskin’s major statement on the importance of reading, and I briefly summarise it here. For Ruskin, the purpose of writing was not just to communicate, important though that was:

The book of talk is printed only because its author cannot speak to thousands of people at once; if he could, he would – the volume is mere multiplication of his voice. You cannot talk to your friend in India; if you could, you would; you write instead: that is mere conveyance of voice. But a book is written, not to multiply the voice merely, not to carry it merely, but to perpetuate it. The author has something to say which he perceives to be true and useful, or helpfully beautiful … that is his “writing”; it is, in his small human way, and with whatever degree of true inspiration is in him, his inscription, or scripture. That is a “Book”.4

Ruskin, naturally, believes in reading, and advocates public libraries5 and spending money on books instead of war.6 But if a book is worth reading it is worth buying7 and he urged his listeners to form libraries of their own – the “kings’ treasuries” of the title:

life being very short, and the quiet hours of it few, we ought to waste none of them in reading valueless books; and that valuable books should, in a civilized country, be within the reach of every one, printed in excellent form, for a just price.8

2 The Written Word What is the purpose of reading? For Ruskin, it is to confer with the mighty dead: great books were the:

eternal court … the chosen, and the mighty, of every place and time [from which] you can never be outcast but by your own fault; by your aristocracy of companionship there, your own inherent aristocracy will be assuredly tested, and the motives with which you strive to take high place in the society of the living, measured, as to all the truth and sincerity that are in them, by the place you desire to take in this company of the Dead.9

The aristocracy Ruskin admires is the aristocracy of classical Greece – the government of a state by its best citizens. Kings by mere title are not necessarily worthy – there are Rust- kings, who are as rust is to armour, and Moth-kings, who lay up treasures for the moth, and Robber-kings.10 To read is to seek “kingly power” of a more important kind:

there is … only one pure kind of kingship; an inevitable and eternal kind, crowned or not; the kingship, namely, which consists in a stronger moral state, and a truer thoughtful state, than that of others; enabling you, therefore, to guide, or to raise them … all literature and all education are only useful so far as they tend to confirm this calm, beneficient, and therefore kingly power – first, over ourselves, and through ourselves, over all around us.11

The primary goal is thus self-improvement, and, because this is so important in Victorian thought, I stop for a moment to consider Ruskin’s views on it. The Victorian age is the age of self-improvement: the demand for universal suffrage, the establishment of state education, the idea that careers should be open to talent – these are potent forces, even revolutionary ones, especially among the skilled members of the working class. Connected to this is the gospel of self help – the Victorian age in a phrase. Its greatest exponent was Samuel Smiles (1812–1904), whose book of the same name, first published in 1859, remained in print for over fifty years, counselling application and perseverance, as opposed to birth or talent alone, as the means to success. Smiles has a number of things to say about education, including the idea of “self culture”:

self-culture … calls for power and cultivates strength. The solution of one problem helps the mastery of another; and thus knowledge is carried into faculty. Our own active effort is the essential thing; and no facilities, no books, no teachers, no amount of lessons learnt by rote will enable us to dispense with it.12

WHO READ RUSKIN? 3 Another contemporary writer on education was George Combe (1788–1858), the famous phrenologist. In The Universal Education of the People (1833) he argues that the working-classes are “God’s creatures … as well entitled to justice as the higher ranks”, and thus: Our opinions of the kind of education which the industrious classes should receive, will depend on the objects which we assign to their lives. If they have been created by Providence merely to toil and pay taxes, to eat, sleep, and transmit existence to future generations, a limited education may suffice. But if they have been born with the full faculties of moral, intellectual, and religious beings … in short, if they are rational beings, capable of all the duties and susceptible of all the enjoyments, which belong to the rational character: then no education is sufficient for them which leaves any portion of their highest powers waste and unproductive.13

This argument, familiar now, was radical for the time. Social mobility was anathema to the upper classes; it was bad enough for them to be pushed from below by the rising class of entrepreneurs, newly-wealthy manufacturers and merchants; but that working- class people should ever hope to do, or be, more than they were entitled to by birth, was indeed revolutionary. The influence of evangelical Protestantism, rational, materialistic and progressive, is also clear in both these writers. It is entirely appropriate that Smiles should quote Thomas Arnold, the headmaster of Rugby School and one of the most influential educators of the day, when he says “I would rather send a boy to Van Diemen’s Land, where he must work for his bread, than send him to Oxford to live in luxury, without any desire to avail himself of his advantages”.14 But what did Ruskin feel about all of this? In “Of Kings’ Treasuries” he writes that he often receives letters from parents asking for advice about the education of their children, and he is struck by the emphasis on the idea of “advancement in life” in these letters. Advancement in life seems to mean becoming conspicuous in life – “the gratification of our thirst for applause”:

the seaman does not commonly desire to be made captain only because he knows he can manage the ship better than any other sailor on board. He wants to be made captain that he may be called captain. The clergyman does not usually want to be made a bishop only because he believes that no other hand can, as firmly as his, direct the diocese through its difficulties. He wants to be made bishop primarily that he may be called “My Lord”.15

4 The Written Word Self-improvement for conspicuousness, then, is misdirected. But the way is open, or should be, to those who improve themselves in other ways:

“the place you desire”, and the place you fit yourself for, I must also say; because, observe, this court of the past differs from all living aristocracy in this: it is open to labour and to merit, but to nothing else. No wealth will bribe, no name overawe, no artifice deceive, the guardian of those Elysian gates.16

This is not to seek the practical merit of Smiles or the efficient use of human potential advocated by Combe, but moral worth:

At the portieres of that silent Faubourg St Germain, there is but brief question: – “Do you deserve to enter? Pass. Do you ask to be the companion of nobles? Make yourself noble, and you shall be … But on other terms? – no. If you will not rise to us, we cannot stoop to you … here we neither feign nor interpret; you must rise to the level of our thoughts if you would be gladdened by them, and share our feelings, if you would recognise our presence”.17

Therefore for Ruskin “the first use of education [is] to enable us to consult with the wisest and the greatest men on all points of earnest difficulty”:

to use books rightly [is] to go to them for help: to appeal to them, when our own knowledge and power of thought failed: to be led by them into wider sight – purer conception than our own, and [to] receive from them the united sentence of the judges and councils of all time, against our solitary and unstable opinion.18

“Solitary and unstable opinion” had a special resonance in the sparsely-populated colonies like Australia of the nineteenth century. Ruskin uses the metaphor of a solitary man in quest of gold to explain what real reading should be:

When you come to a good book, you must ask yourself, “Am I inclined to work as an Australian miner would? Are my pickaxes and shovels in good order, and am I in good trim myself, my sleeves well up to the elbow, and my breath good, and my temper?” … the metal you are in search of being the author’s mind or meaning, his words are as the rock which you have to crush and smelt in order to get at it. And your pickaxes are your own care, wit, and learning, your smelting furnace is your own thoughtful soul. Do not hope to get at any good author’s meaning without those tools and that fire; often you will need sharpest, finest chiselling, and patientist fusing, before you can gather one grain of the metal.19

WHO READ RUSKIN? 5 How then did reading, libraries, and books fare in Australia, in Arnold’s imagined Van Diemen’s Land, in Ruskin’s imagined goldfields? In the next section I consider these questions in more detail.

1. READERS

How literate were the Australian colonists in the second half of the nineteenth century? Illiteracy was a major problem in the countries they had left behind. In 1850 eight million people in England and Wales could not read or write – nearly one quarter of the population. In the northern manufacturing districts the illiteracy rate sometimes reached sixty per cent.20 But in Victoria in 1851, the first year of the gold rushes, three out of four adults, nearly all of them recent immigrants, could read and write, if barely.21 Geoffrey Serle remarks on the very high rate of immigration of “well educated men and skilled artisans” at this time.22 Ten years later only 11% of the men in Victoria, and 22% of the women, could neither read nor write – “less than half the proportions in the United Kingdom, and far better than any other colony or London”, according to one observer.23 Education Acts were passed in all the Australian colonies in the twenty years from 1872 – Victoria (1872), South Australia and Queensland (1875), New South Wales (1880), Tasmania (1885) and Western Australia (1893), with a immediate effect on literacy.24 The percentages of those who could only sign the Marriage Register with marks in this period fell as follows:

6 The Written Word TABLE 1 Illiteracy in Australia 1861–1901 as measured by entries in Marriage Register

percentage of percentage of percentage of year bridegrooms brides married couples

1861 18.50 30.69 24.60

1871 10.58 16.40 13.49

1881 4.14 6.61 5.38

1891 2.12 2.27 2.20

1901 1.19 1.17 1.18

Source: T A Coghlan, A Statistical Account of the Seven Colonies of Australasia, 9th edn, Government Printer, Sydney, 1901–1902, p. 578

What did they read? For emigrants far from home, starved for news of family and friends, letters and newspapers were the first and most important kind of reading, as shown by post office figures:

TABLE 2 Post Office Deliveries in Australia 1851–1901

letters newspapers year letters newspapers per capita per capita

1851 2,165,000 2,150,000 4.7 4.7

1861 14,061,000 10,941,400 11.3 8.8

1871 30,435,300 17,252,700 15.7 8.9

1881 80,791,700 43,802,000 29.1 15.8

1891 183,694,900 95,879,760 47.9 25.0

1901 273,582,000 121,000,00 59.7 26.4

Source: ibid., p. 692

WHO READ RUSKIN? 7 2. BOOKS AND LIBRARIES If you were wealthy enough, you could bring your own library with you, or build one up. Mr Browne of Broken Hill, a manager in the mine workings, had a “splendid library” by the time of his departure in 1900, including many Ruskins.25 John Lane Mullins, a wealthy landowner of “Killountan” in Victoria, had a huge library that was auctioned in 1893; it included Eastlake’s Hints on Household Taste, Morris’s Saga Library and an 1889 edition of Ruskin’s works in twenty volumes, as well as a separate edition of Modern Painters in five volumes plus index.26 Another Victorian landowner, William Rae, though he did not collect Ruskin, clearly had had artistic leanings for a long time; in 1873 his library included a set of The Athenaeum for 1842–1849 and a complete run of The Art Journal from 1849 to 1872.27 If no libraries of their own, where could people go to read? Public libraries sprang up quickly; fifty years after the gold rushes began Australia could boast some impressive totals:

TABLE 3 Number of Public Libraries in Australia by State

state number of libraries number of books

New South Wales 340 520,000

Victoria 342 752,191

Queensland 140 166,589

South Australia 156 303,265

Western Australia 53 82,164

Tasmania 43 86,226

New Zealand 304 409,604

Australasia 1378 2,320,039

Source: Coghlan, op. cit., p. 578

8 The Written Word These libraries were overwhelmingly small libraries in country towns belonging to the local Mechanics’ Institute or School of Arts – interchangeable names for a nineteenth century phenomenon. A visiting librarian, C W Holgate, wrote of Victoria in 1884, “it has been a matter of wonder and surprise to find such large and well-managed libraries in a country whose history goes back but thirty-three years”.28 Victoria excelled in these libraries, often in well-designed buildings; at the time of the writer’s visit, Sandhurst (now Bendigo) was about to acquire some “very handsome new buildings … with a rotunda 50 feet in diameter”.29 Ballarat, another gold town, had two libraries, the Free Public Library, which was kept in a “very handsome [room], 70 feet long by 35 feet wide and 35 feet high … the building as a whole … architecturally striking”.30 The Ballarat Mechanics Institute was no less impressive: it combined “several of the advantages of a first-rate club” with a hall that could seat 1000, committee rooms, billiard rooms, and rooms for a drawing school; it was the “best of all the provincial institutions I have seen in Australia”.31 The writer continued: “The library is a fine room, and it is a sight worth seeing, filled with crowds of borrowers on a Saturday night … books are very rarely stolen … the one or two cases of theft which have been brought to light here have been punished severely”.32 Newspapers, local and foreign, were kept in every library: 120,000 people annually used the reading room in the Ballarat East Free Public Library to see them.33 Holgate speaks of the “really magnificent” collection of the Newspaper Room in the Victorian State Library, with copies of “all the Victorian, and of all the chief colonial and British and foreign newspapers”. There were many of these: the Victorian Parliamentary Library in 1864 had 8 Melbourne and 36 provincial Victorian newspapers and a wide selection of the major English journals.34 Ballarat in 1867 had copies of 46 colonial newspapers, 36 of them Victorian, 36 British newspapers, including The Times of London, the Illustrated London News, Punch, the Leeds Mercury, the British Workman, and the Temperance Record, as well as several American papers, including the New York Herald, the New York Tribune, Harper’s and the Scientific American. Ballarat also had a truly amazing selection of journals for a small country town, including all the important reviews, from the Edinburgh to the Quarterly and the Revue des

WHO READ RUSKIN? 9 Deux Mondes, and the major English art and design titles of the day – the Fine Arts Review, the Athenaeum, the Art Journal and the Builder.35 Similarly the reading room of the Sydney Mechanics’ School of Arts in 1884 had files of 243 “English and foreign and Australasian newspapers, and all the leading English magazines”.36 How many books? Excluding for the moment the major State, Parliamentary and University libraries, the mechanics’ institutes still had impressive collections. Most would have between 1000–2000 books, but by 1884 several Victorian towns had over 4000, and one, Sandhurst had 13,000.37 Ballarat’s two libraries had 12,000 and 15,000 books between them.38 The Melbourne Athenaeum, formerly the Melbourne Mechanics’ Institute, had 16,000 volumes by 1884, while the Sydney Mechanics’ Institute and School of Arts had 22,000.39 This was bigger than the library at Sydney University, with only 15,000 volumes, which was “sadly deficient” according to Holgate.40 Only the New South Wales Parliamentary library had more books at this time – 40,000.41 Did these libraries include Ruskin’s books? Part of the problem was that Ruskin thought that books were valuable possessions, and insisted on their being produced in expensive editions; this initially restricted his readership in England to those who could afford them:

I will even go so far as to say that we ought not to get books too cheaply. No book, I believe, is ever worth half so much to its reader as one that has been coveted for a year at a bookstall, and bought out of saved halfpence; and perhaps a day or two’s fasting.42

The public proved unwilling to forego food for books, and Ruskin, as we have seen, was calling for public libraries by 1865; even in 1857 he had conceded that the “really poor … shall be supplied with the books they want for nothing”, though in limited quantities.43 Did the Australian libraries carry Ruskin’s books? Answering this definitely is a tall order, so I have chosen to look at the top, the parliamentary libraries, which had the biggest collections of serious books, and the bottom, the mechanics’ institutes, which were the most accessible libraries for most readers.

10 The Written Word 3. PARLIAMENTARY LIBRARIES

In 1857 the New South Wales parliamentary library held only one Ruskin, The Stones of Venice; by 1866 it had added Modern Painters, The Political Economy of Art, The Two Paths and Unto This Last. By 1871 it had The Seven Lamps of Architecture, Sesame and Lilies, The Crown of Wild Olive, and The Queen of the Air. Then there is a hiatus until 1886; in the next eight years only a few Ruskins were added, another edition of Unto This Last, Three Letters and an Essay (1836–1841)and, more significantly, a complete set of Fors Clavigera (1871–1887). Between 1894 and 1898 the library acquired only the Selections, first and second series, Letters to a Friend, Ruskin on Music, and The Art of England and the Pleasures of England. Only one other title, Love’s Meinie, was added by 1901.44 This is a very incomplete list and collected in what appears to be a very random way; the mechanics’ institute library at Broken Hill had a far better collection by this time. By contrast, as early as 1864 the Victorian Parliamentary Library had eight Ruskin titles, including The Seven Lamps of Architecture, The Stones of Venice, Lectures on Architecture and Painting, The Harbours of England, The Political Economy of Art, The Two Paths, and the complete set of Modern Painters. By 1886 the library had fifteen Ruskins, adding Sesame and Lilies, The Crown of Wild Olive, The Ethics of the Dust, the first Selections from the Writings of John Ruskin (1866), The Queen of the Air, Lectures on Art, Fors Clavigera (1871–1877) and one of the first bibliographies of Ruskin’s work (1879). By this time the library had a very respectable architecture list as well, including Pugin’s Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England and the True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture, though not Contrasts. There were books by G G Scott and G E Street, Loudon, Fergusson, and Eastlake, as well as three titles by Viollet-le-Duc in translation, How to Build a House, The Architecture of Man in All Ages, and Lectures on Architecture. For the fine arts there was Owen Jones, The Grammar of Ornament, and Reynold’s Discourses. William Morris is represented by The Earthly Paradise, Love is Enough, and Sigurd the Volsung.45

WHO READ RUSKIN? 11 4. MECHANICS’ INSTITUTES

… complete in every part This nursery of Science and of Art; Its door, wide open, bidding all who choose To step within, and read the “latest news”. M K Beveridge, Occasional Address on Laying the 46 Foundation-Stone of the Kilmore Mechanics’ Institute, 1863

By 1881 New South Wales had 81 Mechanics Institutes. Sydney, the first, was founded in 1833, followed by Parramatta (1850), Maitland (1854) and Mudgee (1857). Balmain had two, the School of Arts, established in 1858, and the Working Men’s Institute, in 1865.47 The aims of the institutes over time embraced amusement as well as edification, and there was a lively discussion on whether they were fulfilling their often conflicting roles. The inclusion of billiards rooms was hotly debated, but these were gradually accepted, even becoming a necessary source of revenue.48 Their function as community centres was clear from early on – the institutes would acquire or build a hall as well as a reading room as soon as possible. The Gunnedah School of Arts, for example, was used for activities as varied as auction sales, public meetings, lectures, afternoon teas, conferences, lodge meetings, company meetings, concerts and entertainments (footlights extra), banquets, conversaziones, cafes chantants, tea meetings, flower shows, dances, bazaars, sacred concerts and religious services.49 The biggest, by number of books, in 1881 was Sydney, with 20,776 volumes, followed by Bathurst (6813), West Maitland (5190), Newcastle (4174), Parramatta and Goulburn (4000 each). The smallest were Anvil Creek (260 volumes), Charlestown (150), Cambewarra (105), and South Grafton (45). The biggest, by number of visitors, in 1881, after Sydney, were Bathurst (25,700), Newcastle (12,000), Redfern (11,000), Orange (8500) and Albury (6725). Even South Grafton, open from 10 am to 9 pm every day, attracted 500 visitors a year, eleven for every book.50 Most of their titles, as in the circulating libraries, were fiction (estimates I have seen range from 70% to 90%) but the mechanics’ institutes carried respectable numbers of non-fiction titles as well, and they included Ruskin’s books from 1862, in Sydney.

12 The Written Word 5. SYDNEY MECHANICS’ INSTITUTE

Established in 1833, the Sydney School of Arts and Mechanics’ Institute was the predecessor of the Workingmen’s College and later the Sydney Technical College in 1891. Though supported from the beginning by the most eminent citizens in the colony, it had a chequered career, discussed more fully in Chapter Three. Despite its problems it built up a good library, with 18,000 books by 1876 and 21,000 by 1883.51

TABLE 4 Number of Ruskin Titles in Sydney Mechanics’ Institute

number of year ruskin titles

1862 4 1869 11 1874 12 1880 13 1888 22 1901 28 Source: Catalogues for Mechanics’ Institutes in New South Wales, Mitchell Library

The first four Ruskins – number one on the library’s list of holdings – were Modern Painters, The Stones of Venice, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, and The Two Paths. By 1869 the library had added Ruskin’s Elements of Drawing, The Ethics of the Dust, Lectures on Architecture and Painting, The Laws of Work [sic], The Political Economy of Art, and the first Selections from the Works of John Ruskin (to 1861). By 1880 there were three more titles, The Queen of the Air, The Crown of Wild Oliveand the first series of Fors Clavigera.52 Books were not the only means of reading Ruskin. His voluminous occasional writing, over 600 items by 1893, was carried by most of the major periodicals of the day; and he was a popular subject for review or rebuttal for decades – his bibliographers record 1125 items about Ruskin by the same date.53 Almost every library had a wide selection of periodical literature; Sydney, for example, in 1874 carried The Art Journal(1846–), the Athenaeum (1849–), The Builder (1850–), the Civil Engineers’ and Architects’ Journal (1844–), and the

WHO READ RUSKIN? 13 Journal of the Society of Arts (1856–), as well as magazines such as Blackwood’s (1835–), Fraser’s (1844–), Punch (1849–), and the Cornhill (1860), and most of the major literary reviews of the day, from the Quarterly (1837–1842, 1845–), the Edinburgh (1802–1833, 1850–), the Westminster (1849–), the British Controversialist (1850–), the Eclectic (1853–), the British Quarterly (1854–1873), and the Fortnightly (1868–). It would thus be possible for the young Sydney apprentice in his spare time to have followed Ruskin’s career in these periodicals, from the sustained attacks on him in The Art Journal, the Athenaeum, the Fortnightly and Blackwood’s, to the more measured assessments of Ruskin’s work in the Quarterly, the Cornhill and the later Art Journal.

6. NEW SOUTH WALES MECHANICS’ INSTITUTES

The country institutes proliferated in the second half of the nineteenth century, as settlement spread inwards from the coast, especially between 1860–1885. From early on they struggled with inadequate funding, accommodation and staff, but also with the conflicting demands of their multiple roles – social centre for the district, provider of light entertainment for the masses or moral uplift for the few, and source of technical instruction for the ambitious working man.54 Books were acquired by private donation or purchase with the money grudgingly allotted by local councils; to remedy the situation boxes of books were made up by the Sydney Public Library and sent out by rail – such a box in 1884, for example, contained Bancroft’sHistory of the United States, Bourrienne’s Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Buckle’s Civilization in England, Green’s History of the English People, Grote’s Plato, Hayward’s Sketches of Eminent Statesmen and Writers, Ihne’s History of Rome, Kinglake’s Invasion of the Crimea, Macaulay’s History of England, MacCarthy’s History of Our Own Times, Martin’s Life of Prince Albert, Schliemann’s The City and Country of the Trojans, Smyth’s Life and Work at the Great Pyramid, and Young’s Around the World with General Grant.55 Fiction was always the most desired (Broken Hill had no less than 32 titles by Mrs Humphrey Ward, and 15 by “Rita”, including early bodice-rippers such as My Lord Conceit and My Lady Coquette) but reference books had their place, if a small one, and these would often include a Ruskin or two.

14 The Written Word Table 5 Number of Ruskin Titles in New South Wales Mechanics’ Institutes

town year number of titles

Shellharbour 1875 0 Redfern 1882 0 Goulburn 1888 1 Bega 1890 3 Maclean 1892 0 Braidwood 1897 3 Broken Hill 1899 20 Young 1900 0 Grafton 1901 1 Rylstone 1905 2 Thornleigh 1908 0 Gunnedah 1909 1 Kiama 1910 2 Source: Catalogues in Mitchell Library

Grafton hadThe Seven Lamps of Architecture, Goulburn The Stones of Venice, Gunnedah Sesame and Lilies, Braidwood The Crown of Thorns [sic] and The Queen of the Avi [sic], and Lectures on Architecture and Painting by “J. Rustem”; Kiama had both volumes of the Selections, Rylstone Unto This Lastand The Two Paths, and Bega The Seven Lamps of Architecture, The Political Economy of Art, and The Crown of Wild Olive.56 The odd name out in this list is Broken Hill, and I discuss why this is so in more detail below. Here I give some brief background only. Broken Hill, founded in the early 1880s following the discovery of silver, quickly became a major mining centre. From early on it was a union town, with three daily papers, two of them pro-labour, a militant workforce, and a progressive town council. It quickly developed a reputation for its socialist leanings, and a stream of overseas visitors and socialist luminaries, came to see for themselves – from Beatrice and Sydney Webb, Ben Tillett and H H Champion in the 1890s to Tom Mann and others in the next fifteen years.57

WHO READ RUSKIN? 15 The technical college building was the biggest outside of Sydney, and the library of its mechanics’ institute reflected this radical political consciousness – apart from its Ruskins it held a selection of socialist classics, from Bellamy’s Looking Backwards to the Fabian Society’s Essays on Socialism, Gronlund’s Cooperative Commonwealth, and Graham’s Socialism Old and New. There was also Jevons onMoney , Noquet on Collectivism and Spencer on Sociology; there were five titles by Henry George, including the inevitable Progress and Poverty, and Engels on Socialism – Utopian and Scientific; rather surprisingly, given the above, there was nothing by Marx.58 As for Ruskin, it had Cook’s Studies in Ruskin, and Ruskin’s own Poems (2 vols), Selections (2 vols), Fors Clavigera (4 vols), Modern Painters, The Stones of Venice, A Joy For Ever, Time and Tide, and The Two Paths – though not Unto This Last or The Political Economy of Art.59

7. PERIODICALS

As with the Sydney School of Arts, the country institutes often had a surprisingly wide selection of periodical literature. While a library like Shellharbour could be expected to have popular magazines like Good Words (1860–1874) and Household Words (vols 1–19), it was not unusual to find Blackwood’s, Fraser’s, the Cornhill, the North British Review, the Quarterly and the Saturday Reviews in a Grafton church library in 1863, or in Goulburn, in 1883, to read current copies of the same titles as well as of the Art Journal, the Contemporary Review, the Edinburgh Review, the Fortnightly Review, and the Nineteenth Century. Broken Hill in 1899 had the Pall Mall Gazette, the Nineteenth Century, the Contemporary Review, as well as the Academy Notes and the Magazine of Art for 1892–1898.60 Thus churchgoers in Grafton might read a review of Ruskin’s “Life of Turner” in the Quarterly, or an appreciation of Ruskin’s writings by H H Lancaster in the North British Review; townspeople in Goulburn, turning from newspaper accounts of rainfall and stock prices, could read the increasing number of mentions of Ruskin, now more favourable, in The Art Journal, and weary miners in their leisure hours in Broken Hill could follow that year’s selections for the Royal Academy Exhibitions, or reflect on the doings of London Society.

16 The Written Word 8. THE ART JOURNAL

It is worth stopping briefly to look at one of these periodicals in detail, The Art Journal, the first and most widely-read publication of its day devoted to art.61 It appears in Australia as early as 1849 and is regularly listed in library catalogues of all kinds for the next forty years. What would Australian readers have been able to learn about Ruskin from this one title? A search of The Art Journal for the years 1851–1880 shows that for many years the journal ignored the art that Ruskin championed, the Pre-Raphaelites in particular, and frequently attacked Ruskin and his ideas in very strong language. Ruskin begins to get positive mentions only after 1864, while the first Pre-Raphaelite work is not engraved until 1870. Engravings of Turner’s work are published regularly, but only in black and white.62 Thus colonial readers wondering what all the fuss about Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites was about, for example, and relying on the Art Journal to tell them, would not know.63 However the Art Journal was probably the way news of the Whistler libel trial first reached Australia, since it does not seem to have been reported in the colonial daily press.64

9. BOOKSELLERS

Ruskin’s books were imported into Australia from early on, and two Melbourne booksellers were the principal sources for his work in Australasia – E A Petherick & Co, and following their collapse in 1898, E W Cole of that Melbourne institution, Cole’s Book Arcade.65 The eccentric Cole (1832–1918) was a maverick after Ruskin’s own heart, a firm believer in a federated world with one religion, free speech and books.66 An attractive mixture of publisher, businessman and crackpot, one of Cole’s most successful ventures was a cheap series of the work of famous authors, Worlds for 1/3d; this included over two dozen Ruskin titles. Even cheaper was Cole’s Penny Ruskin, a seventeen part series of extracts from Ruskin’s works, eventually gathered into an anthology called Master Messages from John Ruskin.67 Like similar ventures in England, this put Ruskin’s ideas before the widest possible public.68 Everybody in Australia who wanted to read him by the 1890s, and very many did, could now do so easily.

WHO READ RUSKIN? 17 C. THE LIVING VOICE

By the prolonged experiments and careful thought to which the theory of education has been lately subjected, one result seems prominently established, that, in all departments, book-learning must be regarded as secondary and supplemental. Whatever be the matter of investigation, if we mean to excite the mental faculties to vigorous and healthy energy, it is upon the living voice that we must primarily depend, whether in catechetical examination, or in dialectic disputation, or in elaborate discourse.69 John Woolley, “Oral Instruction and Self Culture”, lecture delivered at the Sydney School of Arts, Thursday, 15 June 1854

1. RUSKIN AS LECTURER

The Victorian era was one of “mighty talkers and instinctive listeners”, when no sermon lasted less than an hour and political leaders like Gladstone could, and frequently did, speak for three or four hours at a time. Before the age of mechanical reproduction of voice or image, it was an age of public speaking, in parliament, church and on street corners, debating the major questions of the day, from science and religion to capital and labour. Able speakers for any cause were prized and quickly recruited; there were classes and competitions in elocution and oratory; poetry was written and recited for special occasions; eisteddfods, originally singing competitions, came to embrace other kinds of performance as well, while public lectures were a popular form of genteel entertainment for the middle class and the aspiring working class in England from the 1840s on. In an 1875 essay, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote:

Eloquence shows the power and possibility of man. There is one of whom we took no note, but on a certain occasion it appears that he has a secret virtue never suspected, – that he can paint what has occurred, and what must occur, with such clearness to a company, as if they saw it done before their eyes. By leading their thought he leads their will, and can make them do gladly what an hour ago they would not believe that they could be led to do at all.70

So with Ruskin; after the three great early works, Modern Painters (1843–1860), The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1848) and The Stones of Venice (1851–1853), conceived as written

18 The Living Voice texts, the rest of his books up until Fors Clavigera (1870) were based on lectures he had given on different occasions – from Sesame and Lilies (1865), to The Ethics of the Dust (1866), Lectures on Art (1870) and Aratra Pentelici (1872), but some earlier books had been based on lectures too, especially The Political Economy of Art (1857) and The Two Paths (1859). People came to hear Ruskin lecture in Oxford, surely the last time university students ever fought for a seat in a lecture room. Ruskin’s biographer ET Cook records that Ruskin was known at Oxford as the “most eloquent man in England”, high praise indeed in a era of mighty names. Cook had heard Ruskin speak many times, and reported that:

He read magnificently. The quotations from Homer or from Chaucer or from some other favourite author were declaimed as no other public man of the time, except Gladstone, could have declaimed them. Passages, too, from his own earlier books came with new force and meaning when recited with the appropriate emphasis and intonation.71

2. LECTURES AND DEBATES AS ENTERTAINMENT

The rage for popular lectures in England in the 1840s and 1850s lasted much longer in Australia. Travelling lecturers could make real money – Mark Twain visited Australia and New Zealand in 1895–1896 as part of a world tour undertaken to pay off his debts, and the ubiquitous Reverend Charles Clark’s lectures on The Tower of London packed out the Melbourne Town Hall for four nights in 1875, netting him one thousand pounds on that occasion alone.72 Lectures were part of the agenda of the mechanics’ institutes from the beginning, and honorary secretaries spent much time hunting up interesting speakers for that fortnight’s talk, duly advertised in the papers beforehand and solemnly reported afterwards. The flavour was instructive mixed with diverting, inclining towards the former. A list of talks given in New South Wales country institutes in 1883 included The Fall of the Roman Empire and Love Courtship and Marriage (Adamstown), Life and Works of Sir Walter Scott and Manners and Customs of New Zealanders (Bega),

WHO READ RUSKIN? 19 A Tour through India and China (Coonamble), Telephone Microphone and Electric Bells (Gunnedah), The Life of Thackeray (Largs), Vegetarianism and Some Real Fun (Morpeth), An Hour with Tennyson and Kings I Have Known (Parramatta), Metereology (Temora), The Works of Henry Kendall and First Cause in Nature (Walcha), Prevention of Disease (West Maitland), and College Life at Oxford (Windsor). Audiences ranged from “full house” to “large” to “moderate” to “fair” to “meagre”; some towns had no lectures at all, “from difficulty of procuring competent lecturers”, but still managed a fortnightly debating class in the winter months.73 The Sydney institute fared better, with a full program of lectures for 1883 that included Economic Botany (Reverend Collie), History of European Colonization (Mr Sladen), Bee Culture (Mr MacDonnell, given twice), Elocution (Mr Connery, given four times), and The Channel and the Thames (Captain Neitenstein, given once). In passing I note the prevalence of three topics in all these lectures, Phrenology, Great Writers and their Books, and The South Kensington Museum. Rivalled only by The Use and Abuse of Alcohol and Tobacco, these topics appear many times in the lists I have seen.74 Elsewhere in Sydney you could attend lectures given by the innumerable mutual improvement associations and literary institutes; topics for one week in 1889 included Wordsworth (Glebe Congregational Mutual Improvement Association), Medical Talk (East Sydney Wesleyans), Tasmania (Newtown Congregationalists), General Gordon (Chalmers Guild Literary Society) and no less than three on Elocution (Woollahra Eclectic Society, Bathurst Street Literary Association, St Leonard’s Wesleyans). Debating societies were also popular, the same week offering Sydneysiders debates on imperial federation versus an Australian republic (Leichhardt Literary and Debating Society versus St Andrew’s), the abolition of capital punishment (East Sydney Wesleyans), the selection of colonial governors (St Paul’s Young Men’s Union) and controlling the liquor traffic (St Mary’s Mechanics’ Institute).75 Though I have not been able to establish exact dates, in such a welter of ideas and such a profusion of excited talk Ruskin, now well known in Australia, was surely discussed and new readers found for his books.

20 The Living Voice 3. LECTURE TOURS

Many distinguished visitors made the long trip to Australia in this period, some for their health, like Rudyard Kipling (1890) and William Michael Rossetti (1897), some to evangelise, like Henry Drummond and General William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army (1890), or the theosophist Annie Besant (1894); on post office business, like Anthony Trollope (1871 and 1875); or from a genuine desire to see how the new democracy was faring, like Sir Charles Dilke (1866–1867), James Anthony Froude (1885), Beatrice and Sydney Webb (1898) and the labour figures Henry George (1890), H H Champion (1894), Ben Tillett (1898) and Tom Mann (1905). Some were content just to observe, like Kipling and Trollope; others were deluged with requests to speak, like General Booth, Drummond, Tillett and the Webbs. All were interviewed by the papers at every stop and invited to innumerable bush picnics, dinner parties and conversaziones, their opinion sought on everything from free trade and the Afghan Question to Imperial Federation and the London theatre. All of these visitors were familiar with Ruskin, and some of them knew Ruskin personally – Froude, Drummond and Rossetti in particular. Froude was the confidante and biographer of Ruskin’s mentor Thomas Carlyle; Drummond was a former student of Ruskin’s; and Rossetti was the brother of the Pre-Raphaelite painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti. A search of their memoirs does not show that they discussed Ruskin while in Australia, but at some point they surely did, if only, by the 1890s, to answer enquiries about his declining health.76

WHO READ RUSKIN? 21 D. SOME LITERARY RUSKINIANS

Some visitors came to stay, and had a more lasting effect on spreading Ruskin’s ideas in Australia. Here I discuss four such men: two prominent academics, John Woolley of the University of Sydney and Thomas Tucker of the University of Melbourne; and two journalists who became the principal art critics of Sydney and Melbourne, James Green and James Smith.

1. JOHN WOOLLEY

John Woolley (1816–1866) arrived in Australia in 1852 at the age of 36 to take up a post as the first principal and professor of classics at the new University of Sydney.77 In his twelve years in Australia Woolley spoke consistently for a university education as one that trained the mind rather than merely imparted facts, and for the responsibility of educated men to share their learning with the wider community. His only book is a collection of occasional lectures, one being the inaugural address he gave at the opening of Sydney University. The rest are talks Woolley gave to mechanics’ institutes in Sydney and Maitland, to the Young Men’s Christian Association and the Darling Point Mutual Improvement Association.78 In this last piece, Woolley describes the recent spread of artistic and literary feeling among the people and the consequent elevation of taste in the community:

not the least cheering is the serious purpose and practical adaptation which distinguishes our English school of Fine Art … museums and lectures are thronged, not by silken idleness lounging for amusement, but by white- jacketed searchers for knowledge. The angel of good taste deigns to plan the cottage and mould the simple furniture of the mechanic, as well as the golden saloon.79

And Woolley makes an explicit comparison here:

The art of a people is a sure index of their moral and intellectual tone. Ruskin has admirably pointed out how wide is the gulf which separates wholesome art, “the servant and interpreter of nature”, gazing with free reverence upon the truth, and faithfully reporting that which it has seen, from the diseased and emasculated fancy which elaborates the grotesque deformities of India

22 Some Literary Ruskinians and China – the patient but unreal minuteness of the cultivated slave. His judgment is confirmed not only by the progress of social improvement, but by the happily-restored alliance of English art and religion.80

Englishness, not-foreignness, social improvement, morality and art, the indivisibility of truth – these are indeed Ruskinian themes, and they reappear in Woolley’s other lectures: for instance in Lecture VI, Inaugural Address to the Maitland School of Arts, 1857:

who has smitten the Goliath of materialism with the sling of spiritual aspiration? who has pleaded the cause of the poor … crying not for vengeance but for deliverance? All have their part in the happy evangel, but the poets are the apostles; economists and naturalists, statesmen and philosophers, do but follow slowly in the wake of Dickens and Carlyle, Wordsworth and Tennyson, Hood and Browning – alas! so slowly that the “Song of the Shirt”, the “Cry of the Young Children”, the “Cry of the Human”, still stand before the wise and mighty, as Nathan before David, before conviction of his guilt had entered the Kings’ soul – still seem ready to rise up in despair from earth to the throne of Justice.81

And, Woolley asks, “Who said that the poet was unpractical? Then who is the dreamer? if life is gold-digging, and railways are the only progress – then let us banish Poetry as the fatal syren. But if there is a spiritual life, – then seek profoundest views of life, its dangers, duties, hopes, and consummation, in the pages of Alfred Tennyson and Elizabeth Browning”.82 This seems very close to the Ruskin of Unto This Last. Or consider Woolley’s remarks in a lecture to the Sydney School of Arts in 1854:

When I gaze upon a picture of Raffaelle, or listen to the melodies of Handel, or read the verses of Milton, what is the object of my enjoyment, and what its source? not in the nice organization of sense, the delicate ear, the accurate eye, – but in the power of entering into the Poet’s conception, in penetrating the spiritual meaning which the sense is intended to convey: – and in the study of the laws of the universe, material or immaterial, may I not, if I have patience, approach Him who is the life of the universe, and hold communion with those 83 whom he has appointed to be his interpreters to their brethren?

Compare Ruskin, in Modern Painters I, “the duty of the painter is the same as that of a preacher”: Both are commentators on infinity, and the duty of both is to take for each discourse one essential truth … insisting especially on those which are less

WHO READ RUSKIN? 23 palpable to ordinary observation … and to impress that, and that alone, upon those whom they address, with every illustration that can be furnished by their knowledge, and every adornment attainable by their power.84

Similarly, in the conclusion to a discussion of Turner’s storm paintings, Ruskin asks his readers to observe the effects of dusk on the mountains for themselves, “and then, when you can look no more for gladness, and when you are bowed down with fear and love of the

85 Maker and Doer of this, tell me who has best delivered this His message unto men!” Woolley was probably closer to Matthew Arnold than to Ruskin in his educational ideas, at least according to some writers,86 but he was a dominant figure in the earliest days of Australia’s first University, and is appropriately remembered for his devotion to the cause of the mechanics’ institutes in New South Wales. In lecture VIII, The Social Use of Schools of Art, Woolley supports the idea of the diffusion of knowledge, but not only of practical knowledge; liberty depends on more, intellectual self-reliance in particular:

the most elaborate intellectual training will not avail to preserve our freedom, if the fatal notion once gains currency that education should be limited to the learning of our trade; that no work is useful at school which will not help us to earn our livelihood in the world, or to advance our material interests. Education must be the 87 forming of the whole man: and what sort of man is he who is only a tradesman?

For Woolley, “This is a question which concerns us all, for all of us are tradesmen alike”:

Trade consists not in what we learn or do, but in our motive for learning and doing it. The carpenter is an artist if he works for the satisfaction of his own taste, and the improvement of his own skill; he is so far following a liberal pursuit: the painter or poet is a tradesman if he employs his genius for gain at the bidding of an employer.88

Thus Ruskin in The Two Paths (1859):

whatever you are to make your bread by, I say, so far as you have time and power, make yourself first a noble and accomplished artist; understand at least what noble and accomplished art is, and then you will be able to apply your knowledge to all service whatsoever.89

For Woolley the question to be answered was:

“How shall the study and enunciation of the highest truths, the cultivation of the noblest powers, the discharge of the functions most important to the common weal, be secured under circumstances favourable to the integrity and

24 Some Literary Ruskinians impartiality of our thinkers and statesmen?” … The only answer is, by educating men in the true spirit of your utilitarian maxim – not in its perverse and distorted limitation. Make them not only nor chiefly tradesmen but citizens, men, inheritors of a divine being and immortal destiny.90

If not a complete Ruskinian, he had certainly read Ruskin, and Ruskin’s ethical ideas found a warm admirer in Woolley. Woolley went back to England on leave in 1864, disappointed in his work in Sydney and the sectarian opposition he had encountered to his ideas on a true liberal education. Yet when he was lost at sea on the return voyage in 1866, the citizens of Sydney raised two thousand pounds to keep his wife and daughters, and his obituaries paid tribute to his efforts in educational reform. A Sydney reviewer of his book in 1864 summed it up succinctly: “Dr Woolley was the finest scholar we have ever seen in the Colony, and many proofs both of taste and learning may be found in this volume”.91

2. JAMES SMITH

Of the 180 exhibits catalogued on the present occasion, four fifths are a pain to the eye. Some of them look like faded pictures seen through several mediums of thick gauze; others suggest that a paint-pot has been accidentally upset over a panel nine inches by five; others resemble the first essays of a small boy who has just been apprenticed to a house painter; whilst not a few are as distressing as the incoherent images which float through the mind of a dispeptic dream.92 James Smith on the first Australian Impressionist Exhibition, 17 August 1889

James Smith (1820–1910) was the foremost art critic of the second half of the nineteenth century in Melbourne, a well-travelled journalist who spoke and read four languages and had a personal library of over five thousand books. He arrived in Victoria in 1854 and quickly became part of the literary and artistic life of Melbourne, a position he retained almost until his death at the age of 90 in 1910.93 In the history of Australian art Smith is best known as the critic who attacked the early work of Tom Roberts, Arthur Streeton and Charles Conder, and for that matter, as the critic who attacked the first Melbourne production of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. Was he a Ruskinian, and if so, how do we know? His

WHO READ RUSKIN? 25 attack on the Australian Impressionists, while very similar to Ruskin’s attack on Whistler eleven years before, could be construed as an argument about finish. Here I briefly examine such points of similarity (and dissimilarity) as I have been able to find. Smith, like Woolley in Sydney, was a popular public speaker, in demand for talks on literary matters almost from his arrival. In the 1860s alone, as reported in Melbourne’s leading paper, The Argus, Smith lectured on Thackeray, Dickens, Pickwick, Wit and Humour, and England Fifty Years Ago, among many other topics, to audiences at the St Kilda Mechanics’ Institute, the Melbourne Young Men’s Mutual Improvement Association, the Collingwood Independent Chapel, Lilydale Common School, the Melbourne Trades Hall and the Early Closing Association.94 In this he resembles Samuel Smiles rather than Ruskin; and in his interest in public education, and his support for such things as a public library, museum and art gallery, he is closer to Matthew Arnold. Ruskin’s political views began to change in the late 1850s, driving him towards a proto-socialism. Smith also began as a conservative in politics, but his opinions hardened rather than softened over time. He gives us a vivid account of the political ferment in Melbourne in the 1850s, soon after his arrival, when the Eastern Market was the forum for street corner agitators:

any political adventurer who wanted to bring himself before the public had only to mount an empty hay-van, illuminated by cotton wicks burning in tin dishes of tallow, and to commence a noisy harangue on the wrongs of the people, accompanied by suitable violence of gesture, in order to gather round him an amused and amusing crowd, some of whom would reward him with cheers and cries of “Go on, old man! give it ‘em hot”; while others would banter the speaker and interrupt him by sarcastic interjections.

Here Smith is the detached observer of dissent, not unfriendly, but professionally skeptical:

You met men who had fought in the streets of Paris; political refugees from Frankfort, Berlin, Vienna, and Buda Pesth; and Carbonari from Italy. Mostly young, ardent, enthusiastic, and animated by more or less Utopian visions of reconstructing the political and social institutions of civilized mankind so as to bring about an era of universal peace and prosperity [for] mankind in general and … the people in Victoria in particular.95

26 Some Literary Ruskinians Smith in fact supported Garibaldi’s campaign for Italian freedom, and though not a socialist, he was well enough regarded by the labour movement to be asked to give the commencement address for the Eight Hours Day celebrations in 1866, and later served as a trustee of the Working Men’s College.96 Where Smith diverged most sharply from Ruskin was in the evolution of his political views: like Ruskin he was a Tory, but unlike Ruskin, Smith was a firm believer, in industrialization, progress and Free Trade; one has only to compare his uncritical descriptions of the factory districts in Melbourne with Ruskin’s comments on the degradation of the English countryside, and the horrors of the slums of English cities, brought by the factory system, to see the difference.97 However, by the early 1870s Smith’s growing hatred of materialism brought him much nearer Ruskin’s position. In a series of increasingly violent public attacks, more fundamentalist sermons than lectures, he outdoes Ruskin in his condemnation of the corruption of society brought about by the worship of money. This is an extract from a particularly vehement denunciation of “idolatry”:

Wealth – wealth – men and women revel in the mere imagination of it. Its glitter fascinates them, its amount awes them. It is the one idol before which all civilized human beings bow down in consentaneous adoration … to the temple of the Golden Calf throng people of all ranks and grades, of both sexes, and of every country in Christendom. There is no sacrifice which they are unprepared to lay upon the altar; no cherished quality of head or heart that they are unwilling to dedicate to the service of Mammon.98

So far, so familiar; many other preachers of the nineteenth century, and Thomas Carlyle in particular, had said the same. But where Smith comes closest to Ruskin is in the connection he makes between morality and art. Lurline Stuart, Smith’s biographer, records Smith’s reasons in 1857 for calling for a national gallery for Victoria: “The value of the Fine Arts, as instruments of civilisation, moral teachers, means of intellectual culture, sources of enjoyment, and adjuncts of industrial enterprise, is now fully realised by the most enlightened nations of Europe”.99 Except for the reference to the Fine Arts as “the adjuncts of industrial enterprise”, which sounds more like Prince Albert and The Art Journal, this passage suggests Smith’s affinity with Ruskin’s idea that “nothing can be beautiful which is not true”. Both Lurline Stuart and Bernard Smith point to James

WHO READ RUSKIN? 27 Smith’s response to the work of the landscape painter Eugene von Guerard in 1870 as a more accurate picture of Smith’s abilities as a critic: “The perspective is correct, the topographical description … most faithful, the elaboration of details merits all the praise due to finished execution, and if the colour were less hard, we should have little fault to find with the technical quality of the picture”. Despite a subject that “might well inspire as noble an effort as landscape artist ever put forth”, Smith finds the picture “wanting in some of the higher qualities to be sought in works of [this] kind”. Accuracy in description is not enough:

The high-priest of pre-Raphaelitism would have told [the artist] that these mountains were made “to fill the thirst of human heart for the beauty of God’s working”; that “they are a great and noble architecture, covered with mighty sculpture and painted legend”; and that “they are lifted up towards heaven in a stillness of perpetual mercy”. Mr von Guerard feels nothing, however, of all this, or cares little about it.

And Smith concluded:

There are some other points to which we might allude, but we think it better at present to direct attention merely to the distinguishing characteristics of Mr von Guerard’s work, and its leading merits and defects. Now that he occupies a position where his example will have more influence than it had before, it is more than ever necessary that just notions should be propagated concerning the principal features and the main tendency of his art.100

The quotations in the second passage above are from Ruskin, the “high priest of pre- Raphaelitism”, and are extracts from Modern Painters. Smith’s concern with von Guerard’s possible influence on other painters is also noteworthy – in the unstable conditions of a colonial society, setting appropriate standards of taste in art was essential to the project of re-creating the society the colonists had left behind.101 Thus the pre- eminent art critic in Melbourne between 1855 and 1890 was a staunch Ruskinian, upholding the master’s dictates on the moral role of art in his reviews and in his capacity as a trustee of the National Gallery of Victoria between 1880 and 1910, on guard against dangerous new tendencies such as Impressionism. In his role as Parliamentary Librarian, Smith is also responsible for the outstanding holdings of Ruskiniana in the

28 Some Literary Ruskinians Victorian Parliamentary Library we noticed above – the best and most complete of any library in Australia. Smith’s interest in Ruskin had some unexpected effects. One of the things that make Smith seem more human is his eccentric but long-held devotion to spiritualism – trances, spirit mediums, telepathy and the rest. He was a stalwart contributor to The Harbinger of Light, the Melbourne spiritualist paper edited by W H Terry. Even here, thanks to Smith’s influence, one can find several long articles on Ruskin, reprinted from the paper’s English parent, along with articles on “zoistic science, free thought, and the harmonial philosophy”.102 Smith did indeed embody the cultural values of colonial Melbourne, as his biographers point out; but his attack on the Australian Impressionists, when an old man and past his peak, is not regarded as the final verdict on his critical career by art historians. Both Bernard Smith and Alan McCulloch, for example, rightly point to his achievements as campaigner for, and later trustee, of the Public Library, Museum and the National Gallery of Victoria, his knowledgeable art criticism, sustained over many years, and his long career as a public spokesman on cultural matters.103 When he died his vast personal library was auctioned off and found to contain, besides the expected books on Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites, copies of the latest English art journals. Even as he approached the age of 90, Smith had not ceased to maintain his vital interest in art and in the new society developing around him.104

3. JAMES GREEN

James Green (1840?–1901) was a long-time journalist, invariably described as “late of the London Building News”, who probably arrived in Sydney in 1883. He is first heard of in 1884, and for the next seventeen years produced a stream of articles on art, architecture, music and theatre in Sydney, and occasionally Melbourne, until his death in 1901.105 Green wrote under a variety of names – his own, “De Libra”, “D.L.”, “J.G.” and “J.G. De Libra” – for a variety of publications, including Once A Month (1884–1886), Society (1887–1888?), The Centennial Magazine of NSW (1889–1890), The Australian Builders and

WHO READ RUSKIN? 29 Contractors’ News (1890–1895), and the Australasian Art Review (1899).106 Bernard Smith says he was “an ardent and extremely vocal follower of John Ruskin … widely travelled, widely read and a voluminous writer” – a very fair assessment, as we shall see.107 Given the amount of his work, I concentrate here on Green’s architectural criticism, for he was a refreshingly forthright critic of his contemporaries, and his comments, particularly on Sydney, find many resonances today. Green first appears in print in Australia with an article on “Art in Sydney”, in Once A Month, 15 October 1884, signed “J.G.”. He laments Australian ignorance of art, but says that things have been improving since the Sydney and Melbourne International Exhibitions of 1879–1881. Following Ruskin, Green intensely disliked sham, in particular the prevailing custom of covering every building in stucco; but even more than stucco, the stylistic chaos of Sydney’s buildings affronted him:

Messrs Farmer & Company’s new premises in Market-street [are] a vast and highly ornate edifice of six stories [whose] ornamentation – a singular medley of Greek, French, Raphaelesque, and cinquecento – is applique, and for all that the design shows to the contrary, might have been – every atom of it – made in any material under the sun, and nailed, or pasted, or glued, or cemented on after the building was entirely finished from top to bottom.108

Even Gothic Revival buildings were not spared:

The premises in course of erection for the YMCA will certainly not inspire visitors to Sydney with a belief that its Free Public Library possesses a complete copy of Voilet le-duc’s [sic] magnificent Dictionarie [sic] Raisonne of medieval Art as applied to structural purposes. The style of the buildings is what geologists might perhaps call “conglomerate”, and simpler persons would probably designate as “nondescript”.109

Called on to review the civic decorations for the 1887 Queen’s Jubilee, Smith lamented the gush that passed for informed comment in Sydney:

this … Australia-for-the-Australians style of journalism … which perpetually represents this colony as a palladium, an El Dorado, a Garden of Eden for everybody, capable of teaching the whole world – past, present, and to come, instead of as a half-developed country that has nearly everything to learn – politically, socially, and artistically – from many an Old World state and city.

30 Some Literary Ruskinians This was not just an Australian problem, but one unique to Sydney:

In no place that I have lived in is this jarring inartistic inattention to detail so painfully apparent as in Sydney. In the National Art Gallery I have seen a name wrongly spelt on a gilt label; at theatres the paper may be dropping off the walls while real artistes are performing in good operas; and at concerts chairs are placed higgly-piggly upon the platform, and pianists drag about the pianoforte as though they were wharf labourers, and then sit down to play elaborate compositions with no one to turn over the pages for them.110

Green was a robust critic, but he was not a snob: although he constantly bewailed the low artistic standard of architecture in Sydney, he could still say “Notwithstanding the ‘pretentious dingy shams and hideous compositions’ spoken of above, it is pleasant to feel that every few months there are being added to the architecture of this city buildings of which any architect and client may feel proud, and which would be a credit and an ornament to any great European or American centre”.111 Melbourne on the whole fared better:

Looking at the chief edifices in “Marvellous Melbourne”, and comparing their architecture with that of the elder metropolis, three things at once impress the critical observer. They are: Firstly, the larger variety shown in the styles and treatment employed; secondly, in the greater nobility of design displayed in the finest buildings, coupled with an undeniable bathos in the worst of those possessing any claim to be called architecture, the detestable and widespread use of stucco, and the deplorable existence of the Yankee “sky-scraper”; and thirdly, the wider and more generally successful use of the Gothic style.112

Green continues: “But it is pleasant to record that in no branch of Victorian architecture has the final decade of the century shown such healthy progress and development as in the domestic. Lifeless stucco, galvanised iron, coarse castings, vulgar shams and tawdry gimcracks are each year more willingly banished to the limbo of abominations”. In their place:

is springing up … an unaffected appreciation of the ”beauty of holiness” in things aesthetic – of the picturesqueness and delight derivable from honest brickwork, moulded bricks, terra cotta and red tiles, from open timber-work and rough- cast, from sgraffito and plain wood-turning, from the virile craftsmanship and right employment that such materials and their natural capabilities demand – in a word, from construction illumined by the twin and brightly burning “Lamps 113 of Architecture” – those of Life and Truth!

WHO READ RUSKIN? 31 But Green, like many critics, is most readable when confronted with the genuinely bad. The new Hall of Temperance in Pitt Street in Sydney was one such building that provoked him to wrath, for it represented “all that is terrible in stucco nightmares”:

It is unnecessary to describe in detail the elevation, and still less do we care to disfigure our pages with an illustration, of the Hall of Temperance [whose] ghastly features … seem to suggest delirium tremens rather than temperance, and almost drive one to hard drinking on the spot … We neither know nor care to enquire who may be responsible for such a burlesque of “Woman’s Mission, the Rescue and Elevation of Mankind” as the pair of dolls under an archway, in elaborately trimmed frocks, drinking something from a tea-table-like vase, with a perplexed and enquiring cherub looking out of a pair of wings above them … 114 And this is Sydney architecture!

There is more, but the point is made. Green was a knowledgeable but conservative critic, who knew his Ruskin, and his Palladio and Viollet-le-Duc, and was unafraid to say what he thought, even more difficult then than in Sydney today. He rightly lamented the lack of informed criticism in architecture, and the many shortcomings of taste in a colonial society; but he did not lose hope. In 1890 he wrote:

There exists in this condition, along with so much that is to be deplored, so much that is natural and sterling, and Australian Public Taste has already accomplished so large a measure of its own advancement, that it deserves the assistance of all well-wishers to Australian nationality and progress to aid it to do more, and to purify its healthy Naturalism of that degree of Sensuality that drags it down.115

Green died in Sydney, in 1901, aged 61. His brief obituary in the Daily Telegraph referred to him as a “veteran journalist” who had had a “useful career” in London. He was well- known in Australia as a critic of music, art and architecture, it said, and concluded with the poignant comment that “Mr Green’s services, though of undoubted value to the community, did not bring to him any very great material prosperity”. Green had never married and the only witnesses at his funeral were the minister and the undertaker’s assistants.116

32 Some Literary Ruskinians 4. THOMAS GEORGE TUCKER

Thomas George Tucker (1859–1946) arrived in Australia in 1885, a year after Green, to take up a professorship at the University of Melbourne at the age of 26. A distinguished classics scholar, he made an immediate impact on Melbourne society through his teaching, both within the university and outside it, in demand as a speaker at the Beefsteak Club, the Socialist Hall, the Pleasant Sunday Afternoon or the Medical Students’ Society. According to his biographers he was known as the “literary oracle of Melbourne” in the 1890s.117 Tucker liked Ruskin, and frequently referred to him in his public lectures. In the first collection of these, Things Worth Thinking About (1890), Ruskin is quoted in talks on, among other things, literary judgement, the proper understanding of culture, and the value of travel:

I would remind this association that one of its objects … is to find out and to put into practice whatever is best to be done in this country, with its peculiarities of position, climate and resources … You are desirous of making your men sublime as well as your geography. To do this you seek civilization in its truest senses, material and personal. You recognize that it is not so much the numbers as the quality of our men that will make us a great nation, or as Ruskin puts it, “a little group of wise hearts is better than a wilderness of fools”.118

In his later collection of essays, Platform Monologues (1914), we learn that “even if a Plato or a Ruskin leave not one single dogma consciously grasped by the student’s faith, they have, nevertheless, been in the highest degree invigorating and ennobling company”.119 And Tucker quotes Ruskin on imagination in an extract from Modern Painters, before concluding:

Therefore the Supreme Literary Gift of communicating exactly what we think and feel, exactly as we think and feel it, involves no mere control of language, but, therewith, an imaginative brain to realize conceptions as vivid pictures. To combine these powers is to be a genius of great rarity.120

Though an admirer, Tucker is not uncritical: he finds “too much aloofness, too little effort” in Matthew Arnold, and “too much pessimism, too little consideration”, about “the writer of Fors Clavigera”. Nor does he propose to make “with Mr Ruskin … any diatribes against those modern monsters the railways, or against the soul-withering immorality of buying in the cheapest and selling in the dearest market”.121 Similarly, after James Smith had attacked the

WHO READ RUSKIN? 33 first Australian Impressionist exhibition in 1889, a writer in The Australasian Critic, edited by Tucker and Baldwin Spencer, quickly came to the young artists’ defence:

[I]t is to be hoped that Mr Roberts, Mr McCubbin, and the others who have been impressed with the opportunities for pictorial description which lie in Australian life will not be discouraged either by silent indifference or outspoken criticism, but persevere in an effort which speaks more hopefully for Australian art than almost any other that has ever been inaugurated.122

Tucker’s career seems to fall into two sections: the first, from the enthusiastic young Englishman in the colonies seeking to argue the case for higher education and the diffusion of culture, and the second, dating from around the turn of the century, the conservative classics professor whose enthusiasm has been tempered by age, experience and the realities of Australian life.123 Even in the first phase there are occasional doubts:

There remains a serious flaw in the highest instruction of these colonies. In England … still more in Germany, the universities set about training men of scholarship and science as other workers are trained. When they pretend to produce a mathematician they produce a mathematician; when a student wants to be manufactured into a scientist, they make a scientist of him. They do not leave him, as we do in Australia, half finished or a quarter finished, in order to make another equally incomplete. A whole chair is better than two legs, a seat, and part of a back.124

But Tucker best deserves to be remembered by remarks he made in a talk to the Auckland University College just before taking up his post in Melbourne in 1885, when he still saw the opportunities presented by the colonies:

One thing I know and can assert with the confidence of knowledge, that whereas when we first came among you there were two courses lying open to us, either to withdraw ourselves into seclusion, and to make ourselves and our objects known to such few students as cared to come, or else to take a liberal view of our obligations to the commonwealth and to come out into the highways and the hedges of the education world. We chose the latter course, and we resolved to diffuse, as far as possible, what light we possessed by bringing philosophy out of the closet, and approaching the general public in popular or public lectures. There is, I am sure, not one among us who does not feel that part of his mission is to raise the taste, to cultivate the demand, rather than merely to satisfy it when raised.125

The tragedy of Tucker’s later career, so ably described by Geoffrey Dutton, is the retreat into seclusion he condemned as a young man – more books, but fewer lectures; more honours,

34 Some Literary Ruskinians but less passion; no longer the “living library” he was to his contemporaries, now merely an “enemy of modernity’ to a later generation.126 Tucker’s importance here is his early and sustained efforts to raise the level of taste among his listeners in Victoria in the 1890s; the lecture on “Literary Judgement”, for example, quoting Ruskin, was initially given to a class at the Bendigo School of Mines in 1889.127 Equally important is the effect his ideas about culture had on his protege, Walter Murdoch (1874–1970), who began his own career as a literary man in Melbourne around 1900 and combined teaching at the University with a prolific journalistic career.128 Murdoch was a capable teacher and populariser who contributed dozens of essays to newspapers and magazines, in which Ruskin appears many times, over the next four decades.129

5. RUSKIN IN AUSTRALIAN TEXTBOOKS

Tucker and Murdoch also edited two widely-used school readers, Illustrative Prose and Verse (1908) and A New Primer of English Literature (1912). Illustrative Prose and Verse contains a long extract from Modern Painters (on the Last Judgement), but, more to the point, in A New Primer Ruskin is described as “the great name” in Victorian criticism – greater even, it seems, than Matthew Arnold, Walter Pater, J A Symonds, Sir Leslie Stephen, Richard Hutton and W E Henley, “though it is as a moral teacher rather than as a critic that he has done his most powerful work”:

the main work of his later life may be described as a headlong assault upon what he conceived to be the degrading and brutalising tendencies of modern civilization … Whatever may be thought of Ruskin’s art-criticisms, or of his social theories, it must be admitted … that he wielded English prose with the hand of a master.130

Ruskin had appeared in Australian school text-books from the late 1870s131 but these were English texts adapted for Australian pupils; Tucker and Murdoch are among the first Australians to include Ruskin in their own versions of the canon – ones that, given their reputations, were widely used, in Victoria and beyond for decades. The very first writer to include Ruskin in school texts written in Australia was Stephen Henry Smith (1865–1943), a dominant figure in New South Wales education for forty years. In

WHO READ RUSKIN? 35 English History Stories for Third Class (1899), a book that went through at least seven editions before the First World War, Smith describes Ruskin, along with Carlyle, Dickens and Kingsley as a “champion of the poor” who had “persuasively appealed to rich men to be unselfish” while Dickens and Kingsley “demanded that love and brotherliness should be shown by all men, and especially that masters should show kindness and sympathy to their servants”.132 In later titles in this series we read that “few men have had a more powerful influence over large masses of their fellows than Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin, who are perhaps

133 the most distinctive prose writers of this era” and of “three great and noble men” (Ruskin, Dickens and Kingsley) who followed Carlyle in seeking justice for the working classes:

Ruskin, the most powerful of them, had great influence on the educated classes. He wrote in bitter condemnation of the rich masters, whose only aim was the increase of their own powers and riches, regardless of the welfare of their neighbours and of their workmen. Ruskin … pleaded for unselfishness with all the power, passion, and persuasiveness which he so amply possessed.

As a result:

During the reign of Victoria there was a marked and general betterment of the condition of Englishmen, so that the artisans are better fed, better shed, better educated … and better paid than ever before.134

By the time of his death in 1900 the Town and Country Journal said that Ruskin appealed to so many kinds of readers that it would be impossible to choose one book as being more popular than the others. Especially, it said, Ruskin was read by the self-educated man, “not only for [Ruskin’s] thought, but [because] he displays such a wide range of reading that one of his works is in itself a small library”.135 Ruskin himself was not dead, said the Barrier Miner, and neither would he die while his books and printed thoughts existed; though he was the “aesthete of the century”, Ruskin had not lived solely for art. The obituary referred to the recent departure of Mr Browne, a popular figure in Broken Hill for his charitable work among the miners, who owned a huge collection of Ruskins. By the law that we become like our associates, Reverend Wheeler had said at his farewell, Mr Browne had made his mind as beautiful as his companions. Elsewhere there were many whose daily existence was a colossal tribute to Ruskin’s influence and thus in a direct fashion Ruskin’s greatness was brought home to them.136

36 Some Literary Ruskinians E. CONCLUSION

Brian Maidment has examined the sales of Ruskin’s books in the United Kingdom between 1870 and 1900, and concludes that their highest point was the period between the publication of the first cheap editions of Ruskin’s work in 1886 and the collapse of the George Allen firm in 1907. The coincidence of cheap editions and growing public demand fuelled by political unrest spread his ideas fastest and farthest in this period. This seems to be what happened in Australia, where the political turmoil that began in the economic depression of the 1890s led to an unprecedented demand for answers, and I argue in Chapter Three that Ruskin found the most readers, and his most loyal ones, in the new Australian labour movement. Brian Maidment also points to the paradox that Ruskin’s influence was arguably greatest at a time when Ruskin himself could no longer take part in public discussion because of illness. He describes the appearance of “Ruskinism” at this time, where Ruskin’s work became open to interpretation without fear of Ruskin’s own judgments:

[A] source of authority for almost any kind of anti-industrial social melioration, a rallying place for an extraordinary diversity of pluralist, progressive, liberal, reactionary or anti-Victorian views, many of them never remotely mindful of the original intentions of his work.137

Much the same thing happened in Australia, though not to the same extent. Although individuals might quote Ruskin selectively, there were no Ruskin Societies or Ruskin Reading Guilds to lend the master’s authority to a bewildering variety of causes. Australia had its Ruskinians, as we shall see, but Ruskinism in Maidment’s sense did not find a home here. T G Tucker divided colonial readers into several categories, and we will meet them in the next three chapters: those who, like sponges, absorbed Ruskin’s ideas indiscriminately, along with everyone else’s; those who, like hourglasses, took Ruskin’s ideas in but also let them all out; those worldly figures who, like strainers, collected only the dregs of Ruskin’s ideas and discarded what was important; and those thoughtful men and women who, like sieves, collected the richest and most valuable parts of Ruskin’s teaching in service of a new order of things.138

WHO READ RUSKIN? 37 ENDNOTES FOR CHAPTER ONE

1 Punch, Sydney, 1 September 1883, p. 367. 2 Sesame and Lilies, 1865, sec. 31. 3 Later editions include a third lecture, “The Mystery of Life and Its Arts”, from 1868. 4 Sesame and Lilies, “Of Kings’ Treasuries”, sec. 9. 5 ibid., sec. 49. 6 ibid., sec. 48. 7 ibid., sec. 32. 8 ibid., sec. 4. 9 ibid., sec. 11. 10 ibid., sec. 45. 11 ibid., secs 52–53. 12 Samuel Smiles, Self Help, with Illustrations of Conduct and Perseverance, John Murray, London, 1908, p. 369 [first published 1859]. For more on Smiles see Kenneth Fielden, “Samuel Smiles and Self-Help”, Victorian Studies, December 1968, pp. 155–176. 13 George Combe, Education: its Principles and Practice, ed. William Jolly, Macmillan, London, 1879, pp. 491–492. 14 Smiles, op. cit., p. 370. 15 ibid., sec. 4. 16 ibid., sec. 12. 17 ibid. 18 ibid., sec. 55. 19 ibid., sec. 14. 20 John W Dodds, The Age of Paradox, Victor Gollancz, London, 1953, pp. 128–129. 21 Geoffrey Serle,The Golden Age: A History of the Colony of Victoria 1851–61, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1963, p. 4. 22 ibid., p. 371. 23 ibid. 24 A G Austin, Australian Education 1788–1900, Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, Melbourne, 1961, pp. 180–182. 25 Barrier Miner, Broken Hill, 25 January 1900, p. 2. 26 John Lane Mullins, catalogue of library sale 1893, copy in Mitchell Library, Sydney, at Q 017.2/1. 27 William Rae, catalogue of library sale 1873, copy in Mitchell Library, Sydney, at 018.2/4. 28 C W Holgate, An Account of the Chief Libraries of Australia and Tasmania, Whittingham & Co, London, 1886, p. 26. 29 ibid., p. 26. 30 ibid., p. 25. 31 ibid. 32 ibid. 33 ibid. 34 Victorian State Parliament, Melbourne, library catalogue for 1864. 35 Ballarat Mechanics Institute, library catalogue for 1867. 36 Holgate, op. cit., p. 42.

38 Endnotes for Chapter One 37 ibid., p. 26. 38 ibid., p. 25. 39 ibid., p. 21 (Melbourne), p. 41 (Sydney). 40 ibid., p. 43. 41 ibid., p. 42. 42 Ruskin, A Joy For Ever, 1857, sec. 65, and see sec. 140. 43 ibid., sec. 65. 44 Catalogues for New South Wales Parliamentary Library for 1857, 1866, 1871; supplementary catalogues for 1886–1894, 1894–1898; supplementary catalogue for 1901, Mitchell Library, Sydney. 45 Catalogues for Victorian Parliamentary Library for 1864, 1886, Mitchell Library. 46 From M K Beveridge, Gatherings Among the Gum-Trees, James Reid, Melbourne, 1863. 47 New South Wales Statistical Register, 1881, pp. 24–25. 48 Barbara Heaton, Greg Preston and Mary Rabbitt, Science, Success and Soirees: The Mechanics’ Institute Movement in Newcastle and the Lower Hunter, Newcastle History Monograph No. 14, Newcastle Region Library, 1997, p. 69. 49 Gunnedah School of Arts, Catalogue for 1909, Mitchell Library, 027.4/S. 50 NSW Statistical Register, 1881, pp. 24–25. 51 NSW Statistical Register, 1876, pp. 26–27; Journal of the Legislative Council for NSW, 1883, p. 1404. 52 Sydney Mechanics’ Institute, catalogues for 1862, 1869, 1874, at Mitchell 019.1/S; for 1880, at Mitchell 019.1/2. 53 Thomas J Wise and James P Smart, compilers, A Complete Bibliography of the Writings in Prose and Verse of John Ruskin LLD, London, published for subscribers only, 1893; reprinted by Dawson’s, 1964; see vol. II, part II, Contributions to Periodical Literature, pp. 111–155, and vol. II, part III, Ruskiniana, Division B, pp. 176–203. 54 For more about the debate over the institutes’ conflicting roles see Greg Preston, “The Nature of Success”, in Heaton, op. cit., pp. 99–121. 55 Journal of the Legislative Council of New South Wales, 1883–84, vol. 36, part 3, Report of the Trustees of the Sydney Free Public Library for 1883–1884, p. 239. 56 The catalogues for the various mechanics’ institutes in NSW that I have been able to find are all in the Mitchell Library, Sydney, at these locations: Bega 1890 027.4/3 Braidwood 1897 017.1/8 Broken Hill 1899 017.1/B Deniliquin n.d. 018.1/D Goulburn 1888 017.1/13 Grafton 1901 017.1/G Gunnedah 1909 Pam File 027.4/S Kiama 1910 018.1/K Maclean 1892 018.1/M Orange 1914 027.505/1 (missing 8/3/2002) Rylstone 1903 Pam File 027.4/S Shellharbour 1875 Pam File 027.3/D Sydney 1862–1874 019.1/S Sydney 1880 019.1/2 Thornleigh 1908 Pam File 027.4/S Young 1900? Pam File 027.4/S The catalogue for the Redfern Free Public Library, 1882, is at 017.1/R, and for the unnamed Grafton church library, 1863, at Pam File 027.3/D.

WHO READ RUSKIN? 39 57 See Brian Kennedy, Silver Sin and Sixpenny Ale: A Social History of Broken Hill 1883–1921, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1978, and G Dale, The Industrial History of Broken Hill, Melbourne, 1918, passim. 58 Catalogue, Mechanics Institute, Broken Hill, 1899, op. cit. 59 ibid. 60 See note 82, above. 61 This claim is made by its long-serving editor, Samuel Carter Hall (1800–1889), in his farewell piece in The Art Journal, December 1880, pp. 353–355. Hall had been editor of the Art Union Journal since its inception in 1839, and of its successor, The Art Journal, from 1849. Hall’s autobiography, Reminiscences of a Long Life (London, 1888) has a very full account of his editorship, though it sheds no light on why the journal’s attitude to Ruskin changed after about 1862. My theory, as yet unproven, is that it coincided with the death of Prince Albert that year. A major supporter of The Art Journal, the prince did not like Ruskin, who had criticised the Crystal Palace and the Great Exhibition of 1851 on numerous occasions. In passing I note Hall’s pride in helping to develop the standard of industrial design in Britain through the prolific illustrations of manufactured items in The Art Journal: [M]odels of excellence – furnished by all the leading Art manufacturers of Europe, America, and Asia – have been engraved and published in the Art Journal, to the number of, I think, 40,000, during the forty-two years of its existence; while at least 500 artists (principally British painters and sculptors) have been represented by the art of the most skilful engravers – the artists thus becoming teachers of the many instead of instructors of the few. Hall, Reminiscences, p. 354 62 The Art Journal, 1851–1880, passim. 63 John Batchelor, John Ruskin: No Wealth But Life, Pimlico, London, 2001, pp. 329–330. 64 The Art Journal, November 1878; I have not been able to find a report on the trial or its outcome in the major newspapers of Sydney and Melbourne (The Sydney Morning Herald, The Daily Telegraph, The Age and The Argus) – at least not in the eight weeks after its conclusion, 26 November 1878, by which time the English papers would have reached Australia by sea. The best account of the trial is in Derrick Leon, Ruskin the Great Victorian, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1949, pp. 518–530. 65 For Cole, see his entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography. An ad for Petherick’s in 1890 identifies them as “the agents in Australia for Mr Ruskin’s works” (The Australasian Critic, 1 October 1890, p. ix; and see a similar ad in the same journal for 1 January 1891, p. xi). 66 Cole was the anthologist’s anthologist, producing many publications based on his vast and eclectic reading, such as Cole’s Funny Picture Book (1879), Cole’s Intellect Sharpener (1900), and his last and most ambitious production, The Cream of Human Thought Library. In a more serious vein he published many broadsides on public questions – most controversially, A White Australia Impossible (1898), which led to him receiving a warm reception in Japan on a visit in 1903. (ADB) 67 E W Cole, publisher, Worlds for 1/3d, Melbourne, n.d., Mitchell Library reference 017.4/12; Cole, Master Messages from John Ruskin, Melbourne, 1907, Mitchell 824.86/1. 68 Wise and Smart, op. cit., vol. I, p. 115; a 15-page pamphlet of extracts from Unto This Last, called The Rights of Labour According to John Ruskin, was produced in 1887 by a man called Merrick; sold for a penny, it went through three editions in three years. 69 John Woolley, Lectures Delivered in Australia, Macmillan, Cambridge and London, 1862; Lecture II, “Oral Instruction and Self Culture”, pp. 27–64, see p. 33.

40 Endnotes for Chapter One 70 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Eloquence”, in Letters and Social Aims (1875), in Emerson, Works, George Routledge & Sons, London, 1905, pp. 453–458. The quote is from pp. 453–454. There is a long study of oratory in Victorian Britain I have found that gives the necessary background to this topic, but it is very dull going: see Robert Oliver, Public Speaking in the Reshaping of Great Britain, University of Delaware Press, Newark, 1987. 71 E T Cook, The Life of John Ruskin, George Allen, London, 1911; see vol. II, p. 174. By 1874 Ruskin had grown tired of giving public lectures because, he wrote, “I find the desire of audiences to beaudiences only becoming an entirely pestilent character of the age. Everybody wants to hear – nobody to read – nobody to think; to be excited for an hour – and, if possible, amused; to get the knowledge it has cost a man half his life to gather, first sweetened up to make it palatable, and then kneaded into the smallest possible pills – and to swallow it homeopathically and be wise – this is the passionate desire and hope of the multitude of the age. It is not to be done” (Ruskin, Arrows of the Chace, II, George Allen, Sunnyside, Orpington, Kent, 1880, p. 179). 72 Michael Cannon, Australia in the Victorian Age, vol. 3: Life in the Cities, Thomas Nelson, Melbourne, 1975, p. 96. 73 This account uses the returns in the Journal of the Legislative Council of NSW, 1883, pp. 1400–1406. 74 ibid. 75 The Literary and Debating Societies’ Journal,Sydney, 15 August 1889, p. 1. 76 See W M Rossetti, Some Reminiscences, Brown Langham & Co, London, 1906, pp. 463–465; George Adam Smith, The Life of Henry Drummond, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1899, ch. XIV; and James Anthony Froude, Oceana, or England and Her Colonies, London, 1886. Rossetti spent two weeks in Sydney, half of them in quarantine because a passenger on his ship came down with smallpox; Drummond’s visit was living proof that, properly guided, visitors could be convinced that Australia in 1890 was sober, Christian and tolerant; and Froude managed to offend the Bulletin, whose obituary described him as “a fine example of a cantankerous man of letters” (27 October 1894, p. 7). 77 This follows the entry on Woolley in the ADB by K J Cable. 78 Woolley, Lectures Delivered in Australia, op. cit. 79 ibid., Lecture IX, “The Idylls of the King”, pp. 369–426; see p. 373. 80 ibid., pp. 373–374. 81 ibid., Lecture VI, “Inaugural Address Delivered to Members of the Maitland School of Arts, Sydney”, pp. 203–258; see p. 239. 82 ibid., pp. 239–240. 83 ibid., Lecture II, “Oral Instruction and Self Culture”, pp. 27–64, see p. 42. 84 Ruskin, Modern Painters I, 1843, p. 131. 85 ibid., p. 341. I owe this comparison to a passage in Ruskin and the Eye of the Beholder by Elizabeth Helsinger, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1982; see ch. 3, “Excursive Sight”, pp. 67–110, passim. 86 See G L Simpson, “Reverend Dr John Woolley and Higher Education”, in C Turney (ed.), Pioneers of Australian Education, I, Sydney University Press, Sydney, 1969, pp. 81–114. 87 Woolley, op. cit., Lecture VIII, “The Social Use of Schools of Art”, pp. 313–368; see pp. 336–337. 88 ibid., p. 337. 89 Ruskin, The Two Paths, 1859, lecture II, “The Unity of Art”, p. 131. 90 Woolley, “The Social Use of Schools of Art”, op. cit., p. 340.

WHO READ RUSKIN? 41 91 ADB entry for Woolley; for the book review, see The Month, Sydney, 1864, p. 196. 92 Cited in James Grant and Geoffrey Serle (eds), The Melbourne Scene 1803–1956, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1978, pp. 182–183. The original review appeared in The Argus, 17 August 1889. 93 This account of Smith’s life follows Lurline Stuart,James Smith: The Making of a Colonial Culture, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1989; and his entry in the ADB by Ann-Mari Jordens. 94 From The Argus Index, 1860–1869, passim. 95 Cited in R N Ebbels and L G Churchward (eds), The Australian Labor Movement 1850–1907: Historical Documents, 2nd edn, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1983, pp. 48–49. The original piece appeared in The Centennial Magazine, December 1889, pp. 344–345. I have transposed the last line from its place in the first paragraph. 96 Smith addresses the Eight Hours March, 1866, from Michael Cannon, op. cit., p. 251. 97 Smith on Melbourne’s factory districts, in The Cyclopedia of Victoria, 1900, vol. i, p. 111; cited in Grant and Serle, op. cit., pp. 228–229. 98 Smith’s lectures were frequently published afterwards. The Mitchell Library has a collection of his pieces, not all signed, from 1873 at ML 208/P10. “Idolatry” was originally given at the Trades Hall, Lygon Street, 30 November 1873. The extract is from pp. 25–28. Melbourne Punch, ever ironic, followed Smith’s lectures with interest: Mr James Smith has modified his views concerning the duty of man. Before his last lecture but one, “man was to live for others”. At his last lecture “man is to live for others and for himself”. That’s just what we are all doing, only most of us haven’t got leisure to go beyond self. The only time we ever remember living for another, was when we put our name to an accommodation bill, for our once bosom friend, Joe Freshman. We had to pay it. Since then we’ve left off living for others. 12 December 1872, p. 185 99 Stuart, op. cit., p. 113. 100 Cited in Bernard Smith (ed.), Documents on Art and Taste in Australia: The Colonial Period 1770–1914, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1975, pp. 162–164; also see pp. 144–146, 161–162. 101 Stuart, op. cit., pp. 167–169. 102 Smith and spiritualism, ADB entry, op. cit.; also see the comments on Smith’s role as a veteran contributor to (and stand in editor for) The Harbinger of Light by Mrs Charles Bright, in The Harbinger of Light, 1 August 1905, p. 8730. The articles on Ruskin, reprinted fromThe Truth Seeker, appeared in the issues for March and April 1879. Smith was not alone; spiritualism had many adherents in boom time Melbourne. See Alfred Gabay, Messages from Beyond: Spiritualism and Spiritualists in Melbourne’s Golden Age 1870–1890, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Vic., 2001, passim. 103 B Smith, Documents on Art and Taste in Australia 1770–1914, op. cit., pp. 161–162; Alan McCulloch, Encyclopedia of Australian Art, op. cit., p. 510. A study collection of James Smith’s writing on art and architecture is overdue. 104 James Smith, Catalogue of Library Sale, December 1910?, in Mitchell at 018.2. 105 Obituaries in Daily Telegraph, Sydney, 2 August 1901, p. 5; Sydney Morning Herald, 2 August 1901, p. 6; Building and Engineering Journal, 10 August 1901, p. 249 (this is virtually identical with the Daily Telegraph). 106 “[A] variety of names”: Green identifies himself as “De Libra” in a letter to Sir Henry Parkes, asking for work as a speechwriter for the coming elections (Parkes Papers, Mitchell Library, CY Reel 74, vol. 52, A922, pp. 598–601). His obituaries also confirm this as his usual pen name. A provisional Green bibliography follows (architectural items only):

42 Endnotes for Chapter One Once A Month (1884–1886) 15 November 1884, “Art in Sydney” by “D.L.”, pp. 369–374; this has extensive architectural commentary as well. 1 January 1886, “Architecture in Sydney”, by “J.G. De Libra”, pp. 23–26. Society (1887–1888?) Green wrote prolifically for this journal in 1887, under several names: music reviews every week, as “De Libra” (May–December); an eleven part series on Sydney architecture, unsigned, but clearly Green’s work – two of them refer to the Once A Month articles cited above, “written by the author of these lines” (June–October); art reviews, as “D.L.” (December); and theatre reviews, as “De Libra” (September–October). The architecture pieces are found in the following issues: 4 June, 9 July, 20 August, 3 September, 10 September, 17 September, 24 September, 1 October, 8 October, 15 October, 29 October, 1887. The Centennial Magazine of NSW (1888–1889). “Model Suburbs – Harcourt, Burwood” by James Green, pp. 150–153. “The Art Society of NSW” by James Green, pp. 271–284. The Australasian Builder and Contractors News (1890–1895) Green wrote continually for this journal from January 1890 until its demise in 1895. By 1893 he was the editor – Green identifies himself as such in a letter to the Sydney Architectural Association, 8 April 1893, offering subscriptions to the ABCN as prizes in a student competition. As editor he was supportive of the local architectural profession but no toady to the formidable President of the NSW Institute of Architects, John Horbury Hunt: we are, happily, not called upon to follow [Hunt] through all this mass of turgid, verbose, ill-written (and scarcely, indeed, grammatical) matter, in which Mr Hunt seems … to confound the bombast of the beadle with the dignity of the divine … but in the interests of the profession generally it is greatly to be regretted that the President should persist in addressing letters of the kind, abounding in spleen and personalities, to the Press [whose only effect will be to] increase mistrust of the profession on the part of an imperfectly informed public. ABCN, 29 April 1893, pp. 171–172 Green also reprinted a provocative speech by Walter Butler to the Royal Victorian Institute of Architects on “The Prospect of the Development of the Arts Among the Handicrafts” (ABCN, 1 April and 8 April, 1893) which quoted Ruskin and Morris liberally in an attack on the current practice of architecture; evidently there was an immediate and strong reaction, and he was obliged to print an (unsigned) reply to Butler which read in part: having perused the paper, we confess to some feeling of appalment [sic] at the Herculean task of combating almost every assertion and expression of opinion put forward by Mr Butler, from start to finish of his Paper, even to the quotations from Ruskin and Carlyle in their wildest and least lucid moods. ABCN, 29 April 1893, pp. 172 But there is no doubt about where Green’s own opinions lay. He comments on a series of articles on architectural education by a Mr Young, recently reprinted in the ABCN from the Architectural Association, London, and says: Mr Young … rises to his highest level as a mentor when he states that “an architect is never at his best until he is designing for the future, putting his thoughts into stone to pass down to future generations, just as an author puts his thoughts into a book, or a painter on canvas”. Here we have some of the noblest teaching of Mr Ruskin reduced to practice in a score or two of words. ABCN, 25 February 1893, p. 76

WHO READ RUSKIN? 43 Australasian Art Review (1899): This was another brave but short-lived journal devoted to art and architecture. Green (as “J.G. De Libra”) wrote a long series of articles on “The Fine Arts in Australasia” throughout the year, two of which contain lengthy discussions of architecture: in New South Wales, 1 May 1899, pp. 17–21, and in Victoria, 5 October 1899, pp. 1–6. 107 Bernard Smith, Australian Painting 1788–1960, Oxford University Press, London, 1962, p. 66. 108 Once A Month, Sydney, 15 November 1884, pp. 371–372. 109 ibid., p. 371. 110 Society, Sydney, 2 July 1887, p. 13. 111 Society, Sydney, 1 October 1887, p. 12. 112 Australasian Art Review, 5 October 1899, p. 2. 113 ibid., p. 6. 114 Society, Sydney, 20 August 1887, p. 12. 115 ABCN, 26 April 1890, p. 973. 116 Death Certificate 1901/011254, NSW Registry of Births Deaths and Marriages, Daily Telegraph, 2 August 1901, p. 5. 117 This account follows Tucker’s entry in the ADB by K J McKay. 118 T G Tucker, Things Worth Thinking About, George Robertson & Co, Melbourne, 1890, p. 200. 119 T G Tucker, Platform Monologues, Thomas Lothian, Melbourne, 1914, p. 201. 120 ibid., p. 47. 121 Tucker, Things Worth Thinking About, op. cit., p. 111. 122 The Australasian Critic, vol. 1, no. 1, October 1890, p. 22. 123 Compare Tucker’s two major statements on education, the first in 1885, when Tucker was still in New Zealand, reported in The Australasian Schoolmaster, June 1885, pp. 178–181; and the second in his testimony to the Royal Commission into the University of Melbourne, 1902, occasioned by the discovery of serious fraud on the part of the university accountant. See the Report of the Royal Commission into the University of Melbourne, Minutes of Evidence, pp. 15–25. Also see Geoffrey Dutton for a critical view of Tucker’s career, in Dutton, Snow on the Saltbush, Viking Press, Melbourne, 1984, pp. 150–152. 124 Tucker, Things Worth Thinking About, op. cit., p. 195. 125 Tucker, The Australasian Schoolmaster, op. cit., and see his fine essay on “Culture and Cant”, inThings Worth Thinking About, op. cit., pp. 109–133. 126 Dutton, op. cit., p. 152. A G Stephens, for one, attacked Tucker in 1907 for continuing to support the study of Latin and Greek in Australian schools: “We must get into direct contact with our share of the work, we must specialise … How can an electrician spare time for Greek? Or an irrigation engineer for Latin? Or an expert in rifles and ammunition for either?” (“Australian Education”, in Leon Cantrell (ed.), A G Stephens, Selected Writings, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1978, pp. 427–429). 127 Compare Tucker, “Literary Judgement”, in Things Worth Thinking About, pp. 203–236, and the lecture of the same name he gave at Bendigo on 5 September 1889; see Bendigo School of Mines and Industries, Annual Report for the year ending 30 June 1890, pp. 123–149, ML 607/B. The Bendigo students heard more about Ruskin in a lecture the following month on “Clouds and Cloudland”, by J B Lillie Mackay. See Bendigo Annual Report, 1890, pp. 199–234. 128 See ADB entry for Murdoch by F Alexander. Murdoch was one of the dominant literary influences in Australia from the First World War to the Second; his career and attitudes, not favourable to modernism or Australian writing, is well surveyed in Dutton, op. cit.; see for example p. 135. Also see J A La Nauze

44 Endnotes for Chapter One and Elizabeth Nurser (eds), Walter Murdoch and Alfred Deakin on Books and Men: Letters and Comments 1900–1918, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1974, passim, for Murdoch’s early career and his long friendship with Alfred Deakin, three times Prime Minister before the First World War. 129 Murdoch’s essay collections include The Enemies of Literature (1907) and 72 Essays (1947). See the entry on Murdoch in E Morris Miller and F T Macartney, Australian Literature: A Bibliography to 1950, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1956, pp. 348–349. In Collected Essays (1938), there are seventeen references to Ruskin in a dozen different essays. In an illuminating aside Murdoch says “Perhaps Ruskin’s madness was the finest of all his sermons; the fact that our world is a world in which men like Ruskin and Swift go mad with indignation should provide a text for thousands of sermons” (p. 150). 130 T G Tucker and W Murdoch (eds), A New Primer of English Literature, Whitcombe & Tomb, Melbourne, 1912, pp. 205–206. 131 See for example the Collins School Series: The Australian Reading Books, London, Glasgow and Sydney, 1876–1877. The Fifth Book for Girls has an extract from Ruskin (XC) on “Appearance of the Sky”; The Fifth Book for Boys has two extracts from Ruskin, one on “Stones” (p. 209) and one on “The Fields” (p. 82), not sourced. 132 S H Brooks, New Australian School Series: The New Standard Histories No. 1: English History Stories for Third Class, Sydney, 1899, p. 131. 133 S H Brooks, English History for Senior Classes, 8th edn, Sydney, 1914, p. 98. 134 S H Brooks, English History Stories for Young Australians, 7th edn, Sydney, 1913, pp. 132–135. 135 Town and Country Journal, Sydney, 27 January 1900. 136 Barrier Miner, Broken Hill, 27 January 1900, editorial, “John Ruskin”. There is more about Mr Browne in the Barrier Miner, 25 January 1900, p. 2, and his “high and noble example of integrity and moral worth”. 137 Brian Maidment, “Interpreting Ruskin 1870–1914”, in John Dixon Hunt and Faith M Holland (eds), The Ruskin Polygon: Essays on the Imagination of John Ruskin, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1982, pp. 159–171, see p. 170. 138 T G Tucker, Things Worth Thinking About, op. cit., p. 131.

WHO READ RUSKIN? 45

CHAPTER TWO RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE

A. INTRODUCTION

The period I examine in this chapter is the twenty years between 1889 to 1908, from the first moment Ruskin is seriously discussed in architectural terms in Australia, to 1908, in which Ruskin’s ideas are embodied in the first Australian book on architectural theory, even as his influence is waning in architectural practice. Late nineteenth century Australia was a fluid world, no less so in architecture than in society, where every man had, as Ruskin said, his “solitary and unstable opinion”.1 In the push to define afresh what an architect was and what real architecture might be, Ruskin is not the only authority cited in these debates – the newly translated Viollet-le-Duc, and now American writers like John Wellborn Root as well as English ones like James Fergusson, are frequently called upon for support. But Ruskin is the writer most widely quoted, on the widest variety of topics, in this period, and no less controversial a figure in Australia than he had been in England. In tracing these debates this chapter makes extensive use of the two major professional journals of the period, the Australasian Builder and Contractors’ News (1887–1895) and the Building and Engineering Journal (1888–1897), which merged in 1897 to become the Building Engineering and Mining Journal (1897–1905). Both titles were conducted by professional journalists, the BEJ by F C Jarrett and the ABCN by James Philp and John Mackay, and appeared on a weekly basis. They were editorially conservative, inevitable given the commercial interests they served, but they were lively, intelligent journals that remain an invaluable record of the nineteenth century Australian building world.2 While there had been scattered mentions of Ruskin on various topics throughout the 1880s, two papers in 1889 put Ruskin firmly on the architectural agenda in Australia. The first was by the Melbourne architect E Wilson Dobbs, in a talk given to the Architecture and Engineering Association of Victoria in September 1889. Describing Ruskin Dobbs waxed alliterative: Ruskin is “a pious-minded poet, pure meaning pleader, philosophical

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 47 philanthropist, prophetic preacher, pre-eminently picturesque prose-writer … full of piquant phillipics against the Philistines … a perfect philomath”. Dobbs summarised Ruskin’s career, quoting liberally from Modern Painters, before stating boldly “I hold that any rational being who reads Ruskin rightly will have no difficulty in declaring to [his] sanity and supreme soundness”. For him Ruskin is “the most cultured critic of this or any time”.3 Two months later another Melbourne architect, Harold Desbrowe-Annear, also gave a paper on Ruskin, this time to a literary and social meeting of the Royal Victorian Institute of Architects, in November 1889.4 For Desbrowe-Annear Ruskin was “the greatest of English prose poets and art critics” who had “continued with gigantic courage … to enrich the world with many works of priceless value”. In his paper Desbrowe-Annear discussed Ruskin’s architectural ideas and not his social ones, but he was clear and forthright on Ruskin the controversialist. Avoiding Ruskin was the very worst advice a student could follow:

this estrangement of modern architects from the teaching and works of Ruskin … has caused the more ignorant to be as loud in their condemnation of what … they … have been too indolent to learn … [this estrangement] must be entirely destroyed if the general practice of our architecture is … to be raised to that of an art.5

Ruskin was evidently as controversial a figure for Australian architects as for their British counterparts. The editors of the Australasian Builder and Contractors’ News did not mince words when commenting on Desbrowe-Annear’s paper two weeks later:

The reason why so many architects care nothing for the admirable writings of Mr Ruskin is to be found in the fact that they regard them all simply in the nature of “Books for Beginners.” Mr Ruskin himself is accepted in the light of an elegant diletantii rambler through the cities of the old world – a gentleman, unquestionably, of refined taste and very exquisite sentiment, who has a talent for clothing his thoughts in beautiful expressions that sometimes captivate – one whose works, no doubt, afford very good reading to cultivated people of leisure, but are of very little, if of any, practical value to the architect.6

But by 1908 the architect Robert Haddon, in a book written for his students at the Melbourne Working Men’s College, could say that “truth may lurk in a kitchen chair as much as in a shrine, and simplicity is not incompatible with beauty”. Haddon does not mention Ruskin by name, but his thoughts on architecture reflect the full Ruskinian

48 Introduction program: he calls for honesty, simplicity, and craftsmanship in making a national style free of affectation or unnecessary ornament, and for “that conformity with truth that makes for great architecture”.7 Between these two dates we see the peak of an extraordinary building boom, a devastating economic depression followed by a slow revival, and the first serious attempts at putting architecture on a professional basis. In late nineteenth century Australia, anybody could call themselves an architect, and very many did. “What constitutes an architect in this colony?” asked Melbourne Punch in 1876, denouncing the ignorant copyism of some recent designs.8 The Emigrants Information Office advised professional men thinking of going to Australia in 1890 that in Victoria, “there is no law to prevent any person qualified or unqualified from styling himself an architect or a civil engineer, and practising as such”, while in Queensland and New South Wales “there are no restrictions imposed upon the members of either of these professions, no examination or licence being necessary”.9 Arguing for a bill to regulate the practice of architecture in 1892, the president of the newly Royal Victorian Institute of Architects thought it was necessary to exclude “unworthy rivals”:

In the present conditions of affairs, any one, whether a pupil or not, and whether he has studied diligently or otherwise, can assume the title of architect at any time … the incompetent may be as successful … in securing clients as his skilled brother.10

Coming to Australia meant beginning again to nineteenth century Englishmen, and the many others who followed them. This unstable, thrusting world meant that everything had to be argued afresh; nothing could be taken for granted, least of all in architecture. Defending your claim to be an architect meant defending your understanding of architecture, and Ruskin appears in the several related ways this debate was conducted in this period: about the difference between architecture and building; the rival claims of various organizations to control the practice of architecture, including government regulation; the debates on architectural education and the establishment of schools; and, most Ruskinian of all, the debates about the relationship on site – between architects and artisans. The professionalization debate described below has its parallels in Britain and the USA, and closely follows them. But in a larger sense too, we see in this debate as in

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 49 many others the political economy of the age, the two great opposing tendencies of the industrializing world, the division of labour and the resulting fragmentation of work, and thus of life, that Ruskin had memorably condemned; and the countervailing tendency to combine, to connect, to consolidate. Henry George, writing on Social Problems in 1884, saw this dynamic as part of a even larger one: the “growing perception of the gross injustice of existing inequalities of privilege and wealth” versus the “rapid and monstrous increase of these inequalities”. But the division of labour had its champions too – in French, the sociologist Emile Durkeim, who writes his great work on the subject in 1893, and in English, the economist David Wells, who speaks for many others when he says in 1889:

while such cases of displacement of labor appeal most strongly to human sympathy … it should be … remembered that … such phases of human suffering are now, always have been, and undoubtedly always will be, the inevitable concomitants of the progress of civilization … that it is not within the power of statute enactment to arrest such transitions [and that] the ultimate result is always an almost immeasurable degree of increased good to mankind.11

The building industry was not immune from these forces. An industry organised along traditional craft lines as late as the 1870s, by 1900 it had undergone dramatic changes: “the division of labour has eaten deep from the architect to the hod-man” said William Morris in the 1880s.12 “Improve architects by all means,” wrote the architect and critic Robert Kerr in 1891, “but instead of abolishing them … classify them, applying in this as in all else the great principle of subdivision of labour and skill for the supply of the increasing exigencies of life”.13 But Ruskin was one of the first writers in Victorian England to question these economic assumptions. Perhaps there was nothing so inflammatory in Unto This Last (1862) as Ruskin’s bold claim, implied in the title, that all men should be paid alike, regardless of merit:

By all means, chose your bricklayer; that is the proper reward of the good workman, to be “chosen.” The natural and right system respecting all labour is, that it should be paid at a fixed rate, but the good workman employed, and the bad workman unemployed. The false, unnatural and destructive system is when the bad workman is allowed to offer his work at half-price, and either take the place of the good, or force him by his competition to work for an inadequate sum.14

50 Introduction It was not just Ruskin’s social theories that were controversial. Robert Kerr, in a long piece in the Edinburgh Review in 1888, eviscerated Ruskin’s whole career.15 Thirty years earlier Kerr had attacked Ruskin for The Seven Lamps of Architecture; now he was as dismissive as ever. Ruskin had become the centre of a sect, and his writing was little more than “audacious fallacies for the mystification of fools”,16 full of “unscientific paradoxes and rhetorical fireworks”, “egotistical in its pretensions”.17 While conceding that Ruskin has more “striking and logical” ideas about architecture than any other art,18 Kerr gives these little quarter. The Seven Lamps is dismissed as “elaborate nonsense”,19 Ruskin’s famous definition of architecture slaughtered: “a more shallow and trumpery definition of this great intellectual form of art was never uttered”.20 The Stones of Venice, while better, especially for its “superb illustrations”,

21 suffered from the old problem of “rhetorical exaggeration” and Ruskin’s perceived ignorance of architectural construction. Kerr concluded:

the whole of the author’s so-called reasoning on architecture – as on everything else – is a jumble of sensational and contradictory rhetoric, more especially so in what relates to architectural ornament, and the relation of nature to architecture.22

And, more painfully, “this kind of writing is what might be expected … from a man who has always specially courted the praises of women and of womanish men”.23 Ruskin for his part relished controversy, and in the second edition of The Stones of Venice (1858) reassured architects that he meant to be their friend:

If I could obtain the public ear and the principles I have advocated were carried into general practice [architects] would be asked to raise whole streets of bold, and rich, and living architecture, with the certainty in their hearts of doing what was honourable to themselves, and good for all men.24

Architectural opinion was still divided over Ruskin by the time of his death in 1900. The American Architect and Building News was reluctant to recommend any of Ruskin’s books to students, but conceded that the Elements of Drawing and Aratra Pentelici might be worth reading; students should however avoid the Lectures on Architecture and Painting at all costs; The Seven Lamps of Architecture was “incomprehensible to some, inspiring and valuable to others”, while The Stones of Venice was the “best studied and most thoughtful of all Mr Ruskin’s works”.25 H H Statham, the editor of the London Builder, declared that

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 51 Ruskin was an inspired prophet and a great writer, but a unsafe teacher or guide, whose contradictions nullified the value of his work: The Stones of Venice was “one tremendous paradox from beginning to end”,26 while the Lectures on Architecture and Painting was “one of the most mischievous books on the subject ever written”.27 The Seven Lamps of Architecture seems to have been the one book of Ruskin’s, other than the Elements of Drawing, that architects liked; both the chairmen of the London Architectural Association and the Royal Institute of British Architects referred to it when remarking on Ruskin’s death,28 and even H H Statham, no friend of Ruskin, thought that “here Ruskin has done nobly”, making thousands of ordinary readers care about architecture for the first time.29 The American architect Russell Sturgis, deeply influenced by Ruskin as a young man, wrote that The Seven Lamps of Architecture was “stimulating in a quite unexampled way” to those who would consider architecture as a fine art. As for Ruskin’s qualifications as a critic of architecture:

The question is not whether … the building or the detail is rightly criticized or not. The question is rather whether the suggestions given are worth giving and worth taking, and whether the whole body of writing, taken together, may or may not be of use to the student of art.

The answer is an emphatic yes, and Sturgis concludes that “the best advice that can be given to one who would gladly understand Ruskin, but can hardly promise to read his many volumes, will be to read this volume and then to read it again”.30

52 Introduction B. THE THREE PHASES OF RUSKINISM

Michael Brooks, in John Ruskin and Victorian Architecture, distinguishes three phases in the spread of Ruskin’s ideas in England: first, his championing of the Gothic Revival, a question of style, in the 1850s and 1860s; a second phase, in the 1870s and 1880s, in which William Morris and Philip Webb rework some key Ruskinian ideas, and espouse a new definition of architecture as honest building; and a third, in the 1880s and 1890s, when Ruskin’s social ideas become dominant: it is the nature of work that matters now, not the style. In the next three sections I outline how this analysis applies to Australia.31 “Visual Ruskinism” appears in Australia in the 1860s and was starting to wane by the late 1880s, twenty years after it peaked in England, though detached elements of Ruskinian doctrine persisted for a while longer; polychromy for example could still be found in Australian work up until the First World War. The core ideas of the second phase, “honest building”, first appear in the professional debates around 1889 and were still being cited in 1908. This phase, like the first one, lags developments in the United Kingdom by about twenty years. In the third phase, however, “the nature of work”, the debates in Australia on architectural practice suddenly catch up with contemporary debates in Britain, prompted by widespread industrial unrest. 1891 is a watershed year for this with the Queensland shearers’ strike and the maritime strikes in the eastern states; though both are defeats for the labour movement, they mark the beginning of the real growth of the Australian labour party. Against this background, Ruskin’s ideas on the nature of work, especially in architecture, as set out in The Seven Lamps of Architecture and The Stones of Venice, were championed by many thoughtful architects in Australia at the same time as in Britain. Thus it is simpler to think of Brook’s second and third phases as parallel developments in Australia, overlapping and reinforcing each other. For this reason I regard this decade, the 1890s, as the real moment of “Ruskinism” in Australian architecture, with the longest-lasting effects. As we shall see in Chapter Three, building workers were also reading Ruskin, though not the same texts, and coming to quite different conclusions from their masters.

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 53 C. PHASE ONE: VISUAL RUSKINISM AND THE GOTHIC REVIVAL

Eve Blau has examined how Ruskin’s ideas were applied to architecture through her study of the mid-Victorian firm of Deane & Woodward.32 Briefly summarised, Ruskinian Gothic is an architecture of detail, worked in traditional materials, especially stone, marble and brick. Following Ruskin’s famous dictum in The Seven Lamps that ornament is what separates architecture from mere building, there is little concern for planning or structure, but a lot for the embellishment of the building fabric; sculpture and painting, applied ornament, are the most important of all, but so are stained glass, mosaic work, and the sculptured enrichment of internal fittings. The carving is naturalistic, not conventionalised, and allows scope for the creativity of individual workmen. There is also an emphasis on polychromy, achieved externally through the use of different coloured materials, internally through painting and ornament. The whole harks back to thirteenth century forms, especially Venetian ones, although Ruskin did allow some other possibilities. John Unrau33 however defends Ruskin against the charge that he did not care for planning or structure, and that his interest in architecture was restricted to two-dimensional effects; Ruskin’s interest in sculpture and the effects of shadow on building mass are sufficient rebuttal. Though Ruskin admitted he did not understand construction, he believed good architecture could only be based on good building; nevertheless he insisted that architecture begins where utility ends. The expression of the feelings and thoughts of the individual artist is what makes architecture an art – hence the importance of craftsmanship, an argument first made in the Seven Lamps of Architecture and then repeated and extended in The Stones of Venice. Unrau and Blau agree however that no writer on architecture has devoted more attention to the detail of building than Ruskin, and Unrau points out Ruskin’s acute understanding of buildings as optical phenomena, their appearance varying with perspective as well as light and shadow.34 Following Michael Brooks, Ruskin is a champion of the Gothic Revival, though he was not the first writer to propose it as the style for the nineteenth century. But he came to be regarded as its greatest spokesman: Charles Eastlake devotes a whole chapter to “Ruskinism” in his History of the Gothic Revival (1872), as do later writers such as Kenneth Clark (1928) and Henry-Russell Hitchcock (1954).35

54 Phase One: Visual Ruskinism and the Gothic Revival 1. THE GOTHIC REVIVAL IN AUSTRALIA

Many of the greatest names of the English Gothic Revival designed buildings for Australia; a list of men who sent out plans for local clients to build includes J F Bentley, William Burges, William Butterfield, C F Hansom, Sir Thomas Jackson, J L Pearson, A W Pugin, Sir George Gilbert Scott, J P Seddon and G E Street.36 In addition expatriate English architects who came to Australia added their own work to the legacy of fine building in this period: in Sydney, Edmund Blacket, who arrived in 1842, and in Melbourne, Joseph Reed in 1853 and William Wardell in 1858. Brian Andrews has traced the architecture of the Gothic Revival in Australia in definitive detail, considering examples from the 1840s to the 1950s.37 He finds that the Gothic Revival was overwhelmingly used for building churches, valued for its powerful associations with the English homeland. As such it was provincial, conservative and derivative, even its greatest Australian exponents making copious use of British pattern books and architectural journals for examples and details. Andrews distinguishes three overlapping phases in English Gothic Revival work: an archaeologically correct Gothic before 1850; a High Victorian Gothic from 1850; and a reaction to the High Victorian style that began in the late 1860s. High Victorian Gothic lasted the longest in Australia, from about 1850 to 1890, and the major works of the Gothic Revival in New South Wales and Victoria are all built within this period: in Sydney, St Andrew’s Cathedral (1847–1874), the first buildings of the University of Sydney (from 1856), and St Mary’s Cathedral (from 1868), and in Melbourne the cathedrals of St Patrick’s (from 1858) and St Paul’s (from 1880). If, as Andrews states, Ruskin was the major theoretical influence behind High Victorian Gothic, was this distinguished work therefore Ruskinian? The answer, with the exceptions discussed below, would seem to be no. Ruskin had definite ideas about which variants of Gothic were acceptable, but this proscription was ignored for major buildings in eastern Australia. Edmund Blacket’s work at Sydney University, for example, is in English Perpendicular Gothic, a style Ruskin forbade, while William Wardell favoured English Decorated Gothic with French planning, a combination Ruskin would not have allowed, for St Patrick’s in Melbourne.38

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 55 However a plethora of minor buildings, mostly churches, were built in an approved Ruskinian style. Early English Gothic was so widely used it had become a formula by the end of the century, but not because of Ruskin. According to Andrews, its very simplicity and lack of expensive detail merely made it cheap to build for poor congregations, both Catholic and Protestant, throughout Australia.39 In England William Burges believed it had become a popular style because it survived more starvation than any other.40 Pugin had preceded Ruskin in arguing for Gothic as the only style for a true Christian architecture, but Andrews sees no such moral thread in the work of Australian architects in this period. Stylistic diversity was the norm and architectural pragmatism the order of the day.41 Australian architecture was resolutely provincial, and the Australian colonies in this light merely distant counties of England.42 The exceptions to the above, where Ruskin’s ideas appear to have been followed in the design, are some buildings in Sydney in the 1870s and in Melbourne in the late 1870s and 1880s.

2. VISUAL RUSKINISM IN SYDNEY

Polychromy is a useful marker of Ruskinism, suggestive but not sufficient to show his influence in a building. Russell Sturgis described polychromy in 1902 as one of the main features of the English Gothic Revival and used a plate from the Stones of Venice to explain what it meant.43 Stefan Muthesius locates its nineteenth century revival from medieval precedent in the writings of Pugin and the Ecclesiologists from 1841, and in the work of William Butterfield from 1849.44 John Unrau traces Ruskin’s advocacy of polychromy to the Seven Lamps of Architecture in 1849, continued in his praise of G E Street’s work in 1859 and Deane & Woodward’s in 1868.45 Aphorism 14 in The Lamp of Truth states firmly that the proper colours of architecture are those of natural stone, and Ruskin recommends achieving polychromatic effects by juxtaposing different kinds of stone and marble, though he allowed the use of brick as well.46 Polychromy appeared in Sydney in the late 1860s and remained in use until the First World War (figures 1–7).

56 Phase One: Visual Ruskinism and the Gothic Revival Polychromy in Sydney

figure 1: Exterior perspective for proposed building for Mutual Life Insurance Company, Sydney. Howard Joseland, architect, 1892, unbuilt. “It will be seen from the perspective view that a good deal of the architectural effect is obtained by introducing bands of stone of two shades. This might be produced by using ‘bluestone’ and Sydney sandstone, as in the new Melbourne Cathedral, or trachyte and sandstone.” from building and engineering journal, 22 october 1892

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 57

Polychromy in Sydney

FIGURE HAS BEEN REMOVED DUE TO COPYRIGHT AGREEMENT

figure 2: “Heidelberg”, Chatswood, Sydney. Architect and date unknown from michael cannon, our beautiful homes n.s.w., melbourne, today’s heritage reprint, 1977, p.22

figure 3: North Annandale Public School, Annandale, Sydney. New South Wales Government Architect’s Branch, 1907

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 59

Polychromy in Sydney

figure 4: All Saints Anglican Church, Petersham, Sydney. Benjamin Backhouse, architect, 1872

figure 5: House, 188 Forbes Street, Darlinghurst, Sydney. Benjamin Backhouse, architect, 1872

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 61

Polychromy in Sydney

figure 6: Entrance, 188 Forbes Street, Darlinghurst, Sydney. Benjamin Backhouse, architect, 1872

FIGURE HAS BEEN REMOVED DUE TO COPYRIGHT AGREEMENT

figure 7: Illustration of polychromatic brickwork by G E Street, in Brick and Marble in the Middle Ages (1855) from megan aldrich, gothic revival, london, phaidon, 1994, p. 183

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 63

If we examine the work of Thomas Rowe47 we get an idea of how Ruskin’s other ideas might have been used in one of the largest private architectural practices in Sydney at the time. In a world in which architects routinely moved from style to style, mostly without allegiance to any one, it is surprising to find so conservative a figure as Colonel Rowe appearing to use Ruskinian elements in more than one building. The Nightingale Wing of Sydney Hospital (1869) (figure 8) features some of the earliest polychromatic brickwork in Sydney, while Rowe also produced some fine Gothic Revival work, from churches like St Joseph’s, Newtown (1869) (figures 9 & 10) to the main buildings at Newington College, Stanmore (1881). The city premises for Henry Bull & Co (1871) and the main building of Newington College both make use of “artistic stonework”, the former featuring naturalistically carved Australian flora and fauna (figures 11–13). The concern for the effect of shadow, a major point in The Lamp of Power, is apparent in the design of the façade of Henry Bull & Co, especially in its re-use as the street elevation of the Primitive Methodist church in Annandale (figures 14 & 15). Rowe’s best work was the design of the Great Synagogue in Elizabeth Street (1873–1878) (figures 16 & 17). Described at the time as “Byzantine” in style, its rich carvings, heavily decorated interior and fine craftsmanship owe something to Ruskin, as does the latitude apparently allowed the stonemasons in some interior details.48 The use of Australian motifs in the capitals of the columns is unusual for the time, and is also found in Rowe’s work at Newington (figures 18 & 19).

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 65

Thomas Rowe

figure 8: Nightingale Wing, Sydney Hospital, Macquarie Street, Sydney. Thomas Rowe, architect, 1869

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 67

Thomas Rowe

figure 9: Entrance, St Joseph’s Catholic Church, Newtown, Sydney. Thomas Rowe, architect, 1869

figure 10: Capital detail, St Joseph’s Catholic Church, Newtown, Sydney. Thomas Rowe, architect, 1869

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 69

Thomas Rowe

figure 11: Façade, former Primitive Methodist Church, Annandale, Sydney, 1891. (Stone carvings on façade transferred from premises of Henry Bull & Co, Pitt Street, Sydney, Thomas Rowe, architect, 1871)

figures 12 & 13: Façade details, carvings of Australian fauna and flora, former Primitive Methodist Church, Annandale, Sydney

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 71

Thomas Rowe

figure 14: Shadow detail, former Primitive Methodist Church, Annandale, Sydney

FIGURE HAS BEEN REMOVED DUE TO COPYRIGHT AGREEMENT

figure 15: Drawing of shadow detail, San Michele, Lucca by Ruskin (1845) from jeanne clegg, ed., john ruskin: an arts council exhibition, london, arts council of great britain, 1983, p. 74

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 73

Thomas Rowe

figure 16: Interior perspective, Great Synagogue, Elizabeth Street, Sydney. Thomas Rowe, architect, 1878 from illustrated sydney news, 22 august 1874, p. 4

FIGURE HAS BEEN REMOVED DUE TO COPYRIGHT AGREEMENT

figure 17: Exterior, Great Synagogue, Elizabeth Street, Sydney. Thomas Rowe, architect, 1878 from douglass baglin and yvonne austin, sandstone sydney, sydney, rigby, p. 86

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 75

Thomas Rowe

figure 18: Entrance detail, main building, Newington College, Stanmore, Sydney. Thomas Rowe, architect, 1881

figure 19: Capital detail, carving of Australian flora, main building, Newington College, Stanmore, Sydney. Thomas Rowe, architect, 1881

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 77

However Rowe built in several styles, predominantly the free classicism of such buildings as the Vickery’s Buildings (1874) and the Royal Arcade (1881). How then do we explain the fine Gothic work at Newington, the consideration of forms in light of the Nightingale Wing, or the large and varied amount of stone carving in some of his buildings? The answer depends on whether you think the work attributed to him is his alone or simply represents the work of his office. Rowe’s practice was the largest in Sydney by the 1880s49 and this, combined with his political roles as alderman and mayor, made him a very busy man. Thus it is safer to speak of “the Rowe office” when discussing his work, in which numerous assistants and pupils did the bulk of the work while Rowe concentrated on getting commissions and looking after the money. This was the pattern of practices like Sir George Gilbert Scott’s in London and McKim Mead & White in New York, where the architectural division of labour meant that there were in-house specialists in every style; a former employee of a similar Melbourne firm, Henderson & Smart, recalled “the fine old Englishman who was their Gothic clerk”.50 Thus Rowe surely had talented collaborators, although their names have not come down to us.51 The finesse evident in his Gothic work is unlikely to be his, given the scratchiness of his training, the demands of his extensive practice, and his many political duties. Rowe has had a bad press, notably from Max Freeland, but this does not seem to reflect the opinion of Rowe’s contemporaries.52 He was a typical commercial architect of the 1870s and 1880s for whom style was merely a matter of pragmatism but who could still surprise you. One such surprise is that the main building of Newington College, as Rowe designed it, bears a striking resemblance to the Oxford Museum by Deane & Woodward, as a comparison with the original model shows (figure 20). In the event the parsimonious client cut the design in half and built only the central tower and one wing of the intended building (figure 21). We can only guess who the Ruskinian in the office might have been.53

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 79

Thomas Rowe

figure 20: Oxford University Museum of Natural History, Oxford, England. Deane & Woodward, architects, 1855–1868 original image from building news, london, 1859, p. 819

figure 21: Model of Newington College, Stanmore, Sydney. Thomas Rowe, architect, 1881

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 81

3. VISUAL RUSKINISM IN MELBOURNE

Ruskinian elements in Melbourne architecture are easier to find. Harriett Edquist has identified a building by Percy Oakden, St Saviour’s in Collingwood (1874), as Ruskinian because of its vivid polychromatic brickwork. In Melbourne polychromy first appears in the Independent Church, Collins Street, by Joseph Reed (1868), but whether Reed got this from Ruskin or from his own recent trip to Italy is still debated.54 By the late 1870s polychromy was widely used, and there are distinguished examples in St George’s Church, St Kilda (1877–1880) by Albert Purchas, and in Ormond College (1879–1881) by Reed & Barnes. This last, according to some writers, represents Ruskin via William Butterfield.55 There is no doubt about where some architects stood. In an 1882 article Nahum Barnet praised Ruskin as the prince of all truth writers,56 but Barnet’s own work, remarkable as it is, remained eclectic. His most famous work, the Auditorium Building in Collins Street, made free use of Arts and Crafts, American Romanesque and English Free Style elements.57 William Wardell and William Pitt have not left us their opinions on Ruskin, but their work clearly shows his influence. Wardell, the architect of St Patrick’s Cathedral, used Venetian Gothic elements for his E S & A Bank in Collins Street (1883–1887), the Queen Street façade of which contains a loggia copied directly from the Doge’s Palace itself (figures 22–24). William Pitt, one of Melbourne’s most successful commercial architects, designed no less than four buildings in as many years in Venetian Gothic (figures 25–28). The Olderfleet and Rialto Buildings (1888–1889), the Melbourne Safe Deposit Building (1889–1890), and, most ironic of all, the Melbourne Stock Exchange (1889–1891), all on Collins Street, are now considered to represent Melbourne’s best nineteenth century mercantile streetscape, and are fine examples of Venetian palazzos adapted to commercial uses.58 To this list I would add the new headquarters for the Metropolitan Gas Company (1892) by Reed, Smart and Tappin.59 However it is not in this phase that we should look for Ruskin’s greatest impact in Australia – indeed a contemporary writer described Ruskin’s influence on the actual design of

60 buildings as “infinitesimal”. That this is not strictly true is shown by the examples illustrated

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 83 above. But it is in the broader debates about architectural fundamentals that Ruskin is most important in Australia, and these are discussed below. Ruskin himself thought that this was the most valuable part of his writings on architecture. In an appendix to the second edition of the Stones of Venice he wrote: I must often be found deficient in technical knowledge; I may often err in my statements respecting matters of practice or of any specific law. But I do not write thoughtlessly respecting principles; and my statements of these will generally be found reconnoitring before attacking.61

84 Phase One: Visual Ruskinism and the Gothic Revival William Wardell

figure 22: Queen Street façade, former E S & A Bank, Collins Street, Melbourne. William Wardell, architect, 1887

FIGURE HAS BEEN REMOVED FIGURE HAS BEEN REMOVED DUE TO DUE TO COPYRIGHT AGREEMENT COPYRIGHT AGREEMENT

figure 23: Ducal palace, Venice, figure 24: Interior ceiling detail, former nineteenth century photograph. E S & A Bank, Collins Street, Melbourne. from sarah quill, ruskin’s venice: the William Wardell, architect, 1887 stones revisited, aldershot, hampshire, uk, from www.walkingmelbourne.com lund humphries, 2003, p. 140

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 85

William Pitt

FIGURE HAS BEEN REMOVED DUE TO COPYRIGHT AGREEMENT

figure 25: Rialto Building, Collins Street, Melbourne. William Pitt, architect, 1889 from www.walkingmelbourne.com

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 87

William Pitt

FIGURE HAS BEEN REMOVED DUE TO COPYRIGHT AGREEMENT

figure 26: Old Melbourne Stock Exchange, figure 26a: Drawing of the Collins Street, Melbourne. Old Melbourne Stock Exchange, William Pitt, architect, 1891 Collins Street, Melbourne. from www.walkingmelbourne.com William Pitt, architect, 1891 from building and engineering journal

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 89

William Pitt

figure 27: Olderfleet Building, Collins Street, Melbourne. William Pitt, architect, 1889

figure 28: Melbourne Safe Deposit Building, Collins Street, Melbourne. William Pitt, architect, 1890

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 91

D. PHASE TWO: RUSKINISM AND HONEST BUILDING

Michael Brooks identifies a second phase in the use made in England of Ruskin’s architectural ideas, starting in the 1870s.62 This has two aspects. In the first, Ruskin’s ideas on architecture are heavily discussed, and either rejected or re-interpreted. In the second, Ruskin’s ideas on restoration are put into practice by the newly-formed Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings. Because I want to outline the background for Australian work, in which restoration is not an issue until the middle of the twentieth century at the earliest, I concentrate here on the first aspect, the revision of Ruskin’s ideas and the birth of the Arts and Crafts movement. The first major revision was the rejection of Ruskin’s controversial view that the glory of architecture lay in its ornament, especially painting and sculpture; for this group, which included William Morris, Philip Webb and J D Sedding, architecture was now the art of honest building. The second major revision was the rejection of Ruskin’s idea that architectural beauty is an adaptation of the forms commonly found in nature.63 The principles that mattered now, according to Morris and Webb, were honest expression of function, truth to materials, craftsmanship, and the avoidance of manufactured elements. They encouraged the use of English rather than Italian models, drawing on vernacular architecture, rural traditions and local materials to make small scale work, especially domestic.64 This in turn implied small architectural practices and a close relationship with the tradesmen, working, as Ruskin said, with “either a pencil or a chisel in your hand”.

1. THE ARTS AND CRAFTS MOVEMENT IN AUSTRALIA

Although these principles give rise, as Brooks and many others point out, to the distinctive work of the English Arts and Crafts movement that began in the 1870s, tracing these changes stylistically in the aesthetic chaos of the Australian colonies in the 1880s and 1890s can be difficult. The copyism of architects in Britain is multiplied many times over in Australia. Now there were American examples to cannibalise too, the effects made worse by distance and unfamiliarity. The bank directors in Melbourne who chose one scheme for the plan and another for the elevation of their new bank were not unique.65 Separating

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 93 the elevation from the plan was standard practice for architects themselves, a principle endorsed by no less a critic than James Fergusson66 (figure 29). George McRae, the architect for the Queen Victoria Building in Sydney (1893–1898) provided his clients with four alternative designs for the exterior, as did John Sulman, who offered the directors of the Premier and Investment Land Building Company in Sydney (1886) no less than five.67 At least these elevations were consistent in themselves; it was more common for Australian architects to combine several styles in one façade (figure 30).

94 Phase Two: Ruskinism and Honest Building Victorian Eclecticism

FIGURE HAS BEEN REMOVED DUE TO COPYRIGHT AGREEMENT

figure 29: Illustration of alternative elevations by James Fergusson, in Handbook of Architecture, 2nd edn (1859). The same structure can be dressed differently according to function: ornament increases as the status of the building rises. from left to right: Warehouse to office building to monumental civic building reproduced in roger dixon and stefan muthesius, victorian architecture, london, thames & hudson, 1978, p. 17

FIGURE HAS BEEN REMOVED DUE TO COPYRIGHT AGREEMENT

figure 30: ‘Tudor House’, College Street, Drummoyne, Sydney. Architect unknown, 1897, demolished 1970 from michael cannon, ed., our beautiful homes, melbourne, today’s heritage reprint, 1977, p. 70

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 95

Thus historians of the Arts and Crafts movement in Australia have also considered it an idiom at several removes from its origin, in particular without its socialist baggage. As a design movement its ideas were prominent in local design thinking in the 1890s, articulated in imported magazines, especially The Studio (from 1893), and the short lived Australian journal Arts and Crafts (1895–1898). By the middle nineties the principal figures in the new technical colleges, such as Lucien Henry in Sydney, Harry P Gill in Adelaide and Lewis Harvey in Brisbane, were all teaching the new ideas. Societies of craftspeople, though not guilds in the British sense, appeared after 1900 and flourished until the First World War.68 Architects were often prominent in these societies, and according to Grace Cochrane they both combined architecture and design in their own work and commissioned other craft workers in their projects.69 In architectural terms the best local work, after a brief start in the depression of the 1890s, reappears in the decade before the First World War. In the popular form of the Californian bungalow it spreads rapidly after 1917, becoming the dominant domestic style until the end of the nineteen thirties.70 Andrew Montana describes the Australian version of the Arts and Crafts movement as solidly middle-class, based on British ideals of “good living” with a distinct local flavour but without the politics.71 Harriet Edquist has documented how Arts and Crafts ideas were carried to Australia, not only by imported books and journals, but especially by a cohort of talented English architects from the same generation as Voysey, Ashbee and Baillie Scott who came to Australia in this period.72 In Melbourne this group included George Addison and Alexander North, who arrived in 1883, Walter Butler and James Fawcett (1888) and Robert Haddon (1889). To this list I would add Thomas Sisley, another Englishman who arrived in the 1890s and who, though not an architect, became one of the most thoughtful writers on architecture of the period. In Sydney the expatriate Englishmen included Walter Liberty Vernon (1883), George McRae, Edward Jeaffreson Jackson, and George Oakeshott (1884), John Sulman (1885) and Gorrie McLeish Blair (1895). In addition a number of locally-born architects who had been studying abroad returned to Australia at this time filled with the new ideas. In Melbourne these men

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 97 included Guyon Purchas, Alan Walker, Beverley Ussher and Alfred Smart, all of whom returned in 1888, and in Sydney John Barlow (1887), George Sydney Jones (1891) and John Barr (1895). Among the younger Australian group who became champions of the new movement only Harold Desbrowe-Annear did not travel abroad, and arrived at his ideas through reading and, presumably, contact with the expatriate Englishmen who came to Melbourne.

2. THE RUSKINIAN MOMENT IN AUSTRALIA, 1889–1894

The Ruskinian moment in Australia spans the ten years either side of his death in 1900, and falls into two acts with an intermission. Act One, from about 1889 to 1894, sees considerable debate about Ruskin’s ideas in the architectural press, and some built work inspired by him, principally in the Gothic Revival style. The intermission is the severe economic depression that lasts from 1894 to 1900, bringing building to a halt; in the pause Ruskin’s ideas find a home in the new technical colleges, especially in Melbourne, and in some Arts and Crafts magazines and societies. Act Two begins when the economy recovers after 1900, and Australian architects produce some fine Arts and Crafts work, especially houses, and societies of craftspeople re-appear and flourish until 1914. The Gothic Revival work inspired by Ruskin is discussed above. In the period 1889– 1894 the expatriate Englishmen raised the level of debate about architecture in Australia, and frequently invoked Ruskin: George Addison73 for example wrote on adapting the style to local requirements (1889), Thomas Sisley74 on ethics in architecture and art in daily life (1890), George Oakeshott75 on drawing (1891), and Alexander North76 (1892) on the truthful treatment of brickwork; most controversial of all was Walter Butler’s 1893 paper on Ruskin, discussed below.77 In addition the young Australians who had been studying overseas in the 1880s also took part in these debates, Alan Walker78 for example writing on craftsmanship in 1892 and John Barlow79 on colour (1892) and the use of marble and mosaics in building (1894). But as we saw above, E Wilson Dobbs and Harold Desbrowe-Annear, two Australian-born architects, are the first to discuss Ruskin’s ideas about architecture in detail, in 1889.

98 Phase Two: Ruskinism and Honest Building 3. E WILSON DOBBS

E Wilson Dobbs (1860–1939) was an assistant architect in the Victorian Department of Public Works around 1890 and often wrote for the building press; a series of articles he did for the Australasian Builders and Contractors News in 1891 was reprinted and became the first locally-produced history of Australian architecture.80 Dobbs was active in the newly-formed Architecture and Engineering Association of Victoria and he discussed Ruskin in a talk he gave to the AEAV in September 1889.81 In this talk, though Dobbs mentioned Ruskin’s two careers, his latter work on political economy was not examined; instead Dobbs discussed Ruskin’s writing on architecture in considerable detail. Dobbs told his Melbourne audience that The Seven Lamps of Architecture was an “ethical and philosophical dissertation” containing “bold theories”, while The Stones of Venice was three volumes of “impassioned rhapsody on the fallen city”, reminding his listeners that:

it would be well for us as a people to take to heart its lessons … a nation’s history is written more truthfully in its architecture … all great architecture is the exponent of national virtue, all debased architecture, national vice and shame.

Dobbs commended Ruskin’s preference for one school of architecture over another being decided by their influence on the life of the workmen, “a question by all other writers on the subject of architecture, wholly forgotten or despised”. Given that Dobbs did not go on to discuss Ruskin’s political ideas, this is odd, but it is clearly sincere. In conclusion Dobbs thought that Ruskin had:

done the best kind of work in the best kind of way in all matters of the highest interest to the world in literature, science and art, by writing as he alone can write on these subjects and of his charity largely helping them.

The Australasian Builder and Contractors News recommended Dobbs’ paper the following week as “well worthy of thoughtful and deliberate perusal”.82 It is therefore hard to explain its visceral reaction to another paper on Ruskin by the young Melbourne architect Harold Desbrowe-Annear two months later.

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 99 4. HAROLD DESBROWE-ANNEAR

Harold Desbrowe-Annear (1865–1933) was an architectural maverick, an uneasy friend of the profession who admired architecture but was ambivalent about architects. He was also a “bohemian who never outgrew the desire to shock”, famously convivial, and moved in literary and artistic circles as well as architectural ones. In his public lectures and his teaching at the Working Men’s College in the 1890s he fought something of a one man war to reform the profession, inspired by Ruskin but also by Viollet-le-Duc and Richard Norman Shaw.83 In his lecture in 1889 he argued the case for architecture as an art, citing Ruskin as his authority; by 1900 he had absorbed Ruskin’s and Morris’s social teaching as well, and was arguing for architecture as a democratic art, whose only real patron was the public.84 On this occasion85 Desbrowe-Annear referred to Ruskin’s definition of the modern architect as an artist and designer “replete with an inexhaustible fund of transcendent thought, fired with a burning love of all that is beautiful and true”, but conceded this was a tall order:

what wonder is it that so many among us of undoubted ability after becoming masterly draughtsmen with considerable experience as technical attorneys, and finding that by the exercise of those qualities alone, they can command a good social position, and even considerable wealth, pause content, and omit to become artists in any sense of the term, evolving their designs by … adapting … the works of their progenitors.

This would only change when both pupil and master wage “one constant war against all deceits both structural and decorative … [display] the closest observation of, and communion with nature, and … the most complete expression of power in original designs”. What relevance did Ruskin then have for students of Australian architecture?

[T]o obtain success in studying and developing the art of architecture in a new country, far from the medieval examples of the northern world, with a climate that is only definable as Australian, and among a people radically liberal, but essentially British, the student from the very first must take as his essential text books Ruskin’s Elements of Drawing and The Seven Lamps of Architecture, while the architect will need these two little works for his most constant companions containing the essential ethics of his art. [emphasis added]

100 Phase Two: Ruskinism and Honest Building Desbrowe-Annear does not discuss The Stones of Venice because “it is frequently sullied by many dashes of morbidly didactic opinion, many pieces of mental jugglery, and falsely technical, or would-be-scientific classification”.86 However he discusses The Seven Lamps of Architecture at length; he concedes some “dimness and perversion of truth” in a few isolated passages, but commends the book to the “intelligent architectural reader” and underlines the “high value that every architect should place upon it”. Desbrowe-Annear defends Ruskin’s views on iron in The Lamp of Truth, “written when iron [was] not understood”, and considers The Lamp of Beauty and The Lamp of Power as the most valuable parts of the book. Discussing The Lamp of Life he is careful to quote Ruskin’s most famous question about ornament, “Was it done with enjoyment, was the carver happy while he was about it?” and concludes:

Many passages, when carefully perused, will prove to be the best stimulants of artistic reasoning and thought, which by some magic touch, while breathing in his ear poetry and music of the greatest beauty, wipes the film of contradictory hopelessness from his mental vision … and places the student, the artist, or designer once more in closer touch with nature, braced for action, and ready again to attempt that course of artistic evolution which requires so much mental and physical energy.

What did Desbrowe Annear’s audience think that night? Mr Billing liked the paper, but did not agree with Ruskin’s “wholesale condemnation of machine-made ornament”; this was not incompatible with abstract beauty of form, and he favoured the elder Pugin over Ruskin on the size of ornament suitable for monumental buildings. The chairman, Mr Tayler, said he had won The Seven Lamps of Architecture as a prize years ago, but was put off by Ruskin’s style: “to [those] who liked to be able to grasp a thing at once it was an undoubted disadvantage”, and he thought Ruskin’s ideas on craftsmanship a “practical impossibility”. The reaction of the Australasian Builder and Contractor’s News, however, was savage. In a withering editorial it said flatly that many architects accorded Ruskin only the “coldest kind of contempt”, and continued:

What little leisure [the architect] can obtain, he devotes to purposes of relaxation, and so the leaves of Ruskin’s latest production remain uncut, and he turns to the 87 slashing criticism of the hurried reviewer – and has the bad taste to enjoy it!

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 101 5. DEBATING RUSKIN

Undeterred, another young Australian architect, Alan Walker, recently returned from England via America, attempted to define the difference between architecture and building in very Ruskinian terms in 1892:

building at its best is but the expression of an architectural design, and that it is in no wise any form of architecture itself. If building were architecture, it would be … necessary for the artist in architecture – i.e. the architect – to work upon it with his own hands. Such a necessity has never … occurred to anyone … On the other hand, building can thrive and continue without the most distant association with anything architectural or artistic, and thus has it thriven most lustily in the colonies, where we have so many examples of large and sometimes convenient buildings dressed out by the builder with various applied ornaments culled from some architectural authority.88

Architecture suffered, not only in Australia, from the lack of intelligent criticism. It is not that laymen do not express their opinions, but these are marked by “thoughtlessness, carelessness and contempt”. This is a “deep insult” to architects “forgetful of our own self respect”; here too Ruskin is valuable: a few pages of The Seven Lamps or The Stones of Venice would stimulate and assist the thoughtful layman to something like a just appreciation of architectural art and encourage him to exercise but a small amount of common sense in formulating his opinions of any design newly realised.

To remedy this, educating the public taste is essential, and Walker lays down some rules of criticism for the architectural layman; they show how thoroughly this writer had absorbed the lessons of second phase Ruskinism:

[the lay critic] can do nothing but good if he vehemently condemns … the coating of an iron girder with cement in imitation of continuous stone … the superficial imitation of one material by a cheaper substitute; any form of constructive untruth; painting or coloring to imitate valuable materials or excessive labour.

A new emphasis on logical arrangement in Walker’s paper, however, comes from another source: [the observer] must admit that the building is composed primarily of various floor spaces super-imposed upon one another, supported by wall veils pierced

102 Phase Two: Ruskinism and Honest Building to effect entrance, light and ventilation … the whole having some logical association with the essential purpose for which the building was intended.

If this sounds like a blend of Ruskin and Viollet-le-Duc, it is. To Walker “these two men … of all modern writers … knew best the subject on which they wrote”; for them “architecture ranks with the highest and finest of arts. The very practice of it is ennobling … and in its highest forms must make great demands upon the moral rectitude and probity of the artist”. The ending of Walker’s paper is especially interesting. It shows the regard Australian architects had for the “powerful genius” of H H Richardson, an architect in another new world. Richardson, wrote Walker:

has given to America an architecture purely of its own, and who has thus, by the most powerful of methods (the force of good example), shown to modern society the possibility of … an architecture suitable to all the complex requirements of modern times, while at the same time elevating all by its majesty, beauty and truth.

One of the most perceptive of contemporary writers on architecture in this period was a layman, Thomas Sisley, an Englishman who arrived in Melbourne in the 1890s to teach at the Working Men’s College. In a paper on architecture and ethics89 Sisley takes Ruskin to task, siding with Fergusson on what constitutes honest building, and he quotes extensively from John Wellborn Root, the Chicago architect whose writing was becoming known in Australia through imported copies of the American Architect and Building News. Sisley begins by lamenting the current state of Australian architecture, holding out little hope for our public buildings “until the remarkable features of our climate as well as the true needs and conditions of our daily life are recognised as the only sound basis of a satisfactory [national] style”. What we need, following Root, are “simple buildings for simple men”, and Fergusson is cited as to how railway stations, warehouses, and office blocks represent “the most original and vigorous efforts” of modern architecture. Where might a new national style be found? Sisley quotes John Wellborn Root again:

We live in an age beyond all others reasonable. The ethical and art status apparently reached by the Greeks and Venetians through [intuitive] processes … must be reached by us through processes entirely rational … So the new type will be found by us, if we do find it, through the frankest possible acceptance of every requirement of modern life in all its conditions.

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 103 And Sisley concludes “with all this I entirely agree, and I regard it as a much sounder doctrine than Mr Ruskin’s, as set forth in the Seven Lamps of Architecture”. Despite his “profoundest respect, nay reverence” for Ruskin, Sisley takes issue with him, especially on style; Ruskin, though “intensely observant of the statuary, floral mouldings, mosaics, and other decorations” of a building:

represents what … I would call the modern aesthetic spirit rather than the artistic spirit, the disposition to regard parts as entities, and so to peep and pry about with lens and foot-rule instead of being satisfied with the combined effect of the whole.

This is a little unfair to Ruskin, whose one idea was seeing life as a whole, and in particular to the years of labour Ruskin spent writing the Stones of Venice. For Sisley, however, the care architects gave to decoration, following Ruskin, was “in large measure” the reason for “the present unsatisfactory state of the art”. The practice of seeing the elevation “merely as a groundwork for ornament” was wrong; true ornament should be the expression of fitness for purpose. The elevation therefore should be “the proper inevitable expression of the interior … in harmony with [the] climate and situation”.90 Sisley writes a long piece on architecture in “colonial, democratic, Americanised” Melbourne two years later,91 where he says:

To speak frankly, I do not expect much from it for a long time yet … chief among these is the reconcilement (sic) of architecture and engineering, which, perhaps, involves the rest – the truthful relation of exterior to interior, the development of suitable forms, with the necessary abandonment of all styles and members that are no longer sincere and significant.

What this meant, Sisley went on to say, was that Australians should make:

less pictorial, but more truly artistic work; less for show, more for use; less for gallery walls, and much more for the home. We must learn how to make … all the simple articles for domestic use, in pottery, woodwork, basketwork; in iron, brass and silver; also to build in such a way that a man would know at once, if he could come down from the clouds into the midst of Collins-street, that he was in Australia. Surely all these things might be done here if there was the will to do them.

William Morris could not put it better, except for the part about engineering, and Ruskin lurks behind Sisley’s comment, and his quote from Wordsworth, that “nothing

104 Phase Two: Ruskinism and Honest Building can be done, however, without a far more close, constant, loving study of nature and of

92 natural objects than has been customary here”. How did these calls for honesty fare in Sydney, a city not conspicuous for this quality? According to James Green in 1886:

When new structures are erected under the auspices of culture and education, all goes tolerably well, and there are buildings in Sydney that would be a credit to any country. We are by no means without conscientious architects of ability, experience, and taste; though no one seems able to strike out, as is being done by English architects in India, a style of architecture really suitable to our climate and requirements, and smacking less of the Builder and the Building News. But it is greatly to be feared that in the lower class of buildings, however vast their dimensions – in the pretentious dingy shams and hideous compositions that disfigure so many of our leading thoroughfares, no professional architect is employed at all; or, if there be one, it is a man who takes a low and grovelling view of his noble calling, willingly panders to the vulgarity and self-conceit of clients, and displaces the brilliant “Lamp of Sacrifice”, to make way for the farthing rushlight of money-grubbing greed. Pugin and Ruskin share but the fate of Vitruvius, Palladio, and Chambers, and are simply ignored, or too often, perhaps, pooh-poohed and laughed at.93

Was Green too pessimistic? Were Ruskin and Morris completely ignored by the architects of Sydney? That they were not is evidenced by some fine Arts and Crafts work in the decades before and after 1900.

6. EARLY ARTS AND CRAFTS WORK IN SYDNEY

Commercial examples, pace Green, might be hard to find, but for educational buildings we might look to the new buildings for the Sydney Technical College (1891–1892) by William Kemp. The main College building and the adjacent Technological Museum employ an Arts and Crafts vocabulary of Romanesque arches, materials, especially brick, used for their natural texture and colour, terra cotta ornament with Australian motifs, and some fine stone carving (figures 31 & 32). Kirsten Orr has examined the design of the College in detail,94 and makes clear the connection with Alfred Waterhouse’s design for the Natural History Museum in

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 105 London, completed ten years before. In addition Kemp took advice from Lucien Henry, the outstanding lecturer in design at the College; the extensive use of Australian motifs in the stone carvings on the façade is certainly due to him. Never before have life size goannas graced the entrance to a major public building in Australia, and never since (figures 33–35). Early examples of Arts and Crafts buildings in Sydney are also found in residential work in this decade, especially houses by Howard Joseland (1888), E J Jackson (1892) and John Horbury Hunt (1890–1893) of which “Hollowforth” by Jackson (1892) (figure 36) and “Highlands” by Hunt (1893) (figure 37) are particularly fine examples.95

106 Phase Two: Ruskinism and Honest Building Sydney Technical College

figure 31: Exterior, main building, Sydney Technical College, Ultimo, Sydney. William Kemp, architect, 1892

figure 32: Exterior detail, polychromatic brick, main building, Sydney Technical College, Ultimo, Sydney. William Kemp, architect, 1892

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 107

Sydney Technical College

figure 33: Façade detail, carving of Australian fauna (goanna), Sydney Technical College, Ultimo, Sydney. William Kemp, architect, 1892

figures 34 & 35: Façade details, carvings of Australian fauna (possum, left, and platypus), Sydney Technical College, Ultimo, Sydney. William Kemp, architect, 1892

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 109

Sydney Arts and Crafts

FIGURE HAS BEEN REMOVED DUE TO COPYRIGHT AGREEMENT

figure 36: “Hollowforth”, Kurraba Road, Neutral Bay, Sydney, nineteenth century photograph. Edward Jeaffreson Jackson, architect, 1892 from harriet edquist, pioneers of modernism, melbourne, miegunyah press, 2008, p. 25

FIGURE HAS BEEN REMOVED DUE TO COPYRIGHT AGREEMENT

figure 37: “Highlands”, Highlands Avenue, Waitara, Sydney. John Horbury Hunt, architect, 1893 from peter reynolds, lesley muir and joy hughes, john horbury hunt: radical architect 1838–1904, sydney, historic houses trust of new south wales, 2002, p. 144

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 111

7. THE VERNON OFFICE

The work of a major public practice, the Government Architect’s Branch of New South Wales, makes a valuable contrast with that of the private practitioners we have been considering.96 While its finest contributions to the Arts and Crafts movement in Australia came after 1900, by 1898 the GAB had already assembled the core staff who were to add so much to this legacy, most of whom, like Walter Liberty Vernon himself, were expatriate Englishmen (see appendix). Walter Liberty Vernon had arrived in Australia in 1883, and after a short period in private practice succeeded James Barnet in 1890 as Colonial (now Government) Architect of New South Wales. Vernon was a highly professional manager, so much so that by the end of his tenure in 1911 he had supervised the letting of 10,000 contracts for government work.97 Andrew Saint has described such public practices as the most consciously rational application of the Arts and Crafts theory of architecture, and stresses the importance of their collaborative and anonymous nature.98 However under Vernon the division of labour, essential to the efficient production of the huge amount of work the GAB had to undertake, meant the GAB was run on strictly hierarchical lines with Vernon at the top. One of Vernon’s great skills was the recruitment of capable subordinates and the delegation of most of the work to them; in this period Vernon’s staff included such talented architects as Gorrie McLeish Blair, George Oakeshott, John Barr, Edward Jeaffreson Jackson and B J Waterhouse. Their biographies suggest that many of these men could be considered Ruskinians, through their membership of the Sydney Architectural Association99 (Oakeshott and Brindley), their training in England (Moyes), their built work in Sydney (Barr and Waterhouse), or all three (Jackson).

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 113 The stories that have come down to us describe how Vernon would demand competing designs for major buildings from his staff.100 Such was the case for example of the 1897 scheme the GAB produced for a new Parliament House in Macquarie Street, in which the same plan was given four different external treatments by Blair, Barr, Truefitt and Oakeshott; Blair’s scheme, in early Italian Renaissance, was preferred. The individual contributions of Vernon’s staff to the work of the GAB are still too little known, but recent research has identified greater roles for them in buildings usually attributed to Vernon – Blair101 for example in the design of the State Library (1906–1909), Barr102 for his work at Sydney University (1901–1918), and Jackson103 for Challis House (1905–1908). While John Barlow might criticise the GAB under Vernon as a “plan factory” that produced

104 buildings “representative of every period but our own” this included a number of very fine buildings in the Arts and Crafts idiom. Vernon, like his counterpart in the private sector, Thomas Rowe, is frequently given the sole credit for the work produced by his office, and architectural historians have thus often portrayed him as a leading architect of the Arts and Crafts movement in Australia. But as John Barlow pointed out at the time, no one man could possibly have designed everything that came out of the GAB, and in such an encyclopedia of styles at that.105 Vernon himself is on record as preferring the Classic Revival as a more suitable style for public architecture,106 evident in the State Parliament House and National Art Gallery designs as well as in ephemeral work like the pavilion he designed for the proclamation of Federation in 1901 (figures 38–41).

114 Phase Two: Ruskinism and Honest Building New South Wales Government Architect’s Branch The Vernon Office and the Classical Revival

figures 38 & 39: Model of the exterior and drawing of the interior for proposed scheme for Houses of Parliament, Macquarie Street, Sydney. New South Wales Government Architect’s Branch, Gorrie McLeish Blair, architect, 1897 both images from the sydney mail, 10 april 1897, p. 765

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 115

New South Wales Government Architect’s Branch The Vernon Office and the Classical Revival

figure 40: Federation Pavilion, Centennial Park, Sydney. New South Wales Government Architect’s Branch, Walter Liberty Vernon, architect, 1901 From j j keenan, the inaugural celebrations of the commonwealth of australia, sydney, government printer, 1904, p. 74

FIGURE HAS BEEN REMOVED DUE TO COPYRIGHT AGREEMENT

figure 41: Art Gallery of New South Wales, Domain Road, Sydney. New South Wales Government Architect’s Branch, Walter Liberty Vernon, architect, 1909 from chris johnson, shaping sydney: public architecture and civic decorum, sydney, hale & iremonger, 1999, p. 86

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 117

For his own house he preferred the Old English style of Richard Norman Shaw. Thus Vernon was a Ruskinian only by default, although a number of the men in his office should be included in any hypothetical Ruskin Society, such as Edward Jeaffreson Jackson, not only for his domestic work but also for the work he did after joining the GAB such as Challis House in Martin Place. I would also include John Barr on the basis of his work at Sydney University, the Engineering School (1906) in particular (figure 42), as well as such younger men as B J Waterhouse and William Moyes.107 Whatever Vernon’s own architectural leanings, it is clear the Government Architect’s Branch at this time was responsible for some very fine work in the Arts and Crafts work, and its status as a public office meant that this was spread all over New South Wales. This work shows the influence of Ruskin at one remove in such examples as the use of a butterfly plan for a Hyde Park kiosk (1907) following E S Prior108 (figure 43), and in a group of fire stations in central Sydney (1907–1910) inspired by C F A Voysey109 (figures 44 & 45). Harriet Edquist regards the Burke Ward Public School at Broken Hill (1906) (figure 46) as one of the finest examples of Arts and Crafts architecture in Australia.110 The ideas introduced by these men is then taken up by others and lasts until the end of the First World War. But some writers have pointed out the importance to this account of the many industrial buildings – the wharves, warehouses, woolsheds and woolstores – built at the turn of the century (figure 47). Their rugged simplicity, consistent use of unadorned materials, especially timber, powerful structures and clear expression of function make them bold, if unconscious, examples of Arts and Crafts architecture around this time.111

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 119

New South Wales Government Architect’s Branch The Vernon Office and the Arts and Crafts

figure 42: Old Engineering School, University of Sydney, Science Road, Sydney. New South Wales Government Architect’s Branch, John Barr, design architect (attributed), 1906

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 121

New South Wales Government Architect’s Branch The Vernon Office and the Arts and Crafts

figure 43: Edwardian butterfly plan for Refreshment Kiosk, Hyde Park, Sydney. New South Wales Government Architect’s Branch, designer unknown, 1907 from art and architecture, 1907, p. 152

figure 44: Fire Station, Glebe, Sydney. New South Wales Government Architect’s Branch, 1907

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 123

New South Wales Government Architect’s Branch The Vernon Office and the Arts and Crafts

figure 45: Façade detail, Fire Station, Darlinghurst, Sydney. New South Wales Government Architect’s Branch, 1910

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 125

New South Wales Government Architect’s Branch The Vernon Office and the Arts and Crafts

FIGURE HAS BEEN REMOVED DUE TO COPYRIGHT AGREEMENT

figure 46: Burke Ward Public School, Broken Hill, New South Wales, New South Wales Government Architect’s Branch, 1906 from harriet edquist, pioneers of modernism, melbourne, miegunyah press, 2008, p. 237

FIGURE HAS BEEN REMOVED DUE TO COPYRIGHT AGREEMENT

figure 47: Interior, “Harken Vale” woolshed, Blandford, New South Wales. Architect unknown, 1906 from philip cox, john freeland and wesley stacey, rude timber buildings in australia, london, thames & hudson, 1969, figure 116

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 127

E. PHASE THREE: RUSKINISM AND THE NATURE OF WORK

Ruskinism in England had entered a third phase in Britain by the 1880s, and according to Michael Brooks “it was now agreed that if a Ruskinian architect was to express any part of his age, it would be its reforming zeal rather than its commercial vigour”.112 The immediate result was the formation of guilds of craftsmen such as the Century Guild (1882), the Art Workers’ Guild (1884) and most radical of all, the Guild of Handicraft (1888), whose guiding spirit was the architect and socialist C R Ashbee.113 Australia produced no guilds in the British sense, but that is not to say that Ruskin’s ideas on the nature of work were not hotly debated in the 1890s; as we have seen, this is the moment when Ruskinism makes its greatest impact on Australian architecture. Ruskin Societies were formed in many cities in England and North America to study the master’s works in the late nineteenth century. There is no record of any such society in Sydney or Melbourne, but if one had existed, its members would have represented the leaders of the artistic world. In Sydney in the 1890s for example it would have included the president of the New South Wales Institute of Architects, John Barlow; the leaders of the Sydney Architectural Association, Samuel Hurst Seager and Howard Joseland; Sydney’s most prominent architecture critic, and now the co-editor of the Australasian Builders and Contractors News, James Green; the lecturer in charge of the department of architecture at the Sydney Technical College, William Wright Campbell; possibly not the Government Architect, Walter Liberty Vernon, but certainly some of the men in his office, such as George Oakeshott and John Barr; a handful of architects in private practice, including George Sydney Jones; and the two men behind the Pitt Town experiment discussed in Chapter Five, the Methodist minister Thomas Roseby and the architect Benjamin Backhouse. These men are the leaders of architectural opinion in Sydney, and their names, and Ruskin’s, come up repeatedly in debates – professional, aesthetic and political – throughout the decade. There was intensive debate, for example, not only about what architecture really was, but about how to organise its practitioners. One aspect of this, parallelled in similar debates in Britain and the USA, was separating architects from their many

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 129 rivals to professional pre-eminence.114 Andrew Saint has traced the huge expansion of the architectural profession in England between 1850 and 1890; while the largest offices might resemble Sir George Gilbert Scott’s, with one or two principals assisted by an army of pupils and clerks, most practices were still small and dependent on a variety of work that might include land surveying and the collection of rents as well as designing buildings.115 In a fluid professional world architects competed for work with builders, surveyors, engineers and tradesmen, and this pattern is repeated in Australia in our period.

1. ARCHITECTS VERSUS ENGINEERS

An editorial in the Building and Engineering Journal in 1888 asked “should architects undertake engineering, and engineering architectural work?” and answered in the negative;116 an architect, Mr Green, of Rowe & Green, wrote in to agree: “let each keep to his own profession”.117 Engineers for their part felt there was simply too much to know for any one man to be master of it all. Norman Selfe, an engineer and an important figure in the growth of Australian technical education, was quite clear about this:

So widespread and manifold are the works now carried out by engineers that they are subdivided into an infinitude of branches, and in this way engineering differs considerably from architecture … no man could possibly be a universal engineer.118

The relationship with architects was now a necessity in all buildings of importance, and Selfe cited in evidence the “wonderful buildings of the World’s Columbian Exhibition” at Chicago. To Selfe “[the] architect is more or less a civil engineer by necessity and training, otherwise his functions would consist of little more than planning and ornamenting a structure”.119 On the vexed question of what separates builders, architects and engineers, Selfe quoted Fergusson’s history of architecture at length. Following Fergusson, Selfe defined architecture as the art of ornamenting construction, and civil engineering as the art of organizing materials in the most economic and scientific manner. Building was lowly regarded, and was merely “heaping materials together in the speediest and readiest fashion”.120 Selfe saw no hard and fast line between architecture and engineering, but the real problem was unqualified pretenders in

130 Phase Three: Ruskinism and the Nature of Work both areas: “some persons prefer to be their own architects; and others, directly they possess a piece of machinery imagine they are engineers”.121 And Selfe sounds like many another professional man of the time when he asked plaintively if it is right that:

after an engineer or an architect has put his heart and head and his whole life’s experience into the … design, and has then worried and wrestled with contractors and others to bring it to success, through months perhaps of toil and anxiety … he is paid only the same … that another man can earn in five minutes by getting the order for the work, or for effecting a sale of it when finished.122

The affinities between professional men such as architects, engineers and surveyors were mostly recognised by the parties involved; all agreed cooperation was essential, as was free discussion, though preferably in professional associations, not in letters to the press.123 The real fault lay with contractors, and the system of competitive tendering for building work.

2. ARCHITECTS VERSUS BUILDERS

Ruskin had railed against poor construction in the Stones of Venice, writing that the portion of the national income sacrificed in bad building passed all calculation.124 Even at the time the building industry in the Australian colonies was seen as an unending litany of bad practice – jerry building, said the Building and Engineering Journal, was more rampant in Australia than anywhere else in the world.125 This involved corruption as well as incompetence: Norman Selfe concluded his paper with multiple examples, all of which involved tendering and the taking of builders’ commissions “without any regard to the interests of the proprietors of the building”.126 The problem of tendering was the source of all the others: sub-contracting meant the cheapest quote always won and quality control was impossible.127 A page of the Australasian Builders and Contractors News for 1889 opened at random shows that of ten recent building contracts, seven went to the lowest bidder, nine if the second lowest is included.128 There were many calls for reform, but one problem was the architects’ deep involvement in the system. When a writer to the Building and Engineering Journal objected to this slander, signing himself “a Gentleman Architect and No Hypocrite”,129 the editors replied “it is useless

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 131 to mince matters, and [agree that] ‘all architects are honourable men.’ The contractors have a different tale to tell”. A correspondent in the same issue goes into revealing detail:

Is it honorable to accept the tender of a man (very often an uneducated one) when the architect knows well, within himself, that the price is excessively below the value of the work? Is it honorable that a contractor should be compelled to do work that the architect had not sufficient foresight to provide for in his plans and specifications? Is it honorable for architects to specify what firms a builder shall purchase from, and himself collect a commission from these firms? Is it honorable for an architect to tack surveyor to his name, and without knowing the first principles of that profession, take fees from his clients for doing that sort of work, very often subjecting his clients to serious losses? Yet these are very light offences to what may be charged against some of our respectable (!) architects.

This writer, signing himself “A Builder”, offers unexpected support, by implication, for the efforts of architects like Horbury Hunt to clean up the profession:

There are many honorable architects, whom we are proud of, and never tire of recommending … yet there are many who should never be allowed to place the word architect after their name; men who have neither been educated up to it, nor have a calling for it; men who almost have to wait until a building is completed before they understand their own plans; men whose only recommendation is the cheapness (?) with which they can get their work done, and the amount they save the proprietors, or their clients, by clipping the contractor of his lawful and just extras.130

A follow-up letter from another builder sums up the situation neatly: “were the architects to put a foot down on this matter, and allow no sub-contracting, we should find fewer insolvent builders, a better class of work, and a better class of workmen”.131

3. AN OPEN PROFESSION?

Moves for the official registration of architects in the Australian colonies gained speed in the 1890s, in an attempt to make professional associations more than mere discussion clubs or mutual admiration societies. Without recapping a story already told in detail by Max Freeland132 and others, some items under this heading are relevant here. The debate about whether architecture should be an open profession or not goes to the heart of questions about definitions of architecture and architects. Ruskin had famously said in

132 Phase Three: Ruskinism and the Nature of Work refusing the RIBA Gold Medal in 1874 that all professional monopolies were a bad thing and that the architectural profession was a modern fallacy.133 The long-running debate in Britain came to a head in 1891, prompted by the manifesto of sixty-nine prominent architects against moves by the RIBA to bring a registration bill before Parliament.134 Richard Norman Shaw led the dissenters who argued that architecture was a mysterious art that could be revealed but not taught. Shaw insisted that architects who were businessmen were not architects at all,135 and another dissenter, Edward Prior, argued that the professional architect was a contradiction in terms, “a dealer in wares, not a producer, a chapman not a craftsman”.136 The British debate was fully reported in Australia, theBuilding and Engineering Journal for example carrying the presidential addresses of both the Royal Institute of British Architects and the London Architectural Association for 1891 in detail.137 The local presidents of architectural bodies followed suit soon after. G C Inskip, the retiring president of the Royal Victorian Institute of Architects in 1891, repeated his call for the registration of architects, a topic under discussion for the past three years in Victoria.138 Unlike Richard Norman Shaw, who thought that the status of architecture as a fine art meant that it should not be regulated by governments, Inskip thought this meant that it should:

Architecture is a fine art … and of all the professions perhaps is the one requiring longest training and study. The presence in our midst of these incompetent men, and the [lack] of a proper Building Act [accounts] for the shoddy houses … in our … suburbs … which have helped to spread sickness and disease amongst us.

The Victorian Government was presently considering the Architects’ Registration Bill, and President Inskip hoped that with the support of the “cultured and educated classes” and of “every right-thinking person in the community” it would soon become law.139 But in Sydney, the president of the Institute of Architects of New South Wales, John Horbury Hunt, disagreed with the idea of a closed profession, especially one closed by legislation:

I fear that the tendency will be to develop the muscular part of our profession in the civil engineer, while the effeminate part will be taken in hand by the gentleman artist, leaving the quantity surveyor to stand by and reap the monetary reward arising out of this disintegration that would be fostered by legislative measures.140

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 133 The IANSW, however, should control access to its membership closely by examination, and have a say in who presumed to teach architecture. This was a reference to the lectures recently begun at Sydney University by Hunt’s old adversary John Sulman, though Hunt does not name him, without consulting the profession (i.e. Hunt). But some form of “school training” was an absolute necessity for prospective architects; office training was not sufficient because “the highest professional standard requires that the architect should be an educated man”.141 Samuel Hurst Seager, President of the newly formed Sydney Architectural Association, disagreed with Hunt.142 Hurst Seager thought there should be regulation because:

it has been … a source of wonder that a law has not been passed compelling all who wished to practise as architects to show their fitness for the position. A city is made or marred by those who practice the art of architecture within it; and although bad architecture is not perhaps so harmful to the community as ruinous advice from unqualified lawyers, or deathful treatment by unskilled doctors, yet, without question, untrained architects do inflict a very considerable amount of injury upon the community … not only by covering the land with ugly and inconvenient buildings … but also by creating distrust against all others … working under the same title.

The problem of unscrupulous practitioners should be addressed by instilling ethical ideas in younger members; Hurst Seager praised the code of ethics recently proposed to the IANSW by Horbury Hunt, and objected only to the rule, inherited from England, about payment as a percentage of the cost of the work, as an unnecessary temptation. Had not Ruskin also spoken out about the problem of “commission on the cost” when refusing the offer of the RIBA Gold Medal in 1874? However Hurst Seager disagreed with Ruskin on the solution to another problem – the many steps between a design and its realization: “too many persons intervening between the mind that conceives and the hand that executes”. The answer was not doing away with the architect altogether, as Ruskin appeared to say. Better, Hurst Seager thought, to do away with the builder, and have the architect work directly with the trades, like in France, or do away with the clerk of works, like in America. Seager recognised

134 Phase Three: Ruskinism and the Nature of Work that these all represented an “effort to return, as far as possible, to the medieval method of working”. He conceded this was impossible today, yet despite this:

I am firmly convinced that the hope of architecture lies in the direction of as close a union as possible between the designers and the workers … the hand workers must do more thinking, and the brain workers gain more practical knowledge.

Building workers should all become artisans, the contract system done away with, and the client act as his own contractor. And more public education was necessary because “nothing can be more prejudicial to art than want of intelligent appreciation on the part of those for whom the work is produced”. Regrettably in Australia:

works which can lay not the least claim to consideration as artistic productions are erected side by side with works of great merit, and the public are equally pleased by both, providing sufficient expenditure has been entailed to win their approbation.

The answer lay in teaching a general knowledge of architecture in high schools and universities, and teaching art appreciation as well as drawing in primary and secondary schools.143 This is a Ruskinian program, though not by name: a higher ethical code in service of the client, doing away with “commission on the cost”, a much closer relationship of the architect with the building trades, better art training for the workers, who should become artisans, and a cultivation of the general taste for finer things through public education. The relationship with the building trades was the central and most difficult issue in the third phase of Ruskinism that Michael Brooks describes. On the authority of Ruskin and Morris Australian architects like Hurst Seager had begun to argue for a different, more collaborative relationship between architects and artisans. Horbury Hunt, still president of the IANSW, sounded a note of caution in 1891.144 Discussing the formation of the Sydney Architectural Association, set up to teach both young architects and craftsmen, Hunt said “let our youths be trained in their own school and our craftsmen in theirs, and if a true system is adopted in both, while independent, the ultimate labour of architecture and craftsmen will be as one”. He thought the SAA’s approach risked muddle: “true architectural identity” would be absorbed, and the current aim of developing a school of architecture “lost or retarded”. There were two insidious problems presently undermining

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 135 the profession, the “effeminate gentleman-artist element” and the “wretched degrading influence of ‘trades-unionism’ over our workmen”. In regard to the latter, Hunt said:

Our tradesmen are fast losing that good old spirit of “Excelsior” which was at one time the pride of the British workman; they who … were our most trusted and powerful auxiliaries, and in whom we placed reliance for the true and masterly execution of our conceptions, are now becoming a source of much trouble to us. That relation once existing between our profession and that true and loyal army of skilled workmen of old is now year by year becoming less and less recognised by both parties, doubt and suspicion has pushed out confidence and respect … These two elements of dilettantism and trades-unionism are increasing the indifference and want of mutual confidence between the workman and the master of the works.145

The discussion about the role of craftsmen in design warmed up as the 1890s unfolded, prompted by the increasing social and industrial distress in the Australian colonies as the economy faltered. A benchmark statement on the topic was a long paper by the architect Walter Butler in 1893. The most telling of all the discussions I have seen on this subject, Butler’s paper provoked a sharp reaction from the architectural profession when it was reprinted in both the BEJ and the ABCN.146 Butler, twenty-nine years old at the time, was one of the expatriate Englishmen who brought the architectural ideas of 1890s London to Australia. He had worked for J D Sedding, a prominent Arts and Crafts architect, and went on to do some fine work in this style in Australia.147 In his paper Butler began by quoting William Morris and Walter Crane as to why handicrafts were of greater value than machine made things, “the opposite of the popular custom of today of steely precision in execution at the expense of beauty and design”. A “point of the utmost importance” was that until the decline of the Gothic in Europe, “the handicrafts and the exercise of the artistic element went hand in hand”. Butler claimed that the master of the works on a cathedral was “foreman, clerk of works, builder, architect and occasionally contractor – all in one” and quoted G E Street on the latitude the individual craftsman was allowed on the cathedrals. The result was the expression of “one mind to each pair of hands”.148

The outside influences that so hamper the progress of the arts now-a-days were unknown to them: they had little fear of want of bread on the morrow, or of money to pay the rent; nor were they constrained to follow the dictation of another man’s mind from a paper drawing, with innumerable difficulties in interpreting the

136 Phase Three: Ruskinism and the Nature of Work precise thing meant, an incessant striving to get at the mind of the designer, and all the while this gnawing fear would hang about them – that if they failed others would be given their places, with all the dependent anxieties of such an event.

This is more Ruskin than Ruskin: while acknowledging the economic difficulties of today, Butler romanticises the past, and is clearly oblivious to the contradictions in Unto This Last that, though Ruskin argued that all workmen should be paid the same, oblivious to merit or even effort, the fate of the bad workman was to go without work at all. In a time of little public support for the poor, going without work meant starvation, or if you were lucky the workhouse. Even more unreal, Butler thought that the artisans of the Middle Ages “lived happy lives in beautiful cottage- homes, and their whole energy was centred in the one object of doing good work … the natural, unhindered expression of their own desires … the characteristic expression of the age”. Ruskin is quoted on the decline of this beneficient age with the dawn of the Renaissance and the disastrous division of labour that followed. The artist was separated from the craftsman, with the result that the artist lost touch with his material, and the artisan lost touch with design:

so it is within the last three or four centuries that the present double belaboured method of producing art in architecture has arisen … since the day … the chisel first became directed through two minds, the breach between art and labour has widened, and the arts have languished.

The severance of art and design is only one problem; an even bigger problem is the “clamouring after cash wages” that began after the Middle Ages. To Butler this in particular:

has proved the biggest mill-stone that was ever hung about the neck of art in the history of the world. The settlement of this question of the severance of art and labour … seems to be deep-rooted in that of the freedom or bondage of the workers … therefore I am inclined to think that this age of newspapers and “election hustings freedom” … is an age of the severest bondage that has come upon men in the history of the world … the vast majority of the men who produce those things that should be works of art are mere human machines.

Artisans have not been left much to do, because for the last four centuries:

we designers, master builders, and architects have taken to ourselves the best of their work, resulting … in a stagnation of the faculty of design; and in the end we can scarce show them how they are to do it as well as they did it without help before our pilfering Act.

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 137 Butler proposes a Ruskinian program to redress the situation. He praises the Art Workers’ Guild and the Arts and Craft Exhibition recently held in London and calls for similar enterprises in Australia to Kendal & Co, founded by Walter Crane in England, as “incentives to the attainment of artistic skill among the handicrafts in Australia”. The sooner this happens, the sooner “shall we see a development in the place where healthy development must start … at the bench in the workshop, the banker in the mason’s yard and at the blacksmith’s anvil, rather than at the desk and the painter’s easel”. To Butler, Carlyle, Ruskin and Morris “are not mere cranks, but are telling us an awful truth … that there will be no healthy development of art amongst the handicrafts … unless it go hand in hand with a change in the condition in the life of the people”.149 This paper occasioned considerable discussion, not least on the night itself. Two people in the audience, Harold Desbrowe-Annear and E Wilson Dobbs, as we have seen, had given papers on Ruskin themselves, and both supported the speaker. Desbrowe- Annear did however take issue with Butler’s claim that the personal freedom of the workers was hostile to artistic expression. While “rampant trades-unionism had injured art most severely”, with personal liberty art had also risen. For his part Wilson Dobbs thought that an appreciation of art was developing among the public, “even if only in the ornamentation of houses with large sized chromos”. The only difficulty was to say “what was art in this century which seemed everything by turns and nothing long”. Dobbs put his finger on a good point: there seemed to be two opposite tendencies in life fighting against each other, and this had resulted in one man being unable to grasp everything.150 Some of the others present were not so positive. Mr [A E] Johnson said that the opinions the essayist had quoted from Ruskin and other writers were very severe, but these men were not architects. A great many had drawn from them ideas which were not practicable in architecture, and it must not be said that there was nothing good in the Renaissance (applause). Mr Purbrick thought that there might be artists among the artisans of Australia, but at the moment the artisan was a tradesman who had to work so many hours a day, and he was satisfied as a rule to do so. Then could they as architects be his teachers, or could they say

151 whether it was desirable the tradesman should be taught?

138 Phase Three: Ruskinism and the Nature of Work The Building and Engineering Journal commented at length on Butler’s paper three weeks later. The editorialist was not impressed: Butler was illogical, too pessimistic, and wrong, proved by a lengthy discussion of the real division of labour on Gothic cathedrals. The past was not better: this was an age of science and progress, and engineers showed the way: “it is from these men, and not from our architects pure and simple, that the development of a new phase of art will arise”. There were too many styles for craftsmen to master, while the contract system did not allow time for a craftsman to do his work well anyway. And the writer seized on the most important point: “[the] development of the arts among the handicrafts would [require] a total revolution in our present system [that] will never come about”.152 The BEJ repeated this point the following year, commenting on the presentation of the RIBA Gold Medal to Sir Frederick Leighton, “the greatest living artist of the century”. This time the editorialist commended Leighton’s “masterly exposition of the relationship and purpose of architecture, sculpture and painting” which would dispel the “long prevailing mists” about their proper functions:

in these democratic days of small things and economy, what satisfaction to the designer in materials so degraded as galvanised iron and weatherboard … that it is not a “Lamp of Truth” for architecture to be defined as the useless or unnecessary, or that ornament on a structure must be flung over it as a superfluous garment or adventitious gaud, nor the installation to pre-eminence of the picturesque.

This feels like wilfully misquoting Ruskin, but the BEJ continued boldly on:

To every Australian architect who has the advancement of his profession at heart, we would commend the study of [Leighton’s] principles … and the abandonment of slavish tradition, for as widely as the mental conditions of the medieval are removed from those of today, even so are the necessities of a climate and life in the new world different from the land of our forefathers.153

Thus by 1894 professional opinion – at least as represented by the Building and Engineering Journal and the commercial interests it served – was finished with Ruskin and Morris. No less a person than Sir Frederick Leighton (soon to be Lord Leighton) had said so. That there

154 was yet hope in the “antipodean art wastes and deserts of Australia” is evidenced by two organizations, one in Victoria and one in New South Wales, that sought to unite Australian architects to nobler aims. Both were established as low-key rivals to the state professional

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 139 institutes, pre-occupied as the latter were with recruitment, regulation and contractural matters, and both saw education as the key. In the absence of a full-time school of architecture in either city, in the middle of a continuing debate about pupillage, both the Architecture and Engineering Association of Victoria and the Sydney Architectural Association tried to show another way, and I briefly discuss them here.

4. THE ARCHITECTURE AND ENGINEERING ASSOCIATION OF VICTORIA

By 1890 the Royal Victorian Institute of Architects had already been through three distinct phases in its short life: formed in 1856, it was re-established in 1871 and reconstituted in 1890.155 The RVIA seems to have been a more professional organization from the start than its contemporary in NSW, and more thoughtful too. Its discussions certainly covered more ground: a selection of topics from 1890–1894 included ethics in architecture, architectural education, architectural competitions, the verandah, architecture and culture, the training of an artist, the RVIA exams and architectural criticism. By contrast discussions in the IANSW were dominated by Horbury Hunt’s one man crusade to reform the profession, and Hunt did not encourage other views. The difference between the two professional bodies in Victoria was also not so marked as between their counterparts in New South Wales; both the RVIA and the AEAV devoted time to philosophical questions as well as practical. Some writers wrote for both, and both had time for Ruskin. The role of the new Architecture and Engineering Association of Victoria, in contrast to the RVIA, was to foster a better relationship between architects and engineers, aimed at the younger members of both professions. Papers given at the AEAV in this period include stone-carving and ornamentation, domestic architecture, King Solomon’s Temple, the theory of columns, and the use of terra-cotta in architecture. This suggests that the Building and Engineering Journal was correct in recognizing the purpose of the AEAV as educating the engineer about architecture more than the architect about engineering.156 The moving spirit of the AEAV was the architect A B Rieusset. In his president’s address of 1889 Rieusset discusses pupillage, depraved public taste, and travelling scholarships,

140 Phase Three: Ruskinism and the Nature of Work and touched on a familiar Ruskinian theme, that the history of a nation is written in its buildings.157 But it is W H Leeds, and his book on the orders, that Rieusset quotes on the difference between architecture and building: “architecture is building … refined and elevated to the rank of art … something more than mere utility and convenience”.158 To Rieusset most of the ugliness that surrounds us is due to inexperience, as well as ignorance of the first principles of design. Therefore the student architect should study construction, but should not be expected to be master of every trade; only long years of patient study made the architect. Like other Australian architects of this time Rieusset goes on to call for a national style, and like many thought it should be a new style derived from the “earliest forms of Eastern art, Byzantine or Norman” such as the “round arch style” championed by Alfred Waterhouse. Here was the chance to evolve a truly Australian architecture and “endeavour to suit the climate in which we live, for one of the great essentials of success in our buildings, is to make them harmonise with their surroundings and climatic influence”.159 In the paper he gave to the AEAV in 1891160 E Wilson Dobbs also discussed what an Australian style of architecture might be, and also concluded that the answer lay in the Romanesque. He agreed with Ruskin that the use of iron and glass did not lead anywhere and commended Fergusson’s suggestion to follow the spirit but not the form of an older style. The American Richardson and the English Waterhouse had shown the way, brilliantly using the Romanesque as the point of departure for new work.161 Dobbs argued this was possible in Australia too: by “manfully following out the tendencies of the Romanesque style, its many sidedness can be made to apply to all our Austral wants, and especially [our] climate”. The result would be to “develop a new order of things essentially Australian”.162 The Romanesque might have been a better style for a new country like Australia at this point than even Dobbs knew. Ruskin had praised the Romanesque for its freedom from dogma, its irregularity, and its feeling for masses in light,163 explaining that:

Impatience is a glorious character in an advancing school: and I love the Romanesque and early Gothic especially, because they afford so much room for it; accidental carelessness of measurement or of execution being mingled indistinguishably with the purposed departures from symmetrical regularity, and the luxuriousness of perpetually variable fancy, which are eminently characteristic of both styles.164

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 141 And Ruskin admired the “imperfection and variety in things professing to be symmetrical” in the Romanesque, whose builders had “looked to loveliness of detail, to nobility in the whole, never to petty measurements”.165 Suggestive as this is, however, it would be straining credulity to attribute the rampant jerry-building in Australia in this period to such noble motives. And it was a brave thing for Dobbs to conclude his talk to an audience of engineers by quoting Ruskin on Sir Joseph Paxton to the effect that the new materials of metal and glass would never speak to the human spirit.166

5. THE SYDNEY ARCHITECTURAL ASSOCIATION

The equivalent organization in New South Wales to the AEVA was the Sydney Architectural Association, formed in 1891 by a number of leading architects dissatisfied with the turbulent reign of Horbury Hunt at the IANSW, and concerned by the lack of architectural education in Sydney. Several of these men had been members of the London Architectural Association and sought to bring its principles to Sydney. Its leader was a thoughtful architect who worked for the Water Board, Samuel Hurst Seager; other prominent members included George Oakeshott, Howard Joseland and Harry Kent. In its short life the SAA was the major promoter of Arts and Crafts ideas in Sydney.167 The SAA was formed in January 1891, held its first meeting in February, and by March had decided on its program. In his inaugural address as the first president of the SAA in April,168 Hurst Seager is careful not to antagonise Horbury Hunt. The SAA was not a rival professional institute; its aims were educational, its method a voluntary system of mutual help, inspired by the London Architectural Association. The SAA was to be a gathering of past AA students and others to carry forward its work in their adopted home. Travelling to learn about architecture was now not so necessary as in the past, thanks to libraries, books, and photographs. Admittedly the SAA library had only one book at the moment, but the professional journals were better because they were “the most powerful art educators of the day”, though it went without saying that the Sydney journals “are not, nor can they be, of the high standard of excellence” of English and American ones, partly because of their patchy record in publishing good work.

142 Phase Three: Ruskinism and the Nature of Work Hurst Seager had begun his speech by defining an architect as an artist and a man of honour, and architecture as a fine art appealing to what is beautiful, true and noble. But architects were now seldom called upon to create more than utilitarian buildings and ”the poetry of our art is all but lost”. His answer to this problem is the most interesting part of his speech and clearly identifies him as a third phase Ruskinian:

If [architecture] is to advance from the eclecticism of to-day towards an artistic expression of our life and thought, there must be … a closer union, as there was in olden times, between the architects who create the works and the artisans who execute them … The hand-worker must do more thinking and the brain- workers gain more practical knowledge.

Where the AEAV had been an attempt to bring together two professions, architects and engineers, the SAA was unique in looking to artisans as well as architects for members. The SAA was to be a “common ground on which they can meet while diligently cultivating their special functions”, and Seager devoted the following three paragraphs to the importance of mutual respect.169 TheBuilding and Engineering Journal’s report on this was benign.170 The BEJ disagreed with Hurst Seager on several points but supported his call for a closer union between architects and artisans. Referring to Hurst Seager’s call for hand-workers to do more thinking, and brain-workers to seek more practical knowledge, the BEJ said:

How many [architects] throughout the colonies … will welcome and endorse these manly expressions, as an all sufficient antidote to the stilted utterances of another … President [i.e. Horbury Hunt] and his patronising and tricky correspondence. How many of the builders will welcome in it the high-way to an interchange of ideas which their more practical knowledge will render most valuable to the profession.

This is not about art workers as Morris, Webb, Crane and Voysey understood them, but about the business relationship between architects and contractors. That the BEJ had missed the paper’s real point became obvious the following year when Hurst Seager repeated it in his second presidential address.171 This attracted no less than five hostile editorials from the BEJ in the following weeks, prompted by considerable correspondence from the profession.

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 143 In his speech Hurst Seager had deplored the fact that architects had so little say in most building in Sydney; in one recent month 201 buildings were commenced, 161 of which did not involve an architect. He went on to attack contemporary domestic design for its “inconvenience of plan; bad design; meretricious ornament; vulgar display”; denounce unscrupulous and unqualified practitioners; and call for registration of architects and a code of professional practice. But the controversial part, at least to the Building and Engineering Journal, was his thoughts on the relationship of architects and craftsmen. If it was “beyond question that there are too many persons intervening between the mind that conceives and the hand that executes”, what was the answer? To Hurst Seager it was not doing away with the architect. While “a return to the medieval manner is impossible”, the hope of architecture lay in “as close a union as possible between the designers and the workers”, and he repeated his remarks of the previous year on the hand workers doing more thinking and the brain workers gaining more practical knowledge. What this meant, as the Building and Engineering Journal now realised, was doing away with the “capitalist contractor”. The client, Hurst Seager thought, should act as his own contractor, though he would retain the “valuable services of the experienced and practical builder”, only adding to his knowledge of art to make him “what in truth he often is now, the architect’s assistant”. All that remained was to ensure that every workman, “or preferably artisan”, employed on the building “should be thoroughly trained in his craft, and hold a certificate to that effect”, ideally from the Sydney Technical College, so that “by ridding ourselves of incompetence from the highest to the lowest grade of workers in the arts and crafts connected with Architecture, we shall have cleared away the greatest hindrance to successful progress”. Under this scheme the architect would appoint all the workers, and “personally direct their labours”. The client would control payments, which would not go through the architect, and the workers would be paid by piece-work, not by day. In Hurst Seager’s vision of the future “no wholly inartistic work” would be possible, for all the workers:

from the highest to the lowest, are thoroughly trained to perform their parts, and can appreciate fully the works of the others. There is no fear of loss; no striving to gain an advantage; nothing to prevent the whole body of artists and artizans

144 Phase Three: Ruskinism and the Nature of Work from working together harmoniously to produce, as far as circumstances permit, a perfect work of Art, which … gives them … pleasure varying in degree [only with] the responsibility of their office … [T]he demoralising pleasure often felt by the client that he has obtained his desire at another’s loss is absent, and in its place there reigns the pure and ennobling delight in the work itself. There is no room for regret – exactly what was intended has been most faithfully accomplished.

Was this an idle dream? Perhaps it was, Hurst Seager thought, but “in the hands of one and all of us lie the possibilities of its realisation”.172 This was the red rag to a bull for the editors of the Building and Engineering Journal. The paper commented crankily on Hurst Seager’s scheme two weeks later, and then for several weeks following. While conceding his “perfect sincerity” the BEJ regretted his “failure to strike with sufficient vigour at the evils that prevail” in the Sydney architectural world.173 These were not rampant corruption and double-dealing, as one might expect, but inadequate professional leadership. The answer was not an alternative to the present contract system but higher standards of conduct by members of the profession. The current public mistrust of architects was actually an “augury of better times in the future”; the public was being educated, not through high schools and universities, but (it was implied) by such papers as the Building and Engineering Journal to condemn “in unrelenting indignation, a profession which has not the spirit to free itself from the incubus of evil which is dragging it in the mire”. But the BEJ’s strongest objection was to the suggestion that a better system would do away with builders: “we take exception both to the theory and system proposed by Mr Seager”. The BEJ was emphatic that “the high road to the success of the profession, is assuredly the success of the capitalist builder and general contractor”. Architects should not get into a contest with builders: “it would not be a wise thing for the architects to provoke this struggle at present,” it said, and the BEJ hinted darkly that “there are not wanting abundant signs that the builder and contractor of today is becoming a very important personage in the community”. Because of widespread distrust of architects, public sympathy has sided with the builder and against the architect:

The profession need not be jealous of the success of the builder and try to blot him out because he monopolises 161 out of 201 buildings, but should

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 145 set itself to ascertain what causes have conduced to this state of affairs, and endeavour by registration and examination to raise the standard of its men and their work.

As for artistic workmen, and the lack of art in recent building, “this is much more the deficiency of the architect himself than the skill of the workmen”. Deficient drawings and careless supervision were a bigger problem than a deficiency of intellect on the part of the builder.174

6. THE SYDNEY ARTS AND CRAFTS EXHIBITION, 1892

The Sydney Architectural Association was quickly noticed back home – according to the London Building News it was doing “useful work”.175 Its greatest success in its short career was the first (and only) Sydney Arts and Crafts Exhibition in late 1892, following the first such exhibition in London only four years before.176 The Exhibition, held in the York Street skating rink, was opened by the Governor of New South Wales on 26 October 1892. There was an extensive collection of architectural drawings, sent in by the leading architects of New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland, and exhibits of work by sixty firms. The Exhibition was well attended and well reviewed, by the Building and Engineering Journal in particular, though it was more discriminating about the drawings than about the products on display.177 On closer inspection, most of the product exhibitors were agents showing imported rather than local work, and machine made at that. Though nobody seems to have remarked on this at the time, this was not at all in the true arts and crafts manner. The exhibition was more like a trade fair as we would understand it today, with displays of patented sanitary ware, electrical appliances, and manufactured ornament, such as Carter’s cement ornaments “mostly in the style of the Renaissance, some Gothic”. While the building materials are described in detail, mentions of true local craftwork are few. Howard Joseland’s furniture designs are favourably reviewed and two sculptors, W P Macintosh and James White, get a brief mention, the latter for a model of a statue for the Water Board “representing Hygeia protecting the city”.178 But as far as craftsmanship was concerned, that was as far as the Exhibition went.179

146 Phase Three: Ruskinism and the Nature of Work The Exhibition was to be the greatest moment in the short career of the SAA. Its worthy educational program was blighted by the apathy of the young members for whom it was designed. Like other, older associations, it felt the effects of the building depression of the early nineties severely, and it collapsed in mid-1894, three months after the AEAV. The brief life of the SAA represents a noble effort to widen the realm of discourse about architecture. Dogged from the beginning by the indifference of the young architects it was meant to serve, there is no evidence it attracted young artisans either. Horbury Hunt, much maligned by the Building and Engineering Journal, was right: Australian youth lacked “that true, earnest determination to prosecute with diligence the study of our profession”. Hunt was right about another point too: “there is [also] with us a tendency to an improper and undue haste to become practitioners – masters too early in life”.180 But while it lasted the Sydney Architectural Association held out an alternative vision of what architecture, and architectural discourse, in Sydney might be, one dominated by men who took Ruskin and Morris as their guides.

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 147 F. THE RUSKINIAN MOMENT IN AUSTRALIA, 1894–1900

Act One of the Ruskinian moment came to an end with the devastating economic collapse of the eastern Australian colonies in the early 1890s. Building activity dropped sharply and remained low for nearly six years. In the interval Ruskin’s architectural ideas found a new home in the technical schools of Sydney and Melbourne. The first architecture schools in Australia had grown out of evening courses for draftsmen and surveyors. In Sydney architectural education was pushed and pulled between the conflicting aims of producing artisans and fine artists. The earliest classes in architecture were drawing classes given at the Sydney Mechanics School of Arts in 1865;181 a fuller program accompanied the formation of the Sydney Technological College in 1878 and its successor, the Sydney Technical College, in 1883.182 But the architects who taught these classes, such as Cyril Blacket (1880–1884) and John F Hennessy (1884–1888), concentrated on training competent draftsmen who might or might not become architects; it is only with the arrival of the Englishman William Wright Campbell that the scope and rigour of the STC course suddenly expand.183 During Campbell’s tenure (1888–1894) the course became a four year diploma in architecture instead of a three year certificate in drafting; most importantly it saw a much greater emphasis on a broad design education and the cooperation of architects and the building trades.184 However under Campbell’s successor, Cyril Blacket again (1895–1904), possibly prompted by the depression, the course reverted to a three year program with a narrower focus, and remained that way until the arrival of James Nangle in 1905.185 This difference can be seen in the preambles to the course in the STC calendars for these years. Ruskin and Morris look over Wright Campbell’s shoulder when he writes that the course offers:

the speedy and complete attainment of that special, almost exceptional, technical knowledge and skill which are absolutely requisite for the architect – the “master workman” of the present day.186

Campbell’s successor, Cyril Blacket, however believed an ignorance of history lay behind such opinions. The architect of the thirteenth century owed his superior position to

148 The Ruskinian Moment in Australia, 1894–1900 his knowledge of geometry, design and construction, more than to any excellence as a craftsman.187 Blacket blamed amateur historians for this error, including Ruskin; such authors were “quite unconnected professionally with Architecture, [and] have given as with authority for facts, what really were but theories”. A major reason for these differing points of view is the reluctance within the architectural profession to divulge the secret of design, that “special, almost exceptional skill”, which all architecture students struggled to learn.188 It was the one thing the earliest architecture courses in Sydney would not teach189 and as Andrew Saint points out, it was the only element in architecture to which some other group did not have a prior or a better claim.190 In the 1891 manifesto Architecture: a Profession or an Art? no less a person than Richard Norman Shaw had said that the power of design was “the real glory of architecture as of all art” as opposed to the mere knowledge of building materials.191 The ability to design, which was more than the knowledge of construction and surveying taught in the technical colleges and involved the mysteries of art and taste, was the marker by which the would-be profession of architecture separated itself from the ambitions of tradesmen. This is the background to the discussions in Australia of the Arts and Crafts desire for closer collaboration between architects and artisans, and remained its biggest obstacle. As in Sydney, Ruskinians in Melbourne tended to show up early in connection with technical education, such as Harold Desbrowe-Annear, one of the founders of the first diploma course in architecture at the Working Men’s College (1890–1895), and his successor Robert Haddon, who revived the course in 1902 after it collapsed in the depression. Prompted by Ruskin, as we have seen, Desbrowe-Annear attempted to make the architecture subjects at the Working Men’s College in Melbourne broader in the 1890s, and there is some suggestion that he was replaced because of this.192 There had been an immediate outcry in 1891 when another lecturer, Felix Storer, had criticised the training of architects as too impractical and recommended a much more thorough grounding in the building trades: in this way “even an architect can be a skilful artisan, or shall I say an artisan can become an architect”.193 It was probably the second half of this remark which earned Storer a sharp rebuke from the Building and Engineering Journal, which denounced

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 149 his paper as “ignorant twaddle”. An architect had to be an artist first and foremost, it said firmly, otherwise he would be nothing more than a builder.194 This did not mean however teaching more art subjects at the Working Men’s College. As the Royal Commission into Technical Education in Victoria reported in 1901, while it attached due importance to the improvement of taste and the cultivation of artistic feeling, things must not be allowed to go too far: “the more immediate duty of the State is to organise the teaching of art in its application to industrial processes, and to enable tradesmen to take full advantage of instruction bearing upon their avocations”.195 But no more. It seems clear for example that under Robert Haddon, Desbrowe- Annear’s successor, the architecture course at the Working Men’s College reverted to a more narrowly defined one aimed at producing draftsmen but not architects. If this seems paradoxical, given Haddon’s evident arts and craft leanings, the answer may be in the line Haddon drew between “those who provide, those who build, and those who direct”, and his remarks are clearly addressed to those who direct, i.e. architects, who are not the same as those who build.196 This attitude also separated two other men who, as we have seen, had read Ruskin, Walter Butler and Harold Desbrowe-Annear. Desbrowe- Annear had disagreed with Butler in 1893 on the question of how to make craft work more artistic; the architect must lead the way in any attempt to improve the artistic skill of the workmen:

If he did true, strong, and powerful work the earnestness of his endeavour would communicate itself to all associated with him … his well-trained, powerful and artistic magnetism … would make an artist of the artisan by force of habit and mere contact.197

The mystery of architectural design was closely held in the offices of practitioners, and architects long resisted all attempts to teach it elsewhere.198 Andrew Saint points out that in Britain by 1890 the image of the architect as an individual artist had come to dominate architectural thinking so strongly that the more artistic a building was, the more architectural control there was likely to be, and the less collaboration.199 Creative collaboration with the building trades was equally problematic for Australian architects. The experience of designing an elaborate tomb for the Springthorpe family in 1897 had stimulated Harold Desbrowe-Annear’s interest

150 The Ruskinian Moment in Australia, 1894–1900 in such collaborations,200 but they remained comparatively rare. It seems clear that architects were prepared to allow craftsmen to contribute to their buildings, but only carefully selected men whom they knew well and who had established reputations outside architecture. Even this very controlled involvement had withered away by the nineteen twenties.

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 151 G. THE RUSKINIAN MOMENT IN AUSTRALIA, 1900–1908

With the lifting of the economic depression by 1900, the building industry revived and the abbreviated Arts and Crafts work of the early 1890s returned in force. Act Two of the Ruskinian moment in Australia begins with the formation of the T Square Club in Melbourne in January 1900, and a famous lecture at the Working Man’s College the following November.201 This lecture, which became something of a talking point in Melbourne, was ostensibly written by Sir John Longstaff but was actually ghosted by Desbrowe-Annear and Walter Withers, and delivered by Thomas Sisley, the College elocution tutor. Despite all this it is clearly Desbrowe-Annear, and Ruskin, speaking when the writer condemns the ugly and insanitary housing of the poor as a moral failure and proposes “the great movement of Arts and Crafts” as the way to redress this.202 The T Square Club, as close as Australia got to the English Art Workers Guild, was the second manifestation of Desbrowe-Annear’s interest in fostering Arts and Crafts ideas in Melbourne in 1900. He was the driving force behind the club, along with R G Hyndman, and it did not survive Hyndman’s death and Desbrowe-Annear’s withdrawal from the club in 1903. Popular with architectural students and draftsmen, the club also drew a wide range of artists and craftspeople to its discussions and competitions, all of which sought a closer union between architecture and the applied arts.203 In a talk in 1903, Desbrowe-Annear reaffirmed his belief in architecture as a democratic art and the alliance of architecture and the arts and crafts as the only way forward, citing recent developments in England, France and Austria.204 In this respect the club was an alternative to the professional club concurrently being sought by the Royal Victorian Institute of Architects. Like Ruskin, Desbrowe-Annear distrusted professional monopolies, and he regarded the Arts and Crafts movement as incompatible with the growing attempt to make architecture a restricted profession of limited scope in Australia. As we have seen his attempts at the Working Men’s College to broaden the curriculum for his artisan students to include the mystery of design, as well as teaching them draftsmanship, were reversed by his successor.205 The decade after 1900 however did see the flowering of Arts and Crafts architecture in Melbourne, led by Walter Butler, Rodney Alsop and Harold Desbrowe-Annear himself.

152 The Ruskinian Moment in Australia, 1900–1908 According to Harriet Edquist, by 1906 Butler had moved from working in the manner of Richard Norman Shaw to designing freer, more obviously Arts and Crafts houses, all for very wealthy clients206 (figure 48). Rodney Alsop, in partnership with Frederick Klingender, had begun to do the same, before evolving a style influenced by American West Coast architecture.207 Although Desbrowe-Annear built very little in the 1890s, in the decade following 1900 a series of houses he designed at Eaglemont, an artists’ colony outside Melbourne, represent his continuing belief in the ideas of Pugin, Morris and Viollet- le-Duc. He had argued in 1902 that the small house could be the site of architectural and social innovation in a democratic society, and the early Eaglemont houses (1903–1911), according to Edquist, embody the Arts and Crafts principles of truth to materials and place, structural honesty, functional transparency and the celebration of the builder’s craft (figure 49).208 As such Desbrowe-Annear has come to be regarded as one of the true precursors of modernism in Australian architecture.

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 153

Melbourne Arts and Crafts

FIGURE HAS BEEN REMOVED DUE TO COPYRIGHT AGREEMENT

figure 48: Elevations for Truby Williams House, Toorak, Melbourne. Butler and Bradshaw, architects, 1906 from harriet edquist, pioneers of modernism, melbourne, miegunyah press, 2008, p. 42

FIGURE HAS BEEN REMOVED DUE TO COPYRIGHT AGREEMENT

figure 49: House, Eaglemont, Victoria. Harold Desbrowe-Annear, architect, 1903 from harriet edquist, pioneers of modernism, melbourne, miegunyah press, 2008, p. 37

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 155

What did Sydney architects take from Ruskin? For the most part it was a question of style, and only those principles to do with style. This was as true of the Gothic Revival work produced in Thomas Rowe’s office as of the Arts and Crafts work of the Government Architect’s Branch under Walter Liberty Vernon, and in the domestic work after 1900 of such architects as Roscoe Collins (figures 50 & 51), E J Jackson (figure 52) and M B Halligan209 (figures 53 & 54). There is one Sydney architect in this period, Benjamin Backhouse, who did pay more attention to Ruskin’s social teaching than to his architectural ideas.210 While Backhouse’s work shows touches of stylistic Ruskinism, principally his early Gothic Revival buildings in Queensland and some early polychromatic work in Sydney, his social ideas owe a great deal to Ruskin, and I discuss these at length in Chapter Five. There are however two Sydney architects who appear to have done both – responded to Ruskin’s social teaching as well as to his specifically architectural ideas – and they are two of the opinion leaders of the Sydney architectural world around 1900. John Barlow and George Sydney Jones were both Australian born and had read more of Ruskin than the Seven Lamps of Architecture and the Stones of Venice.

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 157

Sydney Arts and Crafts

figures 50 & 51: Elevation and interior, Collins House, Hornsby, Sydney. Roscoe Collins, architect, c. 1905 from art and architecture, 1905, pp. 187 & 88

figure 52: Gullett House, Wahroonga, Sydney. Edward Jeaffreson Jackson, architect, 1901 from art and architecture, 1905, p. 87

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 159

Sydney Arts and Crafts

figure 53: Exterior perspective, Fairfax House, Bellevue Hill, Sydney. M B Halligan, architect, c. 1905 from art and architecture, 1905, p. 32

figure 54: Exterior perspective, Royal Sydney Golf Club, Rose Bay, Sydney. M B Halligan, architect, 1908 from art and architecture, 1905, p. 32

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 161

1. JOHN BARLOW

John Barlow (1860?–1924) had been trained in the offices of Benjamin Backhouse and Horbury Hunt, and returned to Sydney in 1887 after an extended tour of England and the continent. He practised successfully in Sydney until the First World War and his portfolio included a large body of socially-conscious work in hospitals and schools, especially for the Catholic church.211 Like most architects of the day he worked in more than one style : his church of St Canice in Elizabeth Bay (1888) still exists, a simple Gothic Revival building with a fine feeling for light and materials (figures 55 & 56), while his houses of the early 1890s are competent essays in the Arts and Crafts. He was still exploring the possibilities of this idiom in his project for an Ideal Home in 1906 (figures 57 & 58). His importance here, however, is as a lifelong participant in, and opinion leader of, the architectural debates of the time. Barlow was a vigorous campaigner on urban issues, and often clashed with Walter Liberty Vernon over the Government Architect’s monopoly of important building projects. Barlow succeeded Hunt as president of the IANSW and was the first editor of Art and Architecture, the longest-running professional journal to reflect the Arts and Crafts movement in Australia. Both as president and editor Barlow propagated Ruskinian ideals of honest building, in every sense, and was vocal in his support for the City Beautiful movement.

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 163

John Barlow

figure 55: Façade detail, St Canice’s Catholic Church, Elizabeth Bay, Sydney. John Barlow, architect, 1888

figure 56: Interior detail, St Canice’s Catholic Church, Elizabeth Bay, Sydney. John Barlow, architect, 1888

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 165

John Barlow

figure 57: Front elevation, Ideal House project. John Barlow, architect, 1906 from art and architecture, 1906, p. 17

figure 58: Interior perspective, Ideal House project. John Barlow, architect, 1906 from art and architecture, 1906, p. 18

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 167

We learn more about Barlow from an unexpected source: from 1889 Barlow was the anonymous Australian correspondent for the American Architect and Building News; although he does not sign the “Letter from Australia” until 1895, the early references clearly indicate that the writer is an architect in close touch with the Sydney building world.212 While the content of these articles is consistent with other pieces Barlow wrote for Australian publications, as a correspondent for a foreign journal he expresses himself more freely, commenting in detail on the architectural politics of Sydney, and often resorting to satire when denouncing rigged competitions or William Lane’s New Australia movement.213 In these pieces it becomes clear that while a firm Ruskinian in architectural matters, Barlow was a social conservative: he did not like the new architecture courses at the Sydney Technical College, doubting whether “such institutions do not undermine to a great extent the old system of apprenticeship, without giving any compensating advantages”.214 In 1893, a dark year for Australia after the wave of bank failures, he was particularly vitriolic, describing a strike by Sydney stonemasons as evidence of the “innate stupidity of tradesmen taken collectively”,215 while the proposed scheme for a new state parliament house, a measure partly designed to relieve unemployment, was denounced as a project to support those “whose pig-headedness and selfishness have done much to bring the country into these financial straits”.216 What redeems Barlow, as it did Ruskin, is his implacable hatred of ugliness and greed, the rampant commercialism which led to the “extraordinary apathy evinced by our people with regard to artistic matters”.217 Nor did Barlow spare those in authority: Barlow used his presidential address of 1899 to criticise the Sydney City Council for its “hideous utilitarianism, wanton pillage, destruction and vandalism”, provoking the Sydney Morning Herald, as we have seen, but earning the approval of the London Building News.218 Barlow often referred to Ruskin in these debates, citing him as one of the “few great minds in revolt” who had rescued English architecture from materialism and bad taste.219 Similarly Ruskin’s views on the social importance of architecture remained a touchstone for Barlow throughout his life; in 1904 he wrote that “architecture is growing into our life more intimately than it has ever done before, as something to be loved as

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 169 well as admired, bringing poetry and repose into homes and lives greyed over by fierce competition”.220 The Sydney architectural world in the decades before the First World War sorely needed men who held architecture to a higher standard, professionally and artistically, and Barlow, strongly influenced by Ruskin and Morris, was one; George Sydney Jones was another.

2. GEORGE SYDNEY JONES

Barlow’s successor as editor of Art and Architecture, George Sydney Jones (1865–1927),221 also shows Ruskin’s influence in his work and in his writing. Jones had studied in London in the 1880s and returned to Australia in 1891, according to Conrad Hamann, breathing the new spirit of Voysey, Ashbee and Baillie Scott.222 Hamann points to Jones’ stylistic restlessness and willingness to experiment, leading him in natural stages from houses in the Arts and Crafts idiom before 1900 to some proto-modern flat-roofed houses by 1906 (figures 59 & 60). Like Barlow his built work included a large body of socially useful buildings and he made a particular study of hospital design; unlike Barlow there was a strong strain of rationalism in his later work and he embraced the new materials of iron and glass.

170 The Ruskinian Moment in Australia, 1900–1908 George Sydney Jones

figure 59: Exterior perspective, “Bickley”, Strathfield, Sydney. George Sydney Jones, architect, 1894 from art and architecture, 1905, p. 189

FIGURE HAS BEEN REMOVED DUE TO COPYRIGHT AGREEMENT

figure 60: Exterior perspective, Ideal House project. George Sydney Jones, architect, 1906 from harriet edquist, pioneers of modernism, melbourne, miegunyah press, 2008, p. 63

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 171

But as Hamann points out, Jones never forgot his early training. In 1905 he wrote that he happened to be “one among the, I regret to say, decreasing number of those who are old-fashioned enough to admire and benefit greatly by the writings of John Ruskin”. Ruskin might be disregarded by architects as an impractical idealist, but:

I hold strongly to the opinion that the seeds which were planted by him … are now bearing fruit a hundredfold. It is seen in the earnestness of modern work, in the better understanding of form and colour, in the knowledge of the value underlying the study of Nature. Hence modern English architecture is simpler, fuller of meaning, more truthful, more manly, more beautiful, than that of the days … in which Ruskin’s best work was done … It cannot be pretended that we, as architects, are uninfluenced by these things; we must be influenced by them to a more or less degree, being an English- speaking people, and naturally receiving a large part of our knowledge from the Mother Country. And it is good to be influenced by the best in whatever form, and from whatsoever source it may come, therefore we should do well to be influenced by the principles on which the best architecture has been built up, not only in our day, but in all great periods of the art of the past.223

For Barlow and Jones, both devoted readers of Ruskin, it was the idealism that infused Ruskin’s architectural writing that mattered, and that supported them in their struggles to reform Australian architecture and civic design. But Ruskin’s influence could be indirect: there is another Sydney architect around this time who certainly read Ruskin, but who rarely mentioned him; nonetheless I believe that of all the Australian architects one would think of as Ruskinian, John Horbury Hunt is it. We have met him before in this chapter, but that account concentrated on Hunt the politician. What is the evidence of his work in estimating Ruskin’s influence?

3. JOHN HORBURY HUNT

Trained in Boston, John Horbury Hunt’s Australian career (1863–1904) spanned the Ruskinian ascendancy from the Gothic Revival to the Arts and Crafts. But his biographers224 do not mention Ruskin, and Hunt himself, though easily the best-read architect in Australia, rarely did; his man is Viollet-le-Duc, whom he did quote frequently in Bucknall’s translation.225 Hunt’s famous dismissal of “effeminate amateurs” in architecture could

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 173 apply to Ruskin as well as local pretenders, while his dictatorial style with builders did not encourage the collaboration with the crafts Ruskin had championed from the Seven Lamps of Architecture onwards. And yet his work tells a different story, and the two buildings most admired by his contemporaries seem clearly Ruskinian. One was his beautiful chapel for the Sacred Heart convent, a late essay in the Gothic Revival (1897), and the other one of Sydney’s most adventurous displays of polychromy, Victoria House (1874). This latter, now long gone, was Hunt’s very personal version of thirteenth century Venetian Gothic, and was regarded by his pupil and friend John Barlow as a building thirty years ahead of its time226 (figures 61 & 62). Similarly Hunt’s biographers have argued that the houses of Hunt’s later career were hugely influential in popularising the Arts and Crafts idiom, in its American form, among Australian architects of the 1890s227 (figures 63 & 64).

174 The Ruskinian Moment in Australia, 1900–1908 John Horbury Hunt

FIGURE HAS BEEN REMOVED DUE TO COPYRIGHT AGREEMENT

figure 61: Victoria House, premises for Farmer & Co, Pitt Street, Sydney. John Horbury Hunt, architect, 1874, demolished 1910 from peter reynolds, lesley muir and joy hughes, john horbury hunt: radical architect 1838–1904, sydney, historic houses trust of new south wales, 2002, p. 102

FIGURE HAS BEEN REMOVED DUE TO COPYRIGHT AGREEMENT

figure 62: Exterior perspective, City Markets project, Haymarket, Sydney, Thomas Sapsford, architect, early 1880s. This vivid polychromatic building was probably inspired by Victoria House but was never built from shirley fitzgerald, sydney 1842–1992, sydney, hale & iremonger, 1992, p. 123

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 175

John Horbury Hunt

FIGURE HAS BEEN REMOVED DUE TO COPYRIGHT AGREEMENT

figure 63: “Booloominbah”, Armidale, New South Wales. John Horbury Hunt, architect, 1888 from peter reynolds, lesley muir and joy hughes, john horbury hunt: radical architect 1838–1904, sydney, historic houses trust of new south wales, 2002, p. 127

FIGURE HAS BEEN REMOVED DUE TO COPYRIGHT AGREEMENT

figure 64: Hamilton House, Moss Vale, New South Wales. John Horbury Hunt, architect, 1891 from peter reynolds, lesley muir and joy hughes, john horbury hunt: radical architect 1838–1904, sydney, historic houses trust of new south wales, 2002, p. 146

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 177

Hunt’s brilliant use of brickwork, valued for its own sake, was also a first in Australian architecture, from the small church of St Silas in the Sydney suburb of Waterloo (1868) to the dramatic cathedrals of Armidale (1875) and Grafton (1884). Brian Andrews remarks on how Hunt’s brick churches seem particularly designed as bold forms that make use of bright light and deep shadow,228 an idea that Ruskin discussed at length in The Lamp of Power.229 Indeed St Peter’s Cathedral at Armidale (figures 65–67) seems to honour more than one of the seven lamps of architecture: Sacrifice, where the ornament is integral to the building; Truth, the use of a material for its own sake; Power, especially, in the massing and the use of shadow; Life, in the boldness of the forms, the purpose-made bricks, and the rich interior work;230 and Memory, a building made for posterity. Only the lamps of Beauty and Obedience are not lit: the beauty of the design does not depend on its reference to natural form, and while Hunt has obeyed Ruskin’s injunction to design in an approved style, the Gothic of the cathedral is in Hunt’s very personal idiom. Thus to me what makes Hunt Ruskinian are the principles he followed from the beginning in his work of simplicity, honesty, lack of affectation in ornament, and the truthful use of materials. What makes Hunt Australian is the fusion of English and American sources in his buildings; what makes him both a Ruskinian and an Australian is his determination to go his own way, the extraordinary self-confidence that supported him in his endless battles to raise the standard of architecture in Australia.

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 179

John Horbury Hunt

FIGURE HAS BEEN REMOVED DUE TO COPYRIGHT AGREEMENT

figure 65: West front, St Peter’s Cathedral, Armidale, New South Wales. John Horbury Hunt, architect, 1875 from peter reynolds, lesley muir and joy hughes, john horbury hunt: radical architect 1838–1904, sydney, historic houses trust of new south wales, 2002, p. 55

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 181

John Horbury Hunt

FIGURE HAS BEEN REMOVED DUE TO COPYRIGHT AGREEMENT

figure 66: West door, St Peter’s Cathedral, Armidale, New South Wales. John Horbury Hunt, architect, 1875 from peter reynolds, lesley muir and joy hughes, john horbury hunt: radical architect 1838–1904, sydney, historic houses trust of new south wales, 2002, p. 25

figure 67: Detail, drawing of ornament and shadow, Cathedral of Lisieux, by Ruskin from “the lamp of power”, the seven lamps of architecture, 1849, plate vii

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 183

H. THE ARGUMENT FROM DRAWINGS

Eve Blau, in Ruskinian Gothic, describes in detail how the firm of Deane & Woodward built the Trinity College Museum between 1854 and 1860, a building often taken as the clearest demonstration of Ruskin’s architectural ideas. In particular Blau draws attention to the latitude given to the stonecutters in response to Ruskin’s insistence on the central importance of craftsmanship in architecture. From this it is inferred that a marker for Ruskin’s influence in a building is the presence or absence of working drawings for the craftsmen. Here I consider this proposition by examining the documentation for some of the buildings discussed in Chapter Two.231 There are two points to be made first. If there are no drawings for a building, this could be for more than one reason: they simply might not have survived, or perhaps they never existed. If the latter, was it because the architect was a Ruskinian or because nineteenth-century building practice was much looser than ours? This question has been considered in detail by Brian Hanson, who argues that drawings were one of several instruments by which architects sought to control the building process and impose their authority on a building world still dominated by custom and resistant to interference with long-established practice.232 While Hanson supports the picture of the increasing industrialization of an unstable building world in the nineteenth century, he qualifies this by drawing attention to the complex political negotiations required to manage this world. Nevertheless the importance of drawings and models as technical instruments of control is clear. David McGee adds that documentation increased because of the growing need to control the costs of a project from the beginning.233 There is a second point: Blau’s argument applies more to Gothic Revival than to Classical Revival buildings. What matters with Classical work is the exact reproduction of given forms; there is no room for the marks of the individual craftsmen that Ruskin called for. Even with Gothic work, Ruskin excepted those things “determinable by line and rule”, structure in particular, and focused instead on architectural ornament, integral to the building fabric.234 (figures 68 & 69)

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 185

FIGURE HAS BEEN REMOVED DUE TO COPYRIGHT AGREEMENT

figure 68: Tracing floor, York Minster, England, c. 1360. The master mason for a Gothic cathedral would draw up full-size details on plaster floors from which templates were cut for the carvers to follow. Ruskin allowed the separation of design and execution for work “determinable by line and rule” (Nature of Gothic, sec. 21) from nicola coldstream, medieval craftsmen: masons and sculptors, london, british museum press, 1991, p. 32

figure 69: Façade detail, Cathedral of St Lo, Normandy. But “on a smaller scale, and in a design which cannot be mathematically defined”, Ruskin insisted craftsmen be given more latitude, following medieval practice (Nature of Gothic, sec. 21) plate ii from the seven lamps of architecture, 1849

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 187

figure 70: The Vine Angle, Ducal Palace, Venice, 14th century. Free sculpture on one of Ruskin’s favourite buildings. “The difference between the spirit of touch of the man who is inventive, and of the man who is obeying directions, is often all the difference between a great and a common work of art” Nature( of Gothic, sec. 21) plate xl from the stones of venice, ii, 1853

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 189

In the Stones of Venice Ruskin identified three degrees of ornament, “classed according to the degrees of correspondence of the executive and conceptive minds”: the servile, typical of pre-Christian work, in which the executive faculty is subjected to the inventive; the medieval, “in which the mind of the inferior workman is guided and ennobled by the ruling mind”; and the “Renaissance and revolutionary”, in which ornament expresses the attempt to equalise the executive and inventive mind, “destructive of all noble architecture”.235 In the same spirit Benedict Read thinks that Gothic Revival work required a truly medieval attitude, employing craftsmen more than independent sculptors, prepared to subsume themselves in the larger scheme.236 To Ruskin this was the “truly Christian and only perfect system”.237 (figure 70) That said, if there was carving to be done, who designed it, architect or craftsman? Benedict Read, in Victorian Sculpture, says it depended on the architect. Someone like William Burges took an intense personal interest in the carved decoration on his buildings; while he occasionally allowed the sculptor his head, more commonly Burges would supply detailed drawings from which full-size plaster models would be made under his supervision; these would then be sent to the site to be executed by trusted craftsmen. On one project, the Cathedral of St Finn Barr in Ireland, over a thousand sculpted details were produced in this way.238 By contrast G G Scott, who also used sculptured decoration extensively on his buildings, was more likely to delegate the actual design, controlling the work of the carvers “by influence”; for one project he sent a carver to study thirteenth-century French work in the Architectural Museum in London, after which the carver collected leaves from nearby woods to use as models.239 Here I follow Read: the design of the carving on a late nineteenth-century building was the architect’s responsibility, to accept or delegate. We can illustrate these issues by looking at the work of two Sydney architects we met in Chapter Two, Thomas Rowe and John Horbury Hunt. Hunt, like Burges, was fanatical about detail. On the opening of one of his finest buildings, the chapel of the Convent of the Sacred Heart at Rose Bay, Hunt praised the workmen but insisted he had designed everything himself.240 Similarly Hunt’s working drawings for St Peter’s Cathedral, Armidale, show how detailed his instructions to the trades could be. (figures 71–73)

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 191

FIGURE HAS BEEN REMOVED DUE TO COPYRIGHT AGREEMENT

FIGURE HAS BEEN REMOVED DUE TO COPYRIGHT AGREEMENT

figures 71 &72: Working drawings, St Peter’s Cathedral, Armidale, NSW, John Horbury Hunt, architect, 1874 from architectural drawing collection, mitchell library, john horbury hunt drawings, pxd 573: st peter’s armidale

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 193

FIGURE HAS BEEN REMOVED DUE TO COPYRIGHT AGREEMENT

figure 73: Working drawing, St Peter’s Cathedral, Armidale, NSW, John Horbury Hunt, architect, 1874. Hunt’s working drawings, unlike those of many of his contemporaries, were scrupulously detailed, and he watched over the construction of his buildings zealously. “Everything about the fabric is real, and if some differ about details … yet all … have owned, that in workmanship, it cannot be beaten. That praise is at least due to the architect, and to the foreman of the works … and all those who for nearly two years worked under his gentle and intelligent rule” (unsourced news clipping, “Opening of the Cathedral Church of St Peter at Armidale”, John Horbury Hunt Papers, Mitchell Library, MSS 7087, Box 16, p. 100) from architectural drawing collection, mitchell library, john horbury hunt drawings, pxd 573: st peter’s armidale

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 195

By contrast, Thomas Rowe was more like G G Scott, frequently, if not always, delegating the detail of his buildings. For the Great Synagogue in Elizabeth Street (1874–1878), very few drawings survive, and those that do show little detail. (figures 74–77) Inspection of the correspondence for the project shows that much of the detailed work was subcontracted, for example for the stained-glass windows and the synagogue furniture.241 As for the capitals of the internal columns, these were modelled from designs taken from a plasterer’s catalogue, a process repeated on the exterior of the building. However much of the external carving does appear to have been left to the masons.242 (figures 78 & 79) Rowe’s design for the main building of Newington College (1878–1880) immediately followed that for the Great Synagogue, and though few drawings survive for this project either, there is a very detailed specification in the college archives. This states that “the carver is to be approved by the architect”,243 and the reports of the clerk of works show that a Mr Wran and son were employed by late 1878, presumably working off Rowe’s verbal instructions and subject to weekly inspection.244 In this case, despite the Ruskinian associations of this building, in particular its probable source in the design for the Oxford Museum, this feels less like following Ruskin’s precepts and more like customary building practice.245 (figures 80 & 81) The two architects considered here, I argued in Chapter Two, had Ruskinian leanings, but one delegated the detailed design to his craftsmen and the other didn’t. In light of the above, can we say that Blau’s argument is correct? The answer is yes and no: yes, it was in the nineteenth-century architect’s power to delegate responsibility for ornament on his buildings, carving in particular; but no, the absence of working drawings is not conclusive that the craftsmen were given a free hand on Ruskinian principles. Even where such drawings exist, as Andrew Saint points out, the attribution of the design to those who signed the drawings is problematic.246 (figures 82 & 83) In Sydney in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the relationship between architect and craftsmen, examined in Chapters Two and Three, illustrates the contest for control described by Brian Hanson. At the bottom end of the market this contest went by default: “we never bothered about the details”, a young English architect wrote in 1886, “nothing was given but the plans and specifications, all the mouldings, ornament, etc, being

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 197

FIGURE HAS BEEN REMOVED DUE TO COPYRIGHT AGREEMENT

FIGURE HAS BEEN REMOVED DUE TO COPYRIGHT AGREEMENT

figures 74 & 75: Elevations, Great Synagogue, Sydney, Thomas Rowe, architect, 1874. In contrast to John Horbury Hunt, Thomas Rowe did not document his buildings fully. Much of the detail was left to craftsmen, though this was more because of custom than because of Rowe’s presumed Ruskinian principles from architectural drawing collection, mitchell library, thomas rowe drawings, pxd 62: great synagogue

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 199

FIGURE HAS BEEN REMOVED DUE TO COPYRIGHT AGREEMENT

FIGURE HAS BEEN REMOVED DUE TO COPYRIGHT AGREEMENT

figures 76 & 77: Sections, Great Synagogue, Sydney, Thomas Rowe, architect, 1874 from architectural drawing collection, mitchell library, thomas rowe drawings, pxd 62: great synagogue

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 201

figures 78 & 79: Conservation work on the Great Synagogue, Sydney, Peter Phillips, architect, 2001. Following practice on the original building, the carvers were allowed to draw up and execute their own details photographs: peter phillips

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 203

FIGURE HAS BEEN REMOVED DUE TO COPYRIGHT AGREEMENT

FIGURE HAS BEEN REMOVED DUE TO COPYRIGHT AGREEMENT

figures 80 & 81: Elevations, main building, Newington College, Stanmore, Thomas Rowe, architect, 1878. The competition drawings for Newington comprise plans and elevations only. The elevation of the main building, divided in half, became the basis of the built work. The elaborate carving on the façade, particularly the capitals, was left to a local firm of masons newington college archives, stanmore

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 205

FIGURE HAS BEEN REMOVED DUE TO COPYRIGHT AGREEMENT

FIGURE HAS BEEN REMOVED DUE TO COPYRIGHT AGREEMENT

figures 82 & 83: Working drawings, St John’s College, University of Sydney, William Wardell, architect, 1861. The working drawings for St John’s College are probably the work of John Young, the builder. His signature appears on the drawings but not that of William Wardell, the actual architect of the building from architectural drawing collection, mitchell library, john young drawings, pxd 394: st john’s college sydney

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 207 left to the contractor’s own sweet will … I never dreamt to what depths bad work could go until now”.247 Better architects and more prestigious projects, as John Horbury Hunt’s work shows, demanded and got fuller documentation, and asserted the architect’s firm control of the project; by contrast Thomas Rowe’s work reflects the survival of traditional building practices, in which design authority for the details of a building was either delegated to or naturally assumed by the trades, up to the end of the century. In Melbourne in 1889 the lecturer in charge of stone cutting at the Working Men’s College, Mr Williams, complained of the lack of freedom architects allowed ornamental carvers, and of the poor quality of the drawings and terracotta models provided to the men: this was the primary cause of the degeneracy of recent work. Williams clearly echoes Ruskin in calling for more freedom for the artisan: “Provide the ‘motif’; but trust the rest to the skilled workman – nothing shackles a carver more than an elaborated endeavour to show him how to do his work”. This was the pattern pursued successfully in England by architects such as Pugin, Scott, Street, Waterhouse, he wrote.248 In Sydney in 1883 James Green thought the problem was the lack of such “art workmen” in the Australian colonies, and that architects had “the greatest difficulty … in getting a working artist who could at all enter into the spirit of the thing”.249 A few years later, however, he felt that it was the architects who were more to blame for bad detailing: architects, especially in Sydney, were indifferent to art, but “the architect is primarily and essentially an artist”, and should be able “to design, or at least to personally direct, his carving, his metal-work, his stained-glass, or his painted decorations”. The Sydney Post Office carvings, subject of a recent controversy, “should be a warning to the whole of these colonies, and for all time, against such inability”.250 (figure 84) Perhaps the final word should go to Ruskin himself. In The Flamboyant Architecture of the Somme (1869), discussing the organization of work on a building site, he offers this gloss on The Nature of Gothic, sixteen years later: “There must be gradations of authority, according to faculty, - and that will always be naturally and necessarily given to the man who can design most brilliantly; all the others will look for government and for working drawings”.251

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 209

FIGURE HAS BEEN REMOVED DUE TO COPYRIGHT AGREEMENT

figure 84: Detail, General Post Office, Sydney, James Barnet, architect, 1882. James Barnet, here portrayed more as Old Testament prophet than architect, gives a workman his instructions. The naturalistic carving on the façade of the GPO attracted fierce criticism at the time, but was retained even after an inquiry recommended its removal. Barnet defended the carvings as based on the practice of Donatello and Ghiberti, and cited John Henry Chamberlain, “the personal friend of Ruskin [and] an almost infallible authority on art”, in support (Barnet, “The Post Office Carvings”,Sydney Morning Herald, 4 September 1884). Ruskin was also cited by Barnet’s parliamentary supporter, the Attorney General William Dalley (Chris Johnson, Shaping Sydney: Public Architecture and Civic Decorum, Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1999, p. 100). Like Ruskin, Barnet loved Venice and the Ducal Palace, but he designed many of his buildings in a Venetian Renaissance style Ruskin would not have approved; nor would Ruskin have agreed with Barnet’s admiration for a style that “not only admits but insists on progress, and knows no guide but common sense [and] owns no master but true taste” (ibid, p. 100, Barnet to Under Secretary of Public Works, 13 May 1884) from morton herman, the architecture of victorian sydney, sydney, angus & robertson, 1964, p. 53

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 211

I. CONCLUSION

The period examined in this chapter is the twenty years between 1889 to 1908, from the first serious discussions of Ruskin’s architectural ideas in Australia, to the embodiment of these ideas in the first Australian book on architectural theory, even as Ruskin’s influence was waning in architectural practice. While James Nangle had published the first Australian architecture textbook in 1900, Australian Building Practice contained no speculative chapters, despite Nangle’s demonstrated interest in architectural history and theory.252 By contrast Robert Haddon’s Australian Architecture253 of 1908 does include some theoretical as well as practical material, and examining this it is clear that Haddon had absorbed more than one idea from Ruskin and Morris. Apart from the references to craft work in home furnishing and the “honesty of constructive purpose” essential to building,254 we see Morris in particular in Haddon’s argument that simplicity was not incompatible with beauty.255 Haddon wrote that buildings should be designed “in a naturalistic manner” with their purpose, site and climate firmly in mind because:

In this way, and in this way only, may we look for true development in our national architecture, free, on the one hand, from slavish copying, and showing an awakening towards such designing of mass, parts, and ornaments as shall best bring forth that conformity with truth which makes for great architecture.256

Suggestive as they are, however, the Australian Ruskinians discussed in this chapter remained ahead of their time. A sympathetic visitor wrote in 1903 that in Australia the Pre-Raphaelites appear to have lived in vain:

Ruskin is sometimes administered, in cheap editions of his shorter works, as a feminine school-prize. William Morris, and the revolution in the domestic interior for which his name stands, has left Australia almost untouched. Sham-graining and varnish riot in Sydney and Melbourne as nowhere else in the world. “The people with money,” said a partner in a large firm of Australian furniture makers and importers, “have no taste, and the people with taste have no money.”

A footnote points out that this is said in London too, but “there it is a half-truth. Here the veracity fraction would be more like ninety-nine hundredths”.257 Copyism and the pattern book had found a ready home in Australia, and the attempts of a few men to create a truly original architecture for Australia met many

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 213 obstacles. Commenting on a paper by Howard Joseland on domestic architecture as the most likely site for the creation of a new style, even so indomitable a figure as Hurst Seager admitted it seemed “impossible to get a thoroughly distinctive style, when there poured into the colonies week by week the greatest ideas that the architectural genius of both England and America generated [so much so that] it was beyond their power to resist [them]”.258 All this against a background of rampant bad practice in the building industry and widespread public indifference to art. The dilemma for Australian architects was well put by an architect in 1893: “ the great bar to progress in our art is the public apathy in reference to it”.259 Similarly in 1898 John Barlow called for a board of experts in city planning to “protect the public interests from an aesthetic standpoint”, though he added “it may be asked why is it necessary to take all this trouble on behalf of a public which cares nothing about these things”.260 James Green summed up the situation in 1899:

The state of England before the days of Ruskin and Morris was certainly bad, but it could not possibly be compared with the ugliness of prevailing ideas in Australia; where buildings are mostly of sheet-iron and of mud, and are set amidst groves of barbed wire; where any piece of beautiful architecture which has been raised up by some special grace of Providence is usually spoiled, so soon as perceived, by the addition of tin attics or something else as horrible; where a tree is looked upon as an enemy of man. In Sydney, a few years ago, a mayor allowed, nay, it is said, ordered, to be cut down, a group of noble trees in front of the Hotel Metropole to replace them with a small triangle of asphalt. There was no reason for the act, except merely the hate of beauty. England at its worst could hardly have been guilty of that.261

And this central question of teaching the public to see, so that they might not look with complacency upon heavy-handed attempts at municipal art, or cities covered in advertising placards, or elect mayors who cut down trees, is Ruskin’s lifelong quest. His Australian followers agreed. The reason to educate the public in art, Hurst Seager said in 1904, was to develop in them “the power to see rightly, to understand and appreciate all those beauties of nature and art which, without such development, would pass unheeded”.262 But it was not only the public that had to learn to see. Architects themselves had to learn the value of beauty: Robert Haddon spoke of “that indispensable quality of mind, the faculty of observation” which conferred the “inestimable value” on the student of “knowing

214 Conclusion the architecturally good from the architecturally bad”.263 George Sydney Jones had also asked rhetorically why it mattered if architects put up bad buildings:

It matters because every individual has a right to expect that what is his shall be properly cared for. It matters because Australians, as a nation, are bound to conserve the best that nature has endowed them with, and to so dispose their buildings that they shall be true architecture … and not mere buildings thrown down without … regard to [the] surrounding landscape.264

Therefore the first obstacle Australian architecture had to overcome was the attitudes of architects themselves, as the reaction to Harold Desbrowe-Annear’s Ruskin paper of 1889 had shown, and which explains why he wrote it. “The architect is to be pardoned,” the Australasian Builders and Contractors News had said then, “if, amidst the turmoil of this busy work-a-day world, he declines to have his time occupied by moral axioms or speculative disquisitions upon the principles of artistic construction”.265 For such practical but limited men Ruskin was, and remained, an irrelevancy. One of the most interesting things Desbrowe Annear had done in 1889 was to tell the students in his audience how to read Ruskin. It was important to remember, he said, “how entirely earnest [Ruskin] is in all he says and does, with what courage he has dared to live his thoughts”; it is safe to admire when Ruskin admires, though better to pause when he condemns.266 Paradoxically to learn from Ruskin it is better that the reader should not be a Ruskinian; it was only necessary that he should exercise “his most thoughtful discrimination”, because “architecturally he will do you most good not only by what he teaches you, but by what he makes you teach yourself, not alone by the beautiful expression of his thoughts, but by what all who read him must think themselves”.267 To read was to think for yourself, and that was the whole point. Fifteen years later Hurst Seager was making the same point when he quoted Ruskin in his paper calling for general art education:

To be taught to read – what is the use of that if we know not what we read is false or true? To be taught to write or to speak – but what is the use of speaking if we have nothing to say? To be taught to think – nay, what is the use of being able to think if we have nothing to think about? But to be taught to see is to gain thought and word at once, and both true.268

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 215 The students in Desbrowe Annear’s audience in 1889 must not have been listening, because his hopes for an informed, self-critical architectural profession went unfulfilled in the following decades. In 1905 John Barlow could still lament the eclecticism and slavishness to overseas fashion of Australian architecture; unscrupulous practices were still rife, and it was still an age of shams.269 It was not just public apathy that was holding Australian architecture back. “We still read Ruskin,” said the editor of the journal of the Institute of Architects of New South Wales in 1914, “though we commit every crime in his catalogue of architectural offence”. Yet reading Ruskin still offered a way out in “these materialistic days”: while Ruskin’s work as a critic was “too charged with rancour”, his work as a teacher and as “a champion for all that is true and noble”, must stand for all time; and the purity of ideals that Ruskin had insisted upon should be honoured in the profession of architecture.270

216 Conclusion ENDNOTES FOR CHAPTER TWO

1 Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies, “Of Queens’ Gardens”, 1865, sec. 55. 2 ABCN, 21 February 1891, p. 126. 3 E Wilson Dobbs, “John Ruskin”, BEJ, 21 September 1889, pp. 242–245. 4 Harold Desbrowe-Annear, “John Ruskin and Architecture”, BEJ, 23 November 1889, pp. 445–446. 5 ibid., p. 445. 6 Editorial, “Ruskin and Architecture”, ABCN, 30 November 1889, pp. 522–523. 7 Robert Haddon, Australian Architecture, George Robertson, Melbourne, 1908, p. 37. 8 Melbourne Punch, 23 November 1876, p. 209. 9 Emigrants’ Information Office, Professional Handbook Dealing with the Professions in the Colonies, HMSO, London, 1890, pp. 2–3. There is an amusing account of the experiences of a young British architect in New South Wales around this time in the American Architect and Building News, 19 June 1886, pp. 298–299. 10 “Royal Victorian Institute of Architects”, BEJ, 20 August 1892, p. 79. The development and regulation of the practice of medicine in Australia makes an interesting parallel to that of architecture: see Philippa Martyr, The Paradise of Quacks: An Alternative History of Medicine in Australia, Macleay Press, Paddington, NSW, 2002, esp. chs 2 and 3. 11 David Wells, Recent Economic Changes: and Their Effect on the Production and Distribution of Wealth and the Well-Being of Society, Appleton, New York, 1889, pp. 365–366; Henry George, Social Problems, Kegan Paul, Trench & Co, London, 1884, see ch. IV. 12 Andrew Saint, The Image of the Architect, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1983, p. 39. 13 James Fergusson, History of the Modern Styles of Architecture, 3rd edn, revised and edited by Robert Kerr, John Murray, London, 1902, p. 33. 14 Ruskin, Unto This Last, “The Roots of Honour”, 1862, sec. 14. 15 Robert Kerr, Edinburgh Review, vol. CLXVII, January–April 1888, pp. 198–234. 16 ibid., p. 203. 17 ibid., p. 201. 18 ibid., p. 218. 19 ibid., p. 218. 20 ibid., p. 219. 21 ibid., p. 220. 22 ibid., p. 224. 23 ibid., p. 233. 24 Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, 2nd edn, Appendix 17, “Reply to Garbett”. 25 American Architect, 20 January 1900, p.18. 26 H H Statham, “The Truth About Ruskin”, Fortnightly Review, London, March 1900, pp. 418–426, see pp. 422–423. 27 ibid., p. 424. 28 The Builder, London, 27 January 1900, p.77, 3 February 1900, p.104. 29 H H Statham, op. cit., p.425. 30 By the time of his death, the standard architectural criticisms of Ruskin were well known: that he was inconsistent, illogical, full of errors, a utopian, and an amateur. But some prominent men had already

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 217 answered these objections for themselves: according to both the American Architect and Building News and the New York Times, the consistency that mattered was that between Ruskin’s ideas and his personal conduct, and here he was an example to the world (American Architect and Building News, 10 February 1900, pp. 45–46; New York Times, 21 January 1900, p. 7). H H Statham, the editor of The Builder and a lifelong opponent of Ruskin, pointed out Ruskin’s illogicality in his obituary but also defended it: Ruskin’s facts might sometimes be wrong, but his enthusiasm for architecture was always right (“The Truth About Ruskin”, op. cit.). As for the errors in his work, even these had their uses, as Richard Norman Shaw thought in the 1890s: “Every word I believe to be fallacious, but I read it with pleasure and lay it down with regret” (Michael Brooks, John Ruskin and Victorian Architecture, Thames & Hudson, London, 1989, p. 319). Marcel Proust had something similar in mind when he translated The Bible of Amiens in 1900, and wrote that “the beauty of his erroneous judgment is often more interesting than the beauty of the work being judged” (Proust, On Reading Ruskin, translated and edited by Jean Autret, William Burford and Phillip Wolfe, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1987, p. 48). Ruskin the utopian was admired by more than one architect for his “passionate elevation of spirit”; as for Ruskin the amateur, John Wellborn Root thought that the opinion of the intelligent layman may have a special value for the architect because it was formed without professional preconceptions: “the technical and professional point of view in art is not always the truest” (cited in Lewis Mumford (ed.), The Roots of Contemporary American Architecture, Dover, New York, 1972, p. 270). An early review of the Seven Lamps of Architecture in Fraser’s Magazine (1850) was even more prescient: “The architect by profession may find many technical mistakes in the writings of such speculators; but still the modern history of architecture proves that they are not worthless. They affect the minds of the whole number of persons who look with interest upon architecture; and if not at first, still at last, they affect the mind of the architect himself, who is often obliged to confess that the amateur has divined the meaning of the combinations which had been produced by a blind tradition” (“The Lamps of Architecture”, Fraser’s Magazine, vol. XLI, February 1850, pp. 151–159, see p. 151). Ruskin’s achievement, it was generally agreed, was to make ordinary people everywhere care about architecture; but his crime was to dismiss the profession of architecture itself. The Lectures on Architecture and Painting of 1854 were particularly provocative, especially Lecture II, where Ruskin says of the professional architect “I deny his jurisdiction; I refuse his decision … I call upon you to search into these things for yourselves”. The American Architect and Building News described this as one of Ruskin’s best, and worst, books: “He must be a thick-skinned artist who can read this book without being inspired with noble sympathies and resolves; and yet no book ever written contains more rubbish, which even its author could not have believed, or teaches more recklessly the doctrine of contempt and hatred for one’s professional brethren” (20 January 1900, p. 18), while H H Statham described it as “one of the most mischievous books on the subject that has ever been written” (Statham, op. cit., p. 424). At the time of his death, judging by his overseas obituaries, Ruskin’s influence was held to be greatest among the art-loving public, followed by an older generation of artists and architects who came of age in the 1860s; it was at its least among contemporary critics and professors of art (New York Times, 21 January 1900, pp. 7, 22; American Architect and Building News, 25 January 1890, p. 49, 27 January 1900, p. 25; The Builder, London, 27 January 1900, pp. 73–74; H H Statham, op. cit.; Montgomery Schuyler, “Glimpses of Western Architecture: Chicago”, Harper’s Magazine, August–September 1891, reprinted in William Jordy and Ralph Coe (eds), American Architecture and Other Writings by Montgomery Schuyler, The Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1961, pp. 246–291, see p. 265; and Charles Waldstein, “The Work of John Ruskin, Its Influence Upon Modern Thought and Life”, Harper’s Magazine, vol. LXXVIII, December 1888–May 1889, pp. 382–418, comments revisited in Waldstein’s article on Ruskin in the North American Review, April 1900, excerpted in the Review of Reviews, London, 15 June 1900, pp. 755–756. Schuyler, America’s most prominent architectural critic, thought in 1891 that Ruskin had fallen into “deserved discredit” as a writer on architecture, “promulgating rhapsodies as dogmas”; Professor Waldstein said in 1900 that Ruskin’s “besetting sin” was amateurishness, born of “intellectual isolation and self-indulgence”.)

218 Endnotes for Chapter Two 31 Michael Brooks, John Ruskin and Victorian Architecture, Thames & Hudson, London, 1989. 32 Eve Blau, Ruskinian Gothic: The Architecture of Deane and Woodward 1845–1861, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1982. 33 John Unrau, Looking at Architecture with Ruskin, Thames & Hudson, London, 1978. 34 ibid. 35 Charles Eastlake, A History of the Gothic Revival, Longmans Green, London, 1872; Kenneth Clark, The Gothic Revival: An Essay in the History of Taste, Constable, London, 1928; Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Early Victorian Architecture in Britain, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1954; Stefan Muthesius, The High Victorian Movement in Architecture 1850–1870, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1972. 36 Brian Andrews, Australian Gothic: The Gothic Revival in Australian Architecture from the 1840s to the 1950s, The Miegunyah Press/Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2001, pp. 143–155. 37 Andrews, op. cit., passim. 38 On this point see Ursula de Jong, “The Architectural Legacy of William Wilkinson Wardell (1823–1899)”, SAHANZ Conference Proceedings 1999, pp. 41–50. 39 ibid. 40 Nikolaus Pevsner, Some Architectural Writers of the Nineteenth Century, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1972, p. 33. 41 Andrews, op. cit., p. 11. 42 ibid., p. 27. 43 Russell Sturgis (ed.), A Dictionary of Architecture and Building, Macmillan, New York, 1902, pp. 173–175. 44 Stefan Muthesius, The High Victorian Movement in Architecture 1850–1870, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1972, pp. 18–22. 45 Unrau, op. cit., pp. 145–146. 46 ibid., p. 147. 47 Australian Men of Mark, Charles F Maxwell, Sydney, 1888, vol. 1, pp. 353–356. 48 Discussion with Peter Phillips, conservation architect for the Great Synagogue, July 2006. 49 J M Freeland, Architect Extraordinary: The Life and Work of John Horbury Hunt 1838–1904, Cassell Australia, Sydney, 1970, p. 17. 50 Philip Goad, Bates Smart: 150 Years of Australian Architecture, Thames & Hudson, Melbourne, 2004, p. 68. 51 Rowe’s first partner, WB Field, won the competition that made Rowe’s name: see Freeland, Architect Extraordinary, op. cit., p. 17. The BEJ printed a piece about Rowe in 1888 which reads like a press release from the Rowe office; there is a revealing comment about the long list of buildings “designed and erected under Mr Rowe’s supervision.” Supervision is the operative word (“Lieutenant-Colonel Rowe, FRIBA, President of the New South Wales Institute of Architects”, BEJ, 15 September 1888, pp. 205–206). 52 Freeland, Architect Extraordinary, op. cit., and Freeland, The Making of a Profession, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1971, passim; but compare the entry on Rowe in Australian Men of Mark, op. cit., his obituary notice in the BEJ, 21 January 1899, pp. 27–28, and see Harry C Kent, “Reminiscences of Building Methods in the Seventies under John Young”, in Architecture, Sydney, November 1924. 53 In this respect see Edward Prior, “The Profession and its Ghosts”, in R Norman Shaw and TG Jackson (eds), Architecture: A Profession or an Art? John Murray, London, 1892, pp. 97–116. 54 Philip Goad (ed.), Melbourne Architecture, Watermark Press, Sydney, 1999, pp. 26, 42; Brian Andrews, op. cit., p. 57; Richard Apperly, Robert Irving and Peter Reynolds, A Pictorial Guide to Identifying Australian Architecture: Styles and Terms from 1788 to the Present, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1989, p. 74.

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 219 55 Philip Goad (ed), op. cit., p. 60. 56 Nahum Barnet, “Climatic Architecture”, Victorian Review, November 1882, pp. 37–43. 57 George Tibbits, “An Emanation of Lunacy: Victoria”, in Trevor Howells and Michael Nicholson (eds), Towards the Dawn: Federation Architecture in Australia 1890–1915, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1989, pp. 47–86, see p. 51. 58 ibid. 59 “New Offices for the Metropolitan Gas Company, Melbourne”, BEJ, 17 September 1892, pp. 114–115. 60 Alan Walker, “Building and Architecture: A Definition and a Vindication”,BEJ , 23 January 1892, pp. 39–40, see p. 40. 61 Ruskin, “Reply to Garbett”, see note 24 above. 62 Brooks, op. cit., ch. XII, passim. 63 ibid., p. 259. 64 Isabelle Anscombe, Arts and Crafts Style, Phaidon, London, 1991, p. 99. 65 Editorial, “Modern Architecture”, BEJ, 22 November 1890. Architectural chaos was so prevalent that one writer thought it had become the true Australian style by default: Howard Joseland, “Domestic Architecture”, BEJ, 13 August 1892, pp. 63–64, see p. 63. Others, like the Melbourne architect A B Rieusset, defended copyism: “in our present stage copying one from another is perfectly legitimate within certain limits” (Rieusset, “On the Study of Architecture”, BEJ, 10 August 1889, pp. 111–113, see p. 113). The debate in Britain about copyism had raged ever since Beresford Hope’s “trumpet call to eclecticism” in 1858; “this judicious, and indeed inevitable eclecticism, is the distinguishing glory of our English architects”, said Benjamin Webb in 1859, and John Sulman defined it in 1876 not as “the haphazard jumbling of incongruous fragments but [as] a judicious combination or modification of forms” (J Mordaunt Crook, The Architect’s Secret: Victorian Critics and the Image of Gravity, John Murray, London, 2003, see ch. 3, esp. pp. 104–105. In this regard also see Walter C Kidney, The Architecture of Choice: Eclecticism in America 1880–1930, George Braziller, New York, 1974, passim). But mostly copyism was just that – the pirating of ideas, and even whole designs, from overseas journals, a practice “refreshingly candid in its cool effrontery”, according to a contemporary critic (“Letter from Australia”, American Architect and Building News, 23 August 1890, p. 116). 66 Roger Dixon and Stefan Muthesius, Victorian Architecture, Thames & Hudson, London, 1978, p. 17. 67 For McRae, see Graham Jahn, Sydney Architecture, Watermark Press, Sydney, 1997, p. 73; for Sulman, see Andrew Montana, The Art Movement in Australia: Design Taste and Society 1875–1900, Miegunyah Press/Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2000, p. 206. 68 Montana, op. cit., p. 199ff; Grace Cochrane, The Crafts Movement in Australia: A History, UNSW Press, Sydney, 1992, pp. 15–16. 69 Cochrane, op. cit., p. 16. 70 Anthony King, The Bungalow: The Production of a Global Culture, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1984, p. 241. 71 Montana, op. cit., p. 234. 72 See Harriet Edquist, Pioneers of Modernism: The Arts and Crafts Movement in Australia, Miegunyah Press, Melbourne, 2002, and Caroline Miley, The Arts Among the Handicrafts: The Arts and Crafts Movement in Victoria 1889–1929, St Lawrence Press, Melbourne, 2001, passim. 73 George Addison, “Evolution in Architecture”, ABCN, 28 September 1889, p. 296, and 5 October 1889, p. 234. 74 Thomas Sisley, “Art in Daily Life”,BEJ, 15 February 1890, pp. 61–63; and “The Ethics of Architecture”, BEJ, 15 November 1890, pp. 404–406.

220 Endnotes for Chapter Two 75 George Oakeshott, “Sketching”, BEJ, 6 June 1891, pp. 221–222, and see the comments of the meeting, pp. 223–224. 76 Alexander North, “The Truthful Treatment of Brickwork”, ANZAAS Report for 1892, pp. 912–931. 77 Walter Butler, “The Prospect of the Development of the Arts Among the Handicrafts”, BEJ, 1 April 1893, pp. 126–127, and 15 April 1893, pp. 145–146, and see the editorial reply, BEJ, 22 April 1893, p. 147. 78 Alan Walker, op. cit., see reference 54 above. 79 John Barlow, in “A Plea for Colour in Colonial Architecture”, BEJ, 10 December 1892, pp. 240–241, criticised the “dulness with which we surround ourselves” (p. 240). “Marble and Mosaic Decorations” (BEJ, 12 May 1894, p. 148ff) was written after his return from a study tour of England and Europe; Barlow seems to have been particularly impressed with the Romanesque cathedrals he saw in Sicily. 80 E Wilson Dobbs, The Rise and Growth of Australasian Architecture, Australasian Builder and Contractors News, Sydney, 1892. Ruskin is quoted on the history of a nation being written in its architecture, but Dobbs continues: “We may not care, however, to stand or fall by the great art critic’s dictum, and indeed it would hardly be fair to expect us to do so. Thus, while for the future we must take to heart and abide by Ruskin’s word, surely we can truly say that our first century’s growth into a place and people, as shown by our architecture, proves that our progress has been prodigious … great and glorious … are our opportunities” (p. 16). 81 E Wilson Dobbs, “John Ruskin”, BEJ, 21 September 1889, pp. 242–245. 82 ABCN, 14 September 1889, p. 263. 83 Harriet Edquist, Harold Desbrowe-Annear: A Life in Architecture, Miegunyah Press, Melbourne, 2004, see ch. 2, passim; “never outgrew the desire to shock”, p. xii. 84 ibid., p. 53. 85 Harold Desbrowe-Annear, “John Ruskin and Architecture”, BEJ, 23 November 1889, pp. 445–446. 86 ibid., p. 446. 87 Editorial, “Ruskin and Architecture”, ABCN, 30 November 1889, pp. 522–523; but the ABCN’s attitude to Ruskin changed when James Green took over as architecture editor in early 1890. One of Green’s first decisions was to run a piece that quoted Ruskin favourably and at length; this caused an uproar too (ABCN, 29 March 1890, p. 486). Green became co-editor of the ABCN with A E Kelshaw in 1891 (ABCN, 21 February 1891, p. 126ff). 88 Alan Walker, op. cit. 89 Thomas Sisley, “The Ethics of Architecture”, BEJ, 15 November 1890, pp. 404–406. 90 ibid. 91 Thomas Sisley, “Thoughts on the Present State of Art in Melbourne”,BEJ, 3 December 1892, p. 236. 92 ibid. 93 J G De Libra (James Green), “Architecture in Sydney”, Once a Month, Sydney, 1 January 1886, pp. 23–26, see p. 26. 94 Kirsten Orr, “The Realisation of the Sydney Technical College and Technological Museum 1878–92”, Fabrications, JSAHANZ, June 2007, pp. 46–67. 95 John Phillips, “ ‘Hollowforth’: E. Jeaffreson Jackson’s Richard Threlfall House, 1891–92”, Fabrications, JSAHANZ, June 1993, pp. 2–30; on “Highlands” see Peter Reynolds, Lesley Muir and Joy Hughes, John Horbury Hunt Radical Architect 1838–1904, Historic Houses Trust of NSW, Sydney, 2002, pp. 144–145. 96 This section is based on Chris Johnson, Shaping Sydney, Public Architecture and Civic Decorum, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1999, pp. 32–35, 84–88, and Harriet Edquist, Pioneers of Modernism, op. cit., pp. 232–236.

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 221 97 The master builders association gave Vernon a tribute dinner on his retirement, and the 10,000 contracts were mentioned on the night. See Vernon Papers, Mitchell Library, MLMSS 6571, Box 9, Album 7A, p. 4. 98 Andrew Saint, The Image of the Architect, op. cit., pp. 69–71. 99 See below, pp. 149–155. 100 Johnson, Shaping Sydney, op. cit., p. 109. 101 Blair at State Library, see Johnson, Shaping Sydney, op. cit., p. 87, and David Jones, A Source of Inspiration and Delight: the Buildings of the State Library of New South Wales Since 1826, Library Council of NSW, Sydney, 1988, p. 44. 102 Barr at Sydney University, see Trevor Howells, University of Sydney Architecture, Watermark Press, Sydney, 2007, passim. Barr worked on various projects at Sydney University between 1901–1918, under Vernon and then George McRae as Government Architect. Barr himself became “chief designing architect” of the GAB in 1911. Howells attaches Barr’s name to at least five buildings in this period, including the old Union building (1908) and the beautiful Veterinary Science building (1910). On the basis of this pattern I think Barr was primarily responsible for the design of the old Engineering School buildings (1906) illustrated here. 103 Jackson at Challis House: see Edquist, Pioneers of Modernism, op. cit., p. 234; and compare with the item on Challis House in Art and Architecture, Sydney, 1906, pp. 120–121, in which only Vernon’s name and those of the associated architects, Robertson & Marks, are listed. 104 Bulletin, Sydney, 9 November 1905. 105 ibid. 106 Vernon, “classic most suitable”, in Johnson, Shaping Sydney, op. cit., p. 109. 107 Waterhouse, see Edquist, Pioneers of Modernism, op. cit., pp. 55–61; Moyes, see Johnson, Shaping Sydney, op. cit., pp. 34–35. 108 For E S Prior (1852–1932) as Ruskinian, see Peter Davey, Arts and Crafts Architecture, Phaidon, London, 1997, chapter seven, passim; butterfly plans, pp. 81–83. 109 For C F A Voysey (1857–1941) as Ruskinian, see Davey, op. cit., chapter eight, passim, and Brooks, op. cit., pp. 306–307. Both Prior and Voysey belonged to the Art Workers’ Guild (Davey, op. cit., p.89). 110 Edquist, Pioneers of Modernism, op. cit., pp. 236–237. 111 Philip Cox, John Freeland and Wesley Stacey, Rude Timber Buildings in Australia, Thames & Hudson, London, 1969, pp. 52–54, 66. 112 Brooks, op. cit., p. 299. 113 Brooks, op. cit., p. 313, and see Alan Crawford, CR Ashbee: Architect Designer and Romantic Socialist, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1985, passim. 114 A good contemporary overview for the UK, the USA and France can be found in Sturgis, A Dictionary of Architecture and Building, op. cit. For more on the USA, see the history of America’s first professional school of architecture at Columbia University, in Richard Oliver (ed.), The Making of an Architect 1881–1981, Rizzoli, New York, 1981, esp. pp. 23–48; and there is some fascinating detail in an 1894 essay by the critic Montgomery Schuyler, reprinted in Schuyler, American Architecture and other Writings, William H Jordy and Ralph Coe (eds), The Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1961, pp. 99–118. For the UK see Andrew Saint, The Image of the Architect, op. cit., J Mordaunt Crook, The Dilemma of Style, Murray, London, 1987, and Michael Brooks, op. cit. 115 Saint, op. cit., passim. 116 BEJ, 21 July 1888.

222 Endnotes for Chapter Two 117 BEJ, 28 July 1888, and see following correspondence in BEJ, 18 August 1888, p. 111, and especially the Kerle letter in BEJ, 8 September 1888, pp. 184–185. 118 Norman Selfe, “The Real Position of the Architect, Engineer and Builder in Modern Works”, BEJ, 17 June 1893, pp. 223–224. 119 ibid. 120 ibid., p. 223. 121 ibid. 122 ibid. 123 ibid. 124 Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, II, ch. 7, sec. 47. 125 Editorial, “Modern Architecture”, BEJ, 22 November 1890. 126 Norman Selfe, “The Relative Position of the Architect, Engineer and Builder in Modern Work”, BEJ, 17 June 1893, pp. 223–224, see p. 224. 127 ibid. 128 ABCN, 19 October 1889, p. 387. 129 BEJ, 1 September 1888. 130 BEJ, 15 September 1888, p. 205. 131 BEJ, 29 September 1888, p. 279. George Oakeshott, when President of the Sydney Architectural Association in 1893, was dismayed to be told by a junior member that he did not intend to take any classes at the SAA because he did not need to. He would simply get the commissions, a draftsman would make all the necessary drawings, and all would be well, as “it had been done before and is being done now”. Oakeshott’s opinion of this bumptious young man was brisk and to the point: “the word ‘Architect’ on his office door will be a lie; he will be a Pecksniff, an architectural broker, a professional sweater, but not an Architect”. And Oakeshott told his hearers that “surely it is time … that the prestige and honor of the profession should not be left to wither away from sheer lack of cultivation … and that architects should aspire to some higher ambition than to be the greatest 5 per cent collector” (“Sydney Architectural Association”, BEJ, 15 April 1893, pp. 142–143). 132 Freeland, The Making of a Profession, op. cit. 133 Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, 3rd edn, 1891, app. I, sec. 4. 134 Shaw and Jackson, Architecture a Profession or an Art?, op. cit. 135 ibid., p. 10. 136 ibid., p. 114. 137 BEJ, 30 January 1892, for British comments; for the RVIA, see Inskip, BEJ, 30 July 1892, pp. 49–50, and his successor Oakden, BEJ, 20 August 1892, p. 79. 138 “Royal Victorian Institute of Architects – President’s Report”, BEJ, 30 July 1892, pp. 49–50. 139 ibid. 140 John Horbury Hunt, “Institute of Architects of New South Wales, President’s Address”, BEJ, 3 September 1892, pp. 93–95. 141 ibid. 142 Samuel Hurst Seager, “The Future of Architects and Their Art”,BEJ, 16 April 1892, pp. 156–158. 143 ibid. 144 John Horbury Hunt, op. cit., BEJ, 3 September 1892, pp. 93–95. 145 ibid.

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 223 146 Walter Butler, “The Prospect of the Development of the Arts among the Handicrafts”, BEJ, 1 April 1893, pp. 126–127, and 15 April 1893, pp. 145–146. 147 On Butler see Edquist, Pioneers of Modernism, op. cit., pp. 40–45, and Miley, Arts Among the Handicrafts, op. cit., p. 167. 148 Butler, op. cit., BEJ, 1 April 1893, pp. 126–127. 149 ibid. 150 BEJ, 15 April 1893; “chromos” are chromo-lithographs, an early form of colour printing. 151 “Royal Victorian Institute of Architects”, BEJ, 1 April 1893, p. 122. 152 Editorial, “The Prospect of the Development of the Arts among the Handicrafts”, BEJ, 22 April 1893, pp. 147–148, see p. 148. 153 Editorial, “The Wedding and Divorce of Architecture and the Sister Arts”,BEJ, 25 August 1894. 154 ibid. 155 Freeland, The Making of a Profession, passim; Editorial, “Modern Architecture”, BEJ, 22 November 1890. 156 Editorial, “The Architect and the Engineer”,BEJ, 24 December 1892, pp. 257–258. 157 For an indication of Rieusset’s thinking, see his paper “On the Study of Architecture”, BEJ, 10 August 1889, pp. 111–113. Apart from calling for a national style for Australian architecture, and recommending the work of Alfred Waterhouse, two familiar points in such papers by now, Rieusset disagrees with “the mighty Ruskin” on the correct style of Gothic, defending the Perpendicular (p. 113). 158 W H Leeds, “The Orders and Their Aesthetic Principles”, in Leeds et al., Rudimentary Architecture for the Use of Beginners and Students, London, Crosby Lockwood, 1880 [first published 1851]. Leeds describes the author of the Seven Lamps of Architecture as “that exceedingly squeamish and superlatively strait-laced gentleman” (p. vii) and attacks him for his “insolence” and “tedious prolixity”, who “more than once plunges plump into arrant nonsense in his will-o’-the-wisp chase after peregrine, fantastical phrases, and alembicated, double-distilled conceits” (p. 99). 159 A B Rieusset, “On the Study of Architecture”, BEJ, 10 August 1889, pp. 111–113. 160 E Wilson Dobbs, “An Australian Style of Architecture”, BEJ, 21 February 1891, pp. 65–68. 161 ibid., p. 66. 162 ibid. 163 Unrau, op. cit., pp. 54–58, 80–86. 164 Ruskin, The Lamp of Life, IX. 165 Ruskin, The Lamp of Life, X. 166 E Wilson Dobbs, op. cit., BEJ, 21 February 1891, p. 66. 167 Samuel Hurst Seager, “Sydney Architectural Association – Presidential Address”, BEJ, 11 April 1891, pp. 137–140. Samuel Hurst Seager was a New Zealand architect who spent the years 1890–1894 in Sydney, his career is discussed by Ian Lochhead, “The Architectural Art of Samuel Hurst Seager”, Art New Zealand, Spring 1987, pp. 92–98 (cited in Miley, The Arts Among the Handicrafts, op. cit., p. 191, n. 4). The formation of the SAA meant that there were now three architectural associations in Sydney – the SAA, the IANSW, and a group made up of local men who were members of the RIBA. This professional proliferation was dangerous: “the enmity of individuals and coteries can only serve to delay [united action] and retard our progress generally” said a local critic (“Letter from Australia”, American Architect and Building News, 23 May 1891, p. 117). I argue below (n. 211) that this critic was the Sydney architect John Barlow (1860?–1924). 168 Samuel Hurst Seager, op. cit., BEJ, 11 April 1891, pp. 137–140. 169 ibid.

224 Endnotes for Chapter Two 170 Editorial, “A Closer Union between Architects and Artisans”, BEJ, 11 April 1891, p. 134. 171 Samuel Hurst Seager, op. cit., BEJ, 16 April 1892, p. 158. 172 ibid. 173 Editorial, “The Future of Architects and Their Art”,BEJ, 21 May 1892, p. 158. 174 ibid. Robert Kerr was defending the middleman around the same time in the UK: in a dire warning about the spread of “art socialism”, Kerr denounced the idea that the contractor be done away with in building. “Of course there is a great deal to be said, and to the great satisfaction of impulsive genius [i.e. Ruskin] in favour of a proposition so poetical; but on the other hand it is affirmed, with greater soberness if with less enthusiasm, that the middleman in these days is, in fact, the third and connecting link without which the other two [producer and consumer] would entirely fail to be joined in any way whatever”. Kerr went on to defend the architect as middleman too: “his command is what stands between miscellaneous artisanship and failure” (Fergusson, History of Modern Architecture, ed. Kerr, op. cit., pp. 32–34). 175 Building News, London, 17 April 1891, p. 560. 176 Anscombe, Arts and Crafts Style, op. cit., p. 55. 177 “Sydney Architectural Association – Arts and Crafts Exhibition”,BEJ, 29 October 1892, pp. 182–183; 5 November, pp. 192–193; 12 November, pp. 199–200. 178 ibid, BEJ, 12 November 1892, pp. 199–200. 179 The exhibition is discussed in detail in Montana, op. cit., pp. 223–227. 180 John Horbury Hunt, “Institute of Architects of New South Wales – Presidential Address”, BEJ, 3 September 1892, pp. 93–95, see p. 94. 181 Freeland, The Making of a Profession, op. cit., p. 210. 182 Sydney Technical College, Calendars, 1884–1888. 183 ibid., 1888–1894. 184 TheBEJ approved of Campbell: see “Technical Education”, the editorial for 23 January 1892. There is a full syllabus for the STC architecture course for 1893 in the BEJ, 11 February 1893, pp. 57–58. 185 Sydney Technical College, Calendars, 1895–1905. For Nangle, see his entry in the ADB, and A Quarter Century of Technical Education in New South Wales, Government Printer, Sydney, 1908. 186 Sydney Technical College, Calendar for 1893, p. 8. 187 Cyril Blacket, “The Education of an Architect”, Australian Technical Journal, 31 May 1897, p. 98. For good measure Justin McCarthy is quoted on Ruskin’s contradictions, which make it “venturesome to call him a great critic even in art”. 188 Freeland, The Making of a Profession, op. cit., p. 214. 189 Peter Proudfoot, “The Development of Architectural Education in Sydney 1880–1930”, Historical Studies, vol. 21, no. 83, October 1981, pp. 197–211, esp. pp. 200–205. 190 Saint, op. cit., p. 61, and see Robert Macleod, Style and Society: Architectural Ideology in Britain 1835–1914, RIBA Publications, London, 1971, p. 125, and Reginald Blomfield, “Architecture and the RIBA”, in Shaw and Jackson (eds), Architecture: A Profession or an Art?, op. cit., pp. 33–54, see p. 38. 191 R Norman Shaw, “That an Artist Is Not Necessarily Impractical”, in Shaw and Jackson, op. cit., pp. 1–16, see p. 12. 192 Edquist, Harold Desbrowe-Annear, op. cit., p. 54. 193 B Felix Storer, ”Manual and Technical Training of Architects and Engineers”, BEJ, 2 May 1891, pp. 171–172, see p. 171. Storer was no Ruskinian, however, judging by his brisk dismissal of students learning to make beautiful drawings – “those fancy letters, with tails and flourishes, that Parkin speaks

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 225 of” (“Parkin” is a misprint for “Ruskin” as Storer points out in his reply to the BEJ, 23 May 1891). Storer did however like C R Ashbee (BEJ, 2 May 1891, p. 172). 194 Editorial, “The Training of an Architect”, BEJ, 2 May 1891. 195 Royal Commission on Technical Education in Victoria, Final Report, Government Printer, Melbourne, 1901, p. 256. This report also quotes an unexpectedly conservative, or realistic, opinion from Harry P Gill of the South Australian School of Art to the effect that Government art schools should not teach “fine art or accomplishments”. Teaching should be confined to “applied art likely to be useful in the improvement of manufactures” (ibid., p. 138). There was a similar controversy over the teaching of fine art at Sydney Technical College in 1898: see the editorial in the Daily Telegraph, Sydney, 28 January 1898, and the letter from Julian Ashton (the cause of all the trouble) the following day. However the BEJ supported the embattled art master at the STC, J R Wright, and thought that “matters may be safely left alone” (Editorial, “Art as Taught at the Sydney Technical College”, BEJ, 5 February 1898). 196 Robert Haddon, Australian Architecture, 1908, op. cit., p. 3. 197 Annear on Butler, “Royal Victorian Institute of Architects – Sectional Meeting”, BEJ, 1 April 1893, p. 122; and see Miley, op. cit., p. 54. 198 See for example the comments of one of the witnesses, Charles D’Ebro, at the Royal Commission on the University of Melbourne in 1903. D’Ebro was a vice-president of the RVIA and was replying to questions about the proposal to establish a diploma course in architecture at the University. Clearly the issue is one of control over architectural education and professional qualifications, and the RVIA was not about to let this go: Royal Commission on the University of Melbourne, Minutes of Evidence, Government Printer, Melbourne, 1903, pp. 215–217, especially Qs 3673–3676. An earlier proposal to found a chair of architecture at Sydney University, apparently made by the university without consulting the profession, had suggested that students be admitted after two years’ experience in the office of a practising architect or building contractor. This drew the indignant comment from a local architect that “you can no more make a man an architect by apprenticing him to a builder, than you can make him a surgeon by apprenticing him to an apothecary [or] ground him in law by causing him to become a policeman”. Worse, the result of such a course would be a “new nondescript species – graduates in architecture who know nothing of their art; architects who are fit to become pupils, perhaps, if their University training has not spoiled them for even that” (“Letter from Australia”, American Architect and Building News, 22 November 1890, p. 121). 199 Saint, op. cit., p. 65. 200 Edquist, Harold Desbrowe-Annear: A Life in Architecture, op. cit., p. 40ff. 201 ibid., pp. 50–51. 202 ibid. 203 ibid. 204 ibid., p. 53. 205 ibid., pp. 54–55. 206 Edquist, Pioneers of Modernism, op. cit., pp. 40–46. 207 ibid., pp. 46–50. 208 ibid., pp. 37–40. 209 The work of Collins, Jackson and Halligan, among others, is well illustrated in Art and Architecture, Sydney, 1905, in a series on Sydney’s domestic architecture: for Collins, see pp. 84–88; for Jackson, pp. 86–87; for Halligan, pp. 31–32. The full series is: Eastern Suburbs, pp. 27–34; Northern Suburbs, pp. 83–89; Mosman and Vicinity, pp. 151–155; Western Suburbs, pp. 186–194.

226 Endnotes for Chapter Two 210 Benjamin Backhouse (1829–1904) was born in England, the son of a successful stonemason and builder, and came to Australia in 1852 to look for gold. When that failed he returned to building, first in Victoria and then in Queensland. He seems to have been a self-taught architect but his ability and wide practical experience brought him success. He retired in 1884 to devote himself to his benevolent interests, and became the first socialist member of the New South Wales Legislative Council in 1895. His son Clarence (R C Backhouse) also became an architect. See Donald Watson and Judith McKay, Queensland Architects of the 19th Century: A Biographical Dictionary, Queensland Museum, Brisbane, 1994, pp. 10–11, and the entry for Backhouse in the ADB by KJ Cable. 211 ADB entry for Barlow’s wife Mary Kate Barlow (1865–1934). 212 The first “Letter from Australia” in the American Architect and Building News was published, unsigned, on 24 August 1889, pp. 85–86; the letters appear regularly until 1899. The first one signed by Barlow appeared on 20 July 1895, pp. 29–30. For “an architect in close touch” see his eyewitness account of the hand-over of the Government Architect’s position from James Barnet to Walter Liberty Vernon, 20 September 1890, pp. 180–181. 213 Rigged competitions, American Architect, 24 January 1891, pp. 54–55, 30 January 1892, pp. 71–72; New Australia project criticised, American Architect, 23 January 1893, p. 169, 1 April 1893, p. 9. 214 American Architect, 8 July 1893, p. 26. 215 American Architect, 16 September 1893, pp. 166–167. 216 American Architect, 1 April 1893, p. 9. 217 American Architect, 8 July 1893, p. 26. 218 Building News, London, 11 May 1900, p. 668. 219 Barlow, “The City Beautiful II”, JIANSW, April 1904, p. 74. Ruskin also shadows Barlow’s comment on Lucien Henry’s teaching at the Sydney Technical College that “if … he succeeds in sending our students to nature for inspiration, instead of following traditional ornament and the decoration of the schools, he will have achieved more than most men may hope to accomplish” (American Architect, 23 May 1891, p. 118). 220 Barlow, “The City Beautiful II”, op. cit., p. 73. 221 Conrad Hamann, “Forgotten Reformer: The Architecture of George Sydney Jones 1865–1927”, Architecture Australia, vol. 68, no. 5, 1979, pp. 39–45, 64. 222 ibid. 223 Art and Architecture, Sydney, 1905, p. 22. 224 J M Freeland, Architect Extraordinary: The Life and Work of John Horbury Hunt 1838–1904, Cassell Australia, Melbourne, 1970; and Peter Reynolds, Leslie Muir and Joy Hughes, John Horbury Hunt Radical Architect 1838–1904, Historic Houses Trust, Sydney, 2002. 225 Reynolds, op. cit., p. 25. 226 Barlow on Victoria House, in Art and Architecture, Sydney, 1906, p. 73: “undoubtedly one of the finest facades in Sydney – as a shop-front it is the very finest”. This apparently was not the popular opinion of the time. 227 Edquist, Pioneers of Modernism, op. cit., p. 18, Reynolds, op. cit., p. 29, and see Howard Joseland, “Domestic Architecture”, BEJ, 13 August 1892, pp. 63–64: Joseland regarded Hunt as “one of the first pioneers of the Modern School” whose domestic work set an “excellent example” (p. 63). 228 Andrews, op. cit., pp. 139–140. 229 Ruskin, The Lamp of Power, XIII–XIV, XVIII–XXIV. The artist Frederick McCubbin, drawing master at the National Gallery Art School in Melbourne, exhorted his listeners in 1894 to remember “Ruskin’s magnificent advice to architects, ‘Think of a subject in its shadows … get but shade and

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 227 simplicity and all good things will follow in their place and time’” (McCubbin, “The Training of An Artist”, BEJ, 2 June 1894, pp. 169–170, see p. 170; this was originally a talk McCubbin gave to the RVIA on 29 May 1894. McCubbin does not give the source for this quote, but it is from the ending of The Lamp of Power, XXIII). For Ruskin on brickwork, see The Lamp of Truth, XX: “it is not the material, but the absence of the human labour, which makes the thing worthless”. But brick was still an acceptable material, and Ruskin wanted architects to spend some time in a brickyard as part of their training (ibid.). 230 Freeland, Architect Extraordinary, op. cit., pp. 60–63. 231 Eve Blau, Ruskinian Gothic: the Architecture of Deane & Woodward 1845–1861, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1982, pp. 41–46. 232 Brian Hanson, Constructing Authority: Architects and the “Building World” from Chambers to Ruskin, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003, pp. 12–13, and passim. While the English architectural press stressed the importance of a full set of drawings from at least the 1840s, as late as 1884 one journal could still observe that “So lightly do some builders think of drawings that there are those who go to work in erecting a house with nothing more than the plan … nay, [the builder] may pride himself – as we have known … those who could so pride themselves – upon his ability to build a house without the aid of any, or at least … the very fewest number of drawings”. (Industrial Self Instructor and Technical Journal, Ward, Lock & Co, London, 1884, I, p. 336) 233 David McGee, “From Craftsmanship to Draftsmanship: Naval Architecture and the Three Traditions of Early Modern Design”, Technology and Culture, 40.2, 1999, pp. 209–236, see pp. 235–236. 234 Ruskin, Stones of Venice, II, vi, sec. 21: “On a large scale, and in work determinable by line and rule, it is indeed both possible and necessary that the thoughts of one man should be carried out by the labour of others … but on a smaller scale, and in a design which cannot be mathematically defined, one man’s thoughts can never be expressed by another: and the difference between the spirit of touch of the man who is inventing, and of the man who is obeying directions, is often all the difference between a great and a common work of art”. A detailed account of how this complex relationship was negotiated in English Gothic Revival work is given in Benedict Read, Victorian Sculpture, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 1982, chapter 7, passim. By the end of the century H H Statham, editor of The Builder and no friend to Ruskin, was recommending that architects draw a detail full size before “hand[ing] it over to a clever carver to continue in the same style, allowing him a little liberty in working it out, in which case he will put all the more life into it”, which suggests that Ruskinian doctrine on this issue might have become mainstream opinion (H H Statham, Architecture for General Readers, Chapman & Hall, London, 1909 [first published 1895], p. 170). 235 Ruskin, Stones of Venice, I, xxi, sec.14. 236 Benedict Read, op. cit., p. 235: “Because the character of Gothic (even when Revived) required the craftsman rather than the artist, prepared to subsume himself to and be assimilated into the style, this was on the whole the type of work and sculptor that came to be used”. 237 Ruskin, Stones of Venice, I, xxi, sec.14. 238 Benedict Read, op. cit., pp. 263–265. 239 ibid., p. 266. 240 “Sacred Heart Convent, Rose Bay – Completion of a New Chapel”, Freeman’s Journal, Sydney, 27 April 1901, pp. 12–13. Hunt lavished praise on the workmanship of the chapel, especially of the altar, which he said “stamps the whole with a feeling of dignity in all of which we are each one of us participators, you as constructors with myself as designer. It has been to me a labour of love, in preparing the many drawings to guide you in your work. Every line, every moulding, has been laid down and developed

228 Endnotes for Chapter Two by my own hand, not only for the altar, but every section of the work” (p. 13). This statement was apparently greeted with applause; it certainly recalls Ruskin’s remark that the architect’s role was “to conceive what others execute” (Stones of Venice, I, xxi, sec.13). Ruskin described the Egyptian architect who makes “noble forms of his own imagining, and having mapped out their lines so that there can be no possibility of error, sets his two thousand men to work upon them, with a will, and so many onions a day” (Stones of Venice, I, xxi, sec. 12). 241 Louis Phillips Papers, Mitchell Library, A4739, vol. 37. Contractors’ estimates for furnishing, 6.2.1878, “we hope to forward the design referred to in the course of the day” (p.81); note from Lyon Cottier & Co regarding fanlights, 21 May 1878: “we were directed in the specification to take sizes from the building itself we never had the plans” (p. 89); estimates from two Melbourne masons, “tracings enclosed” (pp. 145, 147). There was a minor controversy about this practice in England ten years before: a correspondent to The Builder complained about subcontractors supplying sketches free of charge for church fittings which should be “purely architectural objects of design”. “If in this age of competition a non-professional firm supplies without charge sketches for a costly reredos, why should they not give plans gratis for a church? The practice which I complain of is encouraged sometimes by architects even, who will not take the trouble to do this most interesting work in their own office” (“Who Shall Design?”, The Builder, London, 18 May 1867, p. 355). 242 Information supplied by Peter Phillips, conservation architect for the Great Synagogue, July 2010. 243 Newington College Archives, “Wesleyan College Stanmore – Instructions to Tenderers”, p.4. 244 Newington College Archives, Record Series 13, “Weekly Reports from the Clerk of Works”, no 18: “Mr Wran and Son as finished the carving of the first storry on the Northern End and commenced carving the caps in the back corridor” (16 November 1878). 245 Louis Phillips Papers, note from Lyon Cottier & Co, op. cit., and compare with David McGee, op. cit.: this was a craft tradition also apparent in naval architecture, where “the partially completed vessel itself [was] used as an instrument of its own design” (p. 214). 246 Andrew Saint, Richard Norman Shaw, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 1976, pp. 190–191. 247 W. B. [Walter Butler?], “An Architectural Emigrant’s Experience”, originally published in the British Architect, reprinted in the American Architect and Building News, 19 June 1886, pp. 298–299. 248 Graham Williams, “Stone-Carving and Ornamentation”, Building and Engineering Journal, 16 November 1889, pp. 425–426, see p. 426. 249 J G De Libra [James Green]. “The Carvings on the Post Office”, Sydney Morning Herald, 20 April 1883, p. 3. 250 James Green, “The Self-Training of Architects”, Australasian Builder and Contractors’ News, 14 February 1891, pp. 110, 115–116, see p. 116. Green is unfair to Barnet: Barnet knew quite a lot about stonecutting and design. Barnet’s father was a builder and his English training included the “ornamental and decorative arts”; after his arrival in Sydney in 1854 Barnet worked as a stonemason on the Australian Museum and supervised the carvers on the first buildings for Sydney University (Chris Johnson,Shaping Sydney: Public Architecture and Civic Decorum, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1999, p. 102. The story of the Post Office carvings is told in detail on pp. 100–104). 251 Sec 30, The Flamboyant Architecture of the Somme (1869), in Ruskin, Works, XIX, pp. 243-268, see p. 265. 252 James Nangle, Australian Building Practice, George Robertson, Melbourne, 1900. This became the standard construction textbook for Australian students for several decades. 253 Robert Haddon, Australian Architecture, 1908, op. cit. 254 ibid., p. 186. 255 ibid., p. 29.

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 229 256 ibid., p. 37. 257 Percy Rowland, The New Nation, Smith Elder, London, 1903, pp. 163–164. Terence Lane and Jessie Serle believe that Australians “missed the point of Morris”, and find it difficult to explain why the move away from Victorian interiors took so long in Australia; it wasn’t just the depression and the drought of the 1890s (Lane and Serle, Australians at Home: A Documentary History of Australian Domestic Interiors from 1788 to 1914, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1990, p. 44, and see Howells, Towards the Dawn, op. cit., p. 176. Two books published in 1904 show the interiors of wealthy homes in Victoria and New South Wales to be as thoroughly cluttered with Victorian bric-a-brac as ever: see Michael Cannon (ed.), Victoria’s Representative Men at Home, Today’s Heritage reprint, Melbourne, 1977, and Cannon (ed.), Our Beautiful Homes, Today’s Heritage reprint, Melbourne, 1977; and compare these with the South Australian homes furnished by Morris & Co in the 1890s, illustrated in Christopher Menz, Morris & Company: Pre-Raphaelites and the Arts and Crafts Movement in South Australia, Art Gallery Board of South Australia, Adelaide, 1994). 258 Howard Joseland, “Domestic Architecture”, BEJ, 13 August 1892, pp. 63–64. 259 BEJ, 14 October 1893, p. 156. 260 John Barlow, “Architecture and the Allied Arts in New South Wales”, ANZAAS Report for 1898, pp. 991–993, see p. 993. 261 “Points”, Australasian Art Review, 1 September 1899, p. 16. 262 Hurst Seager, “The Study of Art as a Factor in General Education”, ANZAAS Report for 1904, pp. 590–598, see p. 592. 263 Haddon, op. cit., pp. 4–5. 264 George Sydney Jones, “A Word to the Public Concerning Architecture”, Art and Architecture, Sydney, 1905, p. 230ff, see p. 231. 265 ABCN, 30 November 1889, p. 523. Not just in Australia: Arthur Keen, the president of the London Architectural Association, said in 1911 that “I regret exceedingly the contemptuous tone in which John Ruskin’s views are spoken of today, often by those who have not one-tenth part of the right that he had to speak with authority” (quoted in Art and Architecture, Sydney, 1911, pp. 217–218, cited in Miley, Arts among the Handicrafts, op. cit., p. 196). 266 There are several echoes in this passage of a piece by Professor Charles Waldstein in Harper’s Magazine, written several months before: compare for example Desbrowe-Annear, “it is safe to admire when Ruskin admires, though better to pause when he condemns”, with Waldstein: “the golden rule [is to] follow him when he admires, and fly from him when he disapproves” (Charles Waldstein, “The Work of John Ruskin: its influence upon modern thought and life”, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, New York, vol. LXXVIII, December 1888–May 1889, pp. 382–418, see p. 395). Waldstein repeated this advice in his Ruskin obituary in the North American Review, April 1900: “Follow him when he admires; shun him when he disapproves; and examine carefully for yourself when he gives a reason for either admiration or disapproval” (p. 557). 267 Harold Desbrowe-Annear, “John Ruskin and Architecture”, BEJ, 23 November 1889, pp. 445–446. Frederick McCubbin also told architects to read Ruskin, along with [Leigh] Hunt, [Philip] Hamerton, [William] Haslett [sic] and [Robert] Browning, “the last, first and most, and have him always by you”. This list is interesting for the number of radical writers on it, two of them poets; the odd man out is the socially conservative art critic Hamerton (1834–1894), the biographer of Whistler. While acknowledging the impatience practical artists always have with writers on art, McCubbin insisted that he “would have students turn to every possible means of gathering knowledge and fostering thought; work is all important, but reading is of much value; that is, patient reading, in the student’s leisure hour”. They should read most

230 Endnotes for Chapter Two of Ruskin, starting with the smaller works first, and then moving on toM odern Painters, though not all of it; presumably they would then be ready for The Stones of Venice and Fors Clavigera. (F McCubbin, “The Training of an Artist”, BEJ, 16 June 1894, p. 184). 268 Hurst Seager, ANZAAS Report for 1904, op. cit. 269 John Barlow, Art and Architecture, Sydney, 1905, p. 151. 270 Editorial in The Salon, Sydney, September 1914, pp. 63–64. Ruskin himself held out little hope of reforming the architects of his day: in the preface to the 1880 edition of The Seven Lamps of Architecture he described it as the most useless book he ever wrote. And in a later footnote to The Lamp of Power (no. 27) he says “I admire the simplicity with which all this good advice was tendered to a body of men whose occupation for the next fifty years would be the knocking down every beautiful building they could lay hands on; and building the largest quantities of rotten brick wall they could get contracts for”. But he was republishing the book because the public still liked it, which suggests he might have won the battle for public, if not professional, opinion.

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURE 231

CHAPTER THREE RUSKIN AND THE AUSTRALIAN LABOUR MOVEMENT

That the regeneration of popular art must start with the artisans, the actual makers of things, I have not the smallest doubt. It is the business of we architects, designers, and all who care about art, to do what lies within our power to bring about a reunion of art and labour. 1 Walter Butler, 1892

In this chapter I examine the use made of Ruskin’s ideas by the early Australian labour movement. With the Sydney building world as a focus, I show that both masters and men read Ruskin, but that they read different books and came to very different conclusions. This chapter develops the picture, begun in Chapter One, of the importance of books and reading to the self-educated leaders of the working class, the kind of men portrayed in the novels of Joseph Furphy and the pages of the Bulletin and The Worker. These “respectable radicals”, in Bruce Scates’s phrase,2 knew Ruskin well, as the lists of recommended books in the labour press, and later surveys of working class reading, both show; these sources also point to the importance of the Crown of Wild Olive, even more than Unto This Last, to Ruskin’s Australian readers. I then bring these ideas together in a study of the Sydney building world of the 1890s, a turbulent and unstable world that was a microcosm of the laissez-faire society, not merciful to the weak, Australia had become by the late nineteenth century. The struggles to impose order on this world, both from above and below, reflect the larger struggles between capital and labour in Australia on the eve of Federation. The paradox of Ruskin’s authoritarianism and his equally sincere views on the dignity of labour was recognised by some of his Australian readers, but his eloquence, his idealism and his deep religious feeling prevailed. I argue here that the example of Ruskin’s life, as well as his words, left working people in Australia in no doubt that Ruskin was their friend, and his books became foundational writings for the early Australian labour movement.

RUSKIN AND THE AUSTRALIAN LABOUR MOVEMENT 233 A. RUSKIN AND THE LABOUR MOVEMENT IN BRITAIN

The story of Ruskin’s later career is well-known: how England’s greatest art critic became convinced that social reform was imperative, and that the industrializing, mercantile, laissez-faire society all around him was fatally flawed, a disaster, and that the prevailing complacent assumptions about wealth and life must be combated at all costs. The results, predictably, were immediate and severe: “If we do not crush him, his wild words will touch the springs of action in some hearts, and before we are aware, a moral floodgate may fly open and drown us all”, said a leading Manchester paper at the time.3 It does not follow that you cannot have good art in a bad society, but Ruskin thought it did, and his emotional reaction to the despoliation of the English countryside by smoke and pollution, and to the havoc the new forms of society were wreaking on ordinary people, led him, once he arrived at his conclusions, to pursue them until his strength and mind gave way.4 What kind of democrat was Ruskin? The evidence points both ways. The man who said of the vaunted prosperity of Englishmen that it was “very pretty seen from above, but not at all so pretty, seen from below”, also said that the role of the strong man, or the privileged one, was to be the guide and support of the weak and the poor, “not merely of the meritoriously weak and the innocently poor, but of the guilty and punishably

5 poor”. The man who said of modern Christianity, “you knock a man into a ditch, and then you tell him to remain content with the ‘position in which Providence has placed him’ ” also said, of the move for general education, that to “provoke a boy, whatever he is, to want to be something better … is the most entirely and directly diabolic of all the countless stupidities into which the British nation has been of late betrayed by its avarice of irreligion” and “you need not teach … the elegance of grammar to children who throughout the probable course of their total lives will have, or ought to have, little to say, and nothing to write”.6 Ruskin goes further: “in matters moral, most men are not intended to be any better than sheep and robins, so, in matters intellectual, most men are not intended to be any wiser than their cocks and bulls”.7 And yet, this is the man who challenged the leading economists of his day, and the formidable John Stuart Mill

234 Ruskin and the Labour Movement in Britain in particular, on the flaws in their thinking, brilliantly saying of the division of labour, “It is not the labour that is divided, but the man: Divided into mere segments of men –

8 broken into small fragments and crumbs of life” and who, on a visit to the theatre, wondered why “the crowd in the pit, and shilling gallery, allow us of the boxes and stalls to keep our places”.9 Ruskin is a man of contradictions, not only in words: Ruskin is one of the first to support F D Maurice and his Working Men’s College, teaching night classes in drawing to workers for years; but the man who gave away a large part of his fortune by the end of his life is also the man who supported Governor Eyre against those who criticised his brutal suppression of an uprising by emancipated slaves in Jamaica.10 These two attitudes, a wholly instinctive, emotional and genuine reaction to injustice, and an authoritarian desire to put things right, seem contradictory, but are not: one is a diagnosis, one a cure, and both appear early in Ruskin’s writing. In The Seven Lamps of Architecture Ruskin first asks the famous question – “Was the work done with enjoyment?” and there is a long discussion on “that treacherous phantom which men call liberty … the cause of half the discomforts of the world”.11 Freedom is only granted that obedience to God’s law may be more perfect, but restraint is vital. This is discussed in terms of architecture, but Ruskin clearly has a wider application in mind. The passage is printed in bold, or red in some editions, to make the point:

How many and how bright would be the results in every direction of interest, not to the arts merely, but to national happiness and virtue, it would be as difficult to preconceive as it would seem extravagant to state: but the first, perhaps the least, of them would be an increasing sense of friendship among ourselves, a cementing of every patriotic bond of union, a proud and happy recognition of our affection for and sympathy with each other, and our willingness in all things to submit ourselves to every law that could advance the interest of the community.

Remarking on the events of 1848, the year of revolutions in Europe, Ruskin goes on to say:

I am not blind to the distress among [the] operatives; nor do I deny the nearer and visibly active causes of the movement: the recklessness of villainy in the leaders of revolt, the absence of common moral principle in the upper classes, and of common courage and honesty in the heads

RUSKIN AND THE AUSTRALIAN LABOUR MOVEMENT 235 of governments. But these causes themselves are ultimately traceable to a deeper and simpler one … We think too much in our benevolent efforts, more multiplied and more vain day by day, of bettering men by giving them advice and instruction. There are few who will take either: the chief thing they need is occupation.12

Ruskin’s twin attitudes are evident in this passage: an awareness of social distress and a paternalistic, later authoritarian, answer to relieving it. These are not contradictions, merely two sides of the same coin. Why should working people pay any attention to such an attitude, not uncommon in English country squires? It is because of how Ruskin goes on to develop these ideas, starting with his next book, The Stones of Venice. William Morris described the chapter on “The Nature of Gothic” in volume two as “one of the very few necessary and inevitable utterances of the century [which] seemed to point out a new road on which the world should travel”.13 As we learn in this chapter, there is a stern choice to be made: “You must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make both”.14 The dehumanizing impact of mechanization is vividly stated:

The eye of the soul must be bent upon the finger-point, and the soul’s force must fill all the invisible nerves that guide it, ten hours a day, that it may not err from its steely precision, and so soul and sight be worn away, and the whole human being be lost at last – a heap of sawdust.15

This is not only inhuman, but slavery:

Men may be beaten, chained, tormented, yoked like cattle, slaughtered like summer flies, and yet remain … free. But to smother their souls with them, to blight and hew into rotting pollards the suckling branches of their human intelligence, to make the flesh and skin [whose purpose] is to see God, into leathern thongs to yoke machinery with, – this is to be slave- masters indeed.16

Though these ideas had been troubling Ruskin for at least twelve years before, it was not until he began to publish them as essays on political economy in the Cornhill magazine in 1860 that they attracted a wider audience. The controversy they caused was so violent that Thackeray, the editor of the Cornhill, had to suspend publication.17 The reaction of the Saturday Review, no friend to Ruskin, as we have seen, was typical:

236 Ruskin and the Labour Movement in Britain it was an act of condescension (it said) to argue with a man who can only write in a scream, and it went further:

It is not becoming that such a man should be allowed the use of such a pulpit for the purpose of delivering spasmodic rants against political economy. The world may have been mistaken in looking upon Adam Smith, Mr Ricardo, and Mr Mill as some of the clearest and most useful thinkers that England ever produced, but they are, at any rate, entitled to better treatment than, like Sydney Smith’s dean, to be preached to death by a mad governess.18

Ruskin’s real crime, we learn, was to criticise England: “ours is not a country to cry about. It is simply false and absurd to assert that a man who is industrious and sober cannot … get a living here. On the contrary, there is no old country in the world in which he can do this so easily”.19 The Saturday Review saw the implications of Ruskin’s ideas, a criticism still heard today:

Do [the poor] wish some paternal despotism to coddle and dandle them, to protect them against their own faults by depriving them of their free will, and to convert them into emasculate animals, for fear that some of them may be unhappy men? The English people are far too sturdy for such wretched crutches and leading strings. Indeed, they have had enough of them … The difference between the man who earns eighteen shillings a week under the one system and the man who earns nine shillings under the other will give him some notion of the comparative value of the philanthropy of Mr Ruskin and that of Mr Mill.20

Ruskin was dismayed by this reaction, but not deterred. Eighteen months later he republished the original three essays together with a new one as a book called Unto This Last, his best book, he said, “the one that will stand (if anything stand) surest and longest of all works of mine”.21 In the 1870s Ruskin’s social ideas included the famous experiments in street-sweeping, road-digging, and running a tea-shop in London’s East End – all the occasion of much mirth among the onlookers. Ruskin also began a long series of public letters he called Fors Clavigera. Part diary, part admonishment, part public rumination on things that interested him, Fors Clavigera is a kind of nineteenth century blog, with monthly postings from 1871 to 1878, when Ruskin suffered his first major breakdown, and resumed at intervals from 1880 to 1884.22 It is, only just, addressed to its ostensible readers, the “workmen and labourers

RUSKIN AND THE AUSTRALIAN LABOUR MOVEMENT 237 of Great Britain”, but it is a fascinating record of Ruskin’s thinking in his last lucid decade, and contains his social theories in their most developed, if scattered, form. Written in a new, simple and direct style, these political letters are Ruskin’s final sustained attack on the problems of English society in the late nineteenth century. In the first letter in January 1871 Ruskin explains that he cannot paint or read or do anything else he likes because of the social misery he sees all around him. Writing Fors is a “byework to quiet my conscience, that I might be happy in what I supposed to be my own proper life of art-teaching”.23 The seventh letter, written that July, reflects on the fighting in Paris following the establishment of the Paris Commune. He describes himself as a “Communist of the old school”, by which he means 3000 years ago and the Greek city-states; and he quotes Sir Thomas More’sUtopia at length on the ideal society. On the sharing of property Ruskin says he supports sharing what is most valuable, knowledge and appreciation in particular; but there is a fine angry conclusion denouncing “legal, respectable, cowardly” theft: “the guilty thieves of Europe … are the Capitalists … people who live by percentages on the labour of others; instead of by fair wages for their own”.24 As the letters continue, the criticism of society crystallises in a scheme to found a band of companions, with himself as Master – the Guild of St George, “not a plan for a colony, but a principle of reform”.25 Ruskin explains the constitution of St George’s Company in sixteen aphorisms; these reflect his knowledge of the classic authors, and his daily reading of Plato in particular.26 In Ruskin’s ideal commonwealth, everyone earns their living by manual labour; the only machinery is powered by wind or water, except in extreme circumstances; there are no lawyers, preachers or soldiers; and the government provides food, fuel and clothing for everyone, materials and tools for the workers; and looks after the poor first of all. Education is also the responsibility of the government, moral education first, to make people clean and obedient, then intellectual, to awaken the faculties of admiration, hope and love. The Master is a strong leader, elected like a Roman Dictator or Venetian Doge, and obedience to him must be total. For readers who might balk at this, Ruskin reiterates the imperatives of faith and obedience, “the alphabet by which we learn the higher obedience to heaven”, and whose enforcement “must be in the very teeth of the mad-dog’s creed of modernism, ‘I will not be dictated to’, which contains the essence of all diabolical error”.27 This is not new – Ruskin

238 Ruskin and the Labour Movement in Britain had said it before, notably in Time and Tide (1867), where he denounced “this infidelity of the nineteenth century St Thomas in there being anything better than himself alive”.28 As we have seen, Ruskin was no democrat: elsewhere in Time and Tide he says of liberty and equality that he detested the one and denied the possibility of the other.29 Only a handful of people ever joined St George’s Company, mostly personal friends of Ruskin’s, whose names he would solemnly write on a loose sheet of paper kept in a tenth century Greek manuscript in his rooms at Oxford.30 The rest of the world dismissed Fors, and St George’s Company, as “the blunders of a man of genius”.31 But discursive and convoluted as Fors is, Ruskin’s anger at the injustice he perceived in a laissez-faire society is real, and he denounces it until the end. In a late letter, addressed “to the trades unions of England”, he says they are “unquestionably right” to assert themselves and question what they are told. “The wealth of the world is yours”, he tells the workers, who must get themselves thoroughly organised, and work under masters, if any, of their own rank. The caveat, evident in all Ruskin’s writings on the rights of labour, is that workers must know their place: education, for example, is not to enable the child to rise above their father’s business, but to “[set] in order what was amiss in it”.32 Men do not live by trade, but by work, so workers should “give up that foolish and vain title of Trades Unions, and take that of Labourers’ Unions”. Ruskin admits here that nearly everything he has written in Fors so far has been addressed to the masters, but they are really workers too, sharing the same feelings as other working men, “brothers in earth and in heaven”.33 It is not surprising that the monastic ideal Ruskin advocates for his own version of the commonwealth did not appeal to English workers. Real as his emotional response was to the cruelty and poverty he saw all around him, his solution was ignored. Of all his writing about political economy, it is the early work, especially Unto This Last, written in 1860–1862, that had the widest effect. Although fifteen years elapsed between the first and second editions, there were four editions in the 1880s alone, and seven in the 1890s. There were 52,000 copies in print by 1904, in English, French, German, and Italian editions, not to mention several unauthorised American ones, the biggest sales of any of Ruskin’s books.34 In a survey in 1906 of books that helped to make the British Labour Party, Unto This Last easily topped the list.35

RUSKIN AND THE AUSTRALIAN LABOUR MOVEMENT 239 B. RUSKIN AND THE LABOUR MOVEMENT IN AUSTRALIA

Kind reader, at no age was it more necessary to think straight, and to get humanity at large to think straight, than it is at present. The air is full of great and little movements – Socialism, Atheism, Woman’s-Rightism. The noisy wheels of so-called progress are making the dust fly thick all around, and there is much difficulty in groping our way through the cloud. 36 T G Tucker 1886

1. “THIS PERNICIOUS THEORY”

In 1886, at the height of the long boom following the discovery of gold, the Australian Magazine published three provocative articles on the new society Australia was becoming.37 The writers did not like what they saw. Australia might well be the realisation of More’s Utopia, but democracies, more than any other kind of government, need to think straight: “The majority of men have fair common sense, so far as that goes, but it is only a small and misunderstood minority who possess straightforward thought, penetration, reflection, judgment and justice”, said one writer. These qualities were essential to a good society, but they were not conspicuous in Australia:

A harshly-living, mercenary-minded community will of necessity decline. In its narrow little groove, and for the miserable purposes of its being, its thought will be as a plumb line; but on all questions outside the groove it will be crooked, helpless, and contemptible.38

Another writer agreed: in Australia, more than anywhere else, making money was the single aim of every member of the community. If a nation without sentiment is hardly a nation at all, where is the sentiment to appear among “a people solely devoted to buying and selling [and] looking on life as merely a prolonged opportunity for making safe investments?” There is a leisure class in Australia, who have the time and the money to support Art, Literature and Science, but they ignore their responsibilities, take no part in politics, and devote themselves to sport (if male) or to reading silly novels (if female). Travel and education has produced a superficial cultivation in the wealthy young, easily shed; their conversation is “bovine or ovine, their reading is the stock report, their public spirit is undiscernible to the keenest scrutiny”. This matters because without

240 Ruskin and the Labour Movement in Australia culture “we shall become, in everything but money, more and more mediocre every year”, and “those who would be able to recognise or reward talent or genius in any shape are too dull to discern it, and too mean-spirited to substantially help it”.39 The Australian working man did not escape censure either. The third article is the most bitter of all: while the colonial leisure class might be described as “wasting their lives in low- souled slothful luxury”, the working man has nothing to complain of: “whatever the working man wants he gets”.40 The anonymous writer goes on to dismiss every effort at colonial self- improvement – free public libraries, mechanics’ institutes, increased leisure time brought about by the eight hours’ movement – all have been wasted. Predictably enough, strikes are the best evidence of narrow-mindedness and selfishness of the working man, creating only “infinite misery and loss”. Organised labour is tantamount to a “prohibition on excellence”, repressing all ambition:

The theory that all men are equal is very alluring, especially to those who know they are of inferior quality; but it is this pernicious theory whose practical adoption has proved so serious a bar to the working man’s progress.41

In the next section I discuss how this “pernicious theory” and some others, including Ruskin’s, fared in the disputatious world of late nineteenth century Australia, and how they contributed to the imperative of “thinking straight”.

2. “THE WORKERS ARE A READING CLASS”42

“Who has been in Sydney without visiting the Domain?” asked a writer at the end of the century. “What a medley! Here you have reformers and reformers, evangelists and evangelists … self-made medicine vendors, labour advocates, Boer war philosophers, Christadelphians,

43 Salvation Army, have all their stands.” The new radicalism that appeared in the 1880s gathered strength in the 1890s, embracing every kind of reform from the political to the religious to the temperance movement. The federation of the Australian colonies, votes for women, the suppression of the drink traffic, unlocking the land, state socialism – all were discussed constantly, in public lectures, debates and union meetings, a remarkable outpouring of energy and eloquence, a fascinating moment in a culture where verbal persuasion was still considered essential.

RUSKIN AND THE AUSTRALIAN LABOUR MOVEMENT 241 It is remarkable to read the memoirs of prominent labour figures of the period and to see how many had backgrounds in journalism and public speaking before entering politics.44 It is also surprising to a modern reader to learn that Australia once possessed an extensive and vigorous labour press – 141 titles were published between 1880 and 1910 alone. Some were ephemeral, some lasted for thirty years, but collectively they represent a vast periodical literature that offers an alternative view of the familiar events of the period.45 The Brisbane Worker was started by William Lane, the firebrand journalist who later went off to Paraguay to found a New Australia; theTocsin in Melbourne was published by a group of radicals that included the poets Bernard O’Dowd and Frank Anstey as well as the labour men Tom Tunnecliffe and John Percy Jones, while the short-lived New Order in Sydney was edited by A G Yewen, a personal friend of William Morris, and sub-edited by W A Holman, a future premier of New South Wales. One of its writers was W M Hughes, the future prime minister of Australia.46 “Billy” Hughes has left a vivid account of the period in which the deeply conservative political leader of the First World War remembers his radical youth fondly. Leigh House in Sydney, the headquarters of the Australian Socialist League, was a popular venue for debates, and Hughes took part regularly. Lecturers could discuss anything they wanted, as long as they related their remarks to the problems of the day. Speakers made it a point to talk over the heads of their audiences, who didn’t seem to mind and strongly resented attempts at over-simplification. A friend praised one of these performances to Hughes: “Howell was simply wonderful. I don’t believe they understood one word in ten from beginning to end”.47 This period has understandably attracted the attention of intellectual historians for many years, from Vance Palmer in the 1950s to Robin Golland in the 1960s and Verity Burgmann, John Docker and Bruce Scates in the 1990s. Earlier writers have been concerned to trace the origins of Australian radicalism and republicanism and to follow the development of the Australian labour movement; later writers have looked more closely at the intellectual milieu of the time, and the roles of writers, artists, journalists and debating clubs; I briefly summarise their findings here.48

242 Ruskin and the Labour Movement in Australia Verity Burgmann’s detailed study of the history of socialism in Australia remarks on the confidence of late nineteenth century radicals: reformers and revolutionaries alike genuinely believed in the advent of “socialism in our time”. Burgmann distinguishes the conflict between two tendencies, state socialism and labourism, as the central theme of Australian socialist history. Labourism, the “working class but non-socialist outlook enunciated by the conservative wing of the trade union movement”, won the day, becoming the dominant ideology of each colonial labour party within a decade of its formation. Like previous accounts of what happened to labour parties once they gained parliamentary power, there is a strong note of disillusionment in her version, and her book ends with an extract from a poem called “Backing Down”.49 John Docker has investigated the world of the radical intelligentsia in nineteenth century Australia in several books, most recently The Nervous Nineties. He considers the decades before Federation, and the 1890s in particular, as a space in popular culture where anything could happen, and stresses the importance of the idea of transformation in understanding the period: the transformation of ideas, of individuals, and of societies. Rather than a single reading of the events of the day, Docker points to the significance of antagonisms, oppositions and conflicts within it. Widely read texts such as Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backwards (1889) and William Morris’s News From Nowhere (1891) represent conflicting solutions offered by reformers to the problems of society. One of the most widely read Australian tracts, William Lane’s The Workingman’s Paradise, however, while a “passionate political novel”, is neither Utopian nor anti-Utopian: Utopia is off- stage. Docker’s main point is that modern mass culture, as represented by the work of this period, is highly ambivalent ideologically, capable of many readings.50

3. RADICAL READERS

Part of yellow-back novel, mutilated English dictionary, grammar and arithmetic book, a ready reckoner, a cookery book, a bulgy anglo-foreign dictionary, part of a Shakespeare, book in French and book in German, and a book on etiquette and courtship. A dead man’s books, 51 from Henry Lawson, The Romance of the Swag, 1902

RUSKIN AND THE AUSTRALIAN LABOUR MOVEMENT 243 Of recent writers on this period, Bruce Scates comes closest to our subject in his analysis of the politics of reading in nineteenth century Australia. As we saw in Chapter One, working class men and women were omnivorous readers, newly enabled by the Education Acts of the 1870s to read the flood of new books, newspapers and pamphlets appearing from reform presses. Books were inspiration, not just information.52 Books, whether bought as cheap pamphlets or borrowed from libraries, were committed to memory and endlessly discussed; the poet E J Brady remembers learning about politics this way.53 Radical literary networks of readers, writers, printers and booksellers underpinned the oppositional culture of the 1890s Scates describes.54 Bookshops such as McNamara’s in Sydney and Andrade’s in Melbourne were vibrant social centres for radicals, offering coffee and companionship for like-minded readers.55 Radical newspapers came and went rapidly, but some, like the Worker in Sydney and the Tocsin in Melbourne, lasted for decades. A prominent feature of the labour papers was their interaction with readers, whose letters, articles and poems were published regularly, and whose editors replied to their concerns at length in an on-going public dialogue.56 If Docker considers the texts of the period highly ambivalent ideologically, Scates emphasises the fluidity of radical thinking; many radicals moved from one position or tendency to another over time, “trading their ideological allegiance as readily as their libraries”.57 To Scates this represents not confusion or intellectual naivete, common to autodidact culture, but the search for the truly worthwhile text that would explain everything; for him there is nothing arbitrary in the choices of these “incorrigible determined readers”. Anarchist, socialist or Single Taxer, nineteenth century radicals in Australia still sought a kind of religious experience, speaking of their reading as a revelation, leading to conversion and ultimately salvation.58 Of all forms of reading, Scates considers the utopian novel the most successful medium for popularising political thought at this time; he is kinder to these works than writers such as Docker and Burgmann, pointing to the fact that the utopian genre, apart from articulating the hoped-for future in accessible terms, made change seem “possible, imminent and real” for working class readers.59 There is a wonderful picture of these self-educated readers in a novel by Joseph Furphy. Rigby’s Romance consists of material cut from his longer and more famous book

244 Ruskin and the Labour Movement in Australia Such is Life, and based like it on diaries Furphy kept twenty years before.60 In Rigby’s Romance most of the action consists of a group of bushmen yarning by the riverside, as they attempt to catch an elusive thirty-pound fish. Rigby is the itinerant American agitator whose opinions on political questions dominate the discussion; the other men who argue with him are bush workers taking a spell between seasons. Dixon the bullock driver is a harmless pedant who has learned a string of Latin quotations off by heart, but cannot resist interpolating oaths between them (“memento (adj) mori”); several chapters are devoted to his futile attempt to impress women by memorising the greats of English poetry in twelve large volumes. When he first meets Collins, the narrator, he asks if he has a “swapping book”, offering him a Hawthorne he originally got for a Ouida, and he carries a dictionary as well as a pack of cards in his swag. “That’s where my main (adj) holt is – graspin’ what I read”, he tells Collins.61 The men are well, if erratically read, surprising the meek clergyman Lushington with their knowledge of Plato and Harry Stottle. And there is a constant game of literary one-upmanship, where the men try to outdo each other in their knowledge of the classics – “ ‘Mournful is thy tale, son of the car’, I observed, thoughlessly using up a good quotation from Ossian”.62 And later: “Sir, I like a good hater.” “Stolen”, rejoined Thompson maliciously. “I forget at the present moment where the expression is from. Do you know, Tom?” “No,” I replied in a still, small voice.63

Rigby’s Romance is a neglected classic, much less well known than its parent, Such is Life. Joseph Furphy had trouble getting it published, even on the back of the earlier book’s success. It was eventually serialised in a labour paper, the Barrier Truth, in 1905–1906, but not published in book form until much later. Perhaps the problem, as Furphy’s friend Miles Franklin thought, was that as “conversation it is too many words of a good thing [and] the story sinks in discussion”.64 Certainly the political arguments are familiar now, but the novel remains a vivid and engaging portrait of the kind of men who were so willingly recruited into the bush unions of the 1890s and who led the development of the Australian labour movement.

RUSKIN AND THE AUSTRALIAN LABOUR MOVEMENT 245 The last of the argument in Rigby’s Romance is left to the young socialist convert, Sam, who meets the narrator some time after the all-night conversation on the riverbank, and tells him: “We ain’t ready yet. We ain’t schooled. As Gronlund says – or I wouldn’t be sure but what it’s the prophet Hosear – ‘My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.’ ” But Sam confidently predicts that knowledge will come, and then power:

First, the poet an’ the sage has got to enlighten the people; then the statesman’s got to organize the national policy; then, you see, we got the man with the rifle – an’ that’s the beggar we want … As Pompey said to the Mamertines, 65 ‘why will you prate of privileges to men with swords in their hands?’

4. RECOMMENDING RUSKIN

Sam read widely on “the social-economic question”, but did Sam read Ruskin? Opinion leaders in the labour movement thought he should. The librarians of the mechanics’ institutes certainly thought so, and made sure there was a Ruskin or two on the shelves. So did the teachers and critics surveyed in chapter one. Booksellers, as we have seen, also thought the workers should read Ruskin, from the very respectable E A Petherick of Melbourne, the local agents for Ruskin’s work, and E W Cole, who published Ruskin in cheap pamphlets, to the much less respectable W H McNamara of Sydney. The editors of the labour press thought so, quoting Ruskin regularly, and responding to frequent requests from readers for guidance as to what to read by including Ruskin. One such list, in the Worker in 1899, compiled by Bertram Stevens, “would supply most of the knowledge necessary for the mental equipment of a good citizen, furnish the reader with unmixed enjoyment and perhaps lead to the acquisition of some of the wisdom of life”. The list includes 104 titles from Plato, Homer and Thucydides to contemporary economists like Jevons, Spencer and Mill, some English poets, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Bacon’s Essays, Bagehot’s English Constitution, several Carlyles and two Ruskins. “I would especially urge the careful reading of Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies in order to learn how to read as well as a good deal else”, Stevens added.66 The Ruskins recommended varied. The mechanics’ institutes carried a random sample of his books, more considered lists appearing only in political centres like Sydney

246 Ruskin and the Labour Movement in Australia and Broken Hill.67 Labour editors, understandably enough, emphasised the more polemical works like Unto This Last and The Crown of Wild Olive,68 but his voluminous later work after 1866 is seldom referred to, though theBulletin did say of Fors Clavigera in 1885 that it shone with broken splendours.69 But the implied judgement of the opinion leaders of the Australian labour movement of the 1890s was that nothing Ruskin had said in the last thirty years was worth considering.

5. WAS RUSKIN ACTUALLY READ?

This still leaves open the question of whether working people actually read him, whether told to or not. Not every Marxist has finished Das Kapital, and not every Christian has read all of the Old Testament. Following a similar survey in Britain, the Worker asked prominent Labor men the same question in 1906: what were the twelve best books for an enquirer into

70 the aims and principles of the Australian labour movement? G F Pearce, the Labor senator from Western Australia, was the first to reply. He recommends the book that awakened his own interest in social reform, Kingsley’s Alton Locke, and goes on to list “that wonderful prophecy” Looking Backward, and books by Robert Blatchford, Henry George, Karl Marx and the Fabians. Since “no course of such reading is complete without one of Ruskin’s works”, Pearce suggests Unto This Last, “the beauty and pathos of which will stir the enthusiasm and fervor of the most sluggish”.71 Another man who replied to the survey was W G Spence, the dominant figure in the early Australian labour movement. Spence makes the sensible point about such lists that it is important to know who the imagined readers are to be: “there is the Trade Union officer, the organiser, the propagandist, the politician, the idealist, the person with a turn for religious thought – each of whom would be profited more by one class of writing than by some other”. If however the list is for those “who have just begun to feel an interest in social reform”, rather than the more advanced thinker, Spence recommends his choices “not because they are the best, but because they are a good start if read in the order given”. Unto This Last, praised for its “vigorous style”, is fifth on the list, after The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, Wealth versus Commonwealth by Lloyd, Merrie England by Robert Blatchford, and Between Caesar and

RUSKIN AND THE AUSTRALIAN LABOUR MOVEMENT 247 Jesus by Dr Herron. More specifically socialist works follow, from the Webbs, J A Hobson, Morrison Davidson, H G Wells, Ogilvy and Vandervelde.72 Other Labor men who followed Spence and Pearce into parliament had also read Ruskin, for example W A Holman, the outstanding Labor figure of the years between Federation and the First World War, who debated Socialism with Sir George Reid over two nights in 1906 to a packed Sydney Town Hall. Holman, an early reader of Marx, was an even earlier reader of Henry George, but later turned against him as “insufficient and wrong”. In a lecture Holman gave in the early 1890s he describes George as inferior to Jevons, Marx and Ruskin.73 It would be unusual, given all of the above, if W M Hughes, early Labor man and later Prime Minister, had not read Ruskin, though his memoirs do not say so explicitly. Ruskin and a host of other “excellent authorities” were the staple of the debates Hughes attended, and frequently took part in, at Leigh House in Sydney, the headquarters of the Australian Socialist League.74 But W J McKell, Australia’s first Labor Governor-General, did recall reading the great writers as a young man, and always had a pamphlet in his pocket; he particularly liked Ruskin and Emerson.75 What about ordinary readers? The only detailed survey I have found of actual reading habits is by Martyn Lyons and Lucy Taksa. In Australian Readers Remember 76 they present an oral history of reading between1890 and 1930; while their survey covers all kinds of readers, here I consider only the evidence of working class ones. Lyons and Taksa confirm the importance of the mechanics’ institute libraries, discussed in chapter one, as the chief source of reading matter for country and working class readers, but they go on to make the point that these were often middle class attempts to control what ordinary people read. This was particularly true of workplace libraries such as the NSW Railway Institute, from 1891, opposed by railwaymen because management wanted exclusive control of the catalogue.77 Against this background working class readers created alternative reading networks for themselves, passing on books from hand to hand, using book exchanges and second-hand bookshops, and buying group subscriptions to private libraries, still more common than public ones. Friends, family and workmates would provide books and recommendations, and specifically female reading networks existed.78 When questioned long afterwards, these readers recalled the overwhelmingly British school curriculum of the period, reflecting the zenith of the British Empire and

248 Ruskin and the Labour Movement in Australia Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. The history and geography books they read presented an Anglocentric view of the past, parallelling an Anglocentric view of the world, in which schoolroom maps emphasised the searoutes that connected Australia to Britain. At home working class men preferred educational and informative literature, confirming the autodidact taste for non-fiction Scates describes; and those with union backgrounds mentioned some of the socialist writers discussed above, especially Marx and the English Fabians.79 While working class families could not afford the encyclopedias, atlases or cookbooks favoured in wealthier homes, over half of all the families surveyed had a dictionary, and nearly all had a Bible. The family Bible was no cliche to these readers, and represented an important demonstration of traditional literacy and religious faith, especially to Protestants.80 Another discovery the survey made was the importance of poetry. These readers, the generation that went off to fight the First World War, were the “poetry generation”.81 They had read poetry, or had it read to them, from an early age, and Lyons and Taksa remark on the enduring impact of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, still evident in the taste of Australian readers half a century later.82 Longfellow, Tennyson and Browning were the most popular overseas poets, and Paterson, Kendall, and Lawson the most popular Australian ones, though another Australian favourite, C J Dennis, was rarely encountered at school.83 The vernacular style and larrikin attitudes of Songs of a Sentimental Bloke and The Moods of Ginger Mick were clearly too much for the school authorities. Lyons and Taksa’s work supports the picture of a well-read, inquiring working class described above, proud of its hard-won knowledge and eager to put it to use. Sam, the self- taught boy in Rigby’s Romance, tells us he has read “the long line of prophets, from Rousseau to Bellamy”, and Ruskin was surely one of them.

6. “MIGHTY POET WITHOUT THE NAME”

If so, what was Ruskin’s special appeal for working class readers? One clue, that appears in Labor memoirs and confirms Lyons and Taksa’s findings, is the working class love of poetry referred to above. The Queensland activist Ernest Lane recalls in Dawn to Dusk (1913) that “my greatest comfort in times of vicissitude, the one unfailing, source of

RUSKIN AND THE AUSTRALIAN LABOUR MOVEMENT 249 strength and encouragement, has been derived from the people’s poets”.84 Such “lovers of the common people” include writers as varied as William Morris, “the wonderful artist- poet”, Burns, Whitman, and Shelley, “the aristocrat, yet probably the greatest people’s poet of all times”.85 The Australian poet Bernard O’Dowd goes further, and inMay Day celebrates such “messengers of humanity” as Shelley, Byron, Schiller, Uhland, Camille, Marat, Spartacus, Dante, Bakunin, Marx, Lasalle, Whitman, Vaillant, Brutus, Vane, Kossuth and Christ, concluding that:

No longer prostitute to wealth, Among the aery show The Lyric Muse accompanies The Marseilllaise below.86

An imaginary literary “At Home” described in the Worker in 1898 would include Thomas Carlyle, “a master workman in language – deep-brained, deep-hearted, sham-hating, truth- loving, rugged-lipped, tender souled”; Wordsworth, “sweet-worded worshipper at Nature’s shrine”; “Gay, brave, bondage-scorning Tom Moore; “Gentle, refined, retiring” Cowper; “Clingsome, pure-souled” Mrs Browning; “Trumpet-tongued” Schiller; “sad, sombre, and profound” Dante; and Robert Burns, the “passionate, big-hearted, uncompromising humbug- smiter of Bonnie Scotland”.87 Similarly the Worker printed a long piece on Tennyson’s Palace of Art in 1899, and the writer construed its meaning firmly as “the emancipated soul will go forth, and soon bring those it thought swine a little time ago. There shall be brethren, and all shall enjoy the palace with its wealth and harvest of toil and thought together”.88 When William Morris died the Worker described him warmly as a “noble looking, brave, true-hearted man, in full sympathy with men”, and attacked his conservative critics:

[One] critic in our daily press calmly assumes with an air of profound wisdom that the idea [Morris] gives expression to in his “News From Nowhere” is all as unreal and impracticable … as his “Land East of the Moon and West of the Sun.” Yes, my sapient critic, so it is – to you, and so it will ever be until you learn to open your eyes.89

Two weeks later the Worker ran the full text of Morris’s All For the Cause on the front page, not the first time Morris’s poetry had appeared in the paper.90

250 Ruskin and the Labour Movement in Australia Most of the Australian poets who appear around this time had proletarian sympathies, none more so than Henry Lawson, “burning with passionate sorrow and indignation”,91 Victor Daley, Will Ogilvie and Bernard O’Dowd. Daley wrote both for the Bulletin and the Tocsin, and published his first collection in 1898. His serious verse tended to the metaphysical, but there is more bite in his topical verse like The Model Journalist (1903), addressed to the Sydney Morning Herald:92

Cast creeds of change afar, No quarter to them giving; That things are as they are Is our excuse for living. Go dead against Reform – We stand or fall together – While we are snug and warm, Who cares about cold weather?

Bernard O’Dowd was also involved with the Bulletin and the Tocsin, writing a regular column of political commentary for the latter as well as poetry. The Tocsin drew its ideas from Henry George, Edward Bellamy and the British Fabians, but most closely reflected the program of the local trade union movement.93 Dawnward? is O’Dowd’s collection of 1903, and a typical poem such as Young Democracy warns that “Furies of the Right” are awake and abroad in Australia:

Abused as mad or traitors by The trolls they would eject; Cold-shouldered by wan Apathy; Of motives mean suspect; Outcast from social gaieties, Denied life’s lilied grace; They mount their hidden Calvaries To save the human race.

The Furies teach the reader the Golden Rule ofYoung Democracy:

“That culture, joy and goodliness Be th’equal right of all: That creed no more shall oppress Who by the wayside fall:

RUSKIN AND THE AUSTRALIAN LABOUR MOVEMENT 251 “That each shall share what all men sow That colour, caste’s a lie: That man is God, however low – Is man, however high”.

And in A Keynote O’Dowd writes:

Read where, unheeded, outcastes groan, And waits Rebellion’s form: These verses voice an undertone – 94 The prelude to a storm?

The last and most famous of the Bulletin“ Bards” was Henry Lawson, whose poems and stories of the lower depths best describe the emotional world of working class people in late nineteenth-century Australia. The opening lines of Faces in the Street still make electric reading:

They lie, the men who tell us, for reasons of their own, That want is here a stranger, and that misery’s unknown

Lawson carries his social message on through dozens of poems like The Union, The Men Who Made Australia, and Poets of the Tomb:

Let’s fight for things that ought to be, And try to make ’em boom! Mankind gets small assistance from Our ashes in the tomb.

And there is no more militant poem in this era of militant poetry than Lawson’s The Army of the Rear:

The wealthy care not for our wants, nor for the pangs we feel; Our hands have clutched in vain for bread, and now they clutch for steel! Come, men of rags and hunger, come! There’s work for heroes here! 95 There’s room still in the vanguard of the Army of the Rear!

If poetry is the gift of expressing truths in elevated language for the nineteenth century and the Oxford English Dictionary, Ruskin is indeed the “mighty poet without the name” the Worker described.96 Thus it is in the stream of idealistic socialist thought that Ruskin

252 Ruskin and the Labour Movement in Australia takes his place for Australian working class readers. In the clamour of political debate, the idealist writers like Ruskin, Morris and Carlyle stand above the fray, reminding readers of the central problem, returning again and again to the question of “Why?” As Ruskin eloquently put it in The Crown of Wild Olive:

Our cities are a wilderness of spinning wheels instead of palaces; yet the people have not clothes. We have blackened every leaf of English greenwood with ashes, and the people die of cold; our harbours are a forest of merchant ships, and the people die of hunger.97

Without the idealists there would have been no Labor Party, said the New South Wales Labor premier Jack Lang, and it is no accident that bookshops like McNamara’s in Sydney and Andrade’s in Melbourne were centres of energy that could be harnessed to change the world.98 The Labor journalist and politician J D Fitzgerald thought that the most popular of all books read by working men in this period, Bellamy’s Looking Backward, followed Ruskin and Carlyle as well as the English social novelists like Disraeli, Kingsley and Dickens, the one kind of fiction working men did read.99 The real object of Rigby’s Romance, they learned, was state socialism, not the beautiful Kate Vanderbreck.100 While, as John Docker points out, Ruskin would not agree with many of the aspects of the ideal society presented in Looking Backward – the use of machinery and the happiness in consumption, for example – and William Morris wrote News From Nowhere as a counter- attack,101 Fitzgerald had a point. Looking Backward offered the hope that industrial despair could be answered by an “intelligent organization of production and exchange as would settle the bread and butter question once for all”.102 The labour historian Robin Gollan has written that the real importance of Looking Backward – and I would add, of Unto This Last and The Crown of Wild Olive – was not to provide socialist political policies but to prepare opinion for change.103 Following Gollan, I think such books, including Ruskin’s, “presented a new perspective, a new possibility for mankind, at least for those who were dissatisfied and who had not been exposed to socialist ideas in other forms”.104 In this regard it is pertinent that the most important figure of the early Australian labour movement, W G Spence, the organiser of the Australian Shearers Union and the Australian Workers Union, would recommend Unto This Last “to those who

RUSKIN AND THE AUSTRALIAN LABOUR MOVEMENT 253 have just begun to feel an interest in social reform”, a book to be read after a book on religion and social questions and before the Fabian essays. The mention of religion here is a second clue. Nothing makes the nineteenth century seem so far away as its concern with religion; nothing seems so distant as its religious controversies, intolerance, and sectarian bitterness, and yet any account of this period would be incomplete without it. A canvasser for the Worker in 1898 reported being regularly asked whether it was a religious paper,105 and politics and religion overlapped frequently in the Australian colonies. The Papal encyclical on The Condition of Labour had stressed the blessedness of poverty, and Cardinal Moran of New South Wales had instructed his flock in 1890 to keep free of Socialists as the avowed enemies of all religion.106 Protestant churchmen took different sides on the labour question; an editorial in the Australian Christian World might bitterly condemn the 1886 Melbourne waterside strike as trying to reverse “the true order of things”107 but the Reverend Thomas Roseby, praised by labour men for his offer to mediate in the 1890 maritime strike, was only one of several prominent churchmen who were advocates for the unemployed in Sydney after the economic failures of the 1890s.108 It is the strong religious element in Ruskin’s thought that is one of the things distinguishing his political writing from that of others. For a working class that might not attend church but still read the Bible, this would have been a recommendation, especially to those who have “just begun to feel an interest in social reform”. Ruskin, himself no stranger to doubt, is a writer such readers can identify with; and his Christianity at this point had moved long past the bigoted Protestantism of his youth to a humbler, less dogmatic faith.109 Now he hopes that his writings would “be found by an attentive reader to bind themselves together into a general system of interpretation of sacred literature, – both classic and Christian, which will enable him without injustice to sympathise in the faiths of candid and generous souls, of every age and every clime”.110 For Ruskin, the Bible was “the great Book, of which no syllable was ever yet to be understood but through a deed”, and he insisted on “the corruption of even the sincerest religion, which is not daily founded on rational, effective, humble, and helpful action”.111 This perfectly describes a character in Henry Lawson’s stories, Peter McLaughlan, an

254 Ruskin and the Labour Movement in Australia itinerant preacher who had “a sort of haunted sympathy” for the people he met in the desolation of the outback. McLaughlan is “the Christ of the Never” who earns the respect of the hardest bushmen by his practical help and concern. In “Shall We Gather By the River?” the contrast is vividly drawn between McLaughlan, up to his knees in mud trying to free some cattle, and the “piano-fingered” parson with him who does not help but merely suggests they pray for rain.112 Lawson’s stories and poems are the most vivid pictures we have of the poorest and most wretched people in late nineteenth century Australia; the narrator of one of his most famous poems is:

Past wearyin’ or carin’, Past feelin’ and despairin’; And now I only wish to be Beyond all signs of carin’.

For her, and for many readers like her, the final passages of Unto This Last would have a special force: “when, for earth’s severed multitudes of the wicked and the weary, there shall be holier reconciliation than that of the narrow home, and calm economy, where the Wicked cease – not from trouble, but from troubling – and the Weary are at rest”.113 True religion, said a writer to the Worker, was self-help and cooperation: “preaching and praying to the skies” is useless.114 But Christianity is never far away in the lives of Lawson’s and Furphy’s characters. Dixon, the bullock driver in Rigby’s Romance, has a Bible, as well as a dictionary and a pack of cards, in his swag.115 For Furphy, ideal socialism was simply the New Testament put into practice: and he concluded “in the interests of moral progress, the Bible must be read; and in the interests of honest interpretation, the parson must go”.116 Faith shown in deeds was what mattered, and Ruskin’s life was more important in the end to a man like Ernie Lane than his books: Lane recommends Frederick Harrison’s biography of Ruskin but none of Ruskin’s own work.117 There is another gloss we might make on this: that Ruskin’s own travails, well known by this time in Australia,118 made him a more sympathetic writer for working class audiences, accustomed to disaster. The human failures like Gentleman Once in Lawson’s stories remind us of the unstable world these characters inhabit, making them

RUSKIN AND THE AUSTRALIAN LABOUR MOVEMENT 255 wary of complacent and ignorant promises of happiness. While Ruskin might never have experienced want, his life had not been easy, and the torment of his later years would have struck a deep chord in working class readers. Ruskin’s appeal, then, is his idealism, his eloquence and his deep religious feeling, an inspiration, as W G Spence pointed out, to those beginning to question “things as they are”. Although as we have seen Spence and others recommended Unto This Last to their readers, I think the key text is The Crown of Wild Olive. This was the first book that made Ruskin a popular writer, according to his biographer E T Cook, and was warmly recommended by the Melbourne Socialist to “every person you know, without regard to age, sex, or previous condition of servitude”. It is the book that Harry Holland, one of the most militant members of the early Labor movement in both Australia and New Zealand, used long afterwards when he tried to give an audience in 1924 a “spiritual interpretation of Labour’s political and economic objective”.119 Holland quoted the conclusion to the second essay in the book, “Traffic”, but E T Cook directs us to the ending of the preface as “among the most beautiful in [Ruskin’s] writing”. The crown of victory is the crown of the title – “wild olive, mark you: – the tree that grows carelessly, tufting the rocks with no vivid bloom [and] scarcely fulfilled fruit”, that “should have been of gold [but] was the best the god could give them”. The men who made Australia, in Lawson’s poem, “who died to make the Wool-Kings rich”, are not celebrated in official histories. In The Crown of Wild Olive Ruskin speaks to them:

But this, such as it is, you may win while yet you live; type of grey honour and sweet rest. Free-heartedness, and graciousness, and undisturbed trust, and requited love, and the sight of the peace of others, and the ministry to their pain; – these, and the blue sky above you, and the sweet waters and flowers of the earth beneath; and mysteries and presences, innumerable, of living things, – these may yet be here your riches; untormenting and divine: serviceable for the life that now is; nor, it may be, without promise of that which is to come.120

256 Ruskin and the Labour Movement in Australia C. RUSKIN AND THE SYDNEY BUILDING WORLD OF THE 1890s

I want now to relate these findings to a specific milieu, the Sydney building world of the 1890s, seen from below, and to contrast this perspective with that of the architects discussed in Chapter Two.

1. THE BUILDING WORLD DESCRIBED

In Sydney, the building industry was one of the colony’s largest; in 1894 it was estimated to comprise at least 15,000 men, of whom 20% belonged to a union.121 Unions had been made legal entities in 1881122 and the building trades had been among the first to register. Unions, or branches of unions, could be formed with as little as seven members. There were unions of the skilled trades such as the stonemasons, bricklayers, carpenters, plumbers, gasfitters, galvanised iron workers and slaters, the finishing trades such as the painters and plasterers, and the unskilled trades of labourers and quarrymen.123 But not everybody belonged to a union, and not every union belonged to the Building Trades Council.124 Union histories of the time dwell on the difficulty of recruiting and retaining members, and the perennial problem of dealing with non-union workers on the same job. Unions had to compete for members: the carpenters for example had a choice of two unions, the Amalgamated Carpenters and Joiners, an Australian branch of a British union, still directed from head office; and the smaller Progressive Carpenters, a purely Australian union. The labourers had a choice of three, the United Labourers’ Protective Society, the Amalgamated Navvies and General Labourers’ Union, and the catch-all Building Employees Union.125 For their part the employers were organised in the Builders and Contractors Association, but one estimate put its membership at no more than one-tenth of the total number of builders, the vast majority being small sub-contractors who remained outside the BCA’s control.126 There were about one hundred architects, but not all of them belonged to the Institute of Architects, or were even architects at all, as we saw in Chapter Two. This made for a large, unstable world, with thousands of parties in hundreds of disputes. Agreements were made with difficulty and quickly broken; the Building Trades

RUSKIN AND THE AUSTRALIAN LABOUR MOVEMENT 257 Council, a voluntary body of employers and workers, had great difficulty in settling disputes, hampered by the reluctance of the parties to abide by its decisions. Some of the most important unions refused to join.127 One of these was the Stonemasons’ Society, as in Britain and America the “aristocrats of labour” and the acknowledged leaders of the building trades. The Sydney masons had been the first union in Australia to win the eight hour day, in 1856, and their example slowly spread through the rest of the building world.128 At the beginning of the 1880s they were a craft union on the old model, proud of their skills, conservative in their attitudes, concentrating on the benefits they offered their members – sickness and accident pay, funeral allowances, superannuation, unemployment benefits. They also offered strike pay and protection against unfair dismissal, with the proviso that the man dismissed “has used no abusive or threatening language to the employer or foreman. The lodge to be fully satisfied on these points before the claim be paid”. Their principal object was said to be “the social elevation of our position as tradesmen”.129 Similarly the preamble to the rules of the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners stated that such provident societies “have long been the pride of all intelligent men”, and continued:

those who, by forethought and self-denial, make such provision for themselves and families, not only contribute to their social, moral, and intellectual advancement, but by strict adherence to rule and discipline, acquire a knowledge of business which qualifies them for positions of responsibility and trust.130

The United Labourers had a similar aim, discouraging their members from “unwisely or prematurely withdrawing their labour”, as:

nothing can be more derogative to the Society than to be drawn into any conflict, the grounds of which may be found untenable and unjust, and to recede from which would be more injurious to us as a body than defeat in twenty conflicts in which we have justice and equity on our side.131

And the Journeymen Coopers were even more conciliatory, stating that they were:

determined to wield no weapon of violence or injustice in their defence, but hope that employers will see the necessity of acting in that friendly spirit that should at all times exist between the employers and employed, and at once acknowledge 132 that “The labourer is worthy of his hire.”

258 Ruskin and the Sydney Building World of the 1890s Discipline, self-denial, restraint and moral improvement make a very conservative agenda, such to make the modern reader wonder at the hostility unions provoked at this time. Strikes were not only a lawful breach of contract, but a moral breach as well, said a writer in the Victorian Review in 1883, and the Building and Engineering Journal asked in 1888 whether it was “possible to imagine a more barbarous method of settling the simple question of a fair division of a given return for work, whether of the head or of the hand, than by what is called

133 ‘a strike’?” The issue was really the control of work, as Richard Price has pointed out in his study of the British building world around this time.134 The preamble to the rules of another Australian union, the Bricklayers, make this clear: members are to “resist every act of injustice” and “repel any attack” on “all rights, rules, customs, and privileges of the trade”.135 Custom still prevails at the beginning of this period, where few written agreements exist and preference is given to men wishing to join a union to those with fathers or brothers in the trade.136 What happens in the 1880s, as Max Freeland has pointed out, is that a building world that was still largely medieval is radically transformed.137 Building, whether in terms of labour or capital, is reorganised; the craft unions slowly give way to the new unions of unskilled and semi- skilled men, the employers become better organised, and the state becomes involved, first by requiring the registration of unions, then by encouraging boards to fix wages and establishing courts to arbitrate disputes.138 As the state becomes further involved, it takes over more and more of the old functions of trade unions as provident societies; with state socialism come old age pensions, workmen’s compensation, and minimum wages, leaving the unions as industrial self defence organizations, fighting ever more bitter battles over wages and conditions. Their relationship with the emerging labour parties becomes increasingly complex, and is a story told in detail elsewhere; for now we note that the period is one of flux in which the struggle for control over work assumes several different forms. A major issue at this time is the “closed shop”, and the Sydney building trades are divided on working with non-unionists. The stonemasons and plasterers have no rule about it, but others do; rule 26 of the bricklayers forbids it, and so does rule 11of the plasterers. Both fine any members who work with outsiders, but for the Amalgamated Carpenters and Joiners

RUSKIN AND THE AUSTRALIAN LABOUR MOVEMENT 259 it depends on whether the other men are “blacklegs or simply non-unionists”.139 While the situation seems to have been that working with non-unionists was alright as long as they didn’t undercut the union men, as John Grant, secretary of the stonemasons, put it, “We make it pretty warm until they do join the union”.140 The unions in this period retreat from their previous position of craft unions preserving hard-won skills. The old hierarchy of apprentices, journeymen and masters begins to weaken, and a major issue for unions is controlling the number of boys and “improvers” (unskilled men with some experience) employed on site.141 While employers might wish to replace expensive skilled labour with cheaper unskilled men, even the unions take less care now in craft training, partly in an effort to restrict the number of new members.142 Dominating everything, and undercutting every attempt at reform, is the widespread use of sub-contracting, practiced throughout Australia but particularly virulent in Sydney. Everybody is involved in this, both masters and men, and its effect is corrosive. Sub- contracting, to repeat, was the practice of on-selling a contract for work – the division of labour taken to extremes. It is well captured in an exchange in the report of the 1891 Royal Commission into Strikes in New South Wales:

Q. 8803: Is it a fact that [contracts] are sublet, and sublet very often, until it comes down to a man who is almost starving and who does the work for next to nothing?

The witness’s answer (“I have not had any personal experience”) is surely disingenuous, but he goes on to define good and bad employers succinctly. Piece work contractors “have work, perhaps, for six months, and no established place of business, and no material, who

143 simply live out of the profit that they can make on the labour they employ” ; while a legitimate employer was a man who had “an established place of business, and the reputation of being solvent and from whom you have no difficulty in getting your wages when they are due”.144 So prevalent was this practice that the stonemasons even had a special rule about it, rule 8: “No member shall be allowed to work on any job which has been sub-let more than once, and if a contractor sub-lets the stone or brickwork (in one lump) together, it would be an infringement of this rule if the sub-contractor re-let the stonework … this

260 Ruskin and the Sydney Building World of the 1890s rule to be rigorously enforced”.145 In this cut-throat world it is not surprising to see the high bankruptcy figures for builders and contractors year after year, not only in times of recession.146 One effect of this was to drive down the margin for skill, as witnesses at the Royal Commission made clear: “the employer’s interest is confined to getting a youth who can lay bricks as early as possible in a passable manner”, said one.147 As we saw above, even the unions neglected their responsibilities under this system, and an apprentice would be left to “pick up what he can from the workmen on the scaffold”.148 What all this means is that for the building industry, as for many others in this period, the ”new unionism” had arrived.149 The future for labour now would not lie with small unions based on high levels of craft skills and jealously-guarded privileges, but with larger unions of unskilled and semi-skilled workers; both the unions that began the Australian labour movement, the Australian Workers Union and the Australian Shearers Union, were of this type.150 The trend now would be for union amalgamations and consolidations, if they did not collapse or were deregistered in the meantime. In the following century the craft unions gradually disappeared into larger, more generic unions, one exception being the stonemasons, who still had a separate identity as late as 1991.151 The “new unionism” is generally credited by labour historians with a desire to remake society, in particular through seeking a bigger role for the state. The old craft unions did have a wider social vision, but it was a conservative one. At the third intercolonial trade union conference in 1885 the delegates debated Protection, the stonemasons and the painters supporting it, and the carpenters and joiners opposing it; but all the building trades were united in opposing state-assisted immigration, and Chinese immigration in particular, as a threat to their livelihood.152 More positively, this conference heard a long paper from the United Labourers about the benefits of cooperation, a theme throughout the decade. Ruskin is not cited in these debates, although many other authorities are; in a later paper on cooperation, in 1886, the writer mentions Holyoake, J S Mill, Earl Derby, Viscount Hampden, Canon Kingsley, Thomas Hughes, F D Maurice and Horace Greeley – a list with a strong showing of Christian Socialists.153 A surprising speaker at the third ITUC was the conservative politician, B R Wise, known to the Worker as Being Rather Wiley. Wise supported strong unions, but went on to

RUSKIN AND THE AUSTRALIAN LABOUR MOVEMENT 261 say that the primary object of a strong union was of course the prevention of strikes. Wise had been a student at Oxford at the end of Ruskin’s time there and disliked him.154 Nonetheless there are distinct echoes of Ruskin in his speech, extolling pride in craft skills, and denouncing the “unreasonable and immoral” public demand for cheap work. Wise might well have been talking about the building industry when he went on to say that:

Many people seem to have taken to bargain-hunting as a new form of excitement. This leads on all hands to a deterioration of work and a cutting down of wages. Estimates are made at the lowest possible rate, and even honourable firms have to undertake impossible contracts in order to keep the market.

Wise concludes his speech by quoting Emerson to the effect that “Duty, not self interest, is the strongest influence towards social progress”.155 Duty, yes, the delegates might have replied, but to whom? To answer this question I next examine how the social contract was understood by two groups in the Sydney building world, the architects and the building trades.

2. “THE REUNION OF ART AND LABOR”

The subject of the modern workman and his position with our profession is one of grave importance to us as architects, and one which we shall be forced ere long to take heed of as much as educating our own men; for without able and skilled workmen where shall we be?

156 John Horbury Hunt, 1892

As we saw in Chapter Two, advanced architectural opinion in this period had read and understood Ruskin, Morris and Carlyle, and men such as Walter Butler in Melbourne and Samuel Hurst Seager in Sydney were arguing for the reorganization of the building process, and a greater role for craftsmen in particular. Not everyone agreed. Other architects had a low opinion of the trades, and the President of the Victorian institute in 1889 thought that “in these degenerate days” it was difficult to imagine an ordinary mason “who refused to work more than eight hours, taking any interest in his work or in fact thinking of anything except of how much he could make out of it”. To suppose that such a man had any love for his work was Utopian.157 Even Walter Butler

262 Ruskin and the Sydney Building World of the 1890s had reservations about the art instincts of workmen: “the scraping and the filing, rubbing and sand-papering that goes on over any piece of decorative work, if the artisan is left alone, is enough to set one’s teeth on edge”.

[The craftsman] cares little about the form or curve needed to bring out expression. All is sacrificed to sharp and clean edges which, when gained, but spoils the effect of what might have been a creditable whole, as the conception and expression in the spirit of the design are ignored in the craving for neatness … [T]he resultant feeling to the beholder is that it was made for a people who preferred the husk to the kernel of art.158

And the Building and Engineering Journal agreed: “if the author examines the journeyman of to-day he will find that his daily labour means his daily pay and nothing more, and that this was with few exceptions the case during the Middle Ages”.159 But there were undoubtedly architects in the Australian colonies who had read and appreciated The Seven Lamps of Architecture and The Stones of Venice. Their aim, however, was better architecture, not the remaking of society. None of the progressive architects discussed so far ask for this, and this aspect of Ruskin and Morris is ignored. For Australian architects the hope of a better future was confined to better buildings and more beautiful cities. While these things have a political dimension the architects discussed here did not see it this way.160 Walter Butler comes closest, mentioning the British art workers’ guilds at the end of his paper, and talking about “a change in the condition of the life of the people”, but his goal remained “the new birth of art”. “Sweeping away the cobwebs from the eyes of the workers” was not to reveal to them the nature and causes of injustice, but to establish “true methods of design” and a readier, more expressive manner of execution. “Founding a basis of right judgment” was not to invent a new moral order, but to enable the workers to “distinguish between present good art and bad”.161 Samuel Hurst Seager also wanted “as close a union as possible between the designers and the workers”, but this was because he thought this way lay “the hope of architecture”. The evil, he thought, lay in the contract system, especially the practice of sub-contracting, and he argued for eliminating the builder, the middle man. This comes closer to a fairer system, given the widespread opposition of labour to sub-contracting, but even Hurst Seager permitted piece work under certain circumstances.162

RUSKIN AND THE AUSTRALIAN LABOUR MOVEMENT 263 Unprogressive architectural opinion, as represented by the president of the Institute of Architects of New South Wales, John Horbury Hunt, and the New South Wales Government Architect, Walter Liberty Vernon, had no doubts as to where they stood on social questions. Horbury Hunt had little time for trade unions:

Is not this something to prompt the true British workman to halt and contemplate with pride the past, while looking forward and considering that which is, and should be, sacred to every independent able-bodied man, namely, the free exercise of his skill to his own advantage, and jealously repel any attempt to keep all men within some common arbitrary line of efficiency, and worse, dictated to by men unworthy to be claimed as their equals. Should not this be looked upon by our workmen as so tyrannical – yes degrading – as to be beyond 163 endurance?

Hunt did concede, however, that some fault did lie with the architects; but his answer (“a cheering word or a flash of countenance indicating pleasure and satisfaction”) shows just how far behind Hunt was in understanding the new realities. His paternalist views would have been considered out of date in Britain twenty years before.164 It would be interesting to know how Hunt fared on his projects, but his biography says nothing about industrial relations. Was he plagued by strikes, delays, stoppages? Did his men regularly walk off the job at some new affront? Max Freeland’s book does not say, though Hunt’s disputes with clients are recorded in detail. It is clear that Hunt demanded and got a high standard of construction, doubtlessly alienating both builders and workmen along the way. What would have protected him is his acknowledged honesty and integrity; no man would have been killed on one of his jobs, and no man would have gone unpaid. Contemporaries agreed that Walter Liberty Vernon, the NSW Government Architect from 1890 to 1911 was the consummate English gentleman, with a well-deserved reputation for honesty and fair dealing.165 Vernon was, however, regarded by some in the labour movement as one of the “enemies of progress”, principally because of his preference for letting Government work on contract to private firms rather than employing men directly. This was less trouble for Vernon, as he told a parliamentary committee in 1899, but the Worker grumbled that “the State sweats labor per medium of the contractor in order to lighten the burdens of its highly-paid officers”.166 He was also resented for his hands-off

264 Ruskin and the Sydney Building World of the 1890s attitude to providing relief work for the unemployed during the worst of the depression, though this policy may have been due more to the unpopular Minister of Public Works, Bruce Smith, than to Vernon.167

3. MASTERS AND MEN

Several of the witnesses at the NSW Royal Commission on Strikes in 1891 were secretaries of the building unions, and their testimony offers us the clearest and most detailed picture, seen from below, of the Sydney building world at this time. In his testimony Henry Wilkinson of the Amalgamated Carpenters and Joiners touched on two of the issues we have met before, sub-contracting, synonymous with “sweating” to the labour movement, and the equally contentious issue of freedom of contract, referred to by Horbury Hunt. Wilkinson spoke at length on the deputation to see the Minister of Public Works, Bruce Smith, in which Smith had dismissed a request to restrict the sub-letting of Government work as unwarranted interference in a private contract, but Wilkinson was himself ambivalent about government interference in the form of arbitration courts.168 “Freedom of contract”, on the other hand, meant the unfettered right of employers to hire and fire at will, and was bitterly resented by unionists. Wilkinson put the problem plainly: “it was a very hard thing, because I cannot see where my freedom comes in”.

11301. My necessity may compel me to take five shillings a day, while my employer can get rid of a thousand pounds if he likes, and not feel it, but I cannot get any more. I must exist … There is my freedom gone.

William Gillespie, of the United Labourers, vividly described the precarious lives of builders’ labourers on the “threshold of existence”, forced to carry nine tons of plaster or work up to fourteen hours a day.169 But he was also ambivalent about the state as an employer170 and described a failed cooperative experiment to make bricks and tiles.171 A unionist of the old school, Gillespie believed that a major benefit of unions was the discipline and obedience they imposed upon the men.172 John Grant of the Stonemasons was by far the most informed and politically conscious of the unionists examined by the Royal Commission. His lengthy opening

RUSKIN AND THE AUSTRALIAN LABOUR MOVEMENT 265 statement made his views, and those of his union, very clear.173 The real answer to doing away with strikes was a new society, and taxes, temperance, arbitration and conciliation courts were no reforms at all. Cooperation was “superficial”, and there was no advantage either way in Protection or Free Trade – “workers are robbed just as successfully under one system as under the other”. Grant’s social program included reorganizing public education to impart “permanent progressive ideas”, where the “books of instruction” would be overhauled and “modern inequalities and shams unmasked”. Political organization also meant founding a labour newspaper (“a matter of the very first importance”), labour electoral leagues, and workers’ debating clubs; even socially improving Sunday night lectures should be taken advantage of, “although a distinct and decided infringement on the rights of parsons and priests, and an invasion of their recognised hunting ground … by this means the root of industrial troubles will be exposed and a method of eradication decided upon”.174 Political organization, and the nationalization of land, were the essential ways to better the lot of the workers. Anything else was merely tinkering with the problem because “any benefit that you may get by any [other] expedient will ultimately pass to the earth- owner [and] no man has a right to collect rent from another for permission to exist on this planet”.175 Whatever else Grant had read, he had definitely read Henry George, though he denied being a socialist.176 Grant’s views, as craftsman and unionist, stand in stark contrast to those held by the Sydney architects who followed Ruskin; Percy Hockings, for example, who called in 1895 for sculptors to be given a freer hand because “the whole soul of the thing depends on the attitude of [the sculptor’s] mind at the time he is cutting the stone”.177 Hocking’s gentle spirit seems naively far away from the realities of industrial relations on a typical Sydney building site; so does an earlier suggestion by another writer to architects to “draw the carver into your confidence, that there may be a fair exchange of opinions”, employing the men as carvers, not lowest-paid tenderers: “we never shall have high-class art workmanship in this country, until the artizan, the executant, is also the designer of his own work”.178 In the Sydney building world of the 1890s, both masters and men had indeed read Ruskin, but they had read different books, and come to different conclusions. Architects

266 Ruskin and the Sydney Building World of the 1890s looked to Ruskin’s advice on how to inspire their men to better work, derived from their reading of The Seven Lamps of Architecture and The Stones of Venice. For their part the men had read his later books, such as Unto This Last and The Crown of Wild Olive, in public library or mechanics’ institute, or as penny pamphlets, and were prepared on his authority to argue vehemently for the rights of labour, and much else besides, leading to actions and attitudes of which Ruskin would not approve.

4. UNTO THIS LAST AND THE PRINCE ALFRED HOSPITAL PROJECT

Twelve years after the 1891 Royal Commission on Strikes shed revealing light on the Sydney building world, there was another government investigation into this world, and I conclude this account with a summary of its findings. 179 Two of the protagonists in the dispute over the Prince Alfred Hospital project, the subject of the 1903 inquiry, are men we have met before, John Grant of the Stonemasons’ Society and Walter Liberty Vernon, the Government Architect of New South Wales, one a class conscious Scottish militant, the other an English pillar of the colonial Establishment. Vernon had criticised the excessive cost of the stonework on two new buildings for the Prince Alfred Hospital in 1902, and an inquiry was set up in 1903 to examine these claims. Vernon listed twenty-one reasons for the cost over-runs,180 but his main reason was that he had been forced into using the day labour system, under which the Government (here the Department of Public Works) employed the workers directly rather than through a contractor. This was a result of the appointment of E W O’Sullivan as Minister for Public Works two years before, an ex-union man, a social democrat and a friend – perhaps too good a friend – of the working man.181 Under “Owe” Sullivan the State did become the employer, the biggest in the building industry, and day labour became the norm on all government contracts during his tenure. This was a test, sooner than expected, of the ideas advocated in 1891–1892 by the Sydney Architectural Association, the Australian Socialist League, and by Grant himself. The inquiry was asked to discover if day labour did indeed lead, as its progressive

RUSKIN AND THE AUSTRALIAN LABOUR MOVEMENT 267 supporters claimed, to better work, more harmony, less disputes and lower costs than the hated contract system. The two buildings under investigation were initially considered to be an experiment to find out this very thing, though the hope of a rational trial of the two systems, contract versus day labour, had to be abandoned early because builders were reluctant to tender for such a job.182 Both sides, Vernon and the union leaders Grant and Thomson, conceded that the job had not been a happy one; disputes over who was to be employed began almost immediately, and the foreman,Ryce, found his authority constantly undermined by the union, who had direct access to the Minister and no qualms about using it to override unfavourable decisions. The result was that the job was effectively controlled by the stonemasons’ union, who chose the men to work on it and, according to their critics, also controlled the pace of work on site.183 Both sides also agreed that costs had been higher than on other jobs but attributed this to different reasons, the union arguing that the initial estimates had been far too low, and that some of the stone, from two different quarries, had been more difficult to carve, as well as being supplied in smaller sizes, requiring more work. Vernon countered with a long list of reasons why the job had gone over-budget, the last being “having to deal with men like W S Thomson”. Was the work well done? The union said yes, and attributed some of the delay to higher standards of craftsmanship; Vernon would only go so far as to say it was comparable to other work such as the extensions to the National Art Gallery, currently underway, and he was supported by the Government Architect of Victoria, called in as an expert witness. After several months of hearings and 18,443 questions, the inquiry concluded that the cost of the stonework had been excessive, and blamed the political interference in the project.184 Though this obviously meant the Minister, O’Sullivan, as well as the union leaders, Grant and Thomson, the board diplomatically blamed the system, not individuals.185 Grant and Thomson were praised as unselfish advocates for their men,186 but Vernon’s charges were upheld. As for day labour, it could be used successfully, the official report said, especially where a large amount of unskilled labour was required187 but only if it was free of political influence and carefully supervised.188 The Government Architect

268 Ruskin and the Sydney Building World of the 1890s remained convinced it was too much trouble189 and asked some pointed questions about equal pay, regardless of industry or skill.190 If the board of inquiry had read Unto This Last, the evidence they collected would have swayed them against Ruskin’s famous dictum, and the testimony of the many witnesses who spoke of the ”Government stroke” argued against the political economy of the State being the sole employer of labour. It is likely that both Vernon and Grant had read Ruskin, but if they did, it is certain that they had both put him aside. Vernon wanted better architecture, but not by giving craftsmen a greater role; Grant wanted control, but not over the stonework he was carving. The workers wanted more, much more, than Ruskin was willing to give them.

RUSKIN AND THE AUSTRALIAN LABOUR MOVEMENT 269 D. “GO TO, VAIN PROPHET”

According to Ernie Lane,191 the most popular book in remote Queensland railway camps was not Looking Backwards but The Right to be Lazy (1883) written by the French socialist – really anarchist – Paul Lafargue.192 Lafargue attacks the gospel of work and every philosopher who supports it; work, he says, should be forbidden and not imposed. For the past century all it has done for the working class is “broken their bones, bruised their flesh [and] tortured their nerves”, and he pleads “O Laziness, have pity on our long misery! O Laziness, mother

193 of the arts and noble virtues, be thou the balm of human anguish!” Special punishment is reserved for “moralists, canters, hypocrites” who preach the dogma of work; such men “overflow with the purest intentions” but “condescend to teach us how to think”.194 Lafargue might have been talking about men like Ruskin, but the radical poet Francis Adams, a friend of Ernie Lane’s, leaves us in no doubt. One of his Songs of the Army of the Night is dedicated to Ruskin, written after readingModern Painters:

“Obedience, faith, humility, To us were empty names” … The like to you (might we reply) Whose noisy life proclaims Presumption, want of human love, Impatience, filthy breath, The snob in soul who looks above Trampling on what’s beneath

There is more:

Go to, vain prophet, without faith, In God who maketh new With hankerings for this putrid death This Flesh-feast of the Few Pass through that South at last brought low Where loyal freemen live And learn Democracy knows how To utterly forgive.195

This is harsh, and wrong: Ruskin might have been a “vain prophet”, but he did not lack love or faith. Adams is responding to the patronizing side of Ruskin who wrote of the “inevitable

270 “Go To, Vain Prophet” distinction of rank and necessary submission to Authority”.196 Adams would have especially hated Ruskin’s conclusion, particularly applicable to the leveller in Australian life, identifying “the veriest devil of all that have got into modern flesh” as:

the nineteenth century St Thomas [who doubts] there being anything better than himself alive; coupled, as it always is, with the further resolution … to seal the Better living thing down again out of his way, under the first stone handy.197

By the middle of the 1890s the Australian labour movement had begun to divide along the lines suggested by Verity Burgmann and others, into an ameliorist party and a more radical wing.198 The reformist hopes of the early Australian Socialist League, based largely on the British Fabians and behind them Ruskin, Morris and Carlyle, change, as does the ASL itself. Within ten years it has left the Fabians behind and embraced more radical ideas, especially Marxist ones, and makes contact with the revolutionaries of the Industrial Workers of the World.199 Ruskin was not the only reformer to hold conservative, even very conservative, views. A R Sennett, the English author of Garden Cities in Theory and Practice (1905), for example, thought that “the want of integrity in our artisans is the principal cause of our suffering so

200 heavily from foreign competition” and denounced the time lost to strikes, equivalent, he claimed, to three thousand man years in 1903 alone. The leaders of the working class needed education to strengthen their “integrity of purpose” and develop “national character”; what was wanted was a “multitude of educated, and therefore more enlightened, industrial units” with a “proper sense of duty”.201 Sennett commended the newly-formed Ruskin College at Oxford where the student is “taught to regard the education he receives, not as a means of personal advancement, but as a trust which he holds for the good of others. He learns in order

202 that he may raise, and not rise out of, the class to which he belongs”. [emphasis added] Herein lies the problem of Ruskin for working class readers. Almost all nineteenth century reformers were convinced of the value of education, from Matthew Arnold, F D Maurice and Arnold Toynbee, the man who founded Toynbee Hall in the East End, to the lecturers who donated their time to the University Extension movement. But education was to be carefully controlled: as we have seen, mechanics institutes and railwaymen’s libraries in Australia were both vetted by middle class authority to render them safe. John Grant had a point when he insisted that the books of instruction must be overhauled to expose “modern

RUSKIN AND THE AUSTRALIAN LABOUR MOVEMENT 271 inequalities and shams”203 but this was unlikely in a system run by the middle class. Ruskin himself told his students at the Working Men’s College forty years before that his class was not intended “either to fit them for becoming artists, or in any direct manner to advance their skill in the occupations they at present follow”. The object instead was to “direct their attention accurately to the beauty of God’s work in the material universe”.204 Thus it is not surprising that there was a revolt in Ruskin College in 1908, when the students and some of the staff denounced the drift away from a proper working class education and set up the more radical Central Labor College in London the following year.205 At the conference in 1907 that preceded the split, a delegate said vehemently “I have not come here as a suppliant … I refuse to sit down at the rich man’s door and beg for crusts … I demand for my class all the advantages that Oxford has it in her power to offer, and I claim it as a right of which we have been unjustly deprived”.206 Australia also had university extension lectures, a workers’ educational association, even its own Toynbee Hall in Sydney, but militant labour now wanted no part of them. Instead Labor Colleges were set up, “to make us more fit not only for the bringing about of the Industrial Revolution, but also for the more efficient working of Revolutionary society when we have won”.207 After some early attempts, Labor Colleges controlled by the Trades Hall were established in Melbourne by 1917, Brisbane by 1919 and Sydney by 1921. Sydney had the bumpiest time, the first two attempts resulting in spectacular collapses before the third finally took hold.208 The Sydney college was summed up much later as “Marxism plus public speaking”, but the Sydney Trades Hall had had a Literary Institute since 1886. Like other such institutes it conducted debates and mock elections, and held classes in elocution though not in political economy. It also had a library, for which the catalogue for 1914 survives. By this date there were no more Ruskins, but no Marx either. There is one Engels and one Jaures, the only international names in a list still heavily dominated by the leaders of British socialism, Hyndman, Bax, the Webbs, and now Ramsay Macdonald and H G Wells. There were copies of the New South Wales Parliamentary Debates and the Industrial Gazette, and industrial arbitration reports; these and the copies of the Romance of Empire series are enough at this point to place the Trades Hall (or at least its librarian)

272 “Go To, Vain Prophet” firmly in the ameliorist party. More individualistic members could read the institute’s copies of Nietzsche, Herbert Spencer and Jack London.209 W P Earsman, the founder of the Labor College in Victoria, knew the British experience well. Writing in Melbourne in 1920 he described the universities “cooing in the ear of Labor to come and get educated”, but university education was “very much partial and biassed”.210 Like the public schools, universities taught workers to worship kings and flags which stood for oppression instead of freedom. Institutions like Ruskin College believed in social reform unlike the Central Labor College which “[stood] out boldly for social revolution”:

Whereas the Central Labor College has turned out rebels of the first order, the influence of Ruskin [College] has been mainly amongst those who were quite satisfied to compromise here and compromise there, anxious that the old order should continue without interruption.211

Thus militant labour had turned well away from Ruskin, the man and the college, by the time of his death; Marx and the class struggle now dominated their thinking. Bruce Scates describes how Australian labour even turned away from Henry George, rejecting among other things the “Ruskinesque” sensibility behind his attack on the machine.212 But for Paul Lafargue and his readers the machine was the “saviour of humanity, the god who shall redeem man from … working for hire, the god who shall give him leisure and liberty”.213 Far from a world run by craft guilds and windmills, mainstream Australian labour in 1900 wanted control of the machines, leading to more leisure, higher wages and the welfare state. Albert Metin, a French sociologist who visited Australia in 1899, decided that the Australian worker “has become a monsieur”.214 Metin was astonished by the absence of theory behind the positions of both capital and labour: “one hears from the employers simply affirmations of inflexible resistance to change, based on the defence of their profits. There is no argument whatever, only a declaration of war”. The other side was no better. Theoretical arguments “simply do not exist: people ignore or run away from them. The word ‘socialism,’ pleasing to many European reformers because of its philosophical and general connotations, displeases and perturbs Australasian workers by its very amplitude. One of them whom I

215 asked to sum up his programme for me replied: ‘My programme! Ten bob a day!’ ”

RUSKIN AND THE AUSTRALIAN LABOUR MOVEMENT 273 Labour historians, especially the more radical ones, have lamented the Australian labour movement’s limited agenda; as Metin observed a century ago, “here, as throughout the English-speaking world, practical considerations are prized above everything else. Demands on government are for practical concessions rather than declarations of principle”.216 The problem for such historians is not that Australian workers have asked for so much but that they have settled for so little. Where does Ruskin fit into this very material world? Some of the answers have been suggested above: Ruskin as the Introduction for “those who have just begun to feel an interest in social reform”; Ruskin as the Idealist, the conscience of the labour movement; Ruskin as the Religious Man, devoutly Christian but not sectarian, seeking to put the New Testament (“synonymous with socialism”, said Joseph Furphy) into practice; Ruskin as the Eloquent Man, putting experience, and the hope of everlasting rest, into words for working class readers; and Ruskin as Gentleman Once, or perhaps Peter McLaughlin, in the stories of Henry Lawson. “Ruskin appeals to so many and varied classes of readers that it is almost impossible to pick out one book as being more popular than others”, said his obituary in the Town and Country Journal. “Especially, however, is he largely read by the self-educated man, not only for himself and his thought, but he displays such a wide range of reading that one of his works is in itself a small library”.217 “John Ruskin is not dead”, said the Barrier Miner. “Neither will he die while his books and printed thoughts exist, or until … Great or Greater Britain relapses into a condition of utter barbarism”.218 Robert Ross, the very militant editor of the Barrier Truth who published Rigby’s Romance, was a firm Marxist, yet his memoirs pay tribute to the “rousing verse” of William Morris and the “counsel” of John Ruskin.219 A very different writer, Mrs E S Armstrong, analysed that counsel in 1889: Ruskin’s social theory “entirely fails of the synthesis necessary to construct, or even imagine a working governmental system”. However:

His writings [on Art and Political Economy] are so deep and so broad, so wide and so far reaching, so entirely founded and grounded in all that is beautiful, holy and true, that in one as in the other they have done an immensity, and will do still far more, to clear away the mists of prejudice, ignorance, and misconception which have enshrouded and distorted them; and in both they must ultimately furnish the foundation on which the perfect and practical system shall be based.220

274 “Go To, Vain Prophet” ENDNOTES FOR CHAPTER THREE

1 Walter Butler, “The Prospect of the Development of the Arts Among the Handicrafts”, Building and Engineering Journal, 15 April 1893, p. 146. 2 Bruce Scates, A New Australia: Citizenship, Radicalism and the First Republic, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1997, introduction, passim. 3 Manchester Examiner and Times, 2 October 1860, cited in Kenneth Clark, Ruskin Today, Penguin, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, UK, 1982, p. 265. 4 Ruskin, Collected Works, XXVII, p. xvii. Ruskin was overdoing it in his “Oxford decade”, as his friends well knew. Sir John Simon wrote to Charles Eliot Norton about The utterly spendthrift way in which (with imagination less and less controlled by judgment) he has for these last years been at work with a dozen different irons in the fire – each enough to engage one average man’s mind. And his emotions all the while as hard-worked as his intellect – they always blowing the bellows for its furnace. As I see what he has done, I wonder he has not broken down long ago. ibid., p. xviii 5 “Seen from below”, Crown of Wild Olive, lecture II, “Traffic”, sec. 80; “punishably poor”,Joy for Ever (and Its Price in the Market), sec. 118. 6 “Knock a man into a ditch”, Crown of Wild Olive, lecture I, “Work”, sec. 40; “provoke a boy”, Fors Clavigera XCV, October 1884; “elegance of grammar”, ibid. 7 ibid. This passage continues: “To be proud and strong, each in his place and work, is permitted and ordained to the simplest; but ultra – ne sutor, ne fossor.” 8 The Stones of Venice, vol. II, ch. VI, “The Nature of Gothic”, sec. 16. 9 Fors Clavigera LXI, Christmas 1875. The passage continues: Think of it; – those fellows behind there have housed and fed us; their wives have washed our clothes and kept us tidy; – they have bought us the best places, – brought us through the cold to them; and there they sit behind us, patiently, seeing and hearing what they may. 10 Derrick Leon, Ruskin the Great Victorian, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1949, pp. 226ff. Ruskin’s attitudes are clear in a circular given to prospective students: The teacher in landscape drawing wishes it to be generally understood by all his pupils that the instruction given in his class is not intended either to fit them for becoming artists, or in any direct manner to advance their skill in the occupations they at present follow. They are taught drawing, primarily in order to direct their attention accurately to the beauty of God’s work in the material universe; and, secondarily, that they may be enabled to record, with some degree of truth, the forms and colours of objects when such record is likely to be useful. ibid., p. 229 Governor Eyre controversy, ibid., pp. 379ff; Tim Hilton, Ruskin: The Later Years, Yale University Press, New Haven, Conn., 2000, pp. 105–107, 115; ET Cook, The Life of Ruskin, George Allen, London, 1911, vol. II, pp. 111ff. Eyre made his initial reputation as an explorer in Australia between1838–1844: see Geoffrey Dutton, Edward John Eyre: The Hero as Murderer, Penguin Books Australia, Ringwood, Vic., 1977. 11 “Was it done with enjoyment?”, The Lamp of Life, sec. XXIV; “phantom of liberty”, The Lamp of Obedience, sec. I. 12 The Lamp of Obedience, sec. VIII. 1848 was also the year of The Communist Manifesto and J S Mill’s Principles of Political Economy.

RUSKIN AND THE AUSTRALIAN LABOUR MOVEMENT 275 13 Cited in Fiona MacCarthy, William Morris: A Life for Our Times, Faber & Faber, London, 1994, p. 69, quoting the introduction to the Kelmscott Press edition of On the Nature of Gothic, 1892. 14 The Stones of Venice, vol. II, ch. VI, sec. 12. 15 ibid., sec. 12. 16 ibid., sec. 13. 17 Hilton, op. cit., pp. 10–12, 14–16, 35; Cook, op. cit., pp. 4–9; Leon, op. cit., pp. 295–207. 18 The Saturday Review, London, 10 November 1860, pp. 582–584; see p. 582. 19 ibid., p. 584. 20 ibid. 21 Cited in Clark, Ruskin Today, op. cit., p. 265. 22 Ruskin, Collected Works, XXVII, p. xvii, and see note 2 above. 23 Fors Clavigera I, January 1871. 24 Fors Clavigera VII, July 1871. 25 Fors Clavigera XLIX, December 1874. 26 Fors Clavigera LXVII, July 1876. 27 ibid. 28 Time and Tide, 1867, sec. 169. 29 ibid., sec. 141. This is incidentally why Ruskin didn’t like Americans, because they are “discontented with what they are, yet [have] no ideal of anything which they desire to become” (ibid.). 30 “names solemnly kept”, Hilton, John Ruskin: The Later Years, op. cit., p. 308. The Guild is discussed on pp. 306–309. 31 Daily News, London, 2 May 1873, cited in “Notes and Correspondence”, Fors Clavigera XXX, June 1873. 32 Fors Clavigera LXXXIX, August 1880. This is the second letter written after Ruskin’s two year absence due to his mental breakdown in early 1878. 33 ibid. This is a particularly charming and humble letter, for once genuinely addressed to working class readers. 34 Ruskin, Collected Works, XVII, “Bibliographical Note”, pp. 5–11. 35 “The Labour Party and the Books That Helped to Make It”, Review of Reviews, London, June 1906. 36 Anon. (T G Tucker), “Thinking Straight”, The Australian Magazine, August 1886, p. 133. 37 The Australian Magazine, August 1886, passim. 38 Tucker, “Thinking Straight”, op. cit., p. 136. 39 Anon., “The Duties of a Leisure Class in Colonial Society”, The Australian Magazine, August 1886, pp. 149–158, see pp. 151–152. 40 Anon., “The Australian Working Man”, The Australian Magazine, August 1886, pp. 180–190, see p. 181. 41 ibid., p. 182. 42 T A Coghlan, Labour and Industry in Australia, Macmillan of Australia, South Melbourne, Vic., 1969 [originally published 1918], vol. IV, p. 1836. 43 The Methodist Leader, Sydney, 3 March 1900, p. 7. 44 For example, E W O’Sullivan (1846–1910); see Bruce Mansfield,Australian Democrat: The Career of Edward William O’Sullivan, Sydney University Press, Sydney, 1965, H J Gibbney, Labor in Print: A Guide to the People Who Created a Labor Press in Australia between 1850 and 1939, ANU, Canberra, 1975, and R B Walker, The Newspaper Press in New South Wales 1803–1920, Sydney University Press, Sydney, 1976.

276 Endnotes for Chapter Three 45 Gibbney, Labor in Print, op. cit. 46 W M Hughes, Crusts and Crusades: Tales of Bygone Days, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1947, see pp. 136–154. 47 ibid., p. 71. Leigh House is discussed on pp. 68–76. 48 Vance Palmer, The Legend of the Nineties, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Vic., 1954; Robin Gollan, Radical and Working Class Politics: A Study of Eastern Australia 1850–1910, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1960; Verity Burgmann, In Our Time: Socialism and the Rise of Labor 1885–1905, George Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1985; John Docker, The Nervous Nineties: Australian Cultural Life in the 1890s, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1991; Bruce Scates, A New Australia: Citizenship, Radicalism and the First Republic, op. cit. 49 Burgmann, op. cit., passim. 50 Docker, op. cit., passim. 51 Henry Lawson, “The Romance of the Swag” [originally published 1902], in Prose Works of Henry Lawson, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1979, p. 476. 52 Scates, op. cit., p. 42. 53 ibid., pp. 39–40. 54 ibid., pp. 51ff. 55 ibid., p. 54. 56 ibid., p. 68. See “To Democratic Writers, Union Secretaries, and Others”, The Tocsin, Melbourne, 2 October 1897, p. 6: “Democrats are … cordially invited to help the men who are already writing for the Tocsin, as workers in the struggle to obtain a proper recognition of the rights of Labour, and to permanently establish an organ to effectually voice them … Everything will help, and no friend need fear an unsympathetic reception.” 57 Scates, op. cit., p. 72, and see p. 114. 58 ibid., p. 15. 59 ibid., p. 69. 60 Joseph Furphy, Rigby’s Romance, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1946 [originally published 1905–1906], and see John Barnes, The Order of Things: A Life of Joseph Furphy, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1990, passim. Furphy’s own reading was stimulated by the books he found in the Shepparton Mechanics’ Institute in the 1880s (Barnes, op. cit., pp. 163–172). 61 Rigby’s Romance, op. cit., p. 137. 62 ibid., p. 71. 63 ibid., p. 196. 64 Miles Franklin, Joseph Furphy, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1944, p. 165. 65 Rigby’s Romance, op. cit., p. 255. 66 Bertram Stevens, “A Library for a Working Man”, The Worker, Sydney, 18 March 1899, p. 6. 67 Catalogue for Mechanics’ Institute, Broken Hill, 1899, at Mitchell Library 017.1/B. 68 There is another list in The Worker, one of many such, on 14 December 1895, p. 2. 69 The Bulletin, Sydney, 5 September 1885, p. 5. 70 The series begins inThe Worker, Sydney, 20 September 1906. 71 ibid. 72 The Worker, Sydney, 25 October 1906, p. 4. 73 Scates, op. cit., p. 72, n 93. 74 Hughes, Crusts and Crusades, op. cit., pp. 68–76.

RUSKIN AND THE AUSTRALIAN LABOUR MOVEMENT 277 75 Christopher Cunneen, William John McKell: Boilermaker, Premier, Governor-General, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2000, p. 30. Prominent conservative political figures had also read Ruskin, including Unto This Last, mostly as young men: one such was Alfred Deakin (1856–1919), three times Prime Minister of Australia in the period 1903–1910. See A G Austin, Australian Education 1788–1900, Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, Melbourne, 1965, p. 261. 76 Martyn Lyons and Lucy Taksa, Australian Readers Remember: An Oral History of Reading 1890–1930, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1992. 77 ibid., p. 146. 78 ibid., p. 124. 79 ibid., p. 109. 80 ibid., p. 112. 81 ibid., ch. 5, passim. 82 ibid., p. 63. 83 ibid., pp. 62–66. 84 E H Lane, Dawn to Dusk: Reminiscences of a Rebel, SHAPE, Brisbane, 1993 [originally published 1939], pp. 29, 309. 85 ibid., p. 311. The British origins of this attitude are discussed in Martha Vicinus, The Industrial Muse, Croom Helm, London, 1974, pp. 96–112, esp. p. 107, and see Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, op. cit., pp. 195–196. 86 Originally published in Dawnward? (1903), but only in some copies, and omitted in later editions. See Hugh Anderson, The Poet Militant: Bernard O’Dowd, Hill of Content, Melbourne, 1969, p. 83. Another Australian poet, John Farrell, wrote sonnets in praise of the American economist Henry George, prophet of the Single Tax movement (Brian Elliott and Adrian Mitchell (eds), Bards in the Wilderness: Australian Colonial Poetry to 1920, Thomas Nelson, Melbourne, 1970, pp. 103, 235–236). 87 The Worker, Sydney, 21 May 1898, p. 8. 88 The Worker, Sydney, 22 April 1899, p. 6. 89 The Worker, Sydney, 10 October 1896, p. 1. 90 The Worker, Sydney, 24 October 1896, p. 1. 91 The Worker, Sydney, 21 May 1898, p. 8. 92 Muir Holburn and Marjorie Pizer (eds), Creeve Roe: Poetry by Victor Daley, Pinchgut Press, Sydney, 1947, pp. 70–71. 93 Anderson, op. cit., p. 51. 94 Bernard O’Dowd, Dawnward?, Thomas Lothian, Melbourne, 1909 [originally published 1903]. 95 All quotations from Henry Lawson, In the Days When the World Was Wide: Poetical Works of Henry Lawson, Lloyd O’Neill, Hawthorn, Vic., 1970 [originally published 1925]. 96 The Worker, Brisbane, 3 February 1900, p. 5. 97 Crown of Wild Olive, lecture IV, “The Future of England”, sec. 143. 98 J T Lang, I Remember, Invincible Press, Sydney, 1956, p. 11. 99 J D Fitzgerald, The Rise of the Australian Labor Party, Sydney, 1915, pp. 16–18, cited in Manning Clark (ed.), Select Documents in Australian History 1851–1900, vol. II, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1979, pp. 563–564. 100 Joseph Furphy, Rigby’s Romance, op. cit., p. 237, and see chapters XXXVII–XXXVIII, passim, for the extended debate on state socialism.

278 Endnotes for Chapter Three 101 John Docker, “Can The Centre Hold? Conceptions of the State 1890–1925”, in Sydney Labour History Group, What Rough Beast? The State and Social Order in Australian History, George Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1982, pp. 57–88, see pp. 65–66. 102 J D Fitzgerald, in Clark, op. cit., p. 563. 103 Gollan, op. cit., p. 84. 104 ibid., pp. 83–84. 105 The Worker, Sydney, 26 February 1898, p. 3. 106 Walter Phillips, Defending “A Christian Country”: Churchmen and Society in New South Wales in the 1880s and After, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, Qld., 1981, p. 155. 107 ibid., p. 149. 108 ibid.; and see J D Bollen, Protestantism and Social Reform in New South Wales 1890–1910, Melbourne University Press, Clayton, Vic., 1972, pp. 156–157, for more on Thomas Roseby. 109 Cook, Life of Ruskin, op. cit., ii, pp. 449–453. 110 ibid., p. 453. 111 Sesame and Lilies, lecture III, “The Mystery of Life and Its Arts”, sec. 140. 112 Henry Lawson, “Shall We Gather by the River?”, in Prose Works of Henry Lawson, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1979, pp. 518–526. 113 Unto This Last, lecture IV, “Ad Valorem”, sec. 85. 114 The Worker, Sydney, 26 February 1898, p. 3. 115 Joseph Furphy, Rigby’s Romance, op. cit., p. 37. 116 John Barnes (ed.), Portable Australian Authors: Joseph Furphy, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, Qld., 1981, p. 398. 117 E H Lane, op. cit., pp. 318–322. 118 The Bulletin, Sydney, 5 September 1885, p. 5: “His health, never robust, has been long declining, and was, Australia has been informed by cablegrams, lately so bad as to excite alarm among his extensive circle of friends and admirers.” And see E W Dobbs, “John Ruskin”, Building and Engineering Journal, 21 September 1889, p. 242, and “Literary Gossip”, Sydney Morning Herald, 30 December 1893, p. 6. This last item reported that “Although in good health, Mr Ruskin is entirely unequal to any mental effort, and is allowed to converse only on subjects which do not agitate his mind.” An item in Society, Sydney, in 1887 explained that “John Ruskin’s madness appears to be of the King Lear type. The author of the Stones of Venice has been a physical wreck ever since his divorce, and his cousin, Mrs Arthur Severn, has watched over him … During his periodical attacks Ruskin’s entire character is altered … The present attack began in April, during Mrs Severn’s absence, and he was so violent that his friends were unable to control him” (12 November 1887, p. 2). 119 P J O’Farrell, Harry Holland: Militant Socialist, ANU Press, Canberra, 1964, p. 89. 120 Crown of Wild Olive, Preface, sec. 16. 121 Sydney Morning Herald, 11 January 1894, p. 6. This section draws on the following sources: Ray Markey, “New Unionism in Australia 1880–1900”, Labour History, no. 48, May 1985, pp. 15–28; Alice Coolican, “Solidarity and Sectionalism in the Sydney Building Trades: The Role of the Building Trades Council 1886–1895”, Labour History, no. 54, May 1988, pp. 16–29, Ray Markey, “New South Wales Trade Unions and the ‘Co-operative Principle’ in the 1890s”, Labour History, no. 49, November 1985, pp. 51–60, Bruce Scates, “‘Millennium or Pandemonium?’: Radicalism in the Labour Movement, Sydney, 1889–1899”, Labour History, no. 50, May 1986, pp. 72–94.

RUSKIN AND THE AUSTRALIAN LABOUR MOVEMENT 279 122 T A Coghlan, The Wealth and Progress of New South Wales 1898–99, Government Printer, Sydney, 1900, pp. 492–494. 123 New South Wales Royal Commission on Strikes, Government Printer, Sydney, 1891 [hereafter RCS], Literary Appendix, pp. 143ff, for list of trades, and see testimony of Thomas Bavister of the Building Trades Council, RCS, Report, Q. 8788. 124 Alice Coolican, op. cit., pp. 22ff, and Ray Markey, In Case of Oppression: The Life and Times of the Labor Council of New South Wales, Pluto Press, Sydney, 1994, p. 17. 125 RCS, Literary Appendix, pp. 143ff. 126 RCS, Report, Henry Wilkinson, Q. 11329, Thomas Bavister, Q. 8785, and see Alice Coolican, passim. 127 RCS, Report, John Grant, Q. 9833, and see Alice Coolican, op. cit., p. 23. 128 Ian Turner and Leonie Sandercock, In Union Is Strength: A History of Trade Unions in Australia 1788–1983, 3rd edn, Thomas Nelson, Melbourne, 1983, p. 24. 129 Federated Operative Masons’ Union of Australia, Sydney Branch, “Objects”, RCS, Literary Appendix, p. 143. 130 Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners, “Objects”, RCS, Literary Appendix, p. 144. 131 United Labourers Protective Society of New South Wales, “Objects”, RCS, Literary Appendix, p. 149. 132 Journeyman Coopers Society of New South Wales, “Objects”, RCS, Literary Appendix, p. 145. 133 J P Thomas, “An Embarrassment of Strikes”, Victorian Review, Melbourne, February 1883, pp. 410–416, and editorial, “The Demon of Dispute”, Building and Engineering Journal, 17 November 1888, p. 432. 134 Richard Price, Masters, Unions and Men: Work Control in Building and the Rise of Labour 1830–1914, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1980, passim. 135 United Operative Bricklayers’ Trade Society of New South Wales, “Objects”, in RCS, Literary Appendix, p. 144. 136 RCS, Report, Thomas Bavister, Q. 8894, Q. 8899, Peter Dow, Q. 9200. 137 J M Freeland, Architecture in Australia: A History, F W Cheshire, Melbourne, 1968, p. 178; T A Coghlan, Labour and Industry in Australia, Macmillan of Australia, Melbourne, 1969 [originally published 1918], vol. IV, pp. 1835ff. 138 Turner and Sandercock, op. cit., passim. 139 Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners, “Objects”, RCS, Literary Appendix, item 7, p. 145. 140 RCS, Report, John Grant, Q. 9820. 141 RCS, Report, Thomas Bavister, Qs 8798, 8842, 8845, 8848. 142 RCS, Report, Thomas Bavister, Qs 8823–8824; “it is perfectly well-known that the apprenticeship system is at an end; youths are not as instructed in their trade as they used to be” (editorial, “Working Men’s College, Melbourne”, Building and Engineering Journal, 11 March 1893, p. 90). 143 RCS, Report, Thomas Bavister, Q. 8803. 144 RCS, Report, Thomas Bavister, Q. 8808. 145 Federated Operative Masons’ Union of Australia, Sydney Branch, RCS, Literary Appendix, p. 144, para. 1. 146 The New South Wales Statistical Register for 1900 gives the following figures for bankrupts: builders and contractors 20, carpenters 13, painters 9, labourers 106, architects 2 (pp. 817–818). 147 RCS, Report, Thomas Bavister, Q. 8801. 148 RCS, Report, Thomas Bavister, Q. 8822. 149 Ray Markey, “New Unionism in Australia 1880–1900”, op. cit., passim.

280 Endnotes for Chapter Three 150 ibid. 151 Raj Jadeja, Parties to the Award, Noel Butlin Archives Centre, Canberram ANU, 1994, ch. 7, chart 7. 152 Third Intercolonial Trade Union Congress, Sydney, 1885, Report, p. 74. 153 Fourth Intercolonial Trade Union Congress, Adelaide, 1886, Report, pp. 42–47. 154 B R Wise, Industrial Freedom: A Study in Politics, Cassell, London, 1892, p. 12. 155 B R Wise, “Industrial Remuneration”, in Third Intercolonial Trade Union Congress, Sydney, 1885, Report, pp. 94–99, see pp. 97, 99. 156 John Horbury Hunt, “Presidential Address to IANSW”, Building and Engineering Journal, 3 September 1892, p. 95. 157 Building and Engineering Journal, 23 November 1889, p. 429. 158 Walter Butler, “The Prospect of the Development of the Arts among the Handicrafts”, Building and Engineering Journal, 15 April 1893, p. 146. 159 Editorial, Building and Engineering Journal, 22 April 1893, p. 148. 160 The outstanding example is Benjamin Backhouse, discussed in Chapter Five, below. By contrast John Koch, president of the RVIA in 1903, wanted the Melbourne Trades Hall to produce “thorough tradesmen, men who take a pride in their work, rather than … political agitators, always ready and eager to fight against capital and good legislation” (Journal of the Proceedings of the Royal Victorian Institute of Architects, May 1903, p. 49). Similarly William Pitt, the Melbourne architect we met in Chapter Two, and now an MP in the Bent administration of Victoria, stated in 1904 that while in sympathy with the cause of labour he did not carry his sympathy past the mark of commonsense or reason; he thought the election of the first Federal Labor government that year was a good thing because it would show labour that “their ideals, however laudable, cannot be carried into effect in this essentially practical age” (Michael Cannon (ed.), Victoria’s Representative Men at Home, Today’s Heritage, Melbourne, 1977 [originally published 1904], p. 88). George Allen Mansfield, one of the leaders of the Sydney architectural profession in 1893, praised building workers for the “intelligent and faithful discharge of their duties” but added “I also know with a certainty that admits of no doubt how absolutely necessary it is that [they] should have the guidance and correction of a properly-trained architect” (quoted in “Letter From Australia”, American Architect and Building News, 16 September 1893, p. 169). And the architect John Barlow, while a devoted reader of Ruskin, denounced a strike of masons in Sydney in 1893 as “absolutely idiotic” and an excellent example of the “innate stupidity of tradesmen taken collectively” (Barlow, “Letter From Australia”, American Architect and Building News, 16 September 1893, p. 166). 161 Walter Butler, op. cit., 15 April 1893, p. 146. 162 Samuel Hurst Seager, “The Future of Architects and Their Art”, Building and Engineering Journal, 16 April 1892, pp. 156–158, see p. 158. 163 John Horbury Hunt, Building and Engineering Journal, 3 September 1892, p. 95. 164 See Royal Commission on Labour, Fifth and Final Report, Part I, HMSO, London, 1894, pp. 25–31, and R W Postgate, The Builders’ History, National Federation of Building Trade Operatives, London, 1923, ch. 13, passim. 165 “Farewell dinner”, Vernon Papers, Mitchell Library, ML MSS 6571, Box 9, Album 7A, p. 4. 166 The Worker, Sydney, 21, 28 January 1899. 167 RCS, Report, Henry Wilkinson, Q. 11281. 168 RCS, Report, Henry Wilkinson, Qs 11281, 11291. 169 RCS, Report, William Gillespie, Q. 10592. 170 RCS, Report, William Gillespie, Q. 10626.

RUSKIN AND THE AUSTRALIAN LABOUR MOVEMENT 281 171 RCS, Report, William Gillespie, Qs 10605–10610. 172 RCS, Report, William Gillespie, Qs 10600–10602. 173 RCS, Report, John Grant, Q. 9800. 174 RCS, Report, John Grant, Q. 9800, p. 375, point 5. 175 RCS, Report, John Grant, Q. 9801. 176 RCS, Report, John Grant, Q. 9852. 177 Percy Hockings, “Architectural Sculpture”, ANZAAS Report for 1895, pp. 745–753, see p. 752. 178 Building and Engineering Journal, 16 November 1889, pp. 425–426; and Walter Butler, op. cit.: “There is little hope left to one that there will be any great change in the appearance of popular art until free exercise can be allowed to the natural inventive faculty of the handicraftsman” (Building and Engineering Journal, 15 April 1893, p. 146). 179 NSW Legislative Assembly, Votes and Proceedings, 1904, Prince Alfred Hospital: Report of the Public Service Board in Regard to the Inquiry Held into the Causes of the Alleged Excessive Cost of the Erection of the New Pavilions, Under the Day-Labour System [hereafter PAHR], pp. 653–765. 180 PAHR p. 682. 181 For more on O’Sullivan, see Bruce Mansfield,Australian Democrat, op. cit. 182 PAHR, p. 681. 183 PAHR, p. 682. 184 PAHR, p. 708. 185 PAHR, p. 696. 186 PAHR, pp. 698–699. 187 PAHR, p. 708. 188 PAHR, p. 709. 189 PAHR, p. 709. 190 PAHR, p. 705. 191 E H Lane, op. cit., p. 140. 192 Paul Lafargue, The Right to Be Lazy, Charles H Kerr, Chicago, 1975 [original English publication 1883]. 193 ibid., p. 56. 194 ibid., p. 95. 195 Francis Adams, “To John Ruskin”, in Songs of the Army of the Night, William Reeves, London, 1894, n.p. 196 Time and Tide, letter XXV, “Hyssop”. 197 ibid., sec. 169, and compare Crown of Wild Olive, sec. 136. 198 Burgmann, op. cit., p. 195. 199 V G Childe, How Labour Governs: A Study of Workers’ Representation in Australia, 2nd edn, Melbourne University Press, Parkville, Vic., 1964 [originally published 1923], pp. 104–107, and Frank Farrell, International Socialism and Australian Labour: The Left in Australia, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1981, pp. 10ff. 200 A R Sennett, Garden Cities in Theory and Practice, Bemrose, London, 1905, vol. II, p. 784. 201 ibid., p. 785. 202 ibid., p. 788. 203 RCS, Report, John Grant, Q. 9800, p. 375. 204 Leon, Ruskin the Great Victorian, op. cit., p. 229.

282 Endnotes for Chapter Three 205 Elie Halevy, A History of the English People, Epilogue, II, 1905–1910, Ernest Benn, London, 1934, pp. 84–88. 206 ibid., p. 87. 207 W P Earsman, The Proletariat and Education: The Necessity for Labor Colleges, Andrade, Melbourne, 1920, p. 2. 208 A T Brodney, “The Aims and Early History of the Victorian Labor College”, inVictorian Labor College Jubilee 1917–1967, VLC, Melbourne, 1967, pp. 1–17, see p. 5. 209 Trades and Industrial Hall and Literary Institute Association of Sydney Ltd Catalogue, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1914. 210 Earsman, op. cit., pp. 7–8. 211 ibid., p. 13. 212 Scates, op. cit., p. 72, n. 93, and see “Marx and George: Their Theories Contrasted”,The Worker, Sydney, 7 January 1905, p. 7. 213 Lafargue, op. cit., p. 62. The Labor journalist and politician George Black wrote in 1893 that “Master and man, the machines are mastering us. Piston, lever, wheel, crank and boiler, are pressing us daily to the edge of an abyss whose name is Chaos!” But under socialism this will change: “When the machines, like the land, are common property, then men will have the unbridled ownership of their own bodies.” This will bring about the true reconciliation of capital and labour, a good thing because “It is surely time to end this continual class war [which] can only be ended by making interests now antagonistic thoroughly sympathetic” (George Black, “Are the Machines to be Masters?”, Australian Socialist League pamphlet, 1893, pp. 5, 12). 214 Albert Metin, Socialism Without Doctrine, trans. Russell Ward, Alternative Publishing Coop Ltd., Chippendale NSW, 1977, p. 188. 215 ibid., p. 180. 216 ibid. 217 Town and Country Journal, Sydney, 27 January 1900. 218 Barrier Miner, Broken Hill, 27 January 1900. 219 Edgar Ross, These Things Shall Be! Bob Ross, Socialist Pioneer – His Life and Times, Mulavon Publishing, West Ryde NSW, 1988, p. 21. 220 E S Armstrong, “John Ruskin LLD Considered as a Political Economist”, Sydney Quarterly Magazine, December 1889, pp. 317–331, see p. 331. An American writer later offered another explanation for the regard Ruskin was held in by socialists around the world: Ruskin combined Marx’s favourite virtue in a hero, single-heartedness, and his most pardonable failing, gullibility (James Fuchs (ed.), Ruskin’s Views of Social Justice, Vanguard Press, New York, 1926, p. 21, and see “Introducing John Ruskin the Economist”, ibid., pp. 3–23).

RUSKIN AND THE AUSTRALIAN LABOUR MOVEMENT 283

CHAPTER FOUR RUSKIN AND THE AUSTRALIAN FEMINIST MOVEMENT

A. INTRODUCTION

Because I never disobeyed my mother, I have honoured all women with solemn worship. Ruskin, Fors Clavigera XLI, April 1874

Every question which deals with human happiness deals with the home, for the home reflects the condition of society, the state, the nation, the world. 1 Mary Walden, Socialism and the Home, 1901

Because women were central to the reform movements of the nineteenth century, and because of the status of Sesame and Lilies as Ruskin’s most popular book, this chapter considers the use Australian women made of Ruskin’s work. I show that thoughtful women, both conservative and radical, read Ruskin and regarded him as a friend, despite or because of his views on women, and I describe the various strategies they adopted in making use of his work to further their aims. I begin with an extended review of Ruskin’s views on women, contrasted with their views of him, and as they were manifested in the dominant issues of Ruskin’s late career, art and politics. Reform and respectability were intertwined themes for middle class women in Australia in this period, as they were in Britain, and they helped define the feminist agenda, as well as setting its limits. I show here that while Ruskin was no supporter of female emancipation, his championship of truth and beauty, his love of art, and his very chivalrous ideas of womanhood, won him many loyal female readers in the Antipodes. In the last part of this chapter I bring these themes together in a discussion of the ideal of “home”, sacred to Victorians and Ruskin alike. While taken for granted by almost everyone, this centre of respectability was challenged by many progressive thinkers, both socialist and feminist, and I show how this challenge fared in Australia as well.

RUSKIN AND THE AUSTRALIAN FEMINIST MOVEMENT 285 Ruskin’s death was not marked by obituaries in any of the Australian journals devoted to the advancement of women – The Dawn, The Woman’s Voice, The Woman’s Sphere, or the Woman’s Suffrage Journal. That feminist opinion should at first glance appear to ignore him is not surprising; Ruskin was an ambivalent friend of woman, exalting her but restricting her to home and family, resolutely opposed to her making her way in the world. Sesame and Lilies was a standard school prize for girls for decades after its publication in 1865, with its message that girls should be queens of the home, and it was no accident that it was frequently quoted by opponents of the female franchise in parliamentary debates in New South Wales and Victoria, or that one or two of his sillier opinions on women appeared as salutary reminders in the Women’s Suffrage Journal. Ruskin was certainly read by women in late nineteenth century Australia; his work was discussed in depth by Catherine Martin in the Victorian Review (1884) and by Mrs Richard Armstrong in the Sydney Quarterly (1889). Ethel Turner in The Parthenon (1892) included Sesame and Lilies in her suggestions for “A girl’s library”, and their journals show that Ruskin was discussed by the Women’s Literary Society and the Australian Home Reading Union (1892–1895). His books are seen on Rose Scott’s shelves in 1899, alongside Ibsen, Tolstoy and many more.2 What did these readers think about what they read? In the middle of the post gold rush boom, Catherine Martin states firmly that “a woman who has not read “Of Queens’ Gardens” has missed the truest and the wisest words spoken to or of her sex in this generation – indeed in any generation”.3 A few years later Mrs Richard Armstrong is more judicious, extolling Ruskin’s art criticism but expressing reservations about his economic theories. Ruskin’s style however is beyond praise: “he burns as ice burns. The very truth and force of his feeling makes him merciless in asserting it”.4 By 1892 Mrs Montefiore, recording secretary of the Womanhood Suffrage League, is meditating on a passage in Sesame and Lilies:

Women have been so long used to consider that their only sphere of influence, and therefore of responsibility, lay within the narrow circle of homelife that it is almost with a start of incredulous and indignant surprise they hear Ruskin’s words fall on their ears: “There is no suffering, no misery, no injustice in the world but the guilt of it lies with you. Men can bear the sight of it, but you should not be able to bear it.”

286 Introduction What this means is:

If we once wake up to the truth of this we shall all wish to take upon ourselves that burden of responsibility which citizenship throws on us; we shall wish to step out of the category in which women are now politically ranked [women, infants, convicts, lunatics, idiots] … We shall wish to have a voice in legislating on those questions in which the lives and liberties of our fellow men and women are concerned, and in altering those laws which often press so much more heavily on women, the weaker, than on men, the stronger.5

But by the time the issue came to a vote, in New South Wales in 1900, the opposition also turned to Ruskin, as Rose Scott reported:

In consequence of the conduct of Mr Spruson, who was reading page after page of Ruskin, Mr Ashton moved that the Hon. Member be no longer heard – but this motion was defeated by a majority of 29 – and Mr Spruson continued till he tired out even himself.6

Similarly a speaker in the Victorian Legislative Council quoted Ruskin extensively to the same end in 1908.7 This suggests that Ruskin is now clearly positioned as the enemy – someone to overcome, an advocate for the other side, determined to keep women in their place. Nonetheless I believe a fuller reading of his work can yield a richer and more complex picture; accordingly I next examine Ruskin’s views on women in more detail before returning to see how those were received in the Australia of the 1880s and 1890s.

RUSKIN AND THE AUSTRALIAN FEMINIST MOVEMENT 287 B. RUSKIN ON WOMEN

Sesame and Lilies (1865) is Ruskin’s most famous book, and its second essay, “Of Queens’ Gardens”, has come to have an afterlife as the quintessential Victorian statement on womanhood and femininity, and the obligatory starting point for twentieth century feminists in deconstructing the patriarchy. This is partly the result of historical foreshortening: “Of Queens’ Gardens” was not the only statement on the rights and duties of women (the era is thick with them, by both male and female writers); and it was not the most oppressive (there is a strong field of other contenders). In fact one of the reasons it was so popular with women at the time was its exalted view of them based on Ruskin’s extremely romantic and chivalrous ideas. Walter Houghton locates the book in a mysterious bout of “women worship” in the England of the 1860s and 1870s that included writers such as Coventry Patmore, Tennyson and Charles Kingsley.8 But if Sesame and Lilies, especially “Of Queens’ Gardens”, is not unique or even uniquely repressive, it has endured because of Ruskin’s eloquence: it remains the fullest and most brilliantly written exposition in prose of Victorian ideas on women, rivalled in popularity and durability only by two poems, Coventry Patmore’s The Angel in the House and Tennyson’s The Princess. What does Ruskin actually say in “Of Queens’ Gardens”? Ruskin begins by disputing that the rights of women could ever be separate from the rights of man, and continues:

And not less wrong … is the idea that woman is only the shadow and attendant image of her lord, owing him a thoughtless and servile obedience and supported altogether in her weakness by the pre-eminence of his fortitude. As if he could 9 be helped effectively by the shadow, or worthily by a slave!

Men and women are different but complementary:

We are foolish, and without excuse foolish, in speaking of the “superiority” of one sex to the other, as if they could be compared in similar things. Each has what the other has not: each completes the other, and is completed by the other.10

The separate characters of men and women are forcefully put:

[Man’s] power is active, progressive, defensive. He is eminently the doer, the creator, the discoverer, the defender … [W]oman’s power is for rule, not for battle, – and her intellect is not for invention or creation, but for sweet ordering, arrangement and decision.11

288 Ruskin on Women Thus boys and girls should have complementary educations: “Not only in the material and in the course, but yet more earnestly in the spirit of it, let a girl’s education be as serious as a boy’s … Give them the same advantages that you give their brothers” and Ruskin denounces the social customs regarding girls as “one rotten plague of cowardice and imposture”.12 What of their duties to society? The man’s duty is to assist in the defence of the state, the woman’s in its ordering, comforting and adornment: “What the woman is to be within her gates, as the centre of order, the balm of distress, and the mirror of beauty: that she is also to be without her gates, where order is more difficult, distress

13 more imminent, loveliness more rare.” Women, like men, have instincts for love and power: but in their case it is the power “to heal, to redeem, to guide, and to guard”, and Ruskin asks his female listeners “will you not covet such power as this … and be no more housewives, but queens?” … “queens to your lovers, queens to your husbands and your sons” bearing the “stainless sceptre of womanhood”.14 This is a power, if women would wield it, “purer than the air of heaven, and stronger than the seas of earth”, and Ruskin professes himself amazed to see a woman “abdicate this majesty to play at precedence

15 with her next-door neighbour!”

16 This is indeed an ultra-romantic view of women, “crackbrained chivalry” to some modern eyes, but touching all the same: Ruskin really meant it.

In all Christian ages which have been remarkable for their purity or progress, there has been absolute yielding of obedient devotion, by the lover, to his mistress … receiving from the beloved woman, however young, not only the encouragement, the praise, and the reward of all toil, but … the direction of all toil … in this rapturous obedience to the single love of his youth, is the sanctification of all men’s strength, and the continuance of all his purposes.17

This is Ruskin’s definition of chivalry, and to abuse or dishonour it is attributable “whatever is cruel in war, unjust in peace, or corruption and ignoble in domestic relations”. Ruskin goes on to elaborate his ideas about the proper role of women in two further books in the next four years – The Ethics of the Dust (1865), cast as lectures to girls on mineralogy but really dealing with personal conduct, and The Queen of the Air (1869), a study of Greek myths, especially that of Athena.

RUSKIN AND THE AUSTRALIAN FEMINIST MOVEMENT 289 The Ethics of the Dust is one of Ruskin’s oddest books, and though Carlyle liked it, the public did not, and it immediately went out of print. While conceding that “the substance of his teaching is comparatively excellent” the Saturday Review complained that the form in which it was expressed was “whimsical and incongruous and silly beyond all measure”.18 Certainly the ten “lectures to little housewives on the elements of crystallization” make even stranger reading today. However in The Queen of the Air, a favourite book of Ruskin’s,19 he has this to say about the feminine virtue of modesty, “the measuring virtue”.20 Modesty is the goddess of limits, who knows her place, ordained by natural law:

seeking first what are the solemn, appointed, inviolable custom and general orders of nature … out of which habit, once established, arises what is rightly called “conscience” … such as only modest creatures can have.21

Modesty is opposed to the goddess of Liberty, who delights in “the absence of measures, or in false ones … that evil liberty, which men are now glorifying, and proclaiming as essence of gospel to all the earth”.22 Though Ruskin is talking about art, the application of these ideas to society quickly takes over: “Folly unfathomable! Unspeakable!”

I have hardly patience to hold my pen and go on writing, as I remember … the infinite follies of modern thought in this matter, centred on the notion that liberty is good for a man, irrespective of the use he is likely to make of it … 23 The first point we have all to determine is not how free we are, but what kind of creatures we are. It is of small import to any of us whether we get liberty; but it is of the greatest that we deserve it. Whether we can win it, fate must determine; but that we will be worthy of it, we may ourselves determine; and the sorrowfullest fate, of all that we can suffer, is to have it without deserving it.24

This suggests Ruskin is no friend of emancipation, of men or women (perhaps especially of women), but he did not retract the ideas on women first articulated in “Of Queens’ Gardens”. In the preface to the 1882 edition he warns the reader that the book is “wholly of the old school”; that it “takes for granted the persistence of Queenship; and therefore of Kingship, and therefore of Courtliness and Courtesy, and therefore of Uncourtliness or Rusticity”: and “it assumes, with the ideas of higher and lower rank, those of serene

290 Ruskin on Women authority and happy submission; of Riches and Poverty without dispute for their rights, and of Virtue and Vice without confusion of their natures”.25 These are eternal “conditions and existences” unlike the surrounding social ferment, “the mere whirr and dust-cloud of a dissolutely reforming and vulgarly manufacturing age”.26 Tracing Ruskin’s ideas after 1865 and Sesame and Lilies, we find that his attitude on the Woman Question begins to harden, prompted by John Stuart Mill and The Subjection of Women (1869) in particular. Mill is an old adversary, dating from 1848 and The Principles of Political Economy. Now Mill is dismissed as “that poor cretinous wretch” who was endeavouring “to open other ‘careers’ to English women than that of the Wife and the Mother”.27 In the Fors Clavigera letters Ruskin returns to this theme many times, and with increasing vehemence. This starts early, in Fors V, May 1871:

Not only do you declare yourselves too indolent to labour for daughters and wives, and too poor to support them; but you have made the neglected and distracted creatures hold it for an honour to be independent of you, and shriek for some hold of the mattock for themselves … there has not been so low a level of thought reached by any race, since they grew to be made male and female out of star-fish, or chickweed, or whatever else they have been made from … according to modern science.28

In Fors XXIV, December 1872, Ruskin repeats a story of how poor women in manufacturing districts give their babies opium so that they can go out to work. In Fors XXIX, May 1873, he comments on an article in the Pall Mall Gazette about hundreds of respectable middle class women degrading themselves competing for a job at the post office. And in Fors LXXXVII, March 1878, he tells a particularly terrible story, “one of thousands such”, about a mother abandoning her infant child in the snow. This incident gives the letter its title, The Snow Manger, and it evidently made a lasting impression on Ruskin, who mentions it again in Fors XCIII, Christmas 1883: “There is a Christmas card, with a picture of English ‘nativity’ for you”.

We shall, perhaps, require cradle songs with very few words, and Christmas carols with very sad ones, before long; in fact, it seems to me, we are fast losing our old skills in carolling … But the Christmas winds must blow rudely, and warp the waters askance indeed, which rock our English cradles now.

RUSKIN AND THE AUSTRALIAN FEMINIST MOVEMENT 291 Ruskin resolutely blamed “the modern Liberal politico-economist of the Stuart Mill school”29 for this and takes issue with Mill that women should have a choice of career outside marriage and motherhood. The story about working mothers giving their children opium crystallises Ruskin’s indignation that there were “more lucrative occupations than nursing the baby”.30 And he leaves us in no doubt of his opinion with this passage from Fors XXXIII, September 1873:

Whereupon, you are to note this, that the end of all right education for a woman is to make her love her home better than any other place; that she should as seldom leave it as a queen her queendom; nor ever feel entirely at rest but within its threshold.

292 Ruskin on Women C. WOMEN ON RUSKIN

How was Ruskin regarded by women in return? Some women did not like him – Lady Eastlake in particular, whom Ruskin had alienated by criticizing her husband Sir Charles, then president of the Royal Academy; and Queen Victoria herself, whom Ruskin had annoyed by his criticism of Prince Albert and the Great Exhibition; but these were personal slights, though this didn’t stop Lady Eastlake intriguing against Ruskin. Among the opinion makers of the day, the journalist Margaret Oliphant, writing for Blackwood’s, thought little of Ruskin’s ideas on any topic. Oliphant wrote to its proprietor in 1868, ridiculing Ruskin’s proposal to have his friends review his work: “the letter itself would throw you into fits of laughter … sublime”.31 And she wrote to Lady Eastlake that she had attended one of Ruskin’s lectures to hear Ruskin “havering in his celestial way”.32 In a lengthy review of Time and Tide Oliphant is withering: “our readers will probably ask with amaze [sic] how it is possible to regard with any sort of gravity this system of impossible economy, and whether anything but inextinguishable laughter is fit criticism for such a scheme”.33 Given all of the above, it is surprising to find that women have generally held a very positive view of Ruskin from the beginning. The first volume of Modern Painters (1843) was admired by such distinguished women as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Charlotte Bronte, Mrs Gaskell, Sara Coleridge and George Eliot. Elizabeth Barrett Browning said of it:

Very vivid, very graphic, full of sensibility, but inconsequent in some of the reasoning … rather flashing than full in the metaphysics … still, he is no ordinary man, and for a critic to be so much of a poet is a great thing.34

And George Eliot wrote:

I venerate him as one of the great teachers of the day. The grand doctrines of truth and sincerity in art, and the nobleness and solemnity of our human life, which he teaches with the inspiration of a Hebrew prophet, must be stirring up young minds in a promising way.35

Anne Ritchie, Thackeray’s daughter, who met Ruskin many times, approved of Sesame and Lilies – “most deservedly so, a favourite book with the public”.36 For her, “if ever a man lent out his mind to help others, Ruskin is the man. From country to country, from age to age, from element to element, he leads the way”.37 Julia Wedgwood, the prominent

RUSKIN AND THE AUSTRALIAN FEMINIST MOVEMENT 293 journalist and early feminist, compared him to Wordsworth: “both writers bring home to the mind of the reader that he who sees only outward things sees these incompletely”.38 She also had met Ruskin and described him as “a fountain of actual, living influence”, “forthcoming, truthful, human”.39 And she concluded that Ruskin seemed to her to sum up “all that was best in spiritual democracy”.40 Grace Rhys wrote in her introduction to a reissue of The Ethics of the Dust that Ruskin was “a modern Socrates, with maidens for

41 disciples” while “Of Queens’ Gardens” was a “passionate pleading for an exalted ideal of womanhood”.42 The poet Alice Meynell is one of the most insightful writers, male or female, about Ruskin and she felt no hesitation in describing him after his death as “one of the greatest

43 44 of great men of all ages” and “the most original man of his century”. Of The Stones of

Venice she says that its conclusion is “an appeal not to despair, but to the hope of the race” 45 and points to the emancipatory aspect of Ruskin’s work, speaking of “the rapid judgment to which Ruskin intends … to train the reader … or rather for which he intends to set the reader free”.46 [emphasis added] The value of Ruskin’s thinking on so many subjects was recognised early on, and the first digests from his work began to appear in the 1860s, several of them made by women. The American feminist Louisa Tuthill edited Precious Thoughts: Moral and Religious, Gathered from the Works of John Ruskin (second edition 1869) and followed it with Pearls for Young Ladies: from the later work of John Ruskin (1878), while the governess of Whitelands College, Kate Stanley, edited Ruskin’s Thoughts About Women in 1892. The Gibbs sisters, Mary and Ellen, produced an anthology ofThe Bible References of John Ruskin in 1898, described by Ruskin’s biographer Tim Hilton as a book of high literary quality and searching piety.47

294 Women on Ruskin D. ART AND POLITICS

This paradox is worth investigating further, and the reader will pardon me if I stop to consider Ruskin’s views on women in more detail, as they are reflected in his principal concerns, art and politics.

1. ART I have always said that no woman could paint. 48 Ruskin, 1875

Germaine Greer considers Ruskin the most influential art critic of Victorian England, and that the art establishment was made in his image. The problem for her was that Ruskin’s opinion of women artists was essentially tokenistic, Ruskin praising some women inordinately while ignoring others.49 Tokenism was a particularly destructive attitude, for poets as well as artists, because promotion on any other ground than merit tended to stifle ambition.50 On a closer examination of Ruskin’s work, how far was this true? Scattered references in Ruskin’s work on women and art do not reflect the very considerable time Ruskin spent teaching women about art (and life), or the many female pupils he took over his lifetime. To one such, Anna Blunden, he wrote in 1857:

That is the worst of you women – you are always working to your feelings and never to plain firm purpose. If you cannot draw for drawing’s sake, and wouldn’t draw if you were alone in the world, you will never draw.51

And a month later, to the same correspondent:

As far as I know lady painters they always let their feelings run away with them, and get to painting angels and mourners when they should be painting brickbats and stones.52

Despite his conception of women as queens, being female, and aristocratic, was no help to such women who aspired to paint: of the Marchioness of Waterford, another of his pupils, Ruskin wrote that she was “an excellent artist, who would have been really great … if she had not been born such a swell and such a stunner”.53

RUSKIN AND THE AUSTRALIAN FEMINIST MOVEMENT 295 Ruskin reluctantly attended the exhibitions of the Society of Female Artists (founded 1857) but did not like them: he reported “all sorts of fidgeting feeling about how to say disagreeable things pleasantly”.54 He mentions only a few of the women who exhibited at

55 56 the Royal Academy, ignores Louisa Starr, who won the Gold Medal for Painting in 1867 and had little time even for such established and popular artists as Rosa Bonheur, who “could not draw horses”, her favourite subject.57 He did however like Elizabeth Thompson, Lady Butler, who painted stirring battle scenes.58 In Modern Painters V, Ruskin attacks the landscape painter Claude Lorrain (1600–1682), using language comparable to the Saturday Review at its misogynist worst: Claude’s work shows “effeminate softness”, a “weak dislike of toil [and] suffering”; there is “feminine charm” but “nothing energetic or terrible”; he is a painter of “tame waves and tame skies”, “decorative, conventional”.59 It is not a leap of imagination to hear Ruskin talking about the work of the female artists of his day when he denounces Claude’s work as “drawing room ornaments”, with “small sterling qualities”; like fine pieces of china, they were “agreeable curiosities” of which “the price depends on the rarity rather than the merit, yet always on a merit of a certain low kind”.60 Women were sentimental, and gave way to feeling too easily, but a painter needed to be as cool as a general, or a surgeon:

Nothing good can be done without intense feeling; but it must be feeling so crushed, that the work is set about with mechanical steadfastness, absolutely untroubled … not without pity, but conquering it and putting it aside.61

These very qualities of feeling and affection, esteemed as feminine by Victorians and by Ruskin himself, were the problem: Germaine Greer quotes Ruskin on another (male) artist in this regard: “had you been a little less gently made you would have been a great painter”.62 Ruskin had his blind spots but was essentially fair-minded: to one of the many women who sought his opinion as one of the leading art critics of the day, Ruskin wrote “you must resolve to be quite a great paintress, the feminine termination does not exist, there never having been such a being as yet as a lady who could paint. Try and be the first”.63 Seen against this background, Ruskin does not seem so bad: certainly compared to such contemporary luminaries of the Victorian art world as Sir Hubert Herkomer, who hated women and delighted in humiliating his female pupils; or the critic Philip Hamerton, later

296 Art and Politics 64 editor of The Portfolio, who wrote that “art is a masculine business” and believed that “the total lack of accuracy in their mental habits … is still for the immense majority of women, the least easily surmountable impediment to culture”.65 Bemoaning the “remarkable incapacity for independent mental labour” on the part of women, Hamerton saw this accompanied by an “equally remarkable capacity for labour under an accepted masculine guidance”,66 concluding “it is not by adding to our knowledge, but by understanding us, that women are our helpers”.67

And even if it were possible, which it is not, to point to some female Archimedes or Leonardo da Vinci, it is not the rare exceptions which concern us, but the prevalent rule of nature … [A]s women having beards are a physical exception, so women who naturally study and investigate are intellectual exceptions.68

And compare Ruskin to the anonymous critic of The Athenaeum writing about the first exhibition of the Society of Female Artists in 1857: “We only hope this Exhibition is no result of those ridiculous, wrong-headed pretensions which have led in America to almost a war of sexes”.69 The exhibition itself was “a chaos of nothing”:

Vegetables, cottage homes, fortune-tellers, and such small deer, not to mention many thousand babies in all stages of growth, form the chief attraction … The men have glossy hair, and bodies that set anatomical laws at a glorious and superb defiance … the landscapes have a worsted-work character, and every officer simpers.70

Reviews of the Society’s exhibitions, when not satirical, like those in Punch, were a mixture of the charitable and condescending; as the years go by the reviews become more realistic, then more sporadic, before stopping altogether. The problem for male critics was that female art was, in the words of The Athenaeum, “essentially unimaginative, restricted, patient, dealing chiefly with Blenheim spaniels, Castles of Chillon, roses, first-borns, Zillahs, camellias, ball-dresses, copies and miniatures … it can never reach the robust or the exalted”.71 The Art Journal considered the results of thirty years of experiment in 1887:

The difference of sex, of training, of sentiment, of habits of life, should produce the general effect of difference of nations, if the Art spirit were truly and widely diffused among women. That is to say, we should expect to see a different ideal reigning amongst the stronger members and tinging the works of the weaker

RUSKIN AND THE AUSTRALIAN FEMINIST MOVEMENT 297 and more imitative sisters. We see nothing of the sort, however. [Instead] we see the conceptions of all sorts of men worked out with a somewhat less subtle sense of communication, between the idea and the technical means. A certain man, let us say, paints broadly, his lady follower paints brutally; another with delicate subtlety, and his imitator falls into empty feebleness. It is as if they comprehended something of the nature these men see, something of how, and with what sentiment, they see it; but of the meaning and quality of their style absolutely nothing.72

Nothing I have found in Ruskin compares to this. He was conservative, even reactionary, but not dismissive. What he didn’t like was what he saw as women’s obsession with frivolous and useless art.73 Taxed with being a partial critic in 1858, he wrote that it was a matter only of time: “I trust that I shall not often overlook any truly great and consummate picture; but it is better to lose sight of ten than to pass false judgment on one”. He regretted his silences, not his words.74

2. POLITICS

I suppose you have been reading some of the stuff of those American wretches – about [the] rights of women. 75 Ruskin, letter to Anna Blunden, 1858

So far from wishing to give votes to women, I would fain take them away from most men. 76 Ruskin, letter to an unknown correspondent, 1870

Whatever his private opinion on feminism and feminists, Ruskin does not debate them publicly until Fors Clavigera (from 1871). None of his earlier work mentions contemporary feminist writers, of whom there were many; and even in Fors specific writers and texts are not attacked, with the exception as we have seen of John Stuart Mill. Ruskin contents himself with ex cathedra pronouncements: as he grows older, and his love affair with Rose La Touche comes to its tragic end, his opinions about women harden. In Fors XLIX, he says it is the patriotic duty of every married couple to have as large a family as possible, and in Fors LXVI his advice to girls is to be doubly submissive, to see

298 Art and Politics themselves as “a little housemaid set to keep Christ’s books and room in order, to dress plainly, to make clothes for the poor, never seek amusement, and to seek to become a true Christian lady”. Ruskin puts his opinion beyond all doubt in 1873 in a letter to the editor of a feminist journal in Geneva:

I cannot find expression strong enough for the hatred and contempt I feel for the modern idea that a woman should cease to be mother, daughter, or woman so that she may become a shop assistant or an engineer. The duty of a man is to support his wife and children, that of a woman to make him happy in his home, and to bring up his children wisely. No woman is capable of more than that. No man should do less.77

Although this was a private letter, his female readers could have guessed as much from his earlier statements discussed above. Given all of this, how did feminist readers in England deal with “the problem of Ruskin” in his lifetime? “Drawing room Amazons” were still regarded as an exception in Victorian society, amusing or alarming as may be, but they were as likely to be anti-feminist as pro. Eliza Lynn Linton was not alone in denouncing “platform women”; no slouch herself at polemic, she was one of many other women who firmly resisted moves to emancipate their sisters. Mrs Humphrey Ward, the novelist, organised a petition signed by more than one hundred of the most accomplished women in England against women’s suffrage. The list included Mrs T H Huxley, Mrs Leslie Stephen, Mrs Matthew Arnold, Mrs Walter Bagehot, Mrs Arnold Toynbee, Beatrice Potter Webb, Mrs Frederic Harrison, Mrs Max Muller, Mrs Buckle, Mrs James Knowles, Mrs Alma-Tadema, Mrs Poynter, Mrs T H Green, Mrs J R Green, and Mrs Asquith – a roll call of the wives of the intellectual, artistic and political elite.78 Even those who sought repeals of unjust laws in marriage or divorce still believed, as the journalist Frances Power Cobbe did, that woman’s place was in the home. Progressive English women seem to have dealt with the problem of Ruskin’s opinions on women by quietly ignoring them; Jane Carlyle, not herself a feminist, said nothing about Sesame and Lilies; nor, as far as I am able to discover, did any other prominent woman who supported female suffrage take Ruskin on publicly on this point.79 The reason they did, I argue here, is that what Ruskin offered all reformers trumped all objections: his implacable

RUSKIN AND THE AUSTRALIAN FEMINIST MOVEMENT 299 hatred of cant that Carlyle so admired,80 and his sustained attack on all forms of injustice and exploitation. This is Ruskin at his furious best, denouncing hypocrisy in public life in 1883:

Whatever men did before now, of fearful or fatal, they did openly … But your nineteenth century prince of shams and shambles, sells for his own behoof the blood and ashes, preaches with his steam-throat, the gospel of gain from ruin, as the true and only Divine, and fills at the same instant the air with his darkness, the earth with his cruelty, the waters with his filth, and the hearts of men with his lies.81

With such a formidable defender of truth and justice it was better to ignore the bad and celebrate the good – and Ruskin was not, by a very long way, one of the bad; that dubious honour is shared by some of the most eminent thinkers of Victorian England, like Gladstone, the Prime Minister, John Bright, one of the outstanding parliamentarians of his day, Charles Darwin, who thought that women were unevolved men, or the many medical men who used physiology to justify women’s inferior social position. The sociologist Herbert Spencer conceded the oppression of women but insisted on an extreme individualism in his social theories that could only disadvantage them. Even Karl Marx, while denouncing this oppression, balked at supporting feminism, seeing it as divisive of the socialist movement. Conservative Ruskin may have been, but he was no misogynist, and he did not share the Saturday Review’s view that “a learned, or even an over-accomplished young woman, is one of the most intolerable monsters in creation”.82 Feminists of a later day would come back to Ruskin to demolish, once and for all, the idea of separate spheres for men and women, but in his lifetime most intelligent Englishwomen regarded him as a friend, praising his “lofty ideals, untiring industry, and disinterested devotion to his fellow-men”.83 Julia Wedgwood, who knew Ruskin personally, wrote that he seemed “to gather up all that was best in spiritual democracy” and was someone who “longed to spread the truly human life”.84 The closest she comes to criticizing him is this passage:

When Ruskin speaks of Nature and Art, he seems to me inspired. When he turns to finance, to politics, to the social arrangements and legislative enactments of mankind, I can recognize neither sober judgment, nor profound conviction. Every one must regret such an incapacity.85

300 Art and Politics The poet Alice Meynell, who had also known Ruskin, thought he was the child of his parents in his prejudices, of theology, literature and ethics,86 but though a “son of the home” he was also “a most enterprising traveller of the mind, all at once”.87 She praised his “towering sincerity … a thousand times convinced, convinced as a child, but with a great man’s capacity for conviction”.88 In her preface to a new edition of The Seven Lamps of Architecture she wrote that “Ruskin himself, amongst others, has so improved, quickened, and exercised the modern mind that we need less instruction, less urging, and less exposition than did they for whom the book was first written”.89 He was “a commander if ever there was one in our literature”.90 A revealing and more personal comment came from Frances Graham, another young woman with artistic aspirations. Ruskin had befriended her in the late 1870s and would often take her out walking in the woods or rowing on the lake when she came to visit him at Brantwood. Of these visits she wrote later, “He was often rather unkind and loved power; he was not tender by nature and we quarrelled constantly, but his talk was so delightful and his courtesy so great that I always came back to his lure”.91

RUSKIN AND THE AUSTRALIAN FEMINIST MOVEMENT 301 E. WOMEN AND REFORM

Women already had a public presence in Victorian England, well before the suffrage or the legislation of the 1870s and 1880s, but it was in the religious domain. Religious women had spoken out for many years on spiritual questions, and it was only later that they turned their attention to more worldly matters. When that came it started with issues very close to every Victorian home, like temperance – one of the great challenges to Victorian domesticity, even more than unfaithfulness.92 Historians of the period have tended to consider the many facets of Victorianism on their own – labour movements, feminism, social reform – but it is more accurate to recognise that these were all of a piece, that reformers with interests or backgrounds in one area were very likely to be prominent in others. Thus socialism by itself has long been studied, but Christian socialism is more typical of Victorian England, and for women an organization like the Women’s Christian Temperance Union which combined three reforming tendencies and carried over into many more, is more typical still. Thus a crusading journalist like Frances Power Cobbe, a long-time campaigner for the female franchise, had an equally long list of religious works to her credit. In Australia one thinks of Catherine Helen Spence, a lay Methodist preacher from Adelaide before taking up the political cause of women, who preached over one hundred sermons at home and

93 was offered seven pulpits on her overseas tour in 1893–1894, or of Jessie Ackermann, the remarkable American delegate from the Chicago headquarters of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union who made four visits to Australia between 1892 and 1912, preaching the gospel and agitating for the vote, or of Louisa Lawson, with her interests in temperance and purity issues as well as the female suffrage.94 Women were regarded as natural reformers, and considering reform without considering women, either as advocates or as intended beneficiaries, makes little sense. Part of the resistance many men felt to the great reform movements of the nineteenth century was grounded in this belief that women were the “great prohibitionists”.95 Goldwin Smith, a staunch opponent of the female franchise, thought it would lead to “national emasculation”,96 a “wrong done to the whole country”.97 Smith anticipated that

302 Women and Reform women, if they got the vote, would begin with prohibiting strong drink and tobacco and go on to urge such measures as the death penalty for rape; and this had political repercussions:

Would the stronger sex obey such laws when it was known that they were enacted by the weaker? Would it obey any laws manifestly carried by the female vote in the interest of the women against that of the men? If it would not, the result would be contempt for the law and anarchy, which would not be likely to enure to the advantage of the weak. Man would be tempted to resist woman’s government when it galled him, not only by the consciousness of his strength, but by his pride, which would make itself heard in the end, though its voice for a time might be stifled by sentimental declamation.

And he asks “What would be the fate of a community in some dire extremity if it were

98 largely ruled by its women?” Thus female emancipation, politics and male pride were inextricably bound up together from the beginning. But if reformers were apt to be reformers with multiple interests, this increased the likelihood that reformers would disagree: thus a related nineteenth century (and twentieth century) phenomenon is the disunity of people of like interests, on the Woman Question no less than on others.99 Women were not natural allies: Sarah Stickney Ellis produced at least four books on female duty in the 1840s and 1850s, one of which, The Wives of England (1843) was dedicated, by permission, to the Queen. For Mrs Ellis, most insidious of all evils threatening the happiness of a marriage was worldly-mindedness, competing with one’s neighbours, whether in material or in religious matters: “It is … against this single enemy above all others, that married women have to sustain each other in waging constant and determined war”.100 And she, like many others, leaves us in no doubt of her support for the separate spheres:

It is [men’s] business, and their duty, to find a place amongst their fellow-men, to establish a footing in society, and to maintain it by all just and honourable means. This is no care of woman’s. Her appropriate part is to adorn that station, wherever it may be, by a contented mind, an enlightened intellect, a chastened spirit, and an exemplary life. 101

This is also the opinion of Eliza Lynn Linton, who seems to have made a whole journalistic career out of attacking “strong-minded” women. A favourite of the Saturday Review, she is

RUSKIN AND THE AUSTRALIAN FEMINIST MOVEMENT 303 responsible for one of the most notorious of all Victorian anti-feminist tracts, The Girl of the Period:

All men whose opinion is worth having prefer the simple and genuine girl of the past, with her tender little ways and pretty bashful modesties, to this loud and rampant modernization, with her false red hair and painted skin, talking slang as glibly as a man, and by preference leading the conversation to doubtful subjects … she will not see that though men laugh with her they do not respect her, though they flirt with her they do not marry her; she will not believe that she is not the kind of thing they want, and that she is acting against nature and her own interests when she disregards their advice and offends their taste.

And she concludes, “all we can do is to wait patiently until the national madness has passed, and our women have come back again to the old English ideal, once the most beautiful, the most modest, the most essentially womanly in the world”.102

304 Women and Reform F. RESPECTABILITY

We shall be faithless to our fellow workingmen if we omit to record our honest conviction that this much to be desired condition must be preceded by the equally universal spread of the principles of economy and sobriety, [by which] we and our sons should become respectful and respected, and make rapid progress in the onward march of reform. 103 Rules of the Amalgamated Carpenters and Joiners, 1860

Respectability! Heavy-browed and hunch-backed word; once innocent and light-hearted as any other word, why now in thy middle age art thou become so gloomy and saturnine? Is it that thou art responsible for the murder of the innocents? Respectability! Vision of clean hands and blameless dress – why dost thou now appear in the form of a ghoul before me? 104 Edward Carpenter, 1887

Respectability ties together several important ideas in any discussion of social reform in the Victorian period: social aspirations, decorum, temperance, purity and the home, and I now consider these in more detail. Respectability was a central idea in mid-Victorian Britain; this was not the case earlier, as Walter Houghton has pointed out, but from the 1840s the push for social advancement appeared in earnest.105 This was more than a matter of money. According to Geoffrey Best, one of the most perceptive writers on Victorianism, the mid-Victorians, both men and women, seem to have made more of a distinction between the respectable and the non-respectable than between the working and the lower middle class.106 Respectability and independence ran together: “Everyone except the very poor tried to be independent. You were expected to pay your own way, to look after yourself, to keep out of troubles if you could and to bear them manfully if you couldn’t”.107 Best identifies two consequences of this obsession with respectability, the heavy pressure it put on the poor, and the heavy price paid in humiliation if they failed. Respectability was the “sharpest of all lines of social division, signifying both intrinsic virtue and social value”.108 Its core values were temperance and good behaviour; respectable folk showed propriety of speech and decorum of bearing; they dressed tidily

RUSKIN AND THE AUSTRALIAN FEMINIST MOVEMENT 305 and kept their houses clean; they were independent and law-abiding.109 The respectable man was sober, thrifty, clean-spoken and private; he believed in self-control and self- sacrifice.110 For Best all this implied an embrace, not a rejection, of the established social order, and he points to the tendency of British trade unions in this period to seek a modus vivendi with capitalism.111 The history of the British building trades quoted above describes the struggle between the old unionism and the new in the 1860s and 1870s as dominated by the moral reformers such as Robert Applegarth of the Amalgamated Carpenters and Joiners, who urged temperance, self education, chastity, self restraint and hard work on his members.112 Temperance in particular was taken to be the sign of new unionism.113 Robert Blatchford, crusading editor of The Clarion, kept labour clean, fresh, upright, and virile in his writings, said a female admirer.114 Respectability was so firmly entrenched in the mainstream of the labour movement that those advocating reform had to tread carefully. In her discussion of the nineteenth century feminist challenge to the home, of which more below, Dolores Hayden describes the experiences of Marie Howland, an American feminist of the 1870s. Her novel The Familistere (1874) proposed a utopian scheme for group housing, but unfortunately her characters included an unwed mother, a divorcee, and a countrywoman saved from prostitution, “all of whom praised women’s rights and scorned small town standards of respectability and morality”. Howland subsequently found herself alienated from many of the trade unionists, suffragists and socialists active in America at the time.115

1. RUSKIN ON RESPECTABILITY

Ruskin’s opinions change over time: In Modern Painters IV (1856) he writes that he

116 dislikes the idea of gentility: “consider, a little, all the meanness that there is in that epithet” and hated English “spikiness and spruceness”, “perpetual propriety and innovation”.117

[With] us, let who will be married or die, we neglect nothing. All is polished and precise again next morning; and whether people are happy or miserable, poor or prosperous, still we sweep the stairs of a Saturday.118

306 Respectability As for domestic architecture, he wrote in 1849, “what need is there to speak? How small, how cramped, how poor, how miserable in its petty neatness is our best! How beneath the

119 mark of attack, ,and level of contempt, that which is common with us!” But by 1865 Ruskin is reminding women of the social obligations implied in their desire for higher status:

Your fancy is pleased with the thought of being noble ladies, with a train of vassals. Be it so; you cannot be too noble, and your train cannot be too great; but see to it that your train is of vassals whom you serve and feed, not merely of slaves who serve and feed you; and that the multitude which obeys you is of those whom you have comforted, not oppressed, – whom you have redeemed, not led into captivity.120

Ruskin therefore allows noble titles and treatment to those women who deserve it, who perform their duties faithfully to their families and the state, but denies it to those who don’t. Reciprocal obligations ordered society.121 As we have seen, by the 1870s Ruskin believes social change will only come from individual conduct. To the many correspondents who wrote to him doubting the power of individuals to change the world Ruskin replied that he is convinced that it is by his personal conduct that any man will do the greatest amount of good that it is in him to do.122

2. RESPECTABILITY IN AUSTRALIA

The worst thing about respectability is the infernal meanness it drives you into. 123 Rigby’s Romance, ch. XIII

An especial problem for the would-be respectable in Australia, as many writers have pointed out, was the morally shameful beginnings of the convict system, the practice of sending scamps and scoundrels to live in obscurity in the Antipodes as remittance men, and the vast distance from the rigid social codes of home. This gave the struggle for respectability an added burden, as General William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army, found on his Australian tour in 1890. Remarking on the added temptations of “unparalleled material prosperity” for the colonists, Booth continued:

RUSKIN AND THE AUSTRALIAN FEMINIST MOVEMENT 307 At the same time, I should by no means be inclined to say that there is more vice in the Australian colonies than in the older nations of Europe. It may be more bare-faced, just because of the very vigour of the national life, and also because of the very much smaller influence exerted by public opinion.124

John Norton, the yellowest Australian journalist of the 1890s, memorably invented the word “wowser” for the killjoys who campaigned for bans on such popular vices as drinking, smoking, dancing and gambling, but the struggle for respectability long had political dangers too: as late as 1910 the Labor Party was caught off-guard by a Yes vote in a national referendum on Bible reading in state schools.125 Employers, especially banks, forbade their male clerks to marry below a certain salary, sufficient to support a wife and children; this was the case at least until 1904.126 Thrift and home ownership went together: the huge growth in building societies helped the respectable working class to own their own homes; even in the depression of the 1890s loans to owner occupiers were never less than thirty per cent, and in Melbourne nearly double this.127

3. WOMEN AND RESPECTABILITY IN AUSTRALIA

Anne Summers has memorably characterised some reforming women in nineteenth century Australia as “God’s police”.128 Religious women, accustomed to preaching in public, became active in social purity campaigns to control or suppress drinking, smoking, gambling, prostitution and the opium trade, and were vigorous upholders of Sunday observance. This is why the Women’s Christian Temperance Union seems more representative of organised female reform movements than, say, the Women’s Suffrage League. Jesse Ackermann, the American who did so much for the cause of female suffrage in Australia, was originally sent out by the Chicago headquarters of the WCTU on a world tour to spread the word. She made four visits to Australasia between 1892 and 1912, indefatigably travelling the outback in her “gospel van”, depending on bush hospitality and donations to finance her journey. In Australia, apart from her temperance work, she organised campaigns against boxing, cigarettes and the use of women as sex objects in advertising, and in favour of votes for women, for the right of women to preach from the pulpit, and for the right of women to work and be paid a decent wage.129

308 Respectability This very conservative moral agenda, repressive to modern eyes, aroused male opposition to the female suffrage as well. In 1900 the New Zealand branch of the WCTU voted both for a curfew for women and to raise the age of consent to 21, attracting this wry comment from The Worker: “If women were not let outside at all the age might be raised to 41. Since that isn’t possible 18 is about as high as the average juryman will go”.130 Feminism attracted not just the resistance of men but also their scorn, and some of it was vicious. John Norton, the Sydney tabloid journalist, led the sorry way:

A big bouncing baby is a greater treasure to a woman than a vote: a matron and a mother is a sweeter thing than a stagnant, shrieking, female franchisist … it is … infernal impertinence of these barren “blue-stockings” to pretend to speak for the wives and mothers of the nation.131

Following suit, the Melbourne Argus spoke of “vinegar females of habit hysterical/who are terribly strong/on feminine wrong” and the Bulletin ran endless cartoons in which temperance speakers and suffragists were depicted as lunatic crones.132 Respectability then had a strong feminine flavour in late nineteenth century Australia. This was not just theoretical. The social cause first taken up by women was temperance, because of the disastrous effect of male drunkenness on the home lives of women and children. I now consider this here.

RUSKIN AND THE AUSTRALIAN FEMINIST MOVEMENT 309 G. TEMPERANCE

The Socialist’s Catechism Q. What advice is given to the labourer by well-meaning reformers who do not understand the labour question? A. To be sober and thrifty. Q. Is this advice sound? A. As addressed to the individual struggling against his neighbours under the capitalist system, it is excellent. Q. How can it benefit the individual? A. It may enable him to “rise” into the capitalist class; that is, to change his position in the ranks of the oppressed for one in those of the oppressors. Q. What is the socialist criticism of this advice? A. That as a panacea for the wrongs of the system, or as a cure for the sufferings of the labourers as a class, it is inadequate, because a general improvement in intelligence, thrift, and sobriety, if shared by the whole class of labourers, merely supplies the capitalist class with a better instrument for the production of surplus value. Socialist pamphlet, author unknown, Brisbane 1893

Temperance has a special place in this story: according to Judith Allen, Rose Scott’s biographer, nineteenth century women’s temperance movements were the largest public political mobilisation of women in western history.133 In the period we are considering it is a major social issue, cutting across class, religion and political party. Witnesses at a government inquiry in New South Wales in 1887–1888 testified that three-quarters of all crime was directly attributable to drunkenness, and nearly all violent crime. Males arrested for drunkenness outnumbered females by four to one;134 Sydney had at least five thousand confirmed drunkards out of a total population of only 330,000.135 As in England temperance and respectability went together: one of the benefits of unionism was said to be less drinking at meetings;136 and delegates from several building trades, including the carpenters and joiners, the plasterers and the stonemasons, spoke in favour of reducing the number of public

310 Temperance houses in Sydney.137 Sir Alfred Stephens, former Chief Justice of NSW and long-time temperance advocate, said that:

as to wife-beating and the various miseries that result from unhappiness in married life: I believe that almost every case of the many – not scores but hundreds – that exist in this town are invariably the result of drink; and in this particular class of offences the horrible results are such as to shock anyone.138

Canon Boyce, a prominent Anglican churchman and social reformer, urged women to play their part:

The average woman is so quick-witted and ready to see opportunities that she will find plenty to do. Are there no drunkards in the locality for her to influence for good? Are there none who ought to sign the pledge? Are there no weak ones who having signed need a word of counsel and encouragement? Are there no loving ones to pray for? Is there not work among the children that 139 ought to be done?

To Boyce, drink was “the relentless adversary of the home, and almost the only terrible enemy this fair country has to fear”. And it was the sacred duty of women to be “energetic and aggressive” in eradicating the evil. He quoted the Chief Justice of Queensland, Sir Charles Lilley: “If women … could only be taught how largely, how nearly all the poverty and misery their sex suffers is due to drink, they would rouse the world to cast it out as the greatest danger in the path of life”.140 There were political dangers here too. The American historian Ross Evans Paulson makes the point that in America and England, debates over moral issues had violated social proprieties and split women’s rights and suffrage organizations. The need to observe these proprieties for fear of losing widespread public support for key issues like the suffrage set rigid limits to what was considered acceptable to discuss in public. In particular Paulson argues that deferring to such premises as the moral superiority of women and the sanctity of marriage meant that reformers had to refrain from criticizing women’s subjection in the home or advancing more radical social alternatives.141 In her detailed study of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union in the colony of Victoria between 1887 and 1897, Anthea Hyslop identifies the same dilemma: temperance women inevitably widened their interests to include social purity issues such as prostitution

RUSKIN AND THE AUSTRALIAN FEMINIST MOVEMENT 311 and the age of consent, and later political ones such as war and conscription; but these secondary issues risked dispersing their efforts in the great cause. At the same time, seeking the female franchise made sense in terms of the ultimate goal of the temperance movement, legal prohibition of the trade in alcohol altogether.142 The association with temperance and other moral issues held back public support for the female franchise; it certainly did in an all-male parliament, where Hyslop considers the support of the WCTU did more harm than good, at least initially, for women’s suffrage.143 Hyslop fills in the picture we have already begun of the social background of feminist reformers in late nineteenth century Australia. The temperance movement, initially a secular organization, was “almost exclusively Christian” by the 1870s;144 its supporters were women from the middle and lower middle classes, whose husbands were self-employed, and predominantly tradesmen.145 But masculinity and respectability could be contradictory goals in late nineteenth century Australia. A rough and ready masculine ethos dominated everyday life, while an official culture, more civilised, more refined, and more feminine, was upheld by women, schools and churches, although only sometimes by parliaments. One Australian MP, unconsciously echoing Goldwin Smith, objected to the female suffrage because it would:

abolish soldiers and war, also racing, hunting, football, cricket, and all such manly games … Woman suffragists are the worst class of socialists. Their idea of freedom is polyandry, free love, lease marriages, and so on … Are we going to 146 allow women who would sap the very foundations of a nation to have votes?

Feminist historians have recently begun to question the “legend of the nineties” in Australia. Marilyn Lake, among others, has taken issue with the portrait of the bushman, sturdy, self reliant and free to roam, as embodying the Australian national character. In this ideal of Australian manhood, heavily promoted by the Bulletin, marriage and home life were things to be resisted. She points out that alternative versions of masculinity were on offer, even from within the bush tradition: for William Lane, for example, firebrand orator and author of The Workingman’s Paradise, the “manly” man was upright, temperate and monogamous. In his ill-fated attempt to found a socialist community in Paraguay his insistence on temperance became a source of division.147

312 Temperance Where is Ruskin in all this? The hyper-masculine Bulletin quite liked Ruskin,148 and so did The Worker. Ruskin himself described masculinity in terms of which they would have approved: to Ruskin the ideal man is strong, a provider and protector, does not disdain manual labour, is of service to others and content with his lot; if he is a leader it is because of his superior abilities. In Unto This Last Ruskin says that “true manliness despises wealth and is undermined by it”;149 in The Crown of Wild Olive he goes so far as to say that “all healthy men like fighting, and like the sense of danger; all brave women like to hear of their fighting, and of their facing danger”.150 Though war is to be avoided at all costs, “a calamity” of “ghastly ludicrousness”,151 true kings must do their share of the fighting. In the next section I bring the discussion of these ideas, and Ruskin’s opinions of them, together by considering the sacred Victorian notion of home.

RUSKIN AND THE AUSTRALIAN FEMINIST MOVEMENT 313 H. HOME The man, in his rough work in open world, must encounter all peril and trial; – to him, therefore, must be the failure, the offence, the inevitable error: often he must be crowded, or subdued; often misled; and always hardened. But he guards the woman from all this; within his house, as ruled by her, unless she herself has sought it, need enter no danger, no temptation, no cause of error or offence. This is the true nature of home – it is the place of Peace; the shelter, not only from all injury, but from all terror, doubt, and division. In so far as it is not this, it is not home. 152 Ruskin, “Of Queens’ Gardens”, 1865

Home in late nineteenth century Australia meant England,153 but a family home meant a weatherboard cottage. While the inner suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne were gradually filled with terrace houses, built by landlords, the ideal remained a single family living in a detached house with a garden. The architectural historian Robin Boyd wrote fifty years ago that:

Australia is the small house. Ownership of one in a fenced allotment is as inevitable and unquestionable a goal of the average Australian as marriage … Australia has more per head of population than other nations and has maintained a higher standard of living in a greater number of them. Collectively, they are an achievement. Individually they are … an aesthetic calamity.154

Boyd argued that the first white settlers in Australia brought with them the English taste for privacy, which has remained the prime motive in home-building ever since:

Each family asked, when the day’s work was done, for isolation from the next family. Each member asked for the possibility of privacy from the remainder of the family. The nation was built on the principle that for every family there should be a separate house and for every person there should be a separate room.

The result was that Australian cities became “a great sea of small houses around a commercial or industrial island”.155 Visitors soon noticed the dominance of the single home in Australia. The Reverend Francis Clarke, an American clergyman on a gospel visit to Australia in the early 1890s, wrote:

For every Australian his house is his castle, and in this matter he shows his English breeding and training. He shuts himself in from all the world with high

314 Home hedges and fences … So it comes about that the streets of the suburban towns have a more forbidding and unsocial aspect than our streets at home … But to have a home of your own with its distinctive name which is appropriated by no one else! Ah! There is a sensation of homeliness comes over one when we but see 156 the name upon the gate post!

And Richard Twopeny had this to say ten years before: “the colonist is very fond of living in his own house and on his own bit of ground, and building societies and the extensive mortgage system which prevails enable him easily to gratify this desire”. The Australian home had few architectural pretensions, but:

If there is any style which colonists particularly affect, it is the castellar … turrets and flagstaffs abound. The passion for flagstaffs must, I think, be derived from the fact that most of the people who build these houses have had a long sea- journey from England, and retain a little ozone in their composition. There is also something assertive about a flag. A man who has a flag floating on his house is almost sure to have some character about him.

Unfortunately, Twopeny continued, “by far the majority of houses are built by speculators, which means that they are very badly built, run up in a tremendous hurry, constructed of the cheapest and nastiest materials, with thin walls – in short, built for show, and not for use”.157 John Sulman, the Englishman who became Australia’s first university lecturer in architecture, said in 1902:

For parents with young children, a house is absolutely essential if the well-being of the next generation is to be properly cared for [especially] if the essentially British character of our population is maintained … as the desire to possess a home of one’s own, however small, is inherent in our race.158

According to the economic historian N G Butlin, the financial success of the building societies of the 1860s and 1870s was based on the ideal of individual home ownership, an ideal with tremendous force in the context of housing shortages, high rents and steady employment. Butlin considers that owner-occupiers accounted for more than half of total housing built between 1890 and 1910.159

RUSKIN AND THE AUSTRALIAN FEMINIST MOVEMENT 315 1. THE SOCIALIST CHALLENGE TO HOME

Phalanstery. I can’t find it in Johnson’s dictionary, and I don’t know what it means. 160 Ruskin to Robert Browning, 1856

In late nineteenth century Britain most socialist writers had something to say on the subject of families and home life, as Sir Henry Wrixon, late Attorney General of Victoria, discovered in 1894. Sir Henry had been the Victorian delegate to a colonial conference in Canada, and used the opportunity to make a study of the socialist movement there and in England and America. In the book he wrote on his return to Australia he set himself to answer the “question of our age” – how to “better distribute wealth, but without impairing energy; to mitigate the struggle of life, yet maintain its progress; and, while making the people more happy, still to keep them free”.161 On this tour Sir Henry met most of the prominent socialists in England, Canada and America; apart from their atheist views, the things that made Sir Henry most shudder were the socialists’ visions of the family and the home. Edward Carpenter, William Morris, and H H Hyndman, heroes of the movement all, are quoted and exclaimed over, but the most chilling pronouncement he finds is from Belfort Bax, who denounces the bourgeois family as “the most perfect specimen of the complete sham that history has presented to the world”. When the people come to realise this, Bax said, “the bourgeois hearth, with its jerry-built architecture, its cheap art, its shoddy furniture, its false sentiment, its pretentious pseudo- culture, will then be as dead as Roman Britain”.162 Sir Henry sees at once where this is going: “from amid the decent veil of learned discussions and technical terms, and many references to primitive man and early group marriages, there emerges Free Love and State nurseries”.163 The family was the true unit of the State and must be protected:

To cast all this aside at the bidding of some recent but not new theories … and to revert … to the condition of the flocks and herds, certainly seems to the man in the street to be retrogression. It is not progress for the State, for man, or for woman, and particularly not for woman. The more you revert to mere animal conditions, the worse it is for the weaker animal.164

316 Home It is a measure of the distance we have travelled since 1894 that we no longer regard public nurseries and day care as a menace to the State, but this was a serious charge at the time. A popular anti-socialist tract, Richter’s Glimpses of the Socialistic Future, went through three editions from 1893 to 1907 and painted a bleak picture of family life: everyone lives in group homes and eats communally, parents are separated from their children who are brought up in State kindergartens, and there is general unhappiness and estrangement.165 But despite Sir Henry’s misgivings, the socialist challenge to the Victorian ideal of home was widespread, and alternative living arrangements were taken for granted by all leading thinkers. In Civilization: Its Cause and Cure (1895), Edward Carpenter foresaw a “great and wonderful common life” in which there would be no need for private property:

Gladly will each man, and more gladly still each woman, take his or her treasures, except what are immediate or necessary in use, to the common center, where their value will be increased a hundred and a thousand fold by the greater number of those who can enjoy them, and where far more perfectly and with far less toil they can be tended than if scattered abroad in private hands. At one stroke half the labor and all the anxiety of domestic caretaking will be annihilated.166

Progressive men like Edward Carpenter thought women would gladly take part in such noble experiments, but what did women themselves think? In the second half of this chapter I explore how notions of home, and housing, were understood by educated female opinion in late nineteenth century Australia, and the use such readers made of Ruskin’s work in seeking their reform.

2. THE FEMINIST CHALLENGE TO HOME

Are emancipated women to ignore the sacred influences of home? 167 Mrs S C Hall, The Victoria Magazine, 1871

We can see room for change in these old sanctuaries, but none in the sanctity of the home. And this temple, with its rights, is so closely interwound with the services of subject woman, its altar so demands her ceaseless sacrifices, that we find it impossible to conceive of any other basis of human living. 168 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics, 1898

RUSKIN AND THE AUSTRALIAN FEMINIST MOVEMENT 317 You will never find a woman who is really happy and busy at home making a fool of herself on the platform. 169 Letter to The Bulletin, Sydney, 1894

Attacks on marriage and the family were a guaranteed vote-loser, not only among men, but after mid-century feminist pioneers in Britain and America, as elsewhere, advanced a wide range of schemes for different kinds of living arrangements. I briefly review these here before I examine what support there was in Australia for these ideas. Dolores Hayden has traced the feminist challenge in the USA in the nineteenth century to received notions of home and domesticity, especially in their architectural forms;170 she finds examples going back to the 1840s and the first American translations of Charles Fourier’s work followed by the establishment of communitarian socialist societies such as the Shakers before 1860.171 It is after the Civil War that these experiments take on a distinctly feminist character, led by such formidable personalities as Melusina Fay Peirce, a critique that was renewed and reargued in the 1880s and found its most tenacious advocate in Charlotte Perkins Gilman.172 Where Peirce still believed in separate spheres and the institution of marriage, Gilman did not; and in her writing, both fiction and non-fiction, she attacks every idea of the modern home and family. True freedom for women meant emancipation from the endless duties of home and motherhood. In her most famous book, Women and Economics (1898) she calls for kitchenless houses, where everything from child care to cookery to cleaning is outsourced, and there are private quarters for sleeping and recreation only. The residential hotel was one model, the utopian community another. These were the most controversial parts of her book173 but Gilman is careful to reassure her readers: Many fear this movement, and vainly strive to check it. There is no cause for alarm. We are not going to lose our homes nor our families, nor any of the sweetness and happiness that go with them. But we are going to lose our kitchens, as we have lost our laundries and bakeries. The cook-stove will follow the loom and wheel, the wool-carder and shears. We shall have homes that are places to live in and love in, to rest in and play in, to be alone in and to be together in; and they will not be confused and declassed by admixture with any industry whatever.174

318 Home Despite these reassurances, the kitchenless home was immediately controversial, and in her next book, explicitly titled The Home (1903), Gilman tones down her argument, though she does not rescind it: “First, let it be clearly and definitely stated, the purpose of this book is to maintain and improve the home”.175 But the home was a human institution, and all institutions were open to improvement: “the home need be neither a prison, a workhouse, nor a consuming fire”.176 And there is an odd appeal for support as redress of a popular male belief about the cost of keeping a home:

The confinement of the woman to the home, when she does not labour, results in her becoming a parasite, and the appetite of a parasite is insatiable … The house of the parasite woman is a bottomless pit for money.177

Gilman concludes that “the people of our time need the home of our time”. The “primitive home and the house-bound woman” are the causes of domestic unhappiness178 and change is imperative:

This involves great changes in both our idea of home, and our material provision for it. Why not? Growth is change, and there is need of growth here. Slowly, gradually, by successive experiments, we shall find out how to meet new demands.179

Gilman’s biographers report that, although her economic arguments for the emancipation of women were immediately recognised as definitive by progressive thinkers, the attack on the home was not well received, and the kitchenless home remained unrealised.180

3. AUSTRALIA AND THE HOME

It’s singin’ in an’ out, An’ feelin’ full of grace; Here ‘n’ there, up an’ down, An’ round about the place, It’s rollin’ up your sleeves, An’ whit’nin’ up the hearth, An’ scrubbin’ out th’ floors, An’ sweepin’ down the path; It’s bakin’ tarts and pies, An’ shinin’ up the knives;

RUSKIN AND THE AUSTRALIAN FEMINIST MOVEMENT 319 An’ feelin’ ‘s if some days Was worth a thousand lives. It’s watchin’ out th’ door, An’ watchin’ by th’ gate; An’ watchin’ down th’ road, An’ wonderin’ why he’s late … An’ flushin’ all at once, An’ smilin’ just so sweet, An’ feelin’ real proud The place is fresh an’ neat. An’ feelin’ awful glad Like them that watch’d Silo’m; An’ everything because A man is comin’ Home! 181 Mary Gilmore, Marri’d, 1910

The sanctity of home was regularly cited by men (there being no women) in parliamentary debates on the female suffrage. “Divest woman of her home influence, and everything is gone”, said a speaker in the debate in the NSW Legislative Assembly in 1899;182 “the home influence must not be lessened”.183 “We want to ennoble woman, not to degrade her, or to take her out of her proper sphere” said another,184 while a supporter of the suffrage appealed to the “honourable members’ hearts, their homes, and their lives”.185 Protecting the home from political dissension was also a major motivation for those women who opposed the franchise; Anti-Female Suffrage Leagues in Victoria and NSW collected thousands of names against the bills, 24,000 in Victoria alone in 1900. A public meeting in Sydney that year heard that there was general dissatisfaction on the part of women that politicians “should attempt to force women from the peacefulness and quiet of their homes into the arena of politics, and impose a burden upon them in addition to their present duties”.186 Most Australian feminists, if not the socialist ones, were careful to refrain from criticizing marriage, the family, or the home; it was too dangerous. When Elizabeth Ashton dared to describe marriage as a “lamentable failure” in 1891 she was obliged by the resulting furore to resign from the council of the Woman’s Suffrage League.187 Besides, nearly all feminists believed in it. Anthea Hyslop makes the point that the goal for temperance women was protecting the home.188 As Jessie Ackermann eloquently put it:

320 Home Men continue to repeat … that “home and not politics should be the interest of women.” But to what section of land or sea could the home be moved to place it in a latitude or longitude where it is not endangered day and night by the direct affairs of politics? It would be a very pleasing prospect to most women if they could quarantine their home against the blighting and often withering conditions that centre in home-life itself, and to which the fence and gate are no bar. Politics are in the home – every part of it.189

Thus, as feminist historians have pointed out, women’s reform movements began with the home itself and then sought political power to protect it. The goal for Australian women was marriage and family on better terms, not their abolition. Even Louisa Lawson wrote in 1889 that:

Few rightly value a home till they have lost it, till they are called upon to leave it. Then, when they see the selfish indifference, the calculating worldliness, and in some cases, the open duplicity of strangers, their home stands out as a haven of refuge, as a place sacred and pure, where hearts, which have grown cold and cynical by contact with the world regain their old softness and tenderness as the familiar tones of kindly love again break upon their ears.190

The Australian male was not altogether a lost cause. C J Dennis’s hugely popular Sentimental Bloke poems celebrate the joys of love in turn of the century Australia:

’Er name’s Doreen … An’ me – that thort I knoo The ways uv tarts, an’ all that smoogin’ game! An’ so I ort; fer ain’t I known a few? Yet some’ow … I dunno. It ain’t the same. I carn’t tell wot it is; but, all I know, I’ve dropped me bundle – an’ I’m glad it’s so. Fer when I come ter think uv wot I been … . ’Er name’s Doreen.191

In the later poems the Bloke has bowed to the inevitable, and embraced marriage and family life. He and Doreen now have a little house of their own:

To see ‘er bustlin’ ’round about the place, Full of the simple joy o’ doin’ things, That thoughtful, ’appy look upon ’er face, That ’ope an’ peace an’ pride o’ labour brings, Is worth the crowd of joys I knoo one time, An’ makes regrettin’ ’em seem like a crime.192

RUSKIN AND THE AUSTRALIAN FEMINIST MOVEMENT 321 But the ideal of each Australian family in a home of its own, the father the breadwinner and the mother a housewife, did not go unchallenged. Bertha McNamara drew a bleakly realistic picture of the homes Doreen and the Bloke would really have inhabited in the suburbs of Sydney or Melbourne in 1894:

Four small rooms, a little backyard, a few feet wide, a few feet long and, perhaps, a little front garden … though many there are who cannot boast of more than two and three rooms, and may be they are minus the garden … The rooms are small, dingy, and low, and [the] wife’s utmost skill, though they may be scrupulously clean, cannot make them otherwise … the doors … closed to exclude draughts … the air … close and unwholesome … a dark, damp lane where the sun scarcely ever shines, where outhouses and squalor is the only view that meets the eye … it is of favored Australia, the Workingman’s Paradise, I am speaking. Though, I may add, if Australia at present presents the Workingman’s Paradise, I should hardly care for a glimpse of the Workingman’s Hades.193

For Mrs McNamara the answer lay, as it did for British and American writers, in reinventing the home: Many kind and philanthropic people have, and are, interesting themselves in the better housing of the workers and the poor. Little, however, can be achieved this way in the present order of things, where each family requires a separate house or home neither will fever or sickness vanish in the multitudinous small dwellings, and neither will contagion floating in the atmosphere exempt those who are better housed.194

Mrs McNamara describes the shining alternative of a large cooperative home:

In the centre of the long space formerly occupied by those little one-story cottages and their dirty little backyards … stands a magnificent building several stories high; the grounds around are tastefully laid out in flower beds and shrubberies; there is room for grass plots smooth as velvet, for cricket and croquet. A good, wise Government has appropriated all the little fever-breeding dens, and the people are now their own landlords … The balconies are resounding with childish laughter … Here a number of families live in happy cooperation of domestic work and leisure. Ye poor, distracted, housewives and mothers, each toiling and striving to get through your duties alone, 195 would you not like to exchange at once with these happier days?

Cooking, cleaning, and child minding are all shared: there are labour-saving appliances, a library, a smoking room and a music room. “Here is company; here is pleasure. This is home indeed”.196

322 Home Cooperative living was a given for most schemes of social improvement in the late nineteenth century, as we have seen,197 and it was a topic for Australian feminists too. Cooperative homes were discussed by the Womanhood Suffrage League in 1899;198 Maybanke Anderson discussed the issue several times in her journal, the Woman’s Voice, between 1894–1895;199 Louisa Lawson advocated homes or clubs for single businesswomen in 1893;200 and even John Sulman advocated cooperative kitchens, though not cooperative houses, in 1902.201 Some Australian feminists turned to utopian fiction to further this discussion, and three of these imagined futures are described below.202

4. THREE FEMINIST UTOPIAS

Ruskin was frequently accused of being utopian, a charge that annoyed him, but feminists, like other social reformers, might well have taken comfort from Ruskin’s reply:

This blind and cowardly spirit is for ever telling you that evil things are pardonable, and you shall not die for them, and that good things are impossible, and you need not live for them … You will find some day, to your cost, if you believe the first part of it, that it is not true; but you may never if you believe the second part of it, find, to your gain, that also, untrue; and therefore I pray you with all earnestness to prove … that all things lovely and righteous are possible for those who believe in their possibility, and who … make every day’s work contribute to them. 203

In Australia as elsewhere reformers, including feminists, employed speculative fiction to popularise their views of the ideal society. One of the most interesting Australian examples of utopian writing is Catherine Helen Spence’s Handfasted, written in 1879 but not published in her lifetime; written as an entry in a newspaper contest, it was rejected for its advanced social views, especially on marriage.204 Anticipating Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915), the story involves a party of male travellers stumbling on a lost colony of European settlers in South America. Unlike Herland, which consists only of women, Columba consists of both men and women, living peacefully in a cooperative world with few books and no machines. Men and women are perfect equals, and their free union is represented by the old Scottish custom of handfasting, a kind of de facto marriage that can be ended at any time. Helen Thomson identifies this custom, which

RUSKIN AND THE AUSTRALIAN FEMINIST MOVEMENT 323 frees women from the sexual and social constraints of the nineteenth century, as the heart of this utopian society.205 The narrator is handfasted to one young woman, Liliard, who returns with him to the outside world and whose impressions form the last section of the novel. One of the reasons for the contentment the Columbians feel is ignorance, represented by their isolation and illiteracy. Liliard predicts that the effects of closer contact with the rest of the world will be “iron and books”, especially books, which bring great changes in their wake. People will learn to read “to find out what the goods they wanted could be bought for, and other goods sold for … When two or three people had learned, they would have such an advantage over the rest, that there would be a great meeting of the people [to demand schools]”.206 In Chapter V, “Knowledge of Good and Evil”, Liliard sees some prostitutes in New York, “her saddest discovery about our great troubled world”.207 A long discussion about marriage follows, the core of Spence’s social theory. The narrator wants to make a real marriage with Liliard, for propriety’s sake, but she is reluctant, only giving in when they visit Scotland, the home of her ancestors. The novel ends with Liliard’s return to Melbourne with her husband, now a respectable woman, but Spence’s belief that marriage was the basis of women’s subjection is made very clear. Columba, the peaceful world Liliard has left behind, has no prostitution, abandoned children, deserted wives or domestic violence. All this was too strong for the literary judges of the Sydney Mail, who rejected the book; Spence thought they feared “it was calculated to loosen the marriage tie – it was too socialistic, and consequently dangerous”.208 Spence returned to a utopian theme, one with a clearer picture of the architecture of an ideal society, in A Week in the Future (1888).209 In this story, which ran as a serial in the Centennial Magazine, the heroine is given a sleeping draught in Adelaide and wakes in London a century later. She goes to stay with a relative who lives in a large Owen Home, a cooperative dwelling inspired by the ideas of Robert Owen and Charles Fourier. Everyone lives in these now, and they sound very like the one Mrs McNamara describes above. Twenty families share a large and gracious building with communal dining, child care, and laundry facilities. There are no servants any more but cooking and cleaning is done by

324 Home outside contractors who live in Associated Homes of their own. Every family has its own bedrooms and living rooms, though most choose to spend their time in the public rooms: there are rooms for art, whist and chess, music and dancing, and special rooms for ladies’ work, and smoking. There are workshops and vegetable gardens, and the result is a higher standard of living and ample leisure. The visitor asks about quarrelling, “the bugbear which threatened all associated living when it was spoken of in my time”, to which her hostess replies:

The pioneers had to go through many hard trials. My father told me that during the first ten years there were more changes, resignations and expulsions than there were for fifty years after. The quarrels were sometimes personal, sometimes about children. I am ashamed to say that the women were worse offenders in this way than the men. Now, both men and women have been educated into bearing and forebearing. My grandmother told me that she was within an ace of making her husband sell out, she was so aggravated by the dress and manners and language of the people in the next suite of rooms, but he talked her over, and gradually the people improved.210

Spence does not owe anything to Ruskin in either of her forays into utopian speculation. While Handfasted describes a peaceful world based on agriculture and cooperation, and without machines, its criticism of marriage, central to Spence’s argument, was a criticism Ruskin did not share. Nor would he have agreed with its portrait of a society in which men and women are equals; though Ruskin writes of the complementary nature of the sexes in Sesame and Lilies, he thought men and women were not political, though they may be spiritual, equals. Handfasted does recognise the power of books, but as portrayed in the story it is a negative one. Books bring the threat of dissatisfaction and competition, and the Columbans are happy in their illiteracy and ignorance. The Associated Homes Spence describes so lovingly in A Week in the Future would not have found favour with Ruskin either. Despite the good behaviour, gentility and refinement of the inhabitants, Ruskin resisted the idea of the phalanstery, describing a proposal he had read about for group homes in Chicago as “brilliantly illustrat[ing] the development of ‘humanity’ in America”.211 However, the ideal society described by Henrietta Dugdale, a contemporary of Catherine Helen Spence from Victoria, suggests Mrs Dugdale might have been reading Ruskin. In A Few

RUSKIN AND THE AUSTRALIAN FEMINIST MOVEMENT 325 Hours in a Far-Off Age212 (1883) she visualised her city of the future in desirable but rather vague terms as one of “grandeur, cleanliness, order and picturesque loveliness”, free of the smoke and filth of nineteenth century Melbourne. Alcohol, long forbidden, has almost been forgotten, and the people of the future are “bewitchingly graceful”, leading lives of beauty and purity. People live in separate dwellings, but these are clustered together and the clusters are separated from each other by large parks and gardens filled with statues, fountains and scented shrubs.213 Apart from the absence of alcohol, this sounds like the city Ruskin had in mind in a lecture he gave in 1870, where he wrote that it is impossible to have any “right morality, happiness, or art” in cities that are “clotted and coagulated”. Instead there must be “lovely cities, crystallised, not coagulated, into form; limited in size, and … girded each with its sacred pomoerium, and with garlands of gardens fill of blossoming trees, and softly guided streams”.214 What strikes the narrator of the story most forcefully about the Australians of the Far-Off Age is their “noble inner life” born of long generations of “truth-loving ancestors”;215 their city, “so pure within as without”,216 is the result of centuries of progress in taming the animal instincts of man. While this description might make the aims of St George’s Guild sound brutally realistic, I think Mrs Dugdale owes something to Ruskin here in her idea of a better society founded on truth, and her book attempts to portray the “happiness, the independence, the real nobility of acting truly”.217 But where Catherine Spence succeeds and Henrietta Dugdale does not is in locating her ideal society in new social arrangements, carefully analyzed, which constitute a much stronger argument for change; A Few Hours in a Far-Off Age by contrast is only wishful thinking, a world with “every trace of wild-beast treachery and cruelty obliterated”.218 Of all the reflections on the social reform movements of the day, especially the utopian ones, one of the most telling was made by the American philosopher William James, after a visit to the Chautauqua Assembly Grounds in upper New York state just after 1900. The Chautauqua movement was a major progressive force in late nineteenth century America, dominated by Protestant Christians and responsible for the popularity of every kind of self-improvement measure from correspondence courses to free public libraries. The Assembly Grounds were a kind of vast summer camp where visitors from the city could take wholesome family holidays, attend edifying lectures and enjoy healthy exercise.219

326 Home But James was surprised by his own reaction after visiting Chautauqua. After all, the Assembly Grounds represented the realisation of most of the reformist goals of the late nineteenth century, a community where poverty, drunkenness and crime had been eliminated and culture and kindness ruled – “a society all in the light, with no suffering and no dark corners”.220 And yet his reaction after leaving this middle class paradise was one of overwhelming relief: Now for something primordial and savage, even though it were as bad as an Armenian massacre, to set the balance straight again. This order is too tame, this culture is too second-rate, this goodness too uninspiring. This human drama without a villain or a pang; this country so refined that ice-cream soda water is the utmost offering it can make to the brute animal in man; this city simmering in the tepid lakeside sun; this atrocious harmlessness of all things, – I cannot abide with them. Let me take my chances again in the big outside worldly wilderness with all its sins and sufferings.221

Forty thousand years of evolution, in Mrs Dugdale’s story, have made Melbourne into Chautauqua. The Melburnians of the future are “luminous with integrity and benevolence”; the women are taller and better dressed and the men, though “not such fine animals as those of my century”, are far nobler looking.222 But abolishing the “tiger” in life, as William James saw, ran the risk of robbing life of most of its attractions. Utopian writing represents a yearning for a better world, however vaguely imagined; and these feminist utopias described the present better than the future. Certainly the Melbourne of 1883 emerges vividly from Mrs Dugdale’s pages:

No smoke-disfigured architecture. No stream of poisonous filth, running with ferocious delight on its deathly errand. No besotted-looking creatures offending passers-by with debasing language … No knots of babbling men standing around entrances to public-houses … No ill-fed, barefooted, unclean children … No suffering animals, urged by cruelty to overtax their strength. No decrepitude in age. No careworn faces.223

But, bad as the problems of city life in Australia could be, Australians rejected collective answers, especially in housing.224 No cooperative homes or even residential hotels on American lines were built in Australia. The discipline and restrictions of collective life were familiar to everyone who had made the long sea voyage from England; and some would

RUSKIN AND THE AUSTRALIAN FEMINIST MOVEMENT 327 have memories of communal life in other forms – army, navy, boarding school or college. Communal living had special meaning for the poor: at best, life in a boarding house or as a domestic servant, at worst life in prison, asylum, workhouse or slum. The Victorian home with its extended family living under one roof has been much romanticised, but the memoirs of the period are filled with bitter accounts of family conflict and parental tyranny. The urban historian Nicholas Brown concludes that most agitation at this time was directed simply at securing a housing form that represented independence and offered health, privacy and familial integrity.225 Doreen and her Bloke, newly temperate and almost respectable, preferred a home of their own. Ruskin would have approved.226

328 Home I. CONCLUSION

What then did advanced female opinion think of Ruskin in late nineteenth century Australia? Like their sisters in England, the more radical Australian feminists solved the problem of Ruskin’s contradictory opinions on women by ignoring them, preferring to regard him as a champion of truth and justice who could be enlisted in the greater cause. Catherine Martin, writing in 1884, praised Ruskin for his “deep spirituality” and for his “keenness of moral vision”, “ardour for righteousness”, and “unwarped enthusiasm for the welfare of humanity”.227 Florence Walsh, writing in 1891 in the Sydney Quarterly Magazine, was also not blind to Ruskin’s faults but considered him more friend than foe.228 As we have seen, Dora Montefiore of the Womanhood Suffrage League quoted Ruskin on the power of women to effect change and even wondered if this might not be an appropriate motto for the WSL.229 For more conservative women, the answer to the question of how to deal with the “problem of Ruskin” seems to have been to co-opt him. A prominent example of this was the Order of the Daughters of the Court, a reform society established in Melbourne in 1891 that drew its inspiration and most of its rhetoric from Ruskin and Sesame and Lilies in particular. The brainchild of a Protestant minister and his wife, the Order sought to enlist women in the cause of social reform without stepping beyond the boundaries of ladyhood.230 The Order had an elaborate medieval hierarchy of roles and obligations, with its members variously ranked as dames, scribes, chancellors, chatelaines and daughters. It persuaded the wife of the Governor of Victoria, Lady Hopetoun, to be its patron, founded the first women’s political journal in Victoria, and by 1894 was claiming 600 members throughout Australasia, India, England and America. In her analysis of the Order, Victoria Emery sees it as a conservative attempt to widen the sphere of female influence; the Order, sheltering behind Ruskin’s unimpeachable authority, was a safe space from which the Daughters attempted to re-think the boundaries of civic virtue without upsetting the status quo, co-opting Ruskin’s rhetoric of chivalry for feminist purposes. In this way, Emery argues, proposals for social reform could be expressed in ways that “neither infringed the boundaries of ladyhood nor forced a confrontation with the political process”.231

RUSKIN AND THE AUSTRALIAN FEMINIST MOVEMENT 329 If this is so, it is the same strategy Michael Ackland sees as the one some female poets in Australia used around the same time. In his study of the poetry of Emily Manning and Emma Anderson, among others, Ackland describes them as using the conventional forms of contemporary poetry to explore some radical ideas, aiming to arouse but not inflame local sensitivities. In the work of such poets Ackland detects a Ruskinesque sensibility regarding female roles and strategies for change, with many echoes of Sesame and Lilies. While dangerous speculation is generally avoided in their work, and the decorum of gender is scrupulously observed, Ackland concludes that it comes at the cost of cramping these poets’ real imaginative powers.232 Catherine Martin, in her 1884 article on Ruskin, devotes only a few pages to his ideas on women, but her article amply demonstrates that she had read more of his work than Sesame and Lilies. In particular she quotes an aside Ruskin made in a lecture of 1870 that described the lives of many deserving women being passed in a succession of petty anxieties.233 For such women what Ruskin goes on to say is even more interesting: in the following passage Ruskin exhorts his listeners to “map out the spaces of your possible lives”, “narrow spaces of dominion” that might be found in the interstices of history; in such spaces the work of everyman, and everywoman, could endure and prosper. Thus “the true workers redeem inch by inch the wilderness into garden ground; by the help of their joined hands the order of all things is surely sustained and vitally expanded”. 234 [emphasis added] For women who joined the Daughters of the Court, or wrote poetry or tried to do anything else outside the immediate circle of home and family but who did not wish to upset the status quo of gender, this was practical advice, and useful. Thus it seems that, conservative or radical, thoughtful women of the middle classes did read Ruskin, though their poorer or less educated sisters did not.235 They responded to his work either by co-opting his ideas to include a greater social role for women, or by a selective reading of his work that ignored his most reactionary opinions in favour of enlisting him as a champion of truth and justice. In both cases books were regarded as good or bad companions, with the power to transform the reader.236 There were no obituaries of Ruskin in the feminist press, but Ruskin’s death did not go unremarked by some Sydney women. Nellie Martel, one of the founders of the WSL

330 Conclusion and one of its most radical members,237 gave a public lecture on Ruskin in May 1900. The newspaper reports of her speech say that Mrs Martel dwelt on Ruskin’s special belief in woman’s powers and capabilities.238 She referred to Ruskin’s deep religious feeling, his love of Nature, his passionate devotion to pure art, and his grand altruism, and she gave unstinted eulogy to Ruskin as writer, thinker, philanthropist and critic.239 She closed her speech with an “eloquent peroration”:

Mrs Martel remarked, amid the cheers of her audience, that if John Ruskin had been Mayor of Sydney, the plague would not be now a visitor to the city. He would not have allowed the possessions of the rich to become the death traps of the poor, and he would have insisted on property-owners not regarding a high interest rate on their investments as the sole thing to be considered.240

As a feminist epitaph for Ruskin, troubled and divided man on the subject of women as on so many others, this was more than fair.

RUSKIN AND THE AUSTRALIAN FEMINIST MOVEMENT 331 ENDNOTES FOR CHAPTER FOUR 1 May Walden, Socialism and the Home, Charles H Kerr, Chicago, 1901, p. 3. 2 C E M Martin, “The Works of John Ruskin”, Victorian Review, Melbourne, 1 July 1884, pp. 281–303; Mrs Richard Armstrong, “John Ruskin, LLD, Considered as an Art Critic”, Sydney Quarterly Magazine, vol. VI, no. 2, September 1889, pp. 209–224; ES Armstrong, “John Ruskin, LLD, Considered as a Political Economist”, Sydney Quarterly Magazine, vol. VI, no. 4, December 1889, pp. 317–331; Ethel Turner, “A Girl’s Library”, The Parthenon, Sydney, vol. IV, no. I, 25 January 1892, p. 17; “Sydney Women of Intellect, no. 1”, Australasian Art Review, 1 September 1899, p. 19; reports of the Women’s Literary Society, 1892–1896, in Mitchell Library at ML 374.23/W; reports of the Australasian Home Reading Union, 1894–1895, at ML 374.22/A. 3 C E M Martin, op. cit., p. 298. 4 Mrs Richard Armstrong, op. cit., p. 224. 5 The Woman’s Suffrage Journal, Sydney, 15 March 1892, p. 5. 6 Womanhood Suffrage League of NSW, 10th Annual Report, year ending 1 June 1901, p. 5. Mr Spruson’s efforts were to no avail: the bill eventually passed the lower house with a majority of 32. 7 See Victorian Parliamentary Debates, 1908, vol. 119, pp. 1398–1402, 18 November 1908, cited in Manning Clark (ed.), Select Documents in Australian History 1851–1900, Vol. II, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1955, pp. 395–399; see pp. 396–397. 8 See ch. 13, passim, in Walter Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind 1830–1870, Yale University Press, New Haven, Conn., 1957, esp pp. 348–353. 9 Ruskin, “Of Queens’ Gardens”, sec. 54. 10 ibid., sec. 67. 11 ibid., sec. 68. 12 ibid., sec. 80. 13 ibid., sec. 86. 14 ibid., sec. 87. 15 ibid., sec. 90. 16 Germaine Greer, The Obstacle Race, Picador, London, 1981, p. 314. 17 Ruskin, “Of Queens’ Gardens”, sec. 64. 18 Saturday Review, London, 30 December 1865, p. 819. 19 E T Cook, The Life of John Ruskin, George Allen, London, 1911, vol. II, p. 159. 20 Ruskin, The Queen of the Air, sec. 135. 21 ibid., sec. 137. 22 ibid., sec. 143. 23 ibid., sec. 151. 24 ibid., sec. 150. 25 Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies, 1882 edition, pp. ix–x. 26 ibid., p. ix. 27 ibid., pp. viii–ix. 28 Letter of 8.2.1877, reprinted in Arrows of the Chace, George Allen, Orpington, Kent, 1880, vol. II, p. 215. 29 Fors XXIV, November 1872.

332 Endnotes for Chapter Four 30 Mill is compared to a flatfish, “one eyeless side of him always in the mud, and one eye, on the side that has eyes, down in the corner of his mouth – not a desirable guide for man or beast” (Fors X, September 1871). 31 Mrs Harry Coghill (ed.), Autobiography and Letters of Mrs Margaret Oliphant, London, 1895, p. 219. 32 Derrick Leon, Ruskin the Great Victorian, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1949, p. 428. 33 Margaret Oliphant, “The Latest Lawgiver”, Contemporary Review, June 1868, pp. 675–691, see p. 689. 34 E T Cook, Life of Ruskin, op. cit., vol. I, p. 145. 35 ibid., p. 146. 36 Anne Ritchie, Records of Tennyson, Ruskin and Browning, Macmillan, London, 1892, p. 144. 37 ibid., p. 75. 38 Julia Wedgwood, Nineteenth Century Teachers and Other Essays, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1909, pp. 249–250. 39 ibid., p. 250. 40 ibid., p. 252. 41 Grace Rhys, Introduction to The Ethics of the Dust, JM Dent, London, 1907, p. vii. 42 ibid., p. ix. 43 Alice Meynell, John Ruskin, William Blackwood & Sons, Edinburgh, 1900, p. 9. 44 Alice Meynell, Introduction to The Seven Lamps of Architecture, reprint, 1910, in Alice Meynell: Prose and Poetry, Jonathan Cape, London, 1947, pp. 333–343, see p. 336. 45 Alice Meynell, John Ruskin, op. cit., p. 117. 46 ibid., p. 107. 47 Tim Hilton, Ruskin: The Later Years, Yale University Press, New Haven, Conn., 2000, p. 588. Women have continued to write about Ruskin ever since; an incomplete list would include books by Annabel Ellis (1928), Joan Evans (1954), Mary Lutyens (1965), Joan Abse (1980), Elizabeth Helsinger (1982), Diana Birch (1991) and Sarah Quill (2000). Joan Evans’ book is usually regarded as marking the nadir of Ruskin’s posthumous reputation, but she is the exception; Helsinger and Abse are particularly thoughtful and appreciative. In a later essay, Helsinger remarks that “reading Ruskin as a woman can only make one shake one’s head, all too aware that the absolute certainty he looks to the woman aspiring to the role of moral guide to provide in an otherwise morally obscure world will hardly be shared by the object of such adulation”; nonetheless “his conception [of women] is not as simple as some readers have assumed” (E Helsinger, “Authority, Desire, and the Pleasures of Reading”, in Deborah Epstein Nord (ed.), Sesame and Lilies, Yale University Press, New Haven, Conn., 2002, pp. 113–141, see p. 128). For a reply to Joan Evans, see George P Landow, The Aesthetic and Critical Theories of John Ruskin, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1971, pp. 4–5, pp. 18 ff. Kate Millett devotes thirty pages to Ruskin in Sexual Politics (1971); while critical, she lets him off comparatively lightly in a lengthy comparison with John Stuart Mill, concluding “in Mill’s tones one hears the precursor of revolution; in Ruskin’s only reaction tactfully phrased” (Millett, Sexual Politics, Rupert Hart-Davis, London, 1971, p. 108). Her reading of Ruskin has been challenged by David Sonstroem and Nina Auerbach: see Sonstroem, “Millett versus Ruskin: a Defense of Ruskin’s ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’”, Victorian Studies, Spring 1977, pp. 283–297, and Auerbach, Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1982, ch. 2, and see the essays in Deborah Epstein Nord, op. cit.. The most recent study of Ruskin and women is Dinah Birch and Francis O’Gorman (eds), Ruskin and Gender, Palgrave, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, 2002.

RUSKIN AND THE AUSTRALIAN FEMINIST MOVEMENT 333 48 In Academy Notes VI, 1875, cited in Pamela Gerrish Nunn, Victorian Women Artists, The Women’s Press, London, 1987, p. 16. And see The Art of England (1883): “For a long time I used to say, in all my elementary books, that, except in a graceful and minor way, women could not paint or draw. I am beginning, lately, to bow myself to the much more delightful conviction that nobody else can [either]” (lecture I, sec. 21). 49 Germaine Greer, The Obstacle Race, op. cit., p. 87. 50 Germaine Greer, Slip-Shod Sibyls: Recognition, Rejection and the Woman Poet, Viking, New York, 1995: “The more we know about the women who wrote poetry in English before 1900, the more we must realize that it is not a question of woman poets having been ignored or obscured but of women’s poetry remaining unwritten because women were disabled and defeated by the great tradition itself, while a select band of arbitrarily chosen token women, all young, beautiful and virtuous, were rewarded for their failures. Second-rate, dishonest, false poetry is worse than no poetry at all” (pp. xxiii–xxiv). For another opinion of how typical of his times Ruskin was see Pamela Gerrish Nunn, op. cit., pp. 15–16. 51 Virginia Surtees (ed.), Sublime and Instructive: Letters from John Ruskin to Louisa, Marchioness of Waterford, Anna Blunden, and Ellen Heaton, Michael Joseph, London, 1972, p. 90. 52 ibid. 53 Derrick Leon, Ruskin the Great Victorian, op. cit., p. 224. 54 Letter to Jemima Blackburn, 12.7.1858, quoted in John Hayman (ed.), Ruskin: Letters from the Continent 1858, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1982, pp. 180–181. 55 Ruskin, Notes on the Royal Academy, I (1855), II (1856), III (1857), IV (1858), V (1859), VI (1875). 56 Sydney Hutchison, The History of the Royal Academy 1768–1986, Robert Royce, London, 1986, p. 102. 57 Academy Notes IV, 1858. In return Bonheur thought Ruskin was a gentleman, a theorist, and an amateur (Tim Hilton, John Ruskin: The Early Years, Yale University Press, New Haven, Conn., 1985, p. 237). 58 Pamela Gerrish Nunn, op. cit., p. 16. 59 Ruskin, Modern Painters V, 1860, part IX, ch. V, secs 10–12. 60 ibid., sec. 16. 61 Ruskin, Modern Painters V, 1860, part VIII, ch. IV, sec. 20. 62 Greer, The Obstacle Race, op. cit., p. 57. Ruskin to Anna Blunden: “If you were my pupil, and a boy instead of a girl – or youth instead of a young lady, I should at once forbid all sentiment for a couple of years” (Surtees, op. cit., p. 90). 63 Ruskin to Sophia Sinnett, 1858, cited in Nunn, op. cit., p. 15. 64 Philip Hamerton, The Intellectual Life, 2nd edn, Macmillan, London, 1889, p. 242. 65 ibid., p. 231. 66 ibid., p. 240. 67 ibid., p. 236. 68 ibid., p. 248. 69 The Athenaeum, London, no. 1548, 27 June 1857, p. 825. 70 ibid. 71 The Athenaeum, London, no. 1588, 3 April 1858, p. 439. 72 The Art Journal, London, 1887, p. 157. Germaine Greer says of this phenomenon that women were loved by male artists and critics for this very faculty of emulation (The Obstacle Race, op. cit., p. 314). 73 The Magazine of Art, London, 1882, vol. V, pp. xxxi and xxxiv. 74 Academy Notes IV, 1858, p. 274.

334 Endnotes for Chapter Four 75 Letter to Anna Blunden, 20.10.1858, in Surtees, op. cit., p. 99. The most likely candidates are Amelia Bloomer, Susan B Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. All had strong links to the temperance movement, and all were active from the late 1840s through to the 1870s. Books by American feminists were regularly reviewed in the British press, though seldom favourably. See for example the Saturday Review on Eliza Wood Farnham’s Woman and Her Era (1864): “This ferocious indictment goes on until the wretched masculine shuts up the book and calls upon the rocks to fall upon him and the mountains to cover him” (20 August 1864, p. 248). 76 Letter, May 1870, cited in Ruskin, Collected Works, XXXIV, p. 499. 77 Ruskin to Mme Roch, 8 May 1873, quoted in Ruskin, Collected Works, XXXIV, p. 509, cited in Pamela Gerrish Nunn, Victorian Women Artists, The Women’s Press, London, 1987, pp. 28–29. 78 “An Appeal Against Female Suffrage”, Nineteenth Century, London, no. XXV, 1889, pp. 781–788. 79 This seems to have been the common response until at least 1915. Edith Morley, writing in a Fabian tract that year, asks her readers to ignore Ruskin’s “somewhat perverse attitude on the subject of a fully democratic suffrage”, and continues: “More important than any particular means that he advocates, is his whole attitude towards social problems, and, indeed, towards life itself. Above all else, he acts as a stimulating power, a disturber of the vulgar modern complacency which he hated, an awakener of ideals, of higher motives and more generous resolves” (Fabian Tract No. 179, John Ruskin and Social Ethics, Fabian Society, London, 1915, p. 23). In the preface to a new edition of Sesame and Lilies in 1871 Ruskin admits that “a wise and lovely English lady told me … that she was sure the ‘Sesame’ would be useful, but that in the ‘Lilies’ I had been writing of what I knew nothing about … it is more partial than my writings are usually [because] I wrote it to please one girl” (sec. 19). 80 E T Cook, Life of Ruskin, op. cit., vol. II, quotes a letter from Carlyle to Emerson in 1872: “No other man in England that I meet has in him the divine rage against iniquity, falsity, and baseness that Ruskin has, and that every man ought to have” (p. 312). 81 Fors XCIII, Christmas 1883. 82 Saturday Review, London, 23 July 1864, p. 112. 83 Julia Wedgwood, op. cit., p. 242. 84 ibid., p. 252. 85 ibid., p. 242. 86 Alice Meynell, Introduction to The Seven Lamps of Architecture [originally published 1910], in Alice Meynell: Prose and Poetry, Jonathan Cape, London, 1947, pp. 333–343; see p. 335. 87 ibid., p. 337. 88 ibid. 89 ibid. 90 ibid., p. 335. 91 Helen Gill Viljoen, The Brantwood Diary of John Ruskin, Yale University Press, New Haven, Conn., 1971, p. 585. The letter is from 1881. 92 Sarah Stickney Ellis, The Wives of England, their relative duties, domestic influence, and social obligations, Fisher, London, 1843, p. 203. 93 Catherine Helen Spence, An Autobiography, W K Thomas & Co., Adelaide, 1910, cited in Susan Magarey, Unbridling the Tongues of Women, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1985, pp. 83–87, see p. 85. 94 Frances Power Cobbe (1822–1904) also wrote Religious Duty (1864), Broken Lights: an inquiry into the present condition and future prospects of religious faith (1865, reprinted 1878), The Peak in Darien: with some other inquiries touching concerns of the soul and the body (1882), A Faithless World (1885), and more.

RUSKIN AND THE AUSTRALIAN FEMINIST MOVEMENT 335 As a sample of her journalism, see her denunciation of domestic violence, still compelling reading today, “Wife Torture in England”, Contemporary Review, London, no. XXXII, April 1878, pp. 55–87. For Catherine Helen Spence, see Susan Magarey, op. cit.; for Jessie Ackermann, see her book Australia from a Woman’s Point of View [originally published 1913], with an introduction by Elizabeth Riddell, Cassell Australia, Sydney, 1981, and the entry on her by Audrey Oldfield inAustralian Feminism: A Companion, ed. Barbara Caine, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1998; for Louisa Lawson, see her entries in the ADB and Australian Feminism, and Brian Mathews, Louisa, McPhee Gribble/Penguin Books, Fitzroy, Vic., 1987. 95 Goldwin Smith, Questions of the Day, Social and Political, 2nd rev. edn, Macmillan, London, 1894, p. 204. 96 ibid., p. 205. 97 ibid., p. 217. 98 ibid., pp. 204–205. 99 For example, not all feminists were socialists, and not all socialists were feminists. E Belfort Bax, a friend of William Morris and one of the most outspoken socialists of his day, bitterly opposed feminism as granting one sex more privileges than the other. See the acrimonious debate between Bax and his critics in The New Age, London, 30 May, 6 June, 13 June, 1 August, 8 August, 1908. One correspondent who agreed with Bax wrote that “women are fundamentally children, they never grow up … If women get the vote it means petticoat rule in perpetuity” (13 June, p. 138). A woman who wrote in rebuttal ended “You may continue to decry the Feminist movement, Mr Bax, but you are setting yourself against a surging tide of fresh vitality which promises a quickening and regeneration of all our social energies” (6 June, p. 110). But some supporters of the female suffrage still saw a very traditional role for men: an editorial in an Australian women’s magazine attacked the feminist Rose Scott for wanting to disband the world’s armies: “No! Rose. The survival of the fittest is the inexorable law of nature, and the man most likely to keep a wife and rear a family comfortably is the man best able to give and take hard knocks, either in person or in pocket” (The Home Queen, Sydney, 18 November 1903, p. 2). 100 Sarah Stickney Ellis, The Wives of England, op. cit., p. 370. 101 ibid., p. 365. 102 Eliza Lynn Linton, “The Girl of the Period”, in Modern Women and What Is Said of Them, JS Redfield, New York, 1868, pp. 25–33, see pp. 32–33. 103 Quoted in R W Postgate, The Builders’ History, National Federation of Building Trade Operatives, London, 1923, p. 193. 104 Edward Carpenter, England’s Ideal, and other papers on social subjects, Swan Sonnenschein, London, 1887, p. 69. 105 Walter Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind 1830–1870, Yale University Press, New Haven, Conn., 1957, pp. 184–194. 106 Geoffrey Best,Mid Victorian Britain 1851–1875, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, London, 1971, p. 199. 107 ibid. 108 ibid., pp. 259–260. 109 ibid., p. 261. 110 ibid., p. 263. 111 ibid., p. 268. 112 The Builders’ History, op. cit., p. 192; and see ch. 9, passim. 113 ibid., p. 193.

336 Endnotes for Chapter Four 114 Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, Yale University Press, New Haven, Conn., 2001, p. 48. 115 Dolores Hayden, The Grand Domestic Revolution, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1981, p. 101. 116 David Barrie (ed.), Modern Painters, Andre Deutsch, London, 1987, p. 428. 117 ibid., p. 429. 118 ibid., p. 430. 119 Ruskin, “The Lamp of Power”, sec. XXIV. 120 Ruskin, “Of Queens’ Gardens”, sec. 89. 121 Similarly, “gentlemen” were not necessarily Christian, kind or honest. To be a gentleman was a matter of birth, not attainment or behaviour. See Fors LXXV, February 1877. 122 Fors XXI, August 1872 123 Joseph Furphy, Rigby’s Romance, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1946 [first published 1905–1906], p. 66. 124 William Booth, “Social Problems in the Antipodes”, Contemporary Review, London, no. LXI, 1892; extract reprinted in Raymond Evans et al. (eds), 1901 Our Future’s Past: Documenting Australia’s Federation, Pan Macmillan Australia, Sydney, 1997, p. 84; and see pp. 83–89. 125 D J Murphy, TJ Ryan: A Political Biography, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, Qld., 1975, pp. 6–7, 41–42. 126 Peter F McDonald, Marriage in Australia: Age at First Marriage and Proportions Marrying 1860–1971, Department of Demography, Australian National University, Canberra, 1974, p. 129. 127 N G Butlin, Investment in Australian Economic Development 1861–1900, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1964, p. 131, footnote, p. 261, and see ch. IV, passim. 128 Anne Summers, Damned Whores and God’s Police: The Colonization of Women in Australia, Penguin Books, Ringwood, Vic., 1975. 129 Elizabeth Riddell, Introduction to Ackermann, op. cit., p. xii. 130 The Worker, Sydney, 3 March 1900. 131 John Norton, “What Women Want”, Truth, Sydney, 5 March 1903; reprinted in Michael Cannon, That Damned Democrat: John Norton, An Australian Populist 1858–1916, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1981, pp. 146–147. 132 Anthea Hyslop, “Temperance, Christianity and Feminism: the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union of Victoria 1887–1897”, Historical Studies, vol. 17, no. 66, April 1976, pp. 27–49, see p. 44. 133 Judith Allen, “‘Mundane’ Men: Historians, Masculinity and Masculinism”, Historical Studies, vol. 22, no. 89, October 1987, pp. 617–628; see p. 621. 134 NSW Royal Commission on Excessive Use of Intoxicating Drink, Report, 1888, NSW Legislative Assembly, Votes and Proceedings, 1887–1888, vol. 7, pp. 41, 43, 45. 135 ibid., p. 77. Sydney’s population from TA Coghlan, The Wealth and Progress of New South Wales, 1887–88, Sydney, Government Printer, 1888, p. 319. 136 NSW Royal Commission on Strikes, Report, 1891, Minutes of Evidence, vol. 1, evidence of Thomas Bavister, Q. 8855. William Higgs, the delegate from the Socialist League, was one of several labour witnesses who told the commissioners that unions had lifted the men morally as well as financially (Q. 9458). For more on temperance and the labour movement, see Frank Bongiorno, The People’s Party: Victorian Labor and the Radical Tradition 1875–1914, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1996, pp. 175–178, and Bruce Scates, “‘Millenium or Pandemonium?’: Radicalism in the Labour Movement, Sydney, 1889–1899”, Labour History, no 50, May 1986, p. 73, note 9. The coffee palace movement, modelled on British examples, was aimed particularly at “the young working man, who was not married, and had not a home”, whose

RUSKIN AND THE AUSTRALIAN FEMINIST MOVEMENT 337 lodgings were “not tempting or comfortable”, and for whom the public house was a “constant temptation”, according to the proposal for a coffee house in Melbourne in 1878. It was, the prospectus assured readers, to be operated on “strictly Christian and sound commercial principles”. (Argus, Melbourne, 21 October 1878, p. 4, 22 October 1878, p. 6). This was not justified by subsequent events; coffee was not enough to pay their way, and most coffee palaces eventually applied for liquor licences. 137 NSW Royal Commission on Excessive Use of Intoxicating Drink, Report, op. cit., p. 111. 138 ibid., p. 41. 139 F Boyce, “The Drink Problem in Australia”, Sydney, 1893, p. 274. This is one pamphlet bound with others at ML DSM/178/2A1. 140 ibid., p. 277. Also see David Dunstan, “Boozers and Wowsers”, in Verity Burgmann and Jenny Lee (eds), Constructing a Culture: A People’s History of Australia since 1788, McPhee Gribble/Penguin Books, Fitzroy, Vic., 1988, pp. 96–123. Temperance and the home was a major issue for proponents of the Garden City movement: see A R Sennett, Garden Cities in Theory and Practice, vol. II, Bemrose & Sons, London, 1905, pp. 671–710, esp p. 704. 141 Ross Evans Paulson, Women’s Suffrage and Prohibition, Scott Foresman, Glenview, Ill., 1973, chs 4 and 5, esp pp. 92–102. 142 Anthea Hyslop, op. cit., pp. 39ff. The Melbourne feminist Alice Henry had to negotiate strict notions of propriety in attempting to discuss sex education for girls in 1903 (Diane Kirkby, Alice Henry: The Power of Pen and Voice, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1991, pp. 43–45) 143 Hyslop, op. cit., p. 48. Hyslop concludes that the political injury was made up for by the efforts of the WCTU as canvasser and propagandist for the suffrage, and that temperance women were largely responsible for such public support as enfranchisement did have. It took until 1908 for women to get the vote in Victoria; initially the WCTU argued that women should have the vote but not enter parliament (p. 41). 144 ibid., p. 36. 145 ibid., p. 34. Of this trend, also observed in Britain at the time, Geoffrey Best wrote that the “moral and moralising ideal home was likelier to occur below the highest and above the lowest social strata; likeliest to occur where vital religion fertilised the pursuit of respectability” (Best, op. cit., p. 278). 146 Frank Madden MLA, 1895, cited in Janette Bomford, That Dangerous and Persuasive Woman: Vida Goldstein, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1993, p. 21. 147 Marilyn Lake, “The Politics of Respectability: Identifying the Masculinist Context”, Historical Studies, vol. 22, no. 86, April 1986, pp. 116–131, see p. 130. In reply to Lake, Chris McConville considers that respectability formed only one amongst many other inconsistent guides to behaviour; see his “Rough Women, Respectable Men and Social Reform: A Response to Lake’s ‘Masculinism’”, Historical Studies, vol. 22, no. 89, October 1987, pp. 617–628. This debate is continued in Susan Magarey, Sue Rowley and Susan Sheridan (eds), Debutante Nation: Feminism Contests the 1890s, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1993, and in Martin Crotty, Making the Australian Male: Middle Class Masculinity 1870–1920, Melbourne University Press, Carlton South, Vic., 2001. 148 The Bulletin (founded 1880) mentions Ruskin from 1881 onwards, often in satirical pieces like the one on the controversy over the design of the Sydney Town Hall (14 May 1881, p. 2). There is a longer piece on him in 1885, with a front page portrait, that is judicious but fair: “his manners are amiable, though peculiar, his honour is untarnished, his knowledge of fine art unrivalled among Englishmen, and his skill in constructing musical sentences and vitalising them with original thought, a manifestation of a high order of genius” (5 September 1885, p. 5). This piece concluded that while “it is hard to estimate the effect of Ruskin upon his time … for the present it is enough to note that Ruskin’s views on the relations between

338 Endnotes for Chapter Four the rulers and subjects of society are in accord with the principles of the rising school” (ibid.). Given how consistent the Bulletin’s position of amused respect regarding Ruskin remained for the first twenty years of its existence, it is something of a surprise to read A G Stephens’ very critical obituary, where Ruskin is described as a “superfluous veteran” who “intellectually … never did count” (10 February 1900, reprinted in Leon Cantrell (ed.), A G Stephens: Selected Writings, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1977, pp. 328–330). During his time at the Bulletin (1894–1906) Stephens established himself as “Australia’s premier critic and literary editor” (Cantrell, op. cit., Introduction, p. 9). 149 Ruskin, Unto This Last, IV, “Ad Valorem”, sec. 65. 150 Ruskin, Crown of Wild Olive, III, “War”, sec. 100. Mrs Aronson, the editor of a Sydney women’s magazine, agreed: “A man with neither pugnacity nor acquisitiveness is a very poor sort of mortal, such as no woman would be justified in trusting her welfare to in a life partnership” The( Home Queen, Sydney, 18 November 1903, p. 2). 151 Ruskin, Crown of Wild Olive, sec. 96. 152 Ruskin, “Of Queens’ Gardens”, sec. 68; and see “The Lamp of Memory”, secs III–VI: “those comfortless and unhonoured dwellings [in English cities] are the signs of a great and spreading spirit of popular discontent [where] the comfort, the peace, the religion of home have ceased to be felt” (sec. III). 153 See Marcus Clarke’s vivid description of the arrival of the English mail in “Letters From Home”, in L T Hergenhan (ed.), A Colonial City: High and Low Life, Selected Journalism of Marcus Clarke, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, Qld., 1972, pp. 50–52; and more generally, see Stephen Alomes and Catherine Jones (eds), Australian Nationalism: A Documentary History, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1991, pp. 5–17. 154 Robin Boyd, Australia’s Home, 2nd edn, Penguin Books. Melbourne, 1978, pp. i–ii [originally published 1951]. 155 ibid., pp. 11–12. 156 Rev Francis Clark, Our Journey around the World, AD Worthington, Hartford, Conn., 1895, pp. 86–88. 157 Richard Twopeny, Town Life in Australia [originally published 1883], facsimile edition, ed. John M Ward, Sydney University Press, Sydney, 1973, pp. 31–33. Twopeny himself made money by speculating in land: “This land-speculation is quite a feature of Australian life, and at certain periods it is difficult to lose money by it” (p. 38). 158 John Sulman, “The Twentieth Century House: A Suggestion towards the Solution of the Servant Problem”, ANZAAS Report for 1902, pp. 669–678; see p. 670. 159 N G Butlin, Investment in Australian Economic Development 1861–1900, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1964, p. 259. By 1921 only 7% of families in New South Wales did not live in a home of their own, whether rented or bought (Official Year Book of NSW, no. 53, 1950–1951, Government Printer, Sydney, 1955, p. 368, table 328). 160 Letter to Browning, 27.11.1856, quoted in Cook, Life of Ruskin, op. cit., vol. I, p. 461. 161 Sir Henry Wrixon, Socialism: Being Notes on a Political Tour, Macmillan, London, 1896, p. xi. 162 ibid., p. 285. 163 ibid., p. 294. 164 ibid., p. 295. 165 Eugene Richter, Glimpses of the Socialistic Future, 3rd edn, Swan Sonnenschein, London, 1907, chs XI and XVIII. The Sydney Morning Herald praised the book as a “counter-irritant to the Bellamy remedies for Society, for it depicts the miseries of the socialistic regime and its final overthrow” (Richter, op. cit., “Some Press Notices”, n.p.).

RUSKIN AND THE AUSTRALIAN FEMINIST MOVEMENT 339 166 Edward Carpenter, Civilization: Its Cause and Cure, Swan Sonnenschein, London, 1895, pp. 39– 40, cited in W D P Bliss (ed.), Encyclopedia of Social Reforms, 2nd edn, Funk & Wagnalls, New York, 1898, p. 216. Also see William Morris, “How We Live and How We Might Live” (1884), in A L Morton (ed.), Political Writings of William Morris, International Publishers, New York, 1973, pp. 134–158, esp. pp. 154–155. Some conservative opinion questioned the home as well, responsible for the “most fatal of all kinds of selfishness, the selfishness of the home”; this led to “a vast deal of social and political bitterness and intolerance”. See ch. XXI, “Man and his Master”, in Modern Women and What Is Said of Them, op. cit., pp. 215–224, esp. pp. 223–224. 167 Mrs S C Hall in the Victoria Magazine, London, February 1871, cited in James McGrigor Allan, Woman Suffrage Wrong in Principle and Practice, Remington & Co., London, 1890, p. 143. 168 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics, Small Maynard & Co., Boston, 1898, p. 203. 169 Letter to the Bulletin, Sydney, 21 April 1894, pp. 6–7, cited in Ruth Teale, Colonial Eve: Sources on Women in Australia 1788–1914, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1978, p. 196. 170 Dolores Hayden, The Grand Domestic Revolution, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1981, passim, esp. chs 2 to 4. 171 According to the Encyclopedia of Social Reforms (op. cit.) the communitarian ideas of Charles Fourier (1772–1837) spread through America in the 1840s; Brook Farm, near Boston, was influenced by him. Fourier believed that social harmony could only be achieved in phalanxes, ideal communities founded on his principles, of between 1800 and 2000 people. A phalanstery was the main building of such a community, a cross between an hotel and a barracks (pp. 622–624). 172 Hayden, op. cit., on Gilman, pp. 184–197; Gilman (1860–1935) was a prolific author who published both fiction and non-fiction, as well as running her own newspaper, all on feminist lines; the polemics Women and Economics (1898) and The Home (1903), the novel Herland (1915) and the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” are her most famous writings. Her work was well-known in feminist circles in Melbourne by 1900 (Diane Kirkby, op. cit., p. 55). 173 See William O’Neill, Preface to Gilman’s The Home, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, Ill., 1972, p. xi. 174 Gilman, Women and Economics, op. cit., pp. 267–268. 175 Gilman, The Home, op. cit., p. 3. 176 ibid., p. 13. 177 ibid., pp. 290, 296. 178 ibid., p. 336. 179 ibid., p. 341. 180 Ann J Lane, Introduction to Gilman’s Herland, The Women’s Press, London, 1979 [originally published 1915], p. xiv; and William O’Neill, Everyone Was Brave: A History of Feminism in America, Quadrangle/NYT, New York, 1971, p. 45. The American agitator Emma Goldman saw the home as a “terrible fetish” in 1910: “How it saps the very life-energy of woman, – this modern prison with golden bars … Yet woman clings tenaciously to the home, to the power that holds her in bondage” (Anarchism and Other Essays, Kennikat Press, Port Washington, New York, 1969 [originally published 1910], pp. 202–203). 181 Mary Gilmore, Marri’d and Other Verses, George Robertson, Sydney, 1910. 182 NSW Legislative Assembly, Votes and Proceedings, 1899, 21 November, p. 5487. 183 ibid., p. 5488. 184 ibid., p. 5502.

340 Endnotes for Chapter Four 185 ibid., p. 5500. The whole debate makes salutary reading, for and against; those in favour of the female suffrage emerge with more credit than those opposed, seen through modern eyes, and not just because of the justice of their cause. Mr Norton thought that emancipated women were discredited by riding bicycles (p. 5497) while Mr Chanter was shocked to see them haranguing crowds in the Domain on Sunday afternoons (p. 5501); Mr Waddell thought the movement only worthy of effeminate men and masculine women (p. 5510). Compare these with the speeches by Mr Griffith (pp. 5489–5491) or Mr Wilks (pp. 5491–5494). The result on this occasion was the passing of the bill in the Legislative Assembly, but its defeat a week later in the Legislative Council by three votes (p. 5879). 186 Anti female suffrage petition in Victoria, 1900, see Janette Bomford, That Dangerous and Persuasive Woman: Vida Goldstein, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1993, pp. 29–30; Sydney meeting, see Sydney Morning Herald, 11 October 1900, p. 9. Nothing more is heard of the Anti-Female Suffrage League in NSW, presumably because of its members’ distaste for political action. 187 See Jan Roberts and Beverley Kingston (eds), Maybanke: A Woman’s Voice, Ruskin Rowe Press, Sydney, 2001, p. 67, and Sydney Morning Herald, 12, 14, 16 November, 1891. Elizabeth Ashton is reported as saying that once women gained the suffrage, their first work must be to amend the marriage laws or do away with them altogether; marriage was a wrong that had endured for centuries. Lady Windeyer, in the chair, said she hoped that no one would carry away from the meeting the idea that women wished to revolutionise the world. What women wished was to be the helpers of men (SMH, 12 November, p. 7). After a flurry of angry letters, a hostile editorial in theSMH said that “it is really getting to be time for the women who aspire to stand side by side with men in public discussion, and in doing the work of society, to lay aside all this. Their great want is to divest themselves of that morbid consciousness of sex which occupies so large a part in their public talk and labour. Let them try to forget, not that they are women, but that they are female” (16 November). 188 Hyslop, op. cit., p. 40. 189 Ackermann, op. cit., p. 187. 190 Louisa Lawson, “Essay on Home”, in Olive Lawson (ed.), The First Voice of Australian Feminism: Excerpts from Louisa Lawson’s The Dawn 1888–1895, Simon & Schuster Australia, Sydney, 1990, pp. 172–174. Gardens, as markers of stability, were good things too: see Brian Matthews, Louisa, op. cit., p. 181.The real problem, as Felicity Grace points out, was the lack of diversity in housing, especially for single women (F Grace, “Housing”, in Australian Feminism, op. cit., pp. 142–148, esp. pp. 144–145, and see Laura Bogue-Luffmann, “Board and Lodging”, The Home Queen, Sydney, 18 May 1904, p. 7: “Every room of decent size, containing a fire-place, is reserved for a married couple and can only be obtained by payment of double board. ‘The femme Sole’ has to content herself with a mere cabin and to warm her toes at the fire of her own enthusiasm.”) 191 C J Dennis, The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1940 [originally published 1915], II, “The Intro”, p. 13. 192 ibid., XII, “Uncle Jim”, p. 87. 193 Mrs W H McNamara, “Working Men’s Homes”, in Three Essays on Social Issues, The Cooperative Printing Co., Sydney, 1894, pp. 11–14, p. 11 [ML 331.8/M]. 194 ibid., p. 11. 195 ibid., p. 12. 196 ibid., p. 13. 197 In Social Architecture, or, Reasons and Means for the Demolition and Reconstruction of the Social Edifice (Samuel Tinsley, London, 1876), its anonymous author says that he “condemns the private home, not only for giving opportunities to serious crimes and disgusting vices, but chiefly for being a means of

RUSKIN AND THE AUSTRALIAN FEMINIST MOVEMENT 341 withdrawing men, women and children from their natural sphere of social intercourse” (pp. 24–25, and see chs V, XV and XXVI). In a survey of over 100 public housing schemes around the world by the American Commissioner of Labor in 1895, almost all were based on the idea of an associated home, with common facilities, though the author concluded “No matter how excellent the accommodation, no matter what precautions are taken to secure self-containment and isolation, home in a tenement building can never be what it is where a single roof covers a single family” (ERL Gould, The Housing of the Working People: Eight Special Report of the Commissioner of Labor, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1895, p. 176). 198 Womanhood Suffrage League of NSW, 9th Annual Report for Year Ending 1 June 1900. 199 Roberts and Kingston, op. cit. Cooperative homes, cooking and laundry are discussed on 26 January 1895 and 27 July 1895; kindergartens on 23 November 1895. In its brief life the Woman’s Voice also discussed women’s refuges (8 September 1894 and 9 March 1895), women’s hospitals (20 April 1895), public soup kitchens (18 May 1895), and asylums for the aged poor (5 October 1895). 200 Louisa Lawson, The Dawn, June 1893 (Olive Lawson, op. cit.). The Dawn ran numerous items on women and housing, discussing among other things the nature of home (May 1888, September 1889, April 1894), the problems of taking in lodgers (December 1889) and the need for women’s shelters (May 1891). 201 Sulman, see endnote 158, above. Sulman did design a cooperative home, or at least a version of the apartment hotel advocated by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, in 1900: this was the St Bernard’s Home for Working Gentlewomen in Sydney, a project of the philanthropist Dame Eadith Walker, and based on English examples from the 1880s. (Max Kelly, Faces of the Street: William Street Sydney 1916, Doak Press, Paddington, 1982, p. 58). Sulman also designed the first Woman’s College at Sydney University in 1892–1894 (Trevor Howells, University of Sydney Architecture, Watermark Press, Sydney, 2007, pp. 140–141). 202 One utopia not discussed here, because I have not been able to establish where and when it was originally written, and by whom, is Stories of the New Day, by “Alif”, which ran as a serial in The Worker, Sydney, 26 January, 2 February, 9 February, 16 February, 1901. In this unnamed world a benevolent state provides for everything, and women are not forgotten: “Freedom from home cares, of supervision of household – no woman within the Nation’s bounds, maid, wife, or widow, knew aught of anxiety as to the means of sustaining life! – were secured to her by the Nation: it gave her ease of mind with ease of body: it gave her grace and beauty in environment and mental stimulus. It gave her exquisite comfort: it gave her the skill of science; it gave her the glory of simplicity and truth in companionship; it lapped her round with the Infinite in music and in poetry, in draughtsman’s dreamings” (9 February). This story shows the imaginative debt all utopian writers owed to Greek and Roman architecture: columns and domes, terraces and statues, marble and stone abound; see part III, “The Temple of Maternity”, for a particularly vivid description of the “imperishable felicity” of the buildings of the future. Although the buildings are clearly derived from classical precedents, there is a Ruskinian touch about the builders themselves: “Chisel might dint, and plumb and square might chasten the ashlar, but the informing brain of every worker gladdened his work, and lifted him into the van of those who were consciously building a Higher Humanity” (ibid.). 203 Ruskin, Lectures on Art, 1870, IV, sec. 125. Ruskin’s role as utopian thinker, and the fate of some Australian experiments in utopian living, are described in Chapter Five below. 204 Catherine Helen Spence, Handfasted, 1879, ed. Helen Thomson, Penguin Books, Ringwood, Vic., 1984. Spence later met Gilman on her world tour in 1893 (Barbara Caine (ed.), Australian Feminism, op. cit., p. 494). 205 Handfasted, p. viii. 206 ibid., pp. 299–300.

342 Endnotes for Chapter Four 207 ibid., p. 303. 208 Spence, An Autobiography, 1910, quoted in Magarey, op. cit., p. 69. 209 Catherine Helen Spence, A Week in the Future, introduction and notes by Lesley Durrell Ljungdahl, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1987, originally published in the Centennial Magazine, Sydney and Melbourne, vol. 1, August 1888 to July 1889. Ljungdahl points out (pp. 10–12) the debt Spence’s text owes to Jane Hume Clapperton’s Scientific Meliorism and the Evolution of Happiness, Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., London, 1885, a debt that runs close to plagiarism, especially in the description of the Associated Homes. 210 Spence, A Week in the Future, op. cit., ch. II, passim. The quote is from pp. 38–39. 211 Fors LXXI, October 1876, Notes and Correspondence, item VI. The proposal was for a group home on Fourier lines of between 75 and 150 people; 125 was about right. 212 H A Dugdale, A Few Hours in a Far-Off Age, M’Carron Bird, Melbourne, 1883, Mitchell Library copy at DSM/042/P398. 213 ibid., pp. 5–6. 214 Ruskin, Lectures on Art, 1870, IV, sec. 123. 215 Dugdale, op. cit., pp. 6–7. 216 ibid., p. 103. 217 ibid. 218 ibid., p. 7. 219 See John H Vincent, The Chautauqua Movement, Chautauqua Press, Boston, 1886, and Joseph E Gould, The Chautauqua Movement, State University of New York, Fredonia, New York, 1961, for a full account. 220 William James. “What Makes a Life Significant?”, inTalks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals, Longman Green & Co., London, 1908, pp. 265–301, see pp. 269–270. 221 ibid., pp. 270–271. For a more positive view of Chautauqua, see Henry Drummond’s account of his visit there in 1887, in George Adam Smith, The Life of Henry Drummond, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1899, pp. 344–348. 222 Dugdale, op. cit., p. 6. 223 ibid. 224 A writer in the journal of the Institute of Architects of NSW wrote in 1907 that “Australians know little, as yet, of Apartment Houses … The Apartment House is at home in America and in France, but it will never displace the Englishman’s home, as long as that remains his sanctum” (Art and Architecture, Sydney, 1907, pp. 32–33). And Robert Haddon wrote the following year that the “system of collective dwellings in large building blocks … has not … made progress in Australia … Rather has the tendency been to so cheapen the means of communication as to induce the working classes to seek the more open lands for their dwellings” (Robert Haddon, Australian Architecture, George Robertson, Melbourne, 1908, p. 65; on this point see Gould, op. cit., The Housing of the Working People, 1895, pp. 425–426). 225 Nicholas Brown, “Making Oneself Comfortable, or More Rooms Than Persons”, in Patrick Troy (ed.), A History of European Housing in Australia, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000, pp. 107–124, see p. 117. Beverley Kingston writes, “Marriage [in Australia] has always … meant a home of one’s own as opposed to living in a more extended family group … more or less self-contained lodgings were preferred to other forms of accommodation.” Flats or serviced apartments do not appear until the 1920s, and even then are popular only with the smart, the sophisticated and the rich. (Kingston, My Wife, My Daughter and Poor Mary Ann: Women and Work in Australia, Thomas Nelson Australia, Sydney, 1975, p. 101, and see Max Kelly, Faces of the Street, op. cit., p. 58). Kelly estimates that up to 20% of Sydney’s adult population

RUSKIN AND THE AUSTRALIAN FEMINIST MOVEMENT 343 in 1911 lived in boarding houses or as lodgers in private homes. There were hundreds of boarding houses in the poor inner city areas of Woolloomooloo, Darlinghurst and East Sydney alone. As for the attitude of the poor towards communal living, boarding house keepers were stock figures of fun for decades; for one such account see Henry Lawson, “Board and Residence”, in Prose Works of Henry Lawson, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1979, pp. 101–104 [originally published 1896]. The Worker ran many stories of squalor in supposedly charitable institutions; see “The People’s Palace: What an Inmate Says About It”, 4 March 1899, p. 1, “Sydney Doss Houses”, 3 December 1904, p. 3, and “Salv’Army Industrial Farm, Manly”, 10 December 1904, p. 2, for examples. The misery of domestic service was a frequent theme of writers in The Worker too: see “Dearth of Domestic Drudges”, editorial, 22 July 1899: “Briefly speaking, women abstain from domestic service because in most cases the life is one of white slavery.” In this regard also see “Domestic Service” by Beatrix Tracy in the Lone Hand, 2 March 1908, pp. 474–482, and “Indignity of Domestic Service”, by Barbara Baynton, Sydney Morning Herald, 10 June 1911, p. 4, reprinted in Sally Krimmer and Alan Lawson, Portable Australian Authors: Barbara Baynton, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, Qld., 1980, pp. 318–322. 226 See The Eagle’s Nest (1872): “And in actual life, let me reassure you, in conclusion, the first ‘wisdom of calm’ is to plan, and resolve to labour for, the comfort and beauty of a home such as, if we could obtain it, we would quit no more … a cottage all our own, with its little garden, its pleasant view, its surrounding fields” (IX, sec. 206). This passage was frequently quoted by Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker in their writings on the Garden City movement; see for example Raymond Unwin, Cottage Plans and Common Sense: Fabian Tract No. 109, The Fabian Society, London, 1908, p. 4: “Undoubtedly, whenever at all possible of attainment, the majority of men would accept Mr Ruskin’s ideal of a house: ‘Not a compartment of a model lodging house, not the number so and so Paradise Row, but a cottage all of our own, with its little garden, its healthy air, its clean kitchen, parlor and bedrooms.’” Unwin has considerably shortened the original version in this extract. 227 C E M Martin, “The Works of John Ruskin”, Victorian Review, Melbourne, July 1884, pp. 281–303, see p. 288. 228 Florence Walsh, “The Present Position of Women”, Sydney Quarterly Magazine, vol. VIII, no. 3, September 1891, pp. 188–194, see pp. 189, 192. 229 Dora Montefiore was an Englishwoman and a founder of the WSL, who returned to England in the mid- 1890s. There she joined the militant WSPU and was among the first women to be arrested and imprisoned in the struggle for the female franchise. Refusing to pay her income tax on principle, she was besieged in her home by bailiffs and used the occasion to make suffragist speeches from her upstairs window to crowds in the street below. See Audrey Oldfield, Woman Suffrage in Australia, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1992, pp. 233–235, and Montefiore’s autobiography From a Victorian to a Modern (1927). In 1892 she wrote that Ruskin’s “wise and tender saying” in Sesame and Lilies [about women having the power to end suffering and injustice] “struck me as being the keynote to the movement, and … might be an appropriate motto for our league” (Woman’s Suffrage Journal, Sydney, 15 March 1892, p. 5). 230 Victoria Emery, “The Daughters of the Court: Women’s Medievalism in Nineteenth Century Melbourne”, in Stephanie Trigg (ed.), Medievalism and the Gothic in Australian Culture, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Vic., 2005, pp. 171–188, see p. 180. 231 ibid., p. 187. 232 Michael Ackland, That Shining Band: A Study of Australian Colonial Verse Tradition, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, Qld., 1994, pp. 75–92, see p. 80. 233 Martin, op. cit., p. 300, quoting Ruskin, Lectures on Art, 1870, III, “The Relation of Art to Morals”, sec. 94.

344 Endnotes for Chapter Four 234 Ruskin, “The Relation of Art to Morals”, sec. 95. 235 I have been unable to find any trace of whether poor or working class women read Ruskin, but there is ample evidence that middle class women did. Often they were introduced to his work at school: Nettie Palmer, writing in the 1920s but reflecting on the late nineteenth century, wrote that most middle class girls who got Ruskin as a school prize were given Sesame and Lilies, unfortunately, because “ it is a book with passages that innocently lay themselves open to derision, and it is not only the post-war young woman that has protested … they felt that Ruskin’s solution of economic and private problems was a mere sweetish fairy-tale. Even when attracted by his call for an archaic simplicity of living, they resented his ignorance of their very real difficulties in a swiftly-changing world” (Nettie Palmer, “Ruskin Today”, in Vivian Smith (ed.), Nettie Palmer, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, Qld., 1988, pp. 473–477, see pp. 473–474). Older girls with artistic aspirations might get a complete set of Ruskin when they turned twenty-one and had taken up painting, though this was no guarantee they had read all of his work: “perhaps the owner had read, say, one volume out of thirty-six. Even that volume she had used only in some small literary society, working it over chapter by chapter, writing little papers on it and listening to others. Ever afterwards that one volume sits ion the shelf looking like a white blackbird. In contrast with all its fellows, it has a worn, weathered, yet active look: the rest are sleeping partners” (p. 473). Of all Ruskin’s work Palmer preferred Fors Clavigera, which she thought had “a great deal of common sense and a kind of robust charm absent from his other work” (p. 474), but by the time of writing Palmer thought that Ruskin had been “more heavily forgotten than Carlyle” (p. 473). Nevertheless she thought his “perennial youthfulness … remain[s] an inspiration today”, and concluded “He need no longer be kept, periodically dusted but unopened, on drawing-room shelves … he can be taken out, opened, aired and actually read” (p. 477). 236 Emery, op. cit., p. 179. 237 Nellie Martel, another Englishwoman, later split from the WSL over its conservatism on labour questions (Oldfield, op. cit., pp. 93–98). She returned to England in 1904 and like Dora Montefiore joined the WSPU (ibid., pp. 233–234). Mrs Martel was one of the twenty speakers who addressed a monster suffragist rally of over 300,000 people in Hyde Park in 1908 (Andrew Rosen, Rise Up, Women! The Militant Campaign of the Women’s Social and Political Union 1903–1914, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1974, pp. 102–105). 238 Sydney Morning Herald, 11 May 1900, p. 8. 239 Daily Telegraph, Sydney, 10 May 1900, p. 7. 240 Daily Telegraph, Sydney, 10 May 1900, p. 4.

RUSKIN AND THE AUSTRALIAN FEMINIST MOVEMENT 345

CHAPTER FIVE RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN READERS

Ruskin’s appeal for late nineteenth century Australia can be summed up under three headings: Ruskin as Authority, Ruskin as Protest, and Ruskin as Utopian, and I consider these in detail here. Ruskin is the quintessential Victorian sage, and his early work abets this impression with its dogmatic assertion of laws of Ruskin’s own making on everything from art and architecture to geology and political economy. Not everyone could see past Ruskin’s arrogance in doing so, but those who could, like Joseph Chamberlain, mayor of Birmingham in 1876, praised the “genius and eloquence and originality which made self-assertion tolerable and eccentricity enjoyable”.1 By the period we are discussing, according to Brian Maidment, Ruskin was being used as an authority for a “vast range of activities which had only the barest literal source within his work”, a phenomenon which increased as Ruskin fell silent and was no longer able to contradict his more enthusiastic disciples.2 I said in Chapter Three that Ruskin’s lifelong belief in the spiritual unity of men was a very attractive element of his thought for the early Australian labour movement, and I argue here that this parallelled the search for political unity in Australia that led to Federation in 1901. A second aspect of Ruskin’s appeal, related to the first, was his implacable opposition to complacency, especially of the economic kind. Australia at its centennial in 1888 was at the peak of the post gold rush boom, and the future, said the editors of The Picturesque Atlas of Australasia that year, “must be a great and brilliant one – such a future, perhaps, as the history of no country in the world has yet recorded”.3 But in the same year a writer in the Victorian Review was denouncing the “dull well-fed indifference” of prosperous Australia, an attitude more sharply described thirty years later as “unspeakable selfishness”.4 I show below

5 that Ruskin’s denunciations of the “complacency of success” were heard in the Antipodes as well as in Britain, and that the reaction was the same. Ruskin’s most obvious influence in Australia in the 1890s is in his idealism, and his dream of making a perfect society. In the last part of this chapter I describe how this

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN READERS 347 aspect of Ruskin’s thought manifested itself in the work of reformers such as William Lane, Thomas Roseby and Benjamin Backhouse, and in the attempts at founding utopian communities such as New Australia in Paraguay, the Murray River settlements in Victoria and Pitt Town in New South Wales.

348 A. RUSKIN AS AUTHORITY

For colonial readers at the Antipodes, Ruskin offered Authority – the amazing conviction that Alice Meynell saw in him, and that the Australian journalist Randall Bedford saw in Thomas Carlyle – “authenticity, authority, and a poet too”.6 Not everyone was convinced that Ruskin was as reliable an authority on other things as he was on art7 but his sincerity and integrity, and his deep religious feeling, won him a wide readership. In a society characterised by isolation, readers were vulnerable to “solitary and unstable opinion”.8 Ruskin has a lot to say to them9 and points out that “the worst danger by far, to which a solitary student is exposed, is liking things he should not”.10 His advice was to

Remember … that it is of less importance to you … that the books you read should be clever than that they should be right. I do not mean oppressively or repulsively instructive; but that the thoughts they express should be just, and the feelings they excite generous.11

Part of the restlessness Bruce Scates sees in his working class readers is this search for authority. Heroes are constantly proclaimed, then overturned; Henry George is not the only one to sweep the country, then to be dethroned. Libraries are bought and discarded as opinions evolve. Sam, the “petrel of State socialism” in Rigby’s Romance, remarks of another character that he is a “grand little chap, but he’s got notions. Don’t do to be a feller of one book, no matter if that book’s the Bible”.12 Paradoxically it might have been Ruskin’s own changing opinions, and even his contradictions, that appealed to such readers: Ruskin himself is the questioning spirit, especially as time goes by and he becomes less dogmatic, holding that “truth is many-sided”.13 If he is a guide, Ruskin describes what kind in Modern Painters III:

Some men may be compared to careful travellers, who neither stumble at stones, nor slip in sloughs, but have … chosen the wrong road; and others who, however slipping or stumbling at the wayside, have … their eyes fixed on the true gate and goal (stumbling, perhaps, even the more because they have), and will not fail of reaching them. Such are assuredly the safer guides.14

In that case, what was the goal, what the gate? Ruskin says there are two goals, one immediate, one long term. The immediate goal Ruskin wished to set the reader was “to have a definite

15 opinion up to a certain point” and there is an emancipatory aspect to this: “I shall use no

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN READERS 349 influence with him whatever, except to counteract previous prejudices, and leave him, as far as may be, free”.16 The long term goal, reflected throughout Ruskin’s life and work, was unity – the unity of thought and feeling, the unity of art and life, the unity of man with nature and, ultimately, God. In a world marked by increasing fragmentation he sought to erase:

The differences , the outside marks by which Society has parted man from man Neglectful of the universal heart 17

Robert Hewison has pointed out that it was this refusal on Ruskin’s part to accept the normal divisions of thought that is the source of his most profound insights.18 John Rosenberg, writing about Ruskin on architecture, describes him as a superbly articulate moralist who could not divorce the science of building from the art of living.19 Later in Modern Painters V (1860) Ruskin cautions his readers “not [to] think I am irreverently comparing great and small things. The system of the world is entirely one; small things and great are alike part of one mighty whole”.20 Unity was the topic of discussion in Australia in the 1880s. Sir Henry Parkes led the talk of a federation of the Australian colonies, and there was wider talk of imperial federation, the British empire being recast as a commonwealth of equals. The two impulses Henry George saw at work in the nineteenth century, to combine and to separate, were very evident in Australia. Unity in a society facing the fragmenting forces of distance, climate and economics was a powerful goal, but it raised difficult political problems as well. Federation at one point would have included New Zealand and Fiji as well as the other British colonies in the Pacific, a unity of the British race at the antipodes; opposition to a political unity that would have included non-white races as equals caused this to founder. After Federation was restricted to the colonies on the Australian continent, its hopes were summed up by the poet William Gay:

From all divisions let our land be free, For God has made her one: complete she lies Within the unbroken circle of the skies.21

Not everybody was equally enthusiastic about Federation. The labour movement was divided about it, and labour leaders were sparsely represented at the Federation

350 Ruskin as Authority conventions. More radical labour opinion saw it as “Fetteration”, another layer of government that would snuff out hard won democratic protections in the colonial constitutions,22 drawing this comment from the Tocsin:

Tho’ no one knows my meaning, A pleasing name persuades; My sinister companions The cloudy Future shades. Victoria has her troubles, Of minor bonds complains: I guarantee to cure her – With stronger welded chains.23

A lesser poet put his finger on the problem:

We’ll proclaim with lute and tabor The millennium of labour, And we’ll bow before the gammon Of plutocracy and Mammon. We’ll adapt all fads and fictions And their mass of contradictions If all hopes are consummated When Australia’s federated.24

In the end the desire for unity trumped the desire for separateness: nationalism trumped class interests, even for labour voters; the racism of white Australia became more pronounced, infecting every other page of the Bulletin and every page of the Worker.25 Whether the unity represented by Federation was ideal is still debated in Australia, but in this atmosphere – the urge to band together at war with the urge to go it alone – anybody who was certain about anything got a hearing. Though Ruskin did not have a lot to say about colonies and empires, he did have a lot to say about unity. And he could be used, and was, to challenge the complacent assumptions of the majority.

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN READERS 351 B. RUSKIN AS PROTEST

They lie, the men who tell us, for reasons of their own, That want is here a stranger, and that misery’s unknown 26 Henry Lawson, Faces in the Street, 1887

1. “FACES IN THE STREET”

At the height of the boom in the 1880s, T G Tucker, whom we met in Chapter One, addressed a mutual improvement society in Melbourne. Tucker, still new to Australian ways, used his talk to deplore the cant he heard everywhere, the thoughtless repetition of second-hand opinion.27 The result was not just demoralizing and debilitating, it posed problems for society and politics too: “many innocent diversions and charms of public and private life are denied us through cant, many enormities are sanctioned by it, many panics

28 originate in it” Cant in nineteenth century Australia was not hard to find, so much so that Henry Lawson made his reputation with Faces in the Street, his first published poem. The poem continues:

I wonder would the apathy of wealthy men endure Were all their windows level with the faces of the Poor? Ah! Mammon’s slaves, your knees shall knock, your hearts in terror beat, When God demands a reason for the sorrows of the street

Australia in the late nineteenth century was not the best of all possible worlds, seen from below, and not the workingman’s paradise it was supposed to be. And yet people who pointed this out were sharply dealt with: as the Australian Graphic remarked in 1883, “there is ample ground for taking things as they are”:

When the great bulk of a well-ordered community goes one way and the terrible warnings of the so-called thinkers go another, a revision of the theories rather than fruitless efforts to turn the popular tide seems more like the right thing … The procedure of the hurried reformer comes from impatience, and its result has been the faggot, and the guillotine in later times, as it is in an attempted patriarchal supervision in the present.29

Invoking the guillotine seems a bit harsh as criticism of those who were merely debating the low level of public taste, but colonial societies are not famous for their tolerance of

352 Ruskin as Protest contrary opinion. They can be complacent too, especially if things are going well, evident in a review by the Melbourne Punch of a lecture by James Smith in 1872:

The whole sum of Mr James Smith’s doctrine is that we should crucify self and live for each other. Now, it strikes us that this sort of thing would cause a great deal of unnecessary confusion. Why not go on as we are doing now, viz, each live for himself. It comes to the same thing in the end, and works very fairly.30

Commenting on a waterside workers’ strike in 1886, the Intercolonial Christian Messenger said that the labour movement was trying to reverse the true order of things: “The men who, by their wisdom and energy have accumulated sufficient wealth to employ others, are certainly better able to rule than those who, however worthy as citizens, have not brains enough to raise themselves out of the ranks of manual workers”.31 Yet churchmen who adopted progressive social policies were attacked themselves, the Sydney Morning Herald for example in 1894 urging them to stick to their primary purpose: saintliness was “a large compensation for the great evils of the time”.32 An anonymous writer in the Australian Magazine in 1886 had gone much further, painting a bitter portrait of the Australian working man: “he has enjoyed, in these Colonies, advantages of the kind not probably to be found in any other part of the world. He has had unexampled opportunities, and he has not taken advantage of them”.33

And yet, at this moment, it is simply the truth that the working-man is secretly hated by everyone not of his own class; for he is selfish, wilful, narrow-minded, truculent, and, what is perhaps worse than all, generally unintelligent and technically unprogressive.34

In the same issue of the Sydney Daily Telegraph that reported the death of William Morris, an editorial on the eight hour day claimed that its achievement was not due to benevolent legislation, merely to supply and demand. Governments should not interfere in economic matters and things should be left as they are.35 “The mischief of such demands”, said the Brisbane Courier in 1900, is “that people are led to look to the State for everything, instead of sturdily trusting to their own ability and pluck to keep going”.36 A writer in 1892 attacked the drift to state socialism in Australia (principally unemployment relief and old age pensions) as preaching “the despicable gospel of shirking, laziness, mendicancy, and moral cowardice”.37

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN READERS 353 Yet even an unfriendly reviewer of one of Ruskin’s books had admitted in 1866 that “with very little art or culture amongst us [and] with the wealthiest among our citizens, boors

38 or misers, we are in peculiar danger of ‘falling down before the golden image.’ ” Twenty-five years of prosperity later, not much had changed; leaders of opinion such as the Australian Natives Association, said one writer, had:

seen nothing of other countries, older countries, wiser countries, more learned countries, richer and more powerful countries. They have been fed and swollen on the rank wind of fulsome flattery by itinerant lecturers and patronizing foreigners. They get a conception of our country and ourselves quite out of proportion to our real bulk in the world.39

Complacency was bad enough, but what was even worse was the dull conformity that came with it, brilliantly caught by Bernard O’Dowd in A Poet of the Moment:

If chance has thrown me genius (Which, well-applied, means cash), Why should I waste the gift in fuss O’er democratic trash? Tho’ dreamers warn of moral death And ragged envy brays, The moment is my muses’ breath, The moment ‘tis that pays. The soul may have its higher needs (As if you pay, I’ll show), But he who with the crowd succeeds Must with the current go.40

In such an atmosphere, those who challenged “the true order of things” might well turn to Ruskin for support, as we saw in chapters three and four. It is worthwhile briefly recapitulating Ruskin’s own experiences before considering what happened to some of his Australian followers.

354 Ruskin as Protest 2. “TOO AMUSING TO BE DANGEROUS”

The following points may be regarded as established beyond the possibility of contradiction: 1. That such phases of human suffering are now, always have been, and undoubtedly always will be, the inevitable concomitants of the progress of civilization, or the transitions of the life of society to a higher and better stage … 2. That it is not within the power of statute enactment to arrest such transitions, even when a large and immediate amount of human suffering can certainly be predicated as their consequent, except so far as it initiates and favors a return of society towards barbarism.

41 David A Wells, Recent Economic Changes, 1889

No people, understanding pain, ever inflicted so much: no people, understanding facts, ever acted on them so little. 42 Ruskin, The Eagle’s Nest, 1872

In the first issue of Fors Clavigera (1871) Ruskin declares his aim: “I have listened to many ingenious persons, who say we are better off now than ever we were before … I do not know how well off we were before; but I know positively that many very deserving persons of my acquaintance have great difficulty in living under these improved circumstances”. He is a reluctant reformer who has been forced to speak out because “I simply cannot paint, nor read … nor do anything else that I like … because of the misery that I know of, and see signs of, where I know it not, which no imagination can interpret too bitterly”.43 Fors Clavigera is Ruskin’s sustained protest against the economic and social order of things. “Of such prosperity I have seen enough and will endure it no longer quietly” he says in Fors XXII (1872), but his anger at the complacency of prosperity goes back at least to 1846 and Modern Painters II: “men insolently call themselves Utilitarians, who would turn, if they had their way, themselves and their race into vegetables”.44 Suffering and struggle in the lives of nations have brought fortitude and faith, but prosperity and safety have brought “evils that vex less and mortify more, that suck the blood though they do not shed it, and ossify the heart though they do not torture it”.45 But what most provokes Ruskin are the “devil’s militia” of “base litterateurs … totally occupied in every journal and penny magazine all over the world, in declaring that this present state of the poor to be glorious and enviable, as compared with

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN READERS 355 the poor that have been”. Of all the lies being told today the “primary and all-pestilentialist is the one formalised now into wide European faith by political economists, and bruited about by frantic clergymen”.46 Ruskin’s war with the “vulgar triumphalism” of the economic orthodoxies of the day, particularly laissez faire, is well known. His attacks on John Stuart Mill fill pages of Unto This Last; David Ricardo and Adam Smith are not spared; and Professors Fawcett of Cambridge and Bastiat of Paris get a drubbing. All this achieved was the derision of right thinking men; as the Saturday Review commented in 1880, “one of the most delicate connoisseurs of art that have ever lived is also the most confused, short-sighted, and Utopian political economist that is now alive and prominent”.47 Anthony Trollope, who ought to have known better, savaged The Crown of Wild Olive mercilessly:

the reader, – even our most unthinking reader, – knows that mines and iron furnaces are essentially necessary, that they have been given by God as blessings, that the world without them could not be the world which God has intended, – and he rejects such prophesyzing as this. The gaze of the denouncer who denounces like this has not been sufficiently intense to discover truth.48

Ruskin knew perfectly well what was going on in the minds of such readers; in Unto This Last he remarks that “the attraction of riches is already too strong, as their authority is already too weighty, for the reason of mankind”.49 And it is in the same book that he draws one of his most famous contrasts: “Government and cooperation are in all things the laws of life; Anarchy and competition the laws of Death”.50 This was not the way orthodox economists saw it: “Human nature needs a heavy whip”, said one, and “no whip has ever been discovered so effective as competition, and if it were dispensed with, the human race, even if happier, would be less vigorous and less prone to make steady advance toward more perfect work its rule of life”.51 Ruskin had a different rule. It is in Unto This Last that Ruskin states his “one great fact” that “THERE IS NO WEALTH BUT LIFE. Life, including all its powers of love, of joy, and of admiration”. A strange political economy; the only one, nevertheless, that ever was or can be: all political economy founded on self-interest being but the fulfilment of that which once brought schism into the Policy of angels, and ruin into the Economy of Heaven.52

356 Ruskin as Protest Though Ruskin was often criticised as a pessimist, Alice Meynell for one read the conclusion to The Stones of Venice as an appeal “not to despair, but to the hope of the race”.53 And in The Crown of Wild Olive Ruskin says what he offers his listeners is “a sureness of hope, which may perhaps be the one thing that can be helpful to men who have done too much not to have often failed in doing all that they desired”.54 But many readers read Ruskin for his willingness to question “things as they are”, “the true order of things”, that the most learned opinion deemed to be unchangeable by human intervention and therefore beyond hope. As an early reviewer of The Stones of Venice wrote:

His censures are so widely flung about, his denunciations are so dogmatic and curt, his doctrine is so directly counter to all the teachings and practices of our own time, and so subversive of nearly all hitherto received authority, that those who are otherwise at variance with each other will make common cause against Mr Ruskin as their common foe.55

Though the review concludes that “the flippancy of the book robs it of all authority, and the dogmatism has an extravagance about it which is much too amusing to be dangerous”, Ruskin could still annoy the complacent and the indifferent among the middle classes, in Australia no less than in Britain. I discuss examples of this now.

3. “A COUNSEL OF PERFECTION”

Some of the earliest mentions of Ruskin in Australia are reviews of Sesame and Lilies and The Crown of Wild Olive in the Melbourne Spectator (1865–1866). They are not positive. “What pestilent vanity is it which drives him to political economy – which prompts him to set himself up as a social preacher?” the Spectator asked. A giant in art, Mr Ruskin is in truth but a baby in political economy; and his ignorance is only equalled by his arrogance on this subject. He is stupendously absurd by reason of the very eloquence and power of language which he uses in proving to us how little he knows of that which he so grandly denounces.

Ruskin belongs to the new school of “emotional political economy”, of which he is the “prophet and proto-martyr”. His mistake, apart from criticizing his own country, is to want political economy to “extinguish poverty, put down vice, and promote truth”. This is not

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN READERS 357 the province of political economy, which anyway is a science and not an art. Therefore “one might as reasonably expect a mathematician, who tells us that all the radii of a circle are [un]equal, to draw a circle correctly, as to ask that the political economist should concern himself with the ethical application of his science”. The reviewer ends with an exasperated, but revealing, question:

What is to be done with a writer who prints the death, by starvation, of one Michael Collins in red ink, in order that the record may fix itself more indelibly in the national conscience – with a teacher who holds that this one fact is a proof of our national degeneracy, of the baseness of our commercial system, of the 56 rottenness of our political economy?

57 58 The Ethics of the Dust fares better, unexpectedly, but not The Olive Crown [sic] at least initially. The familiar charges are made – Ruskin is unpractical, paradoxical, Utopian – but his eloquence gradually wins the reviewer over: “our blame and our opposition vanish before the honeyed sentences to whose felicity of arrangement we can scarcely find a parallel in the English language”. The reviewer accepts Ruskin on beauty, even deploring a recent local example of anti-beauty, the defeat of a bill to prevent the pollution of the Yarra River. But, eloquent or not, he will not accept Ruskin’s proposals for social reform:

Paradox after paradox is heaped on his astonished disciples, and we are asked to reverse all the teaching of political economy, and renounce all the wisdom of sages and philosophers at the bidding of this social Mahomet. Nor does he hesitate to support his theories by assertions of the wildest and most extravagant nature.

Ruskin, the reviewer concludes, is “too eager after perfection to strive earnestly and heartily for gradual amelioration”. There are scattered mentions of Ruskin in the periodical press of Australia in the 1860s and 1870s, but they become more frequent in the eighties and nineties. He is well enough known now for readers of Sydney Punch and the Bulletin to get the jokes about art and municipal politics, and for the readers of Truth to know what it meant when it said that “Ruskinese was a lingo delightful to the soul”.59 But as the political ferment grows towards the end of the century, politics becomes more bitter, and Ruskin is given less quarter. In 1892 B R Wise, the smooth young Attorney – General of New South Wales we met in Chapter Three,

358 Ruskin as Protest dismissed Ruskin’s attacks on laissez faire as “wild vilification”: no one who has read Ruskin’s writings on economics can deny that “even patent silliness is no impediment to the popularity of a groundless charge”.60 While “ignorant and misdirected”, Wise is forced to consider such views only because of their great influence on “a large class of benevolent people, who do not reason closely or at all on economic questions”.61 As we saw in Chapter Two, Walter Butler’s paper on the Arts and Crafts movement, given to the Royal Victorian Institute of Architects in 1893, attracted a strongly-worded rebuttal from a reader of the Australasian Builder and Contractors News, who denounced Butler’s citations from Ruskin and Carlyle “in their wildest and least lucid moods”.62 And a late review in 1894 of Sesame and Lilies, in the journal of the Australasian Home Reading Union, agreed with Ruskin’s attack on “the barrenness, the unrighteousness, the meanness, and the all-absorbing selfishness of the world we live in”, but baulked at Ruskin’s answer: “Books, only books! A very mild remedy indeed for such a desperate case.” Public libraries are no answer for social distress, and “it is doubtful whether if every householder in this colony were presented with Professor Ruskin’s own selection of ‘books for all time,’ the community, as a whole, would be much the better for it”.63 In 1898 the Sydney Morning Herald criticised some remarks by John Barlow, president of the Institute of Architects of New South Wales, about the poor quality of Australian housing. Barlow was a Ruskinian, and the Herald knew it and did not like it. Barlow’s vision of a better Sydney was “an ideal, a counsel of perfection”:

If we were all Ruskinians, or, not to put too fine a point upon it, members of the Guild of St George, we should be much too conscientious. In that case everything would be harmonious, uniform, beautiful – and frightfully costly … Meantime, the great majority of city dwellers who must be tenants of structures they never built and cannot own, have to be thankful for greater comfort, security for health, decency for living, and general convenience than ever were thought necessary for poor men in the days when “the builder and contractor” was not.

The conclusion, as so often before, was the tried and true path of gradual change: “By slow degrees, the standard grows, by the steady pressure of public demand and the educating influence of good examples more than by force of Building Acts or the zeal of

64 reformers.”

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN READERS 359 Sometimes gradual reform is not enough. At the end of the nineteenth century it was still possible to die of hunger in Australia, and in the big cities too. In 1898 The Worker contrasted the death of an old man in Melbourne with the recent murder of the Empress of Austria: “the world goes into hysterics over the quick and easy death of an empress at the hand of a man maddened by social injustice, and it takes no notice of the robbing of workers to death by slow starvation. Which is the madder – Luccheni or Society?” In 1902 a deputation of the wives and daughters of the unemployed went to see the premier of Victoria, and were turned away, prompting this angry poem in The Worker:

Tenant of a rented hovel sits the sweated worker’s wife, Watching sadly, while her only child is breathing out its life, Hunger gnawing at its vitals, famine in her own pale face – 65 God, is this the prize of triumph? Christ, are these the signs of grace?

360 Ruskin as Protest C. RUSKIN AS UTOPIAN

I wish we could all go somewhere fresh, and begin anew; it would be so much easier. A young girl writes to Ruskin, 187366

1. RUSKIN ON UTOPIA

Ruskin was, as far as I can tell, no more and no less a patriotic Englishman than any of his contemporaries, and accepted, though he did not show much interest in, the British Empire. There are a only a few mentions of colonies in his work but there is quite a lot about utopias. As we would expect, it is the religious dimension that interests him: in Modern Painters V (1860) he remarks that if there is no God, men will seek heaven on earth, but this is neither the Greek nor the Roman spirit.67 In The Crown of Wild Olive (1866) he makes one of his most quoted remarks: “if you do not wish for the Kingdom [of God] don’t pray for it. But if you do, you must do more than pray for it; you must work for it”.68 And in Lectures on Art (1870) Ruskin says of utopia that he has “nothing to do with its possibility, only its indispensability”.69 Hearing about the Paris Commune in 1871 leads Ruskin to reflect on the idea of utopia, characteristically defined as “a place of well-being” instead of the more common “no place”.70 He goes back to Sir Thomas More for his definition of the common wealth, of pleasant and pretty things, “which every poor person in the nation should be summoned to receive his dole of, annually”.71

And when you cry, “Long live the Republic,” the question is mainly, what thing it is you wish to be publicly alive, and whether you are striving for a common-wealth, and Public-Thing, or, as too plainly in Paris, for a common-Illth, and Public-Nothing, or even Public-less-than-nothing and Common Deficit.72

“Us communists of the old school”, however, “cannot rest until we are giving what we can spare of our own.”73 Ruskin originally regarded “quixotism, or utopianism” as “another of the devil’s pet words” because:

the great admission which we are all of us so ready to make, that, because things have long been wrong, it is impossible that they should ever be right, is one of the most fatal sources of misery and crime from which this world

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN READERS 361 suffers. Whenever you hear a man dissuading you from attempting to do well, on the ground that perfection is “Utopian,” beware of that man.

And Ruskin concluded as early as 1854, in words that would be echoed by many a nineteenth- century reformer:

Things are either possible or impossible – you can easily determine which … If the thing is impossible, you need not trouble yourselves about it; if possible, try for it.74

2. THE WORKING MAN’S PARADISE

It takes a moment to think of Australia itself as a utopian project: it certainly wasn’t in the beginning, when the first European settlements, the penal colonies of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land, were established. The early governors were not interested in nation building, and Macquarie, the exception, was heavily censured because he was. But some in Britain saw Australia as more than this, and from Edward Gibbon Wakefield onwards there were schemes for colonies of free settlers to be established in Australia. The gold rushes brought huge waves of immigrants to the eastern colonies, especially Victoria. Chronic labour shortages meant Australia soon became known as the “working man’s paradise”, and books promoting emigration began to appear in Britain.75 Prosperity brought grander dreams for Australians. “Are we not ourselves the realisation of More’s Utopia?” T G Tucker asked rhetorically in 1886; “the most real discrepancy between our Australian commonwealths and More’s ideal state lies in the fact that in Utopia the streets were all kept clean”.76 If Australia was Utopia, a bold claim for any new country, it was an unstable one. Things could go backwards as well as forwards for those who came to make their fortunes here. The narrator of a Henry Lawson story meets an English couple in London who had returned after a failed attempt to settle in Australia. Reflecting on their conversation afterwards the narrator says “How familiar that expression sounded! – I think it is used more often in Australia than in any other country: ‘He might have

77 been an independent man.’ ”

362 Ruskin as Utopian That this unstable world had to be controlled somehow led to the socialist challenge to the “order of things” that appeared in the 1880s, as we saw in Chapter Three.78 Of the different varieties of socialism on offer, one of the most prominent was utopian, leading to some of the most interesting social experiments of the nineties, discussed below. The utopian impulse explains the amazing popularity of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1887), the most widely-read book among social reformers and the working class of any in this period.79 If utopian socialism in Australia was personified in one man, it was the labour figure William Lane (1861–1917). Active as a journalist and union organiser in Queensland, in 1892 he writes his political novel The Workingman’s Paradise.80 The title is ironic, because Australia under laissez-faire capitalism is no longer, if it ever had been, a paradise for the poor. Ned, the sturdy bush worker come to the big city, is shown the true order of things by Nellie, who takes him on a tour of the poorest quarters in Sydney and later introduces him to her circle of socialist friends.81 Her mentor, the intellectual Geisner, debates Ned on the best way to remedy the evils he has seen. Of the many writers he recommends Ned read, Ruskin is not mentioned, but he is clearly between the lines of passages like the following. Geisner is insisting that all reforms will fail unless men have faith, and when Ned asks “How can they get it?” Geisner replies:

“If we ourselves have it, sooner or later we shall give it to others. Hearts that this world has wounded are longing for the ideal we bring: artist-souls that suffering has purified and edged are working for the Cause in every land; weak though we are we have a love for the Beautiful in us, a sense that revolts against the unloveliness of life as we have it, a conception of what might be if things were only right. In every class the ground is being turned by the ploughshare of Discontent; everywhere we can sow the seed broadcast with both hands. And if only one seed in a thousand springs up and bears, it is worth it.”

The Biblical references, as well as those to beauty and loveliness, suggest Ruskin, as does this exchange: “But how can one do it best?” Ned asks, and Geisner replies “By doing always the work that comes to one’s hand.” A few lines later he repeats this advice: “Some day you will

82 find other work opening out. Always do that which comes to your hand.” The origins of this phrase can be traced back to Ecclesiastes but Ruskin uses it many times.83 In a private letter

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN READERS 363 in 1871 he writes to a young friend that “I should like you, for the most part, to do what you enjoy most, in a resolute manner, and to be sure that what you most enjoy doing or learning, Heaven means you to do and learn. Do not try to be great or wise … try to be happy first, and

84 useful afterwards.” The fictional Geisner would have read Fors Clavigera, as the real William Lane surely did; and in Fors XIX (June 1872) Ruskin tells his readers to “help anyone, anyhow you can: so, in order, the greatest possible number will be helped … keep what you want; cast what you can, and expect nothing back, once lost, or once given”. And in Fors XXXV (September 1873) Ruskin says “it is of use to remedy any evil you can reach”. Social change must come from the reorganization of society, a point Ruskin had been making at least since 1854, but it must begin with the individual. As he wrote to Thomas Dixon in the letters later published as Time and Tide in 1867, “whatever I have hitherto urged upon you, it is in the power of all men quietly to promote, and finally to secure, by the patient resolution of personal conduct”.85 The Workingman’s Paradise ends with Ned, newly radicalised, returning to Queensland to further struggle and certain imprisonment. William Lane himself was discouraged by what he saw as the failure of the socialist dream, and in 1893 led a band of followers to Paraguay to found a utopian colony he named New Australia. This was regarded as desertion in the face of the enemy by many in the labour movement, one writer admonishing Lane and his group to “stand your ground, quit you like men”:

Is it wise or necessary for our bone and sinew to run away from this old Australia to form a New Australia in South America? I say no. It is not. I say let us all stop here and insist on this being made a New Australia. Can it be done? Yes, it can, and the process is just as easy as kissing. The power is entirely in the hands of the masses.86

The Sydney Bulletin, no friend of utopian ideas, thought that Lane was making “an ignominious bolt”, describing the scheme as “one of the most feather-brained expeditions ever conceived since Ponce de Leon started out to find the Fountain of Eternal Youth”.87 The story of New Australia, fascinating and poignant, has been told elsewhere, but the short version is that it was not a success, the colonists quickly falling prey to jealousies and bickering. Lane himself returned to Australia a few years later.88

364 Ruskin as Utopian 3. VILLAGE SETTLEMENTS IN VICTORIA

By the end of the nineteenth century there were utopian colonies all over the world, especially in North and South America.89 One of the most famous was the Ruskin Colony in Tennessee (1894–1899) widely known through its journal the Coming Nation.90 The same impulse manifested itself in Australia around this time with a number of experiments in “village settlements” in South Australia, Victoria and New South Wales. In this section I review their history before considering the fate of one of the most well-known settlements, Pitt Town in New South Wales. Prompted by the economic distress of the early 1890s, and the urgent problem of dealing with the unemployed, colonial governments passed acts to permit village, group or cooperative settlements where only individual ownership had been permitted before.91 Some of these were to be self-governing colonies of farmers, based on irrigation, and some were labour colonies meant to absorb the poorest of the urban unemployed.92 The theory behind them, such as it was, consisted of generalised ideas of goodwill and uncontested ideas of cooperation. Ruskin or Morris do not appear as mentors of the village settlements in the accounts I have read, but nor does anybody else, with the exception of Murtho in South Australia, said to be inspired by Henry George. I think the reality was that the moving spirits behind the settlements drew on multiple sources for their inspiration, a characteristic of socialist practice at the time, as we have seen; even the Ruskin Colony in Tennessee was inspired by Bellamy and Gronlund as well as by Ruskin.93 Robin Gollan notes that in all the colonies the Labor Party welcomed the village settlement acts enthusiastically. In New South Wales George Black regarded the Crown Land Associated Settlements Bill as far in advance of anything the Labor Party could have hoped for, while Arthur Rae advocated its potential for cooperative and socialist living. Certainly the more advanced reformers looked forward to the test of the cooperative ideal the village settlements offered, as we will see with Pitt Town, discussed below.94 In Victoria and South Australia a series of fourteen village settlements based on cooperative principles were established on the Goulburn and Murray Rivers beginning in 1893;95 by 1898 there were more than 2000 settlers in the Victorian villages alone.96

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN READERS 365 Michael Davitt, a progressive English MP, toured these settlements not long after they were established and praised the industry of the settlers and the absence of want he saw. Should these experiments succeed, he wrote:

as every visitor must earnestly hope they will – a great object lesson in social reform will have been given, not alone to the sister colonies but to older countries too, in which tens of thousands of idle hands are an every-day comment upon the evil of millions of acres of land also idle and economically useless, for want of necessary labour.97

Given the hopes held by socialist and non-socialist well-wishers alike, what was the fate of these attempts at cooperative living and working, both among men who had been farmers as well as the urban unemployed? A conservative historian summed it up in 1924:

The result in every colony was alike. Communal settlement was inherently weak, co-operative settlement hindered by a lack of the spirit of cooperation. Group settlement, as understood in the nineties, whether in the Paraguayan pampas or at Barton’s settlement in the jungles of the New Hebrides or in the fruit districts at Rameo – was a pleasing theory, a failure in occupation.98

There were other factors that contributed to this failure, including poor land, an unhappy choice of settlers, and the prolonged drought, and even the conservative historian qualified his conclusion. While this experience “does not condemn group settlement in the back country”, the rule seemed to be “a minimum of cooperation in the old sense of communism … members should work for their own benefit and cooperate only in certain respects”. “Nevertheless,” Stephen Roberts wrote, “the failure of the nineties serves as a reminder of

99 the human factor in all such schemes.” Michael Davitt, a more sympathetic observer who had seen the experiment at first hand, regretted the “eloquent fault finding” he heard in the Victorian settlement of Pyap, known to the other settlements as a colony of bush lawyers. This was an “incongruity and a mockery”:

Here was Labour left to its own laws; unfettered by any landlord or capitalistic right, rule or authority. All the right, and all the law, and all the land here belonged to the workers. Here was no place for tyranny, injustice or wrong … and yet this most fluent speaker spoke as if the retiring committee had been a board of capitalistic autocrats deserving of impeachment for not having made

366 Ruskin as Utopian the pumping station complete in half the time, and the grain to grow and the fruit trees to ripen before the seasons had time to perform their share of the work of the harvest! … The Pyap orators were … whilom Adelaide proponents of a new and better order of things … and hence, by the irony of fate, they were made to become, in the applications of theories to practice, the most discontented exemplars of their own doctrinal exposition among the several camps on the Murray.100

One of the issues incidentally that divided the Pyap settlers was the female franchise. While women were initially allowed to vote, this right had been revoked after opposition from the men. When Davitt argued with some of the Pyap leaders about this “injustice and inconsistency”, he was reminded that “some theories don’t work out satisfactorily when applied”.101 Although Davitt saw the irony in this remark, the speaker clearly did not.

4. THE PITT TOWN SETTLEMENT IN NEW SOUTH WALES

The natural and right system respecting all labour is, that it should be paid at a fixed rate, but the good workman employed, and the bad workman unemployed … [t]his equality of wages … being the first object towards which we have to discover the directest available road.102 Ruskin, Unto This Last, 1862

The story of the failure of the Pitt Town village settlement in New South Wales offers a vivid insight into the hopes held by progressive thinkers for an alternative to the intensely individualistic world of late nineteenth century Australia. More than a desperate scheme to relieve the plight of the unemployed, Pitt Town and the other settlements at Wilberforce and Bega were regarded by supporters and opponents alike as a test of the cooperative ideal.103 After the collapse of Pitt Town a parliamentary inquiry was held into the reasons why. The members of the inquiry included a future NSW cabinet minister, E W O’Sullivan, whom we met in Chapter Three, and two future Labor prime ministers of Australia, W M Hughes and J C Watson.104 Their questions show that they were well aware of similar ventures in Victoria, New Zealand and Paraguay, and were genuinely interested in these cooperative experiments.

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN READERS 367 The principal figures behind village settlements in New South Wales were the Reverend Thomas Roseby and Benjamin Backhouse. Backhouse (1829–1904) was an architect and social reformer, strongly influenced by his reading of Morris, Ruskin and Carlyle. The son of an English stonemason, his family had done well in Sydney; his brother became vice-chancellor of Sydney University, one of his sons became an architect and the other a judge.105 Inspired by the “Tucker colonies” in Victoria, named after their promoter, the Reverend Horace Tucker, Backhouse and Roseby convened a public meeting in Sydney in May 1893 to start a similar scheme in New South Wales. 5000 people attended a meeting in the Sydney Town Hall on 22 May, addressed by Tucker and Roseby, and on the wave of enthusiasm, and because the government was desperate to do something about the growing numbers of unemployed, the necessary legislation was passed in June. 2000 acres of crown land were donated at Pitt Town, on the Hawkesbury River, and a Board of Control established to run the settlement. Backhouse was the driving force behind the founding of Pitt Town, laying out the settlement, designing simple cottages that could be built of log, slab, brick or stone, and taking a close interest in later developments.106 Seven hundred applications had been received from the most destitute class of Sydney, and 100 families, comprising 450 people, were in place by 23 September 1893.107 But things started to go wrong almost right away: the soil was poor, the drought unremitting, the government funding intermittent, the public support waning; bad management made things worse. While the organizing committee had made a point of saying that great care should be taken in choosing the resident supervisor of the settlement, the Board’s first choice, Jenkins, was a drunk, and had to be replaced; the second, Waite, was incompetent, and was also replaced; the third, Tressider, was competent but another drunk; and the fourth, Waite again, deeply divided the settlers: not only incompetent, it was alleged he was guilty of favouritism as well. In desperation the settlers began writing to the Minister responsible (Copeland, the Minister for Lands), behind the back of the group ostensibly in charge, the Board of Control. Besides Backhouse, the ten members of the Board included three clergymen and assorted worthy citizens, none of whom knew anything about agriculture.108 William McGuire, a settler called to give evidence, said he had complained to the Minister many

368 Ruskin as Utopian times because his family were near starvation. He had lost all faith in cooperation and singled out Backhouse for special blame, for supporting the incompetent Waite and for ignoring the allegations of favouritism.109 Under questioning, Backhouse rejected the allegations and insisted that under his care the settlement had not been a failure. The main problem was water, and even more the lack of support, both public and private; a hostile press had not helped either.110 While every settler had signed an agreement to live an industrious, peaceable, and sober life, and to do their best to enhance the general welfare, it is clear that expectations for Pitt Town were much too high. The government wanted immediate results, but for any new farming venture to prosper within a year or two of its establishment was unlikely; for an irrigation settlement to succeed in the middle of a prolonged drought certain failure. The settlers were chosen from amongst the chronic unemployed, and the Board of Control consisted of idealists insufficiently aware of practical matters as well as human realities. In the Epitome, the summary of the scheme given to every settler to sign, largely the work of Roseby, the essential features of Pitt Town were said to be 1. No private ownership 2. Sharing of profits 3. Temperance 4. Obedience to “industrial and civil authority” 5. Equality – “as near an approach to this will be arrived at as is equitable as possible”.111 When the settlement began, Backhouse and the other members of the Board thought that poverty would be a sufficient bond of brotherhood among the settlers, but “in that we were mistaken”. The problem was therefore not the unfitness of the men but the lack of a stronger bond between them; perhaps a religious one would have helped.112 O’Sullivan questioned Backhouse closely about this: “Do you think that the men themselves had faith in the cooperative principle?” to which Backhouse replied “When they started they had, they said so.” This turned out to mean that the settlers had merely signed the Epitome, presumably after actually reading it. O’Sullivan asked Backhouse about cooperation again, leading to this illuminating exchange:

A: After experience it turned out that some of the men had faith in [cooperation] and knew what it was, but some did not know what it was, and do not to this day. They began to clamour as the children of Israel clamoured against Moses. Had we had the sympathy and assistance that we ought to have had, we could have educated the men up to it.

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN READERS 369 Q: Do you think you would have dragged the Settlement through if the settlers had lost faith in the cooperative principle? A: We could have drafted some of the unsuitable ones off to other work. Q: Then you would simply have had the survival of the fittest? A: The survival of those impressed that cooperation was the best thing for them. Q: We were making a test of the Pitt Town Settlement as to whether the principle could be applied to humanity; you say it can be applied to a selected few? A: Yes. Had the men been united and friendly they might have made it a success; but they were opposed to each other, and jealousy crept in. Q: What was to be done with all those who are not amongst a selected few? A: They were free agents, and could retire.113

This reluctant conclusion was confirmed by the settler William McGuire, only more brutally. O’Sullivan again is the one asking the questions: Q: You say you have had a taste of cooperation, and would not care to go on again with it unless you selected men as colleagues? A: I would have to know the men’s working ability before I would go on again. I should expect that every man would do as much as I did, or very near it, otherwise it would be only crushing me between the lot. Q: But what is to become of all those who could not come up to your standard? A: Let them have a settlement of their own. Q: On a lower standard? A: Yes. Q: Do you not think that if that plan were carried out you would have one portion of the community worse off than another portion, and you would gradually develop into an aristocracy? A: I do not see that. Q: But your lot of good men would be getting richer than another lot, who were weaker men; – would it not be a better plan, for humanity as a whole, to intersperse the men and let some of the stronger men take the weaker men with them? A: There was too much of that there.114

According to McGuire, the settlers were given no encouragement to do more than the minimum work required, and that everyone drew the same rations no matter how much work they did, so “they only tried to earn that amount, and would not earn any more”. He could get more working for himself.115

370 Ruskin as Utopian To be fair to the achievements of Pitt Town in its short life, most of the settlers questioned still believed in cooperation, but resented the outside interference in their affairs and wanted to elect their own overseers.116 And Backhouse was not wrong about the difference he saw after only a few months amongst the men.117 Even some of those who had complained agreed there were positive effects of the Pitt Town experiment: when the settler Harry Packwood got there, he said, he was “a walking ragman”, with only one flannel shirt and a pair of socks for clothes.118 It could have worked, said another: bad management, outside interference, favouritism – these were the problems.119 What should we conclude about the failure of Pitt Town? A hostile press rubbed its hands. The Building and Engineering Journal had opposed the scheme from the beginning: the history of the village settlements in New South Wales “is perhaps the most cruel one attached to any ministerial scheme for labour settlements yet published”. The whole thing had been under capitalised, and so once the initial money had been spent “the settlers would have nothing to do but wait and work and starve while the crops grew, and when they were grown and disposed of, the results would not pay for labour expended and interest upon capital so that the immediate collapse of the enterprise is certain as doomsday”.120 And the Bulletin, no friend of utopian schemes as we have seen, wrote presciently, not long after the troubles at Pitt Town began:

[T]he farce continues; and the knot of well-meaning persons with large aspirations and small intelligences … continue to frolic round in the guise of little tin gods dispensing Government largesse; and when the settlement finally expires, it will be because the land was bad, or the management was bad, or something else was bad; and in three or four years new prophets will arise to prove that the way to settle people on the land is to take all the shiftless people you can muster and spoon-feed them into absolute incapacity to do a stroke for themselves without Government (i.e., level-headed and industrious taxpayers) backing. Then we will start more “co-operative labor settlements”. 121 Good old human nature!

The Worker defended Pitt Town, blaming its failure on the “blundering incapacity” of the Lands Department: “we know that all our Governments are afraid of Socialism, and so rejoice when anything which they can term Socialistic experiment fails … bad management would ruin anything”.122

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN READERS 371 From the first the whole concern was humbugged, and it would be contrary to common sense or all human experience for it to have succeeded.123

True enough, but the following year Michael Davitt, a friend of cooperation, visited the labour colonies in Victoria and concluded:

(tell it not in the Trades Hall, Brisbane, nor whisper it in London Fabian circles!) after a couple of years’ experience … the principles of an unmixed Socialistic system of society do not suit the minds and needs of an English-speaking community, when it comes down to the work of applying Karl Marx to actual land and labour.124

Or, it would seem, John Ruskin. When the Ruskin Colony in Tennessee collapsed in 1899, the New York Times remarked that “the failure only adds one more item to a long list of similar disasters”. Yet the Times also recognised the persistence of the impulse to “go somewhere fresh, and begin anew”: “Of course, the failure of Ruskin hasn’t exactly demonstrated anything, and there isn’t the slightest reason to suppose that it will prevent other folks of like minds from

125 making the same experiment over and over again till the end of time.”

5. SPIRITUAL IDEALS AND GENEROUS VIRTUES

[The history of utopias] has been everywhere one of disaster … a history of splittings, re-splittings, re-re-splittings, accompanied by numerous individual secessions and final dissolution. And for the failure of such social schemes, as for the failure of the political schemes, there has been one general cause. 126 Herbert Spencer, 1892

Utopian socialism was widely tried and widely failed in the second half of the nineteenth century.127 It was condemned by left-wing opinion as well as right, Engels for example dismissing it as a “mish mash” and recommending scientific socialism instead. Though the utopian impulse was not dead by 1895, the editors of the Encyclopedia of Social Reforms said that year that most socialists now believed that socialism would come about through evolution, not through colonies.128 There was only ever one Australian member of Ruskin’s Guild of St George, a bush worker in Victoria.129 Despite this, it would be wrong to dismiss

372 Ruskin as Utopian the importance of utopian socialism in Australia in this period – as we saw in Chapter Three, without the idealists there would have been no Labor Party, and chief among those idealists were John Ruskin and William Morris.130 If William James is correct that what makes a life significant is the combination of ideals and virtues,131 Ruskin’s spiritual ideals and generous virtues appealed to many in the unstable world of nineteenth century Australia, where meaning, not only fortunes, could be lost as well as found. Recognised like Tolstoy as a contemporary prophet, Ruskin’s was a religious vision in a sectarian age that united men instead of dividing them. It was a transcendental vision that did not deny “the heights and depths, the precipices and the steep ideals, the gleams of the awful and the infinite” of this unstable world, and represented “more hope and help a thousand times” than the “dead level and quintessence of every mediocrity” exemplified by Chautauqua in America.132 Ruskin was a leveller, but not the kind already too familiar in Australia: reading Ruskin raised your sights instead of lowering them.

Thus are men’s lives levelled up as well as levelled down, – levelled up in their common inner meaning, and levelled down in their outer gloriousness and show.133

But in 1892 even the safety and mediocrity of Chautauqua was still a far distant hope for poor men and women in Australia. Thus the last word should belong to Ned, the protagonist of The Workingman’s Paradise, who is puzzled by all this talk of the Cause he has been hearing in Sydney:

What was this Cause? To break down all walls, to overthrow all wrong, to destroy the ugliness of human life, to free thought, to elevate Art, to purify Love, to lift mankind higher, to give equality to women, to – to – he did not see exactly where he himself came in – all this was the Cause. Yet he did not quite understand it, just the same. Nor did he know how it was all to come about. But he intended to find out.134 For Ned, and for thousands of Australian readers like him, Ruskin helped define the Cause.

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN READERS 373 D. RUSKIN AS COMPANION

Of Ruskin’s many roles for his Australian readers, one role was unique, and to conclude I briefly describe it here. Australians of the period did not want another master, but in their isolation and uncertainty they wanted companions. One thinks of the young girl teacher in the Henry Lawson poem, trapped in a tiny bush village and haunted by the thought that she will become as narrow-minded and “mean of soul” as her neighbours:

I had ideals when I came here – A purpose made me glad; But all that they can understand 135 Is “axe to grind” or “mad.”

In the loneliness of the Australian bush, T G Tucker thought that such writers as Ruskin and Plato were “in the highest degree invigorating and ennobling company”.136 Ruskin had the “supreme literary gift” of “communicating exactly what we think and feel, exactly as we think and feel it”; this was “genius of great rarity”.137 For Australian readers like the young girl in Lawson’s poem, Ruskin’s books offered glimpses of a better world, but as the editors of an English poetry anthology pointed out, “it will depend on the largeness of the world revealed, the completeness with which it satisfies the craving for beauty which is also truth whether we are willing to remain there or to return thither again and again for high companionship and spiritual refreshment”.138 The Ruskinian world was wider than the harsh one colonial readers knew from everyday experience, offering “horizons of ideas, valleys of dreams, and centuries of history”.139 Catherine Martin, the author of An Australian Girl, was not the only reader to return to this world many times, reluctant to lend her Ruskins for fear they would not be returned.140 J T Moore described the impact reading Sesame and Lilies had on him after eight bitter years in rural Australia: “I had never met with any works of Mr Ruskin’s before that, and perhaps it was that my previous life brought them home to me with peculiar force and power; but I wept for joy, and read the book twice through in one day, and I felt for Mr Ruskin such love as I never felt before for

141 living man, and which I shall feel for him evermore.” But as a companion Ruskin offered more than “solace and recreation”.142 For the bush workers debating socialism on the riverbank, or the swagmen swapping books on the

374 Ruskin as Companion verandahs of country pubs, Ruskin led his readers back to first principles, and the most important principle of all was the moral unity of the world, and our obligations to one another that flow from this. To me this is the essence of Ruskin’s appeal to nineteenth century Australia: like Tolstoy, it was to show the “moral geology of the world” to a barren land.143 The effect of such teaching, William James wrote, was that gradually “our blindness and deadness to each other” grows less,144 and “little by little there comes some stable gain”.145 For a pioneer society at the bottom of the world, isolated and divided, no lesson could be more important. The companions Ruskin himself sought for his order of St George were to be “eager givers and servants”, not the idle, poor or dependent;146 like another saint, they were to “help, forgive and cheer”. St Martin, as Ruskin describes him, sounds like a better fit for Australians than the austere St George: he was “companionable even to the loving-cup”, “as readily the clown as the king”, the patron of honest drinking, “a good Christian toper”. More importantly, Ruskin’s St Martin, like Ruskin himself by this time, understood that “undipped people may be as good as dipped if their hearts are clean”.147 Ruskin famously said that no true disciple of his would ever be a Ruskinian because he would follow “not me, but the instincts of his own soul, and the guidance of its Creator”. But there is a distinct note of regret in the passage that follows. “I know myself to be a true master”, he wrote in 1878, “because my pupils are well on the way to do better than I have done; but there is not always a sense of extreme pleasure in watching their advance, where one has no more strength, though more than ever the will, to companion them”.148

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN READERS 375 ENDNOTES FOR CHAPTER FIVE

1 Quoted in Michael Brooks, John Ruskin and Victorian Architecture, Thames & Hudson, London, 1989, p. 234. Ruskin was ambivalent about the idea of authority, despite his public attitudes: see Dinah Birch, “‘Who Wants Authority?’ Ruskin as a Dissenter”, Yearbook of English Studies, vol. 36, no. 2, 2006, pp. 65–77. Birch describes the paradox of Ruskin the dissenter from public orthodoxy on social issues and the writer whose characteristic literary paradigm was the sermon. 2 Brian Maidment, “Ruskin, Fors Clavigera and Ruskinism 1870–1900”, in Robert Hewison (ed.), New Approaches to Ruskin, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1981, pp. 194–213, see p. 209. Maidment point outs that it is this discrepancy between what Ruskin actually said, and what was done in his name, which makes discussing his influence so imprecise (ibid.). On this point also see Maidment, “Interpreting Ruskin 1870–1914”, in J D Hunt and F M Holland (eds), The Ruskin Polygon: Essays on the Imagination of John Ruskin, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1982, pp. 159–171. Marcel Proust reminds us that Ruskin did not say his work was infallible, an authority he refused even to the Bible (Proust, On Reading Ruskin, Yale University Press, New Haven, Conn., p. 55). 3 Andrew Garran (ed.), The Picturesque Atlas of Australasia, The Picturesque Atlas Publishing Company Ltd., Sydney, 1886, vol. II, p. 798. 4 Jessie Ackermann, Australia from a Woman’s Point of View, Cassell Australia, Sydney, 1981 [originally published 1913], p. 169. Ackermann thought that “the unprecedented prosperity of the country is fatal to citizenship” (ibid.). 5 Stones of Venice, vol. II, ch. VI, secs 11, 12. 6 Alice Meynell, Prose and Poetry, op. cit., p. 337. Randall Bedford, Nought to Thirty Three, Melbourne University Press reprint, Melbourne, 1976 [originally published 1944], pp. 69–70. 7 Tim Hilton, Ruskin: The Early Years 1819–1859, Yale University Press, New Haven, Conn., 1985, p. 213. 8 “Of Queens’ Gardens”, sec. 55. 9 The Elements of Drawing, passim. 10 ibid., Appendix II, “Things to be Studied”, sec. 255. 11 ibid., sec. 259. 12 Joseph Furphy, Rigby’s Romance, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1946, ch. XLVII, p. 258. 13 On Ruskin’s contradictions, see Robert Hewison, John Ruskin: The Argument of the Eye, Thames & Hudson, London, 1976, pp. 206–208; on Ruskin’s three orders of truth, ibid., ch. 4, passim; on his early arrogance, Praeterita, vol. II, sec. 188. 14 Modern Painters, John Alden, New York, 1885, vol. III, part IV, preface, p. 10. And see Fors XXXI (1873): “I have been making not a few mistakes in Fors lately [but] being entirely sure of my main ground, and entirely honest in purpose, I know that I cannot make any mistake which will invalidate my work, and that any chance error ... is often likely to bring out, in its correction, more good than if I have taken pains to avoid it” (note following). 15 Stones of Venice, vol. I, ch. II, sec. 15. 16 ibid., sec. 18. 17 Wordsworth, “The Prelude” (1805), XII, lines 217–219, in Stephen Gill (ed.),William Wordsworth: Selected Poems, Penguin Books, London, 2004, and see Susan Casteras et al., John Ruskin and the Victorian Eye, Abrams, New York, 1993, p. 33. Ruskin remarks in Modern Painters IV, ch. XIX, sec. 19, that “this tendency to dismember and separate everything is one of the eminent conditions of a mind leaning to vice and ugliness; just as to connect and harmonize everything is that of a mind leaning to virtue and beauty”.

376 Endnotes for Chapter Five 18 Robert Hewison, op. cit., p. 192. 19 John Rosenberg, The Genius of John Ruskin, George Allen & Unwin, London, 1964, p. 122. 20 Modern Painters V, 1860, part IX, ch. XII, sec. 10. 21 William Gay (1865–1897), “Australian Federation”, in Brian Elliott and Adrian Mitchell (eds), Bards in the Wilderness: Australian Colonial Poetry to 1920, Thomas Nelson (Australia), Melbourne, 1970, p. 127. 22 Bob Birrell, Federation: The Secret Story, Duffy & Snelgrove, Potts Point, NSW, 2001, ch. 5, passim, and see Hugh Anderson (ed.), Tocsin: Radical Arguments Against Federation 1897–1900, Drummond, Richmond Vic., 1977, pp. 15–17, 34. 23 Anderson, op. cit., p. 9 (Tocsin, 17 February 1898). 24 W T Goodge (1862–1909), “Federation”, in Hits! Skits! and Jingles! [originally published 1904], Pollard Publishing, Sydney, 1972, p. 104. 25 See Birrell, op. cit., pp. 179–180; the first vote for Federation in 1898 was inconclusive, but the second in late 1899 was overwhelmingly in favour, 377,988 votes to 141,386 (ibid., p. 183). 26 “Faces in the Street”, from In the Days When the World Was Wide: Poetical Works of Henry Lawson, Lloyd O’Neil, Hawthorn, Vic., 1970, p. 8. 27 T G Tucker, “Culture and Cant”, in Things Worth Thinking About: A Series of Lectures upon Literature and Culture, George Robertson, Melbourne, 1890, pp. 109–133, see p. 119. 28 ibid., p. 126. 29 Australian Graphic, Sydney, 24 November 1883, p. 2. 30 Melbourne Punch, 28 November 1872, p. 171. 31 Intercolonial Christian Messenger, 22 January 1896, cited in Walter Phillips, Defending “A Christian Country”: Churchmen and Society in New South Wales in the 1880s and after, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, Qld., 1981, p. 149. 32 SMH, 30 January 1894, editorial. In fairness to the Sydney Morning Herald, though it once praised a hostile book on socialism as a tonic for ”the countless theories set up by numerous teachers and prophets, weak- minded, selfish, and unjust, but so single in intent and so plausible in manner as to make many converts or perverts, and to disestablish much wholesome satisfaction and belief”, it admitted that the writer’s doctrine, if applied, “would result simply in the survival of the fittest, the tremendous growth and enrichment of the able, the perfect liberty, but yet ... the absolute slavery of the weak” (21 August 1884, p. 12). 33 “The Australian Workingman”,The Australian Magazine, August 1886, pp. 180–190, see p. 186. 34 ibid., p. 181. 35 Daily Telegraph, Sydney, 5 October 1896, p. 4. 36 The Courier, Brisbane, 23 January 1900, p. 4. 37 Charles Fairfield, “State Socialism at the Antipodes”, in Thomas Mackay (ed.), A Plea for Liberty: An Argument against Socialism and Socialistic Legislation, John Murray, London, 1892, pp. 124–172, see p. 172. 38 The Spectator, Melbourne, 13 October 1866, p. 175. 39 T G Tucker, “Culture and Cant”, op. cit., p. 133. 40 Bernard O’Dowd, “A Poet of the Moment”, in Dawnward?, TC Lothian, Melbourne, 1909 [originally published 1903]. 41 David A Wells, Recent Economic Changes, and their effect on the production and distribution of wealth and the well-being of society, D Appleton & Co, New York, 1889, p. 366. 42 The Eagle’s Nest, II, sec. 35. 43 Fors I, January 1871.

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN READERS 377 44 Modern Painters II (1846), III, i, I, sec. 5. 45 ibid., sec. 6, 46 Fors XCIII, Christmas 1883. On hypocritical clergymen who “lie for God” also see Fors XLIX (1875). 47 Saturday Review, London, 25 September 1880, p. 407. Not all economists thought Ruskin was irrelevant: the French historian Charles Gide grouped him with Carlyle and Tolstoy as economic dissenters, who while “having no definite standing either as socialists or economists ... have nevertheless lent the powerful support of their eloquence to the upholding of somewhat similar doctrines” (Charles Gide and Charles Rist, A History of Economic Doctrines, trans. R Richards, George Harrap & Co., London, 1947 [originally published 1909], p. 540). On the other hand not all of Ruskin’s own supporters thought he was right about economics either: see JA Hobson, John Ruskin, Social Reformer, James Nisbet, London, 1899, ch. VI. 48 Fortnightly Review, XXVII, 15 June 1866, pp. 381–384, see p. 382. This review, which stands as the definitive middle class rejection of Ruskin in the mid-Victorian period, goes on to deny that Ruskin is a prophet: what he says is “not new, persuasive or strong; but, moreover, he accompanies [these familiar lessons] by special doctrines of his own which rob them of all their old value” (p. 382). To his credit Trollope went on to write a scathing indictment of commercial speculation and fraud a few years later in The Way We Live Now (1875). 49 Unto This Last, lecture III, sec. 55. 50 ibid., sec. 54 51 Undated extract from The Economist, London, cited in Wells, Recent Economic Changes, op. cit., p. 452. 52 Unto This Last, lecture IV, sec. 77. Capitals in the original. 53 Alice Meynell, John Ruskin, William Blackwood, Edinburgh, 1900, p. 117. 54 The Crown of Wild Olive, lecture IV, “The Future of England”, sec. 132. 55 The Athenaeum, London, no. 1221, 22 March 1851, p. 330. 56 The Spectator, Melbourne, 30 September 1865, pp. 247–249. 57 The Spectator, Melbourne, 28 April 1866, pp. 287–289. 58 The Spectator, Melbourne, 13 October 1866, pp. 174–175. 59 Sydney Punch (1 September 1883, p. 367), The Bulletin (14 May 1881, p. 2), Truth cited in Society (2 July 1887, p. 4). 60 B R Wise, Industrial Freedom: A Study in Politics, Cassell, London, 1892, p. 12. It is no surprise to learn that Wise, a man of the world if ever there was one, wrote the first Australian textbook on bankruptcy in 1888, just in time for the bank crashes of the nineties. The Bulletin referred to him in 1889 as “that extremely lucky young man”. 61 Wise, op. cit., pp. 275–276. 62 The original paper, discussed in Chapter Two, was “The Prospect of Art among the Handicrafts” by Walter Butler, published both in the BEJ (1 April 1893) and the ABCN (1 April, 8 April). The rebuttal is in the ABCN for 29 April, p. 172. 63 The AHR, journal of the Australasian Home Reading Union, 1894, review of Sesame and Lilies by G Chamier, pp. 61–66; see pp. 64, 66. Ruskin fares better elsewhere in the AHR: see the piece on him in 1892 by “E.F.G.”, pp. 202–205, which describes him as “a truly great man”. In 1893, in an item on the progress of the Home Reading Union, we read that “in every Group or Circle where the works of our great thinkers – Carlyle, Ruskin, Emerson – is read, where history is studied as it should be, there the friction of minds must produce the spark which enlightens, there must be discussions on the problems of humanity, and the result must be good, first to those immediately concerned, and then in ever- widening circle to the world beyond” (p. 195). With all due respect to Maybanke Wolstenholme (see

378 Endnotes for Chapter Five above, Chapter Four), nothing shows the middle class nature of the AHR more than her suggestion, kindly meant, that strikes might be less bitter if employers and employees shared an interest in Shakespeare or the Fabian essays (AHR, 1893, pp. 196–197). Mr Chamier, was more pointed: “As well might you propose pacifying a furious strike with public readings from Plato’s dialogues, or softening a usurer’s heart with a dose of Shylock from Shakespeare, or prescribing a course of Pastoral poetry for an ejected Irish tenant!” (AHR, 1894, p. 65). 64 SMH, 18 February 1898, p. 4. 65 The Worker, 17 September 1898, p. 1. DK McDougall, “Give Us Our Daily Bread”, The Worker, 16 August 1902. This is a misprint for JK McDougall, author of Poems (1896) and The Trend of the Ages (190–?), a labour activist from the western districts of Victoria. 66 Quoted in Fors XXXV, September 1873. 67 Modern Painters V, part IX, ch. V, secs 2, 3. 68 The Crown of Wild Olive, lecture I, sec. 46, part III. Even American feminists could quote Ruskin as need be, as one did at a convention in 1908: see Ida Husted Harper, A History of Woman Suffrage, V, 1900–1920 [Source Book Press reprint, New York, 1970, of 1922 edn], p. 223. 69 Lectures on Art, IV, “The Relation of Art to Use”, sec. 123. 70 Fors VII, July 1871, p. 128. 71 ibid., p. 133. 72 ibid., p. 134. 73 ibid., pp. 134, 136. 74 Lectures on Art and Painting, 1854, lecture II. 75 A typical example is a title by Sir Archibald Mackenzie, Readings in Melbourne, with an essay on the resources and prospects of Victoria for the emigrant and uneasy classes, probably published around 1879 in London. Coral Lansbury has traced the gradual appearance of Australia in English fiction in her fascinating study Arcady in Australia: The Evocation of Australia in Nineteenth-century English Literature, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Vic., 1970. 76 T G Tucker, “Thinking Straight”, Australian Magazine, August 1886, p. 135. 77 “Barney, Take Me Home Again”, in Henry Lawson, The Romance of the Swag, c. 1902, reprinted in Prose Works of Henry Lawson, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1979, pp. 504–509, see p. 508. 78 T A Coghlan, Labour and Industry in Australia, IV, Macmillan Australia, South Melbourne, Vic., 1969 [originally published 1918], pp. 1834–1835. 79 ibid., p. 1890; J D Fitzgerald, The Rise of the Australian Labor Party, Australian Labor Party, Sydney, 1915, pp. 16–18; and especially Sylvia Bowman et al., Edward Bellamy Abroad: An American Prophet’s Influence, Twayne Publishers, New York, 1962. A writer to the Bulletin in 1890 saw five copies among nine passengers in one carriage on a recent rail trip (8 February 1890, p. 5). 80 John Miller [William Lane], The Workingman’s Paradise, introduction by Michael Wilding, Sydney University Press, Sydney, 2004 [originally published 1892]. 81 ibid.; see ch. IV, “Saturday Night in Paddy’s Market”, and ch. VII, “A Medley of Conversation”, in particular. 82 ibid., pp. 135–136 [italics added]. In Time and Tide, Ruskin says “we shall all be soldiers of either ploughshare or sword” (letter XXV, April 1867, sec. 179). 83 Among other references, it is Aphorism 26 in The Seven Lamps of Architecture. 84 Ecclesiastes (11,1): “cast your bread upon the waters ... ”. The letter is from September 1871, in Ruskin, Collected Works, XXXVII, Letters, II, 1870–1889, p. 37.

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN READERS 379 85 Time and Tide, letter XXIII, April 1867. 86 Gavin Souter, A Peculiar People: The Australians in Paraguay, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1968, pp. 58–59. 87 ibid., p. 60. The Bulletin went on to suggest a settlement be made in Queensland named New Paraguay. W Spence declined to go, but is supposed to have mooted a similar cooperative colony in New South Wales a few years before (Vance Palmer, The Legend of the Nineties, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Vic., 1954, p. 85). 88 Souter, op. cit., is the best account. 89 Roland Schaer, Gregory Claeys and Lyman Tower Sargent (eds), Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World, New York Public Library/Oxford University Press, New York, 2000. 90 See W Fitzhugh Brundage, A Socialist Utopia in the New South: The Ruskin Colonies in Tennessee and Georgia 1894–1901, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, Ill., 1996, passim. 91 Beverly Kingston, The Oxford History of Australia, vol. 3, 1860–1900, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1988, p. 267. 92 Stephen Henry Roberts, The History of Australian Land Settlement 1888–1920, Macmillan/Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1924, ch. 27, p. 330. 93 Brundage, op. cit., p. 27. “Murtho based on Henry George”: see Michael Davitt, Life and Progress in Australasia, Methuen, London, 1898, p. 101. 94 Robin Gollan, Radical and Working Class Politics, op. cit., p. 190; for Arthur Rae’s ideas see NSW Parliamentary Debates, vol. 66, 1893, pp. 8016ff. 95 Kingston, op. cit., p. 267; Davitt, op. cit., p. 73; Gollan, op. cit., pp. 160–161. 96 Roberts, op. cit., p. 331. 97 Davitt, op. cit., p. 88. 98 Roberts, p. 334. “Barton in the New Hebrides”: this was an 1889 attempt to set up an Australian cooperative settlement in the New Hebrides to counter French influence. See Roger C Thompson, Australian Imperialism in the Pacific: The Expansionist Era 1820–1920, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1980. 99 Roberts, op. cit., p. 334. 100 Davitt, op. cit., p. 93. 101 ibid., p. 94. This was also a problem for the Ruskin Colony in Tennessee: its historian says that there is no question that the unresolved status of women in the colony contributed to its demise (Brundage, op. cit., p. 92). 102 Unto This Last, lecture I, secs 14–15. 103 The following account is based on the report of the Select Committee on the Pitt Town Settlement, NSW Parliament, Legislative Assembly, Votes and Proceedings, 1896, V, pp. 745–780. 104 Watson in fact had been on the committee to establish village settlements in the first place. 105 ADB, entry on Backhouse by KJ Cable; also see BEJ, 17 August 1895, p. 260; SMH, 30 July 1904. There is a typical letter from Backhouse in The Worker, September 17, 1898, urging the new Labor members of parliament to stick to their principles. 106 NSW Parliament, Legislative Assembly, Votes and Proceedings, 1896, V, pp. 745–780. Progress Report from the Select Committee on Pitt Town Settlement, Backhouse testimony, 3 November 1896, pp. 766–773. 107 Backhouse testimony, op. cit., p. 768. 108 Testimony of William McGuire, Q. 297.

380 Endnotes for Chapter Five 109 ibid., Qs 241, 281. 110 Backhouse testimony, op. cit., Q. 386. 111 Epitome, sec. 18; Report, op. cit., p. 767. 112 Backhouse testimony, p. 769. 113 ibid., Qs 377–382, p. 773. 114 McGuire testimony, Qs 268–273, p. 762. 115 ibid., Qs 234–236, p. 761. 116 Testimony of Harry Packwood, Q. 137. 117 Backhouse testimony, op. cit., p. 772. 118 Packwood testimony, Q. 164, p. 758. 119 Testimony of Thomas Thornton, Q. 304, p. 763. 120 BEJ, editorial, “Labour and Capital”, 27 January 1894, p. 27. 121 The Bulletin, Sydney, 27 October 1894, p. 7. 122 The Worker, Sydney, 20 June 1896, p. 5. 123 ibid. 124 Davitt, op. cit., p. 84. Backhouse and Roseby did not give up: they were behind a Citizens’ Committee that made detailed proposals to the NSW government for dealing with the continuing problem of the unemployed in March 1899. These included an extensive program of public works, and the revival of the idea of labour colonies. These were to be less cooperative than Pitt Town and considerably more punitive, reserved for the incorrigibly shiftless and lazy who would not work. The proposals are spelled out in detail in The Worker, Sydney, 18 March 1899; see Appendix A in particular. This recommended better land, better supervision and a longer trial than Pitt Town had had. Item 12 is worthy of note: the rules of the settlement “should not be unduly oppressive or inquisitorial, but should include prompt dismissal for disobedience, idleness, drunkenness and immorality”. There were 22 members of the Citizens’ Committee, eight of them Protestant clergymen, including Roseby. For detailed studies of some of the Australian village settlements, apart from Michael Davitt, op. cit., see R B Walker, “The Ambiguous Experiment: Agricultural Co-operatives in New South Wales 1893–1896”, Labour History, no. 18, 1970, pp. 19–31, and R E W Kennedy, “The Leongatha Labour Colony: Founding an Anti-Utopia”,Labour History, no. 14, 1968, pp. 54–58. 125 New York Times, 23 September 1899, p. 6. The Times commented: “Despite [their] diversities of opinion on religious and pseudo-religious matters, a common approval of communistic doctrines served as a sufficient bond of union, and the experimenters seem not only to have lived together peaceably enough, but they won the respect of their neighbors by their kindliness and industry ... Everything, to be brief, went well with Ruskin – everything, that is, except the inevitable contest between income and expenses.” 126 Herbert Spencer, Introduction, in Thomas Mackay (ed.), A Plea for Liberty: An Argument Against Socialism and Socialistic Legislation, new and rev. edn, John Murray, London, 1892, p. 13. 127 For a detailed account of what happened to such societies in one country, see Mark Holloway, Heavens on Earth: Utopian Communities in America 1680–1880, Library Publishers, New York, 1951, especially chs 12 and 13; and more globally, see Richard Trahair, Utopias and Utopians: An Historical Dictionary, Greenwood Press, Westport, Conn., 1999, and Schaer, Claeys and Sargent (eds), Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World, op. cit. 128 WDP Bliss (ed.), Encyclopedia of Social Reforms, Funk & Wagnalls, New York, 1898, entry for Theodor Hertzka, p. 686. F Engels, Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, 4th edn, 1918 [first published 1892]: “The Utopians’ mode of thought has for a long time governed the socialist ideas of the nineteenth century,

RUSKIN AND AUSTRALIAN READERS 381 and still governs some of them ... a kind of eclectic, average Socialism ... a mish-mash allowing of the most manifold shades of opinion; a mish-mash of such critical statements, economic theories, pictures of future society by the founders of different sects, as excite a minimum of opposition; a mish-mash which is the more easily brewed the more the definite sharp edges of the individual constituents are rubbed down in the stream of debate, like rounded pebbles in a brook” (pp. 15–16). 129 J Moore, of Allan’s Flat, Victoria, discovered Ruskin when a friend lent him Sesame and Lilies in 1870, and then read the rest of his work in the public library. Too poor to afford books of his own, Moore borrowed the ones he liked and copied them out by hand (Ruskin, Collected Works, XXX, pp. 26–28). By 1883 he was a paid-up subscriber to St George’s Guild (John Rylands library, Manchester, English MSS 1164, item 33). 130 J T Lang, I Remember, Invincible Press, Sydney, 1956, p. 11. 131 William James, Talks to Teachers on Psychology: and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals, Longmans Green & Co., London, 1908, pp. 294–296. 132 ibid., pp. 270–271. 133 ibid., p. 278. 134 William Lane, The Workingman’s Paradise, op. cit., pp. 121–122. 135 Henry Lawson, “Pigeon Toes”, in In the Days When the World Was Wide: Poetical Works of Henry Lawson, Lloyd O’Neil, Hawthorn, Vic., 1970, pp. 248–251. 136 T G Tucker, “Literature and Life”, in Platform Monologues, T C Lothian, Melbourne, 1914, pp. 191–218, see pp. 201, 208. 137 ibid., “The Supreme Literary Gift”, pp. 9–52, see p. 47. 138 W Macneile Dixon and H J C Grierson (eds), The English Parnassus, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911, p. xii. 139 Robert de la Sizeranne, Ruskin and the Religion of Beauty, trans. MA A Galloway, George Allen, London, 1899, p. 135. 140 C E M Martin, “The Works of John Ruskin”,Victorian Review, Melbourne, July 1884, pp. 281–303, see p. 282. 141 Ruskin, Collected Works, XXX, p. 27. 142 Martin, op. cit., p. 282. 143 William James, op. cit., p. 289. 144 ibid., p. 291. 145 ibid., p. 278. 146 Fors LXIII, June 1876. 147 The Bible of Amiens, 1883, sec. 29. 148 St Mark’s Rest, sec. 209. When an old friend, Frederick Gale, set out for Australia in 1878 Ruskin wrote to him that he “would fain be following in your track, if I had the spirit and zeal to do so” (Collected Works, XXXVII, p. 250).

382 Endnotes for Chapter Five EPILOGUE

1. THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD, 1906

There is one more Ruskinian moment in Australia to describe. Six years after Ruskin’s death, the Pre-Raphaelite painter William Holman Hunt’s third version of The Light of the World arrived in Australia as part of a tour organised by its new owner, the British MP and philanthropist Charles Booth. Its exhibition caused unprecedented scenes in Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney, where nearly half the population came to see it in three weeks, and Sydney, not normally a city of art lovers, debated the merits of the picture, the artist and the critic endlessly.1 Based on a Biblical text from the Book of Revelations, the painting shows Christ the King knocking at the door, long closed and overgrown with weeds, of a symbolic orchard full of fallen fruit. First painted in 1853, fifty years later The Light of the World was as well-known as the Mona Lisa is today through the sale of thousands of engraved copies all over the British Empire.2 In 1906, the year the painting reached Australia, the provisional unity represented by Federation and described in the preceding chapters had already begun to fray. Although two-thirds of voters in Western Australia had supported Federation, a majority in country districts had not. The following year agitation for secession from the new commonwealth began and continued for decades, overlapping similar agitation in far north Queensland. In 1906 the Fabian Australian Socialist League, the main vehicle for the hopes of reformers, split into the Victorian Socialist Party and the more militant Socialist Labor Party. The new parliamentary Labor Party itself had fought off attempts to split it on sectarian lines in 1903, but by 1906 it was already dividing on other grounds, especially nationalism and Chinese immigration. The race issue was the most divisive issue of all. A poem in The Worker that year, and there were many such, reminded readers:

White is the sand that rings our shore snow white the fleecy foam, And white must be the race that calls the Commonwealth its home A white man’s home, a white man’s land – our destiny is told – The man before the money god, the race before the gold.3

EPILOGUE 383 Socialism, the other question of the hour, came in many kinds in 1906, as the Holman – Reid debate in Sydney made clear. At the same time as crowds were lining up to see The Light of the World at the Art Gallery, audiences packed the Town Hall for two consecutive nights to hear Sir George Reid attack socialism and W A Holman defend it. That there was more than one kind of socialism on offer (or perhaps that it was the subject of some very fuzzy thinking) is made clear by the debate itself and the extensive commentary afterwards. In the same issue of the Daily Telegraph that carried the report of the debate, three Labor figures alone gave three different accounts of what socialism was: W A Holman said it was the nationalisation of monopolies only, not the nationalisation of everything; J C Watson, the leader of the short-lived Federal Labor government of 1904, said the Labor Party was socialistic, but that it had not adopted the peculiar programme of any cult of socialism; while the maverick Queensland premier William Kidston told reporters that Australia was not yet ready for the cooperative commonwealth and that it would not be a good thing if they got it.4 By 1906 women had won the vote Federally and in New South Wales, though not yet in Victoria. In New South Wales, Rose Scott struggled to keep the Women’s Suffrage League focussed on its primary objective, but it split over her leadership and other issues in September 1901, and again on the eve of victory in June 1902; the vote was finally won that August. The (by now) three main suffragist groups had rival celebrations, and the WSL formally disbanded in October 1902.5 The uneasy alliance between progressive labor and feminists was strained by the victory, however, The Worker sternly reminding women, now that they had political power, about who had helped them get it.6 The new women’s political organizations that replaced the WSL were more clearly aligned with one major party or the other. In 1906 the respectable faction, represented in this instance by the Parramatta Women’s Bee, deplored the selfishness and lack of culture of the Labor Party, drawing this response from The Worker:

Do you hear it, Labor Party? Can you bear it and survive The strong denunciation of the Parramatta hive Or do you gaze with pity on these tea-and-gossip gangs, With make-up on their faces and the nuggets in their fangs? 7

384 The Light of the World

FIGURE HAS BEEN REMOVED DUE TO COPYRIGHT AGREEMENT

figure 85: William Holman Hunt’s painting The Light of the World (1851–1853) became one of the most well-known pictures in the English-speaking world in the second half of the nineteenth century thanks to its huge sales as an engraving. Its popularity meant that Australian audiences were already familiar with Hunt’s famous picture well before it arrived in Australia in 1906 from hilary guise, great victorian engravings, london, astragal books, 1980, p. 91

EPILOGUE 385

The Light of the World

FIGURE HAS BEEN REMOVED DUE TO COPYRIGHT AGREEMENT

figure 86: The third version ofThe Light of the World, painted fifty years after the first, was the one that toured the world in 1905–1906. Considerably larger than the original, it was painted by Holman Hunt with the assistance of Edward Robert Hughes. Hunt also designed its imposing gold frame from katharine lochnan and carol jacobi, eds, holman hunt and the pre-raphaelite vision, toronto: art gallery of ontario, 2008, p. 122

EPILOGUE 387

Led by Horbury Hunt, the Institute of Architects of New South Wales affiliated with the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1893 (the Victorian institute got its royal charter in 1889) but the progressive hopes held by groups like the Sydney Architectural Association crumbled with it in the economic disasters of the 1890s. For most architects in 1906 it was more a matter of not joining, rather than leaving, an organization; Harold Desbrowe- Annear was not the only one who did not join the RVIA.8 Among the rest certain bad habits remained, subcontracting in particular; the Lone Hand could still run a stinging article on “The Architect as a Swindler” in 1907.9 As for poets, there was no organization for them to join, or split, but there was a distinct retreat from the radicalism of the 1890s. In 1909 Bernard O’Dowd regretted the neglect of social issues in Australian poetry. “Men need gods,” he wrote, “and new men new gods to drag them onward and upward”.10 But where those new gods were to come from in Australia was no longer so clear. The crowds filling the Art Gallery of New South Wales in March 1906 to see The Light of the World set attendance records that were not broken for thirty years. By the end of the second week nearly 200,000 people had been to see it; on the third Sunday over 32,000 people queued to see it in three hours.11 A letter to the Sydney Morning Herald begged the Art Gallery to keep it for just one more week, so country visitors down for the Royal Easter Show could see it, to no avail. In a long piece in the Sydney Morning Herald, one reporter called the excitement “nothing short of a remarkable popular demonstration”, and described the scene at the gallery vividly: It takes time to work one’s way round the building in the long queue, until the entrance is at last reached. But the people are patient and orderly, and the ornamental policemen in their Sunday uniforms have not much to do once the system is understood. Everyone gets there in time. The turnstiles are removed to allow of the easy passage of the visitors as they come two by two, the attendants counting as they pass. Care is taken to regulate the entry so as to prevent over-crowding, and no one is hurried inside. But it is noticeable that everyone presses on to the room where the famous picture hangs alone, with no other canvases in the neighbourhood to distract the eye.12

This was a reference to the nudes originally hung on each side of the sacred picture, hurriedly removed after indignant protests.

EPILOGUE 389 Was it the painting or its moral message that audiences found most interesting? Knowledgeable critics argued this point endlessly in the Sydney press. Was it religious enthusiasm? Possibly – Bernard Smith thought the tour had all the marks of a religious revival, but some contemporary commentators were doubtful: John Norton, the editor of Truth, published a bitter editorial on Easter Day about “canting Christians” in their “weatherboard bethels and tin chapels”.13 Was it curiosity, fuelled by advertising? This is more likely – a writer said of the Melbourne crowds:

If the picture had been slipped into the gallery in the ordinary way without any boom or advertising, it would be interesting to know how many of these people would have gone to see it. This crowd, which jostled and elbowed each other to get a glimpse of The Light of the World, passed a watercolour by Turner entirely unheeded.14

This, and a general lack of entertainment, especially on Sundays, is probably right – after all, this happened before the era of mass entertainment, movies, radio, television, colour magazines and the internet – in the long interval between Royal visits, and in the five years between Nellie Melba’s first two farewell tours. That said, what of critical opinion? Given the religious nature of the picture, was there sectarian controversy? The promoters were clearly concerned about this – a pamphlet given to every visitor to the exhibition reassured them that “the picture then, and again now, has been painted with no concern for party prejudice, either artistic, religious, or secular”.15 There was, a little – all the main Protestant church papers praised it, from the Anglicans to the Methodists to the Salvation Army, which was in no doubt about the picture’s religious impact.16 Writing in the Army paper The War Cry, Brigadier Frances McMillan described the scene in Melbourne:

Finely-dressed ladies, armed with the latest cuttings, descriptive of the picture, sat down in an analytical frame of mind to compare notes; but soon their rapt faces and tear-filled eyes told that they had forgotten all about the cuttings. The message of the picture had sunk into their souls.17

But in Sydney the Catholic press did not like it, and said so, denouncing the picture as “wanting in devotional insight and high artistic merit” and firmly asserting that in the last few decades “no picture of a sacred subject has been painted in a non-Catholic atmosphere”. When a reader wrote in to protest this dismissive attitude, he was sharply

390 rebuked: “What is the use of speculating on the noble intentions and the great worth of

18 a bad work? The monster success of mediocrity is not uncommon.” Among the public the debate was about the face – was this the face of Christ? – referred to many times. The President of the Art Gallery, Eccleston Du Faur, in a pamphlet issued after the tour, reported a debate he had with a stranger on whether the face of Christ in the picture was sufficiently Jewish, and whether it was a true depiction of the Man of Sorrows. The President answered the man by saying that the artist’s aim had been “to represent, not the sorrowing man, but the Christ of all time – the idealised Christ – appealing to the closed hearts of all the past centuries that have intervened”.19 But most of the debate the picture caused was between artists and critics. The critics almost all liked it, but the artists didn’t. Strangely, none of the local artists said the picture was dated, though artists in Britain mostly did; or drew attention to the newest developments overseas. Quite the opposite – an Australian writer shortly after this denounced the first Cubist pictures as “a bad dream, a huge joke, the very nihilism of art”.20 Nor did the picture appeal to Australian artists on progressive grounds, despite being endorsed by Dr Furnivall, the renowned Christian Socialist, as “the culmination and crown of Victorian English art; nay, the greatest that our country has ever produced, and fit to range with the most glorious creations that the world has ever seen”.21 Artists probably disliked the Imperial trappings of the tour – it was described as “a gesture of the ties that bind the self-governing states of the Empire” after all. And they were definitely annoyed by Ruskin being quoted at them, of which more later. But, according to the Newcastle Morning Herald and Miners Advocate, “parable pictures, or problem pictures, are discounted by the great body of artists”.22 And for the most part Australian artists objected to the picture on three grounds – that it was sentimental, that it was mediocre, and that the heavy advertising alone was responsible for its amazing success. David Souter, a founding member and past chairman of the Sydney Society of Artists, said that “as an artistic production it falls below mediocrity, and as a religious work hardly rises above it”, and continued:

As to the wave of curiosity – I can call it by no other name – which has submerged our Australian indifference to pictures, it is quite possible, with the same amount of sentimental advertisement, to arouse it in connection with almost any object, especially if it plays on the religious emotions of the people.23

EPILOGUE 391 Another artist, Julian Ashton, denounced the picture in a long piece in the Daily Telegraph. Like Souter, Ashton attacked it on two grounds – its appeal lay more in the pious sentiments it aroused, and it was a clumsy painting anyway. “That it appeals to the great mass of the general public is true. So does Longfellow’s poetry and Offenbach’s music. Its cheap and strident colour, its ostentation of unimportant detail, its flashing jewels, and elaborate lanthorn are dear to their crude and uneducated taste,” he said.24 This provoked an equally long reply from an anonymous writer a few days later, who defended the picture vigorously:

Granting that its great popularity of necessity depends upon the sentiment aroused, is the deduction therefore just, that the quality of the picture is inferior? Mr Ashton’s summary treatment of it seems to be the typical Australian attitude towards things outside our line of vision. We are not overgifted with reverence or modesty, because we are very young and very ignorant … As for the painting as a painting, is not Mr Ashton demanding a portrait, when Holman Hunt set 25 out to paint an allegory?

Another defender of the picture, the architect John Barlow, agreed that most people had gone out of curiosity, but argued that:

Hunt’s picture has now withstood the criticism of two generations, and today is attracting more attention than probably any canvas ever painted, since the people of Florence carried Cimabue’s Madonna in triumph to the church of Santa Maria Novella.

As for its popularity being a reason for criticism from artists, Barlow went on:

The people want pictures, not paintings, and fine painting alone will no more make a fine picture than fine words will make a poem … We soon tire of the finest painting, however deftly the work has been done, if there is nothing offered for our consideration but the technical skill of the artist … A New Testament subject is probably the only one that could, in a city like Sydney, attract a quarter of a million of people to the Gallery within three weeks.26

I think Australian artists intuitively objected to the picture being trumpeted as the highest achievement in art – had not all the overseas critics said so? – and Ruskin, heavily quoted in all the ballyhoo, came in for his share of criticism. The anonymous writer to the Daily Telegraph had defended the picture, but took care to distance himself from Ruskin; the

392 Catholic Press had quoted Whistler, his old adversary, against Ruskin; and Julian Ashton, provoked, went much further:

Ruskin said of Whistler’s pictures that “they were a pot of paint flung into the face of the public”. Within twenty years they have become classics in the world of art … in the whirligig of time, those deftly flung pots of paint will represent the art genius of the nineteenth century, while the name of Ruskin will be unknown to the sons of man.27

That Ruskin has not been forgotten we now know, but in Australia in 1906 his reputation was already in flux.The Worker dutifully listed his books among those all true labour men should read,28 and figures like John Percy Jones, a founder of the Victorian Socialist Party, still regarded him as a hero: Jones had a complete collection of Ruskin’s work and named his country home Ruskin House and his city home Ruskin Hall. Encouraged by Jones the VSP even fielded a football team named the Ruskin Football Club, but whether the players studied The Crown of Wild Olive before a game or chanted passages from Sesame and Lilies in the locker room is not recorded.29 In 1906 most architects, even if admirers, regarded Ruskin as old-fashioned,30 and one critic declared firmly that socialism in art was quite impossible.31 The writer of a pamphlet on design education in 1906 insisted on the importance of drawing from Nature, but by 1913 the same writer described the work of the Pre-Raphaelites as “homely democratic middle class art” and criticised Ruskin’s influence on the Brotherhood.32 In 1907 the expatriate English Fabian H H Champion, now living in Melbourne, provided the introduction to a new Australian edition of Unto This Last. He praised Ruskin “not for clearness of vision into knotty problems, not for ability of leadership in contested issues, but for a passionate love of the truth and for command of splendid language in his impeachments”. Champion thought this was a credit to the hearts, if not the heads, of Englishmen, and asked “what will their

33 descendants say at this other end of the world?” To answer his question, and to conclude this examination of Ruskin’s reception in Australia, I imagine the conversation at a dinner party just after The Light of the World has left Australia, bound for New Zealand, England and its final resting place in St Paul’s Cathedral.

EPILOGUE 393 2. THE DINNER PARTY

Get all you want, and more, no law the greedy breaks, This in a world that gives a man just as much as he makes. Randolph Bedford, The Maxims of Billy Pagan

In his memoirs Randolph Bedford briefly mentions a dinner party he attended in Melbourne sometime before the First World War.34 The account I give here of this dinner is wholly imaginary, but the opinions I attribute to the guests are as consistent with their known views as I can make them. Bedford gives no date for the party, so I have chosen to set it in the last week of April 1906. In my version of this dinner the guests sit around a table in the upstairs room of an hotel in Spring Street. The table is laid for six, but the sixth chair is empty. The five men present (there are no women) include Edmund Barton, barrister and first prime minister of Australia, now a judge of the High Court; the architect Harold Desbrowe- Annear; Ebenezar Ward, the South Australian journalist and politician, known as the most eloquent man in parliament; and the host, Paris Nesbit, another South Australian, a prominent barrister denied a political career because of recurrent bouts of madness. The odd man out is Bedford, a self educated journalist with strong proletarian sympathies, who was fascinated by the mining boom and became a successful speculator himself. He is the writer in the group, producing novels, stories and travel books based on his adventures, with occasional forays into poetry and drama. The guests represent a cross-section of worldly opinion, with their backgrounds in journalism, law, business and politics. They are reformers of various kinds, and inclined to support State Socialism and Protection; the only one who doesn’t is Edmund Barton, a lifelong Free Trader. Though they are not especially religious, they share the same background – all are Protestants, Anglicans, some with Baptist and Presbyterian parents. They are respectable men but two of the men are not as respectable as the others: Nesbit’s fits of madness have led to sexual scandal, and Bedford’s sometime partner in his mining ventures is the Melbourne underworld identity John Wren. All of them enjoy good company: Barton earned his nickname Toby Tosspot early in his political career; Nesbit was the “absinthe-

394 drinking, woman-loving, tobacco-enslaved Prince of Bohemia”; Desbrowe-Annear affected a monocle and was famously convivial; Bedford was the best raconteur Vance Palmer had ever met. On this night I imagine the conversation is political, heavy on the gossip, and more ribald as the night wears on, fuelled by heavy drinking. The Holman-Reid debate, Sir George Reid’s attempt to form an “Anti-Sosh” movement, Vida Goldstein and the elusive quest for the female franchise in Victoria, the character of English governors, and recent frauds dominate the discussion, and there is the inevitable talk of sport, especially cricket, an obsession of Barton’s. At some point in the evening Ruskin’s name comes up, prompted by the Light of the World tour. All of the guests have read Ruskin, mostly as young men, and one or two have been to see the picture in Melbourne. The conversation turns at once to the most famous episodes in Ruskin’s life – his marriage, his sexuality, his madness – this last quickly dropped, out of respect for their host. The lawyers present, Nesbit and Barton, are fascinated by the libel case, which damaged both Whistler and Ruskin, and recommend avoiding libel suits on principle. The men agree on Ruskin’s eloquence, however – everyone appreciates this, an obvious advantage in their several fields. The talk turns to the main question about Ruskin for such men: did England’s greatest art critic go badly astray when he became a social reformer and public scourge? Barton takes the affirmative: Ruskin is an authority on art, a baby in politics; besides, as a Free Trade man, Barton does not believe in the paternal State. The others immediately object: Australia cannot be developed without Government intervention – Bedford believes this passionately, as does Ward, who introduced the railways and compulsory secular education when a minister in the South Australian government. Barton quotes Anthony Trollope’s famous dictum that nobody ever learned anything from reading Ruskin, to which Desbrowe-Annear makes a moving reply, drawing on his experiences teaching in the Working Men’s College in Melbourne. Barton is undeterred: Unto This Last is hopelessly wrong – for one thing, you can’t pay everyone the same wage for the same work; nobody would feel the need to work at all. Paris Nesbit takes this up: why not? The cooperative commonwealth cannot be worse than the system we have now. But Ruskin is too utopian, Barton says impatiently, and

EPILOGUE 395 Bedford agrees: life in outback mining camps has made Bedford a shrewd judge of human nature, and sympathetic to the Working Man as he is, he is suspicious of political dreamers. Bedford tells us that the party lasted until three in the morning, and that Barton said to him as they left, “Ah! Randolph. Men die and dynasties fall, but tonight there is only one tragedy. There is no more Chateau Y’quem.” But the point of my story is that Ruskin, the missing occupant of the sixth chair, was part of the conversation – “the conversation that is us”. If Ruskin had never existed, the conversation in the last two decades of the nineteenth century in Australia might have gone differently. Socialism would still have come, but without its distinctive Fabian character; utopian socialism would still have come, but without one of its most eloquent spokesmen; there would still have been plenty of critics of society, but one less to show the way. And Australian writers and artists, poets and architects, would not have had a mighty champion of Truth and Beauty, who said that these things mattered – by implication, even in Australia – and that these things could be found here, if you knew where to look. In my imaginary dinner party I see Harold Desbrowe- Annear replying to Edmund Barton and Randolph Bedford, practical men in a very practical world, quoting the young Bulletin poet Louise Mack:

No place for dreamers! No room for dreams! Then why these visions, 35 And why these gleams?

396 ENDNOTES FOR EPILOGUE

1 The painting was exhibited from mid-January to February 9, 1906 (Adelaide), 14 February to 7(?) March (Melbourne), and 14 March to 9 April (Sydney), after which it went to New Zealand. A piece in the Melbourne Argus for 14 February 1906 makes the bold claim that “although Hunt was the leader of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, John Ruskin alone was its real originator and inspirer”. For a judicious view of this old controversy, see George P Landow, The Aesthetic and Critical Theories of John Ruskin, Princeton University Press, 1971, pp. 12–13. Ruskin defended the original picture in a letter to The Times, 5 May 1854, after it was criticised at the Royal Academy, and he was still eulogizing William Holman Hunt thirty years later – see Ruskin, The Art of England, Lecture I, “The Realistic School of Painting”, secs 5 and 6; this lecture was originally given at Oxford on 9 March 1883. The painting was regarded by many as a symbol of Protestant piety: Mark Roskill, “Holman Hunt’s Differing Versions of The Light of the World”, Victorian Studies, March 1963, pp. 229–244, is the basic source. Hunt’s ideas are further explored by George P Landow in William Holman Hunt and Typological Symbolism, Yale University Press, 1979. For more about Hunt, see his autobiography, Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, London, 1905, and his obituaries in The Times, 8 September 1910, and The Athenaeum, 10 September 1910. For the Pre-Raphaelites, see William E Fredeman, Pre-Raphaelitism: A Bibliocritical Study, Harvard University Press, 1965, and William Gaunt, The Pre-Raphaelite Tragedy, Jonathan Cape, 1942. For the huge popularity of reproductions, see Anthony Dyson, Pictures to Print: The Nineteenth Century Engraving Trade, Farrand Press, London, 1984, and Chapter One, above. This was Hunt’s last and brightest moment in the sun. In the same year, 1905, in which The Light of the World began its world tour, he published his autobiography, amid new controversy, and he began his last big painting, The Lady of Shalott. There was also a major retrospective of his work at the Leicester Galleries the following year. For The Lady of Shalott, see The Studio, 1905, p. 153, and 1907, p. 163; for the retrospective, see The Art Journal, 1906, p. 350 and pp. 377ff. For the painting’s status as a Protestant icon, see Jeremy Maas, Victorian Painters, Barrie & Jenkins, 1988, p. 128, and Fredeman, op. cit., pp. 133ff. For the remarkable couple who bought the picture and then sent it out into the world, see Belinda Norman-Butler, Victorian Aspirations: The Life and Labour of Charles and Mary Booth, Allen & Unwin, 1972, pp. 162–163, and Roskill, op. cit., pp. 236–237. There are three pamphlets about the painting in the Mitchell Library, Sydney, issued by the Art Gallery of NSW, at 755/H. For an account of the Canadian leg of its world tour, see Katherine Lochnan and Carol Jacobi (eds), Holman Hunt and the Pre-Raphaelite Vision, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, 2008, passim; I thank my sister Janet Thompson of Toronto for finding this reference for me. Holman Hunt once considered going to Australia himself to make his fortune on the goldfields, according to Ruskin (Modern Painters V, IX, 12.9), but Hunt contradicts this story in his autobiography: needy as he was, “the prospect had no temptation for me” (Hunt, op. cit., pp. 224–225). Thomas Woolner, the sculptor, was the only member of the Pre-Raphaelites to visit Australia, but he soon returned to England. 2 The text is Revelations (3,20): “Behold, I stand at the door and knock …” Hunt later denied that the picture was based upon “ecclesiastical or archaic symbolisms”, insisting that its meaning was obvious : “The closed door was the obstinately shut mind, the weeds the cumber of daily neglect … the orchard the garden of … fruit for … the soul … the bat flitting about only in darkness … a natural symbol of ignorance”. The symbolism was meant to “elucidate, not to mystify, truth”, but in any event the “delectability” of a picture should always come first. (Hunt, op. cit., pp. 350–351). Ruskin defended the picture on its controversial first appearance in 1854 (see note 1, above) but Thomas Carlyle was among those who did not like it (Hunt, op. cit., pp. 353–359). 3 The Worker, Sydney, 19 April 1906.

EPILOGUE 397 4 Daily Telegraph, Sydney, 5 April 1906. 5 Audrey Oldfield,Woman Suffrage in Australia: A Gift or a Struggle?, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1992, pp. 93–98. 6 The Worker, Sydney, 23 August 1902, and especially 13 June 1903: “The wage-earning, producing woman, the woman who is supported by a wage-earner or producer, may rightly and conscientiously join only one political organization, and that – the Political Labor League. There is no health or help for Labor, mental or physical, outside its ranks.” 7 The Worker, Sydney, 29 March 1906. One month later The Worker satirised a meeting of the Women’s Branch of the People’s Reform League in another ditty: Society functions of various kinds Are held by the privileged few, Who constantly worry their weak little minds To introduce anything new. And something delightfully novel and smart Now fills the Reformers with glee, For great is the pleasure of all who take part In a Women’s Political Tea. (26 April 1906) 8 ADB entry on Harold Desbrowe-Annear by George Tibbits. 9 The Lone Hand, Melbourne, July 1907, pp. 320–322 10 Bernard O’Dowd, Poetry Militant, Thomas Lothian, Melbourne, 1909, p. 36. 11 Attendances exceeded 25,000 on Sunday 25 March, the eleventh day (Evening News, 26 March 1906) and 32,000 the following Sunday (Daily Telegraph, 2 April 1906). This meant 206,865 people had seen it by 1 April (ibid.). The final figure was 302,183 visitors by the time the exhibition closed on 8 AprilDaily ( Telegraph, 10 April 1906). 12 Sydney Morning Herald, 7 April 1906. 13 Truth, Sydney, 15 April 1906. 14 Art and Architecture, Sydney, January–February 1906, p. 80. 15 AGNSW pamphlet 2, op. cit. 16 The Methodist, Sydney, 24 March 1906, p. 7. 17 The War Cry, Melbourne, 14 April 1906, p. 11. 18 The Catholic Press, Sydney, 5 April 1906, p. 19, and 12 April 1906, p. 19. 19 AGNSW pamphlet 3, in Mitchell Library, 755/H. This reprints a talk the President of the Art Gallery of NSW gave five months after the tour on 4 September 1906. 20 The Art Journal, London, 1906, pp. 377–379, on Hunt retrospective; Art and Architecture, Sydney, November–December 1910, p. 171. The Art Journal said that it would be unjust to dismiss Hunt as “a Puritan Prophet, a Fanatic of Sight, a Prosecutor of Beauty, a Pietistic Ejaculator”, and then did so (pp. 377–378). 21 The Art Journal, London, 1907, p. 251. Furnivall was devoted to Ruskin too – see Tim Hilton, Ruskin: The Early Years 1819–1859, Yale University Press, 1985, p. 151. 22 The Newcastle Morning Herald and Miners’ Advocate, 10 March 1906. 23 Art and Architecture, Sydney, March–April 1906, pp. 66–67. 24 Daily Telegraph, Sydney, 23 March 1906. 25 “Anson” in the Daily Telegraph, Sydney, 4 April 1906.

398 Endnotes for Epilogue 26 “J.B.” (John Barlow) in Art and Architecture, Sydney, March–April 1906, pp. 67–68. Barlow was one of the editors of this journal. 27 Daily Telegraph, Sydney, 23 March 1906. 28 See L F Crisp, “ ‘Remember the Literature, Comrades!’ Labour Party Reading Then and Now”, Labour History, no. 36, May 1979, pp. 31–38. 29 Graeme Osborne, “John Percy Jones 1872–1955: A Biographical Note”, Labour History, no. 28, May 1975, pp. 33–36, see note 4, p. 34. 30 G Sydney Jones, “Some Thoughts on Australian Architecture”, Art and Architecture, Sydney, 1905, pp. 215–220, see p. 220. 31 George Taylor, review of Royal Art Society annual exhibition, Art and Architecture, Sydney, 1906, pp. 194–198, see p. 194. 32 John Branch, “Another Note on Design”, in J L Tadd, New Methods in Education: Books III and IV, G & C Merriam Co., Sydney, 1906, p. 9; this was an Australian reprint of an American title. J Liberty Tadd was an influential American educator, and Director of the Public Industrial Art School in Philadelphia; Branch was the Superintendent of Drawing in the NSW Department of Public Instruction. See a later title by Branch, Picture Study in Schools, Government Printer, Sydney, 1913, for “homely democratic middle class art” (p. 28); Ruskin criticised (p. 26). 33 H H Champion, introduction, Unto This Last, Thomas C Lothian, Melbourne, 1907, pp. 6–7. 34 Randolph Bedford, Naught to Thirty-Three, op. cit., p. 330 for the dinner party; the maxims of Billy Pagan, Bedford’s alter ego, are from Bedford, Aladdin and the Boss Cockie, Bookstall Publishing, Sydney, 1919; see p. 162. The details of the other guests are taken from theAustralian Dictionary of Biography, supplemented by individual sources. There is a vivid picture of Bedford the raconteur in Vivian Smith (ed.), Nettie Palmer, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, Qld., 1988, pp. 36–37. 35 Louise Mack (1870–1935), according to her biographers, chose a life of adventure over respectability. She contributed to The Bulletin from the late 1880s and joined its staff in 1898. She wrote profusely and, increasingly, for money; her early poetry is some of her best work. This extract is from the poem of the same name, published in her collection Dreams in Flower (The Bulletin Newspaper Co., Sydney, 1901).

EPILOGUE 399

APPENDIX

TABLE 6 Arts and Crafts in Public Practice: The Vernon Office 1895–1908 1900 1904 1906 1907 1908 1897 1902 1899 1905 1896 1903 1895 1898 1901 architect

BlairXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

BarrXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Oakeshott XXXXXXXXX

McRae XXXXXXXXXXXX

Coulter XXXXXXXXX

Waterhouse XXXXXXXXX

Brindley XXXXXXXXX

Jackson XXXXXXXX

Moyes XX

APPENDIX 401 TABLE 7 Australian Careers of Principal Figures in the Vernon Office

tenure in the architect vernon australian career office

Joined GAB as draftsman 1895 after arriving from Gorrie Mcleish Blair 1895–1926 Scotland. First Class Assistant Architect by 1912. (1862–?) Succeeded McRae as Government Architect 1923.

Born in England but grew up in Brisbane. Articled to G H M Addison in Queensland 1888. Joined John Barr 1895–1919 GAB 1895. Chief Designing Architect by 1911. (1872–1949) Extensive work at Sydney University 1901–1918 under Vernon and McRae.

Classmate in UK of G M H Addison and E Jeaffreson Jackson. Arrived Australia 1884. Joined GAB 1891. Active in Sydney Architectural George Oakeshott Association 1891–1894, SAA President 1893. Chief 1891–1903 (1861?–1924) Draftsman for GAB by 1897. Work at Sydney University including Fisher Library 1900. Resigned from GAB in 1903 to become first Commonwealth Architect for Federal Government.

Arrived Sydney 1884. City Architect 1889, designer of Queen Victoria Building 1893. Appointed George McRae 1897–1923 Principal Assistant Architect in GAB 1897. (1858–1923) Succeeded Vernon as Government Architect 1912. Died in office 1923.

Talented draftsman who drew up many of Vernon’s Robert Coulter schemes including 1909 Sydney improvements, 1922 1900–1929 (dates unknown) Sydney Harbour Bridge surrounds, first schemes for new federal capital at Canberra.

402 tenure in the architect vernon australian career office

After GAB, formed partnership with John Bertram Waterhouse 1900–1908 Hamilton Lake. Later domestic work inspired by (1876–1965) John Horbury Hunt, C F A Voysey.

Member Sydney Architecture Association Alfred Brindley 1892–1893. Involved in rebuilding The Rocks after 1900–1908 (dates unknown) 1900 plague, including model housing scheme in Windmill Street 1908.

Arrived Australia 1884. Private practice 1884–1901, E Jeaffreson Jackson 1901–1908 then joined GAB. Member Sydney Architectural (1862–1921) Association 1891. Returned to England in 1908.

William Moyes Articled to Charles Rennie Mackintosh in 1907–? (dates unknown) Glasgow before coming to Australia.

APPENDIX 403

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. RUSKIN

It is the custom in Ruskin studies to use the Library Edition of 1903–1912, edited by E T Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, when citing Ruskin’s work. Unfortunately no Sydney library possesses an intact copy that is readily available, and so I have had to use a variety of editions instead. Fortunately the texts do not vary from one edition to another (except where noted) and since Ruskin numbered the sections of his work consistently through every edition, I have been able to rely on this. The principal Ruskin texts referred to in this thesis are given below.

1. BOOKS BY RUSKIN

Academy Notes (1855–1859, 1875)

Arrows of the Chace (1880)

The Crown of Wild Olive: Three Lectures on Work, Traffic and War (1866)

The Eagle’s Nest: Ten Lectures on the Relation of Natural Science to Art, Given before the University of Oxford in Lent Term (1872)

The Elements of Drawing, in Three Letters to Beginners (1857)

The Ethics of the Dust: Ten Lectures to Little Housewives on the Elements of Crystallisation (1866)

Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain (1871–1880)

“A Joy Forever” and Its Price in the Market, or The Political Economy of Art (1857) (2nd edn 1880)

Lectures on Architecture and Painting, Delivered at Edinburgh in November 1853 (1854)

Lectures on Art, Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary Term, 1870 (1870)

Modern Painters (1843–1860)

Praeterita (1885–1889)

The Queen of the Air: Being a Study of the Greek Myths of Cloud and Storm (1869)

Sesame and Lilies: Two Lectures Delivered at Manchester in 1864

BIBLIOGRAPHY 405 The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849)

The Stones of Venice (1851–1853)

Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne: Twenty-five Letters to a Working Man of Sunderland on the Laws of Work (1867)

The Two Paths: Being Lectures on Art, and Its Application to Decoration and Manufacture, Delivered in 1858–9 (1859)

“Unto This Last”: Four Essays on the First Principles of Political Economy (1860)

2. BOOKS ON RUSKIN

Abse, Joan, John Ruskin, The Passionate Moralist,Quartet Books, London, 1980.

Anthony, Peter, John Ruskin’s Labour: A Study of Ruskin’s Social Theory, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1983.

Barrie, David (ed.), intro to Modern Painters, by John Ruskin, Deutsch, London, 1987.

Batchelor, John, John Ruskin: No Wealth But Life, Pimlico, London, 2001.

Birch, Dinah, “Ruskin and the Science of Proserpina” in Robert Hewison (ed.), New Approaches to Ruskin, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1981, pp. 142–156.

Birch, Dinah, Ruskin on Turner, Cassell, London, 1990.

Birch, Dinah (ed.), John Ruskin: Selected Writings, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004.

Birch, Dinah (ed.), Ruskin and the Dawn of the Modern, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1999.

Blau, Eve, Ruskinian Gothic: The Architecture of Deane and Woodward 1845–1861, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1982.

Brooks, Michael, John Ruskin and Victorian Architecture, Thames & Hudson, London, 1989.

Casteras, Susan, et al. (eds), John Ruskin and the Victorian Eye, Harry N Abrams, New York, 1993.

Cerutti, Toni (ed.), Ruskin and the Twentieth Century, Edizioni Mercurio, Vercetti, 2000.

Champion, H H (ed.), intro to Unto This Last, by John Ruskin, Thomas C Lothian, Melbourne, 1907.

Cianci, Giovanni, and Peter Nicholls, Ruskin and Modernism, Palgrave, London, 2001.

Clark, Kenneth, Ruskin Today, John Murray, London, 1964.

406 Ruskin Cockram, Gill, Ruskin and Social Reform: Ethics and Economics in the Victorian Age, Tauris Academic Studies, London, 2007.

Cook, E T, The Life of John Ruskin, George Allen & Co., London, 1911.

Craig, David M, John Ruskin and the Ethics of Consumption, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, 2006.

Ellis, Amabel, The Tragedy of John Ruskin, Jonathan Cape, London, 1928.

Evans, Joan, John Ruskin, London, Jonathan Cape, 1954.

Ferber, Linda S, and William H Gerdts, The New Path: Ruskin and the American Pre- Raphaelites, Brooklyn Museum/Schocken Books, Brooklyn, NY, 1985.

Finley, Stephen C, Nature’s Covenant: Figures of Landscape in Ruskin, Penn State University Press, University Park, PA, 1992.

Fuchs, James (ed.), Ruskin’s Views of Social Justice, Vanguard Press, New York, 1926.

Garrigan, Kristine, Ruskin on Architecture: His Thought and Influence, University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1973.

Gully, Anthony Lacy, “Sermons in Stone: Ruskin and Geology” in Susan Casteras et al. (eds), John Ruskin and the Victorian Eye, Harry Abrams, New York, 1993, pp. 158–183.

Hasan, Zaheer, The Relevance of Ruskin and Gandhi, Shree, Delhi, 1985.

Hayman, John (ed.), intro to Letters from the Continent 1858, by John Ruskin, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1982.

Helsinger, Elizabeth K, Ruskin and the Art of the Beholder, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, 1982.

Hewison, Robert, John Ruskin, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2007.

Hewison, Robert, John Ruskin: The Argument of the Eye, Thames & Hudson, London, 1976.

Hewison, Robert, Ruskin and Venice, Thames & Hudson, London, 1978.

Hewison, Robert (ed.), New Approaches to Ruskin: 13 Essays, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1981.

Hewison, Robert (ed.), Ruskin’s Artists: Studies in the Victorian Visual Economy, Ashgate, Aldershot, Hants, 2000.

Hilton, Tim, John Ruskin: The Early Years 1819–1859, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 1985.

BIBLIOGRAPHY 407 Hilton, Tim, John Ruskin: The Later Years, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 2000.

Hobson, J A, John Ruskin, Social Reformer, James Nisbet, London, 1899.

Hunt, John Dixon, and Holland, Faith M. (eds.), The Ruskin Polygon : Essays on the Imagination of John Ruskin, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1982.

Kimura, Masami, “Japanese Interest in Ruskin: Some Historical Trends” in Robert Rhodes and Del Ivan Janik (eds), Studies in Ruskin: Essays in Honor of Van Ikin Burd, Ohio University Press, Athens, OH, 1982.

Landow, George P, The Aesthetic and Critical Theories of John Ruskin, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1971.

Landow, George P, Ruskin, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1985.

Lang, Michael H, Designing Utopia: John Ruskin’s Urban Vision for Britain and America, Black Rose Books, Montreal, 1999.

Leon, Derrick, Ruskin, The Great Victorian, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1949.

Lutyens, Mary, Effie in Venice: Her Picture of Society and Life with John Ruskin 1849–1852, John Murray, London, 1965.

Lutyens, Mary, Millais and the Ruskins, John Murray, London, 1967.

Lutyens, Mary, The Ruskins and the Grays, John Murray, London, 1972.

Meynell, Alice, John Ruskin, William Blackwood & Sons, Edinburgh and London, 1900.

Morley, Edith, John Ruskin and Social Ethics, Fabian Tract No. 179, Fabian Society, London, 1915.

Nord, Deborah Epstein (ed.), intro to Sesame and Lilies, by John Ruskin, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 2002.

O’Gorman, Francis, “Ruskin’s Science of the 1870s: Science, Education, and the Nation” in Dinah Birch (ed.), Ruskin and the Dawn of the Modern, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1999, pp. 35–56.

Oechslin, Werner (ed.), John Ruskin: Werk und Wirkung, gta Verlag, Zurich, and Gebr. Mann Verlag, Berlin, 2002.

Proust, Marcel, On Reading Ruskin, translated and edited by Jean Autret, William Burford and Phillip J Wolfe, intro Richard Macksey, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 1987.

Quill, Sarah, Ruskin’s Venice: The Stones Revisited, Ashgate, London, 2000.

408 Ruskin Rhodes, Robert, and Del Ivan Janik (eds), Studies in Ruskin: Essays in Honor of Van Ikin Burd, Ohio University Press, Athens, OH, 1982.

Rhys, Grace (ed.), The Ethics of the Dust: Ten Lectures to Little Housewives on the Elements of Crystallization, by John Ruskin, reprint edn, J M Dent, London, 1907.

Ritchie, Anne, Records of Tennyson, Ruskin and Browning, Macmillan, London, 1892.

Rosenberg, John D, The Darkening Glass: A Portrait of Ruskin’s Genius, Columbia University Press, New York, 1961.

Rosenberg, John D, The Genius of John Ruskin: Selections from His Writings, George Allen & Unwin, London, 1963.

Sawyer, Paul, Ruskin’s Poetic Argument: The Design of the Major Works, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 1985.

Sizeranne, Robert de la, Ruskin and the Religion of Beauty, George Allen, London, 1899.

Stein, Roger B, John Ruskin and Aesthetic Thought in America 1840–1900, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1967.

Stiles, Mark, “Deplorable Ruskin and the Mad Dog Creed: John Ruskin and Filippo Marinetti on the Destruction of the Past” in Adriano Cornoldi (ed.), Gli Interni nel Progetto sull’ Essistente, Universita IUAV di Venezia, Venice, and Il Poligrafo, Padova, 2007, pp. 43–46.

Surtees, Virginia (ed.), Sublime and Instructive: Letters from John Ruskin to Louisa, Marchioness of Waterford, Anna Blunden, and Ellen Heaton, Michael Joseph, London, 1972.

Tuthill, Louisa, Pearls for Young Ladies: From the Later Work of John Ruskin, John Wiley & Sons, New York, 1878.

Tuthill, Louisa, Precious Thoughts: Moral and Religious, Gathered from the Works of John Ruskin, John Wiley & Sons, New York, 1865.

Tuthill, Louisa, The True and the Beautiful in Nature, Art, Morals, and Religion, Selected from the Works of John Ruskin, A.M., John Wiley & Sons, New York, 1858.

Unrau, John, Looking at Architecture with Ruskin, Thames & Hudson, London, 1978.

Unrau, John, Ruskin and St Mark’s: A Visual Study, Thames & Hudson, London, 1984.

Viljoen, Helen Gill, The Brantwood Diary of John Ruskin, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 1971.

Watanabe, Toshio, Ruskin in Japan 1890–1940, Tokyo, 1997.

BIBLIOGRAPHY 409 Weltman, Sharon Aronofsky, Ruskin’s Mythic Queen: Gender Subversion in Victorian Culture, Ohio University Press, Athens, OH, 1998.

Wheeler, Michael, The Lamp of Memory: Ruskin, Tradition, and Architecture, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1992.

Wheeler, Michael, Ruskin’s God, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999.

Whittick, Arnold, Ruskin’s Venice, G Godwin, London, 1976.

Wise, Thomas J, and James P Smart (eds), A Complete Bibliography of the Writings in Prose and Verse of John Ruskin, LLD, first pub. 1893, reprint edn, Dawson’s, 1964.

410 Ruskin B. SOCIAL HISTORY

1. CONTEMPORARY AUSTRALIAN SOCIAL PERIODICALS

AHR: Journal of the Australasian Home Reading Union (Sydney, 1894)

Australasian Critic: A Monthly Review of Literature, Science and Art (Melbourne, 1890–1891)

Australian Magazine of Contemporary Colonial Opinion (Melbourne, 1886)

“The Australian Working Man”, Australian Magazine, August 1886, pp. 180–190.

“The Duties of a Leisure Class in Colonial Society”, Australian Magazine, August 1886, pp. 149–158.

“Thinking Straight”, Australian Magazine, August 1886, p. 133.

Literary and Debating Societies Journal (Sydney, 1889–)

Sydney Quarterly Magazine (1883–1892)

Armstrong, E S, “John Ruskin, LLD, Considered as an Art Critic”, Sydney Quarterly Magazine, vol. VI, no. 3, September 1889, pp. 209–224.

Armstrong, E S, “John Ruskin, LLD, Considered as a Political Economist”, Sydney Quarterly Magazine, vol. VI, no. 4, December 1889, pp. 317–331.

Walsh, Florence, “The Present Position of Women”, Sydney Quarterly Magazine, vol. VIII, no. 3, September 1891, pp. 188–194.

Victorian Review (Melbourne, 1879–1886) Barnet, Nahum, “Climatic Architecture”, Victorian Review, November 1882, pp. 37–43.

Martin, C E M, “The Works of John Ruskin”, Victorian Review, July 1884, pp. 281–303.

Thomas, J P, “An Embarrassment of Strikes”, Victorian Review, February 1883, pp. 410–416.

BIBLIOGRAPHY 411 2. CONTEMPORARY FOREIGN SOCIAL PERIODICALS

Art Journal (London, 1849–1912)

Athenaeum (London, 1830–1921)

“The Political Economy of Art”, Athenaeum, 26 December 1857, pp. 1615–1617.

Contemporary Review (London, 1861–)

Cobbe, Frances Power, “Wife Torture in England”, Contemporary Review, April 1878, pp. 55–87.

Oliphant, Margaret, “The Latest Lawgiver”, Contemporary Review, June 1868, pp. 675–691.

Edinburgh Review (1802–1929)

Kerr, Robert, “The Works of John Ruskin, LL.D.”, Edinburgh Review, January–April 1888, pp. 198–234.

Fortnightly Review (London, 1865–1934)

Trollope, Anthony, review of The Crown of Wild Olive, by John Ruskin, Fortnightly Review, 15 June 1866, pp. 381–384.

Magazine of Art (London, 1878–1904)

Nineteenth Century (London, 1877–1900)

Review of Reviews (London, 1890–1936)

“The Labour Party and the Books That Helped to Make It”,Review of Reviews, June 1906.

Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art (London, 1855–1938)

“J.R. on Political Economy”, Saturday Review, 4 August 1860, pp. 136–138.

“Mr Ruskin Again”, Saturday Review, 10 November 1860, pp. 582–584.

Scribner’s Magazine (New York, 1887–1939)

Royce, Josiah, “Impressions of Australia”, Scribner’s Magazine, January 1891, pp. 75–87.

412 Social History 3. CONTEMPORARY AUSTRALIAN NEWSPAPERS

NEW SOUTH WALES Australian Graphic (Sydney) Barrier Miner (Broken Hill) Bulletin (Sydney) Daily Telegraph (Sydney) Society (Sydney) Sydney Morning Herald Sydney Punch Town and Country Journal (Sydney) Truth (Sydney)

QUEENSLAND Courier Mail (Brisbane)

VICTORIA Age (Melbourne) Argus (Melbourne) Australasian (Melbourne) Bendigo Advertiser Lone Hand (Melbourne) Melbourne Punch Spectator (Melbourne)

BIBLIOGRAPHY 413 4. GOVERNMENT PUBLICATIONS ON AUSTRALIAN SOCIAL HISTORY

Coghlan, T A, Labour and Industry in Australia: from the first settlement in 1788 to the establishment of the Commonwealth in 1901, first pub. 1918, reprint edn, Melbourne, Macmillan, 1969.

Coghlan, T A, A Statistical Account of the Seven Colonies of Australasia, 9th edn, Sydney, Government Printer, 1901–1902.

Coghlan, T A, The Wealth and Progress of New South Wales 1887–88, Sydney, Government Printer, 1888.

Coghlan, T A, The Wealth and Progress of New South Wales 1898–99, Sydney, Government Printer, 1900.

New South Wales, Legislative Assembly, “Prince Alfred Hospital : Report of the Public Service Board in Regard to the Inquiry Held into the Causes of the Alleged Excessive Cost of the Erection of the New Pavilions, Under the Day-Labour System”, in Votes and Proceedings, 1904, pp. 653–765.

New South Wales, Legislative Council, “Report of the Trustees of the Sydney Free Public Library for 1883–84” in Journal of the Legislative Council of New South Wales, 1883–1884, Vol. 36, Part 3, p. 239.

New South Wales, Legislative Council, “Report of the New South Wales Royal Commission on Excessive Use of Intoxicating Drink, 1888”, in Votes and Proceedings, 1887–1888, Vol. 7, pp. 41ff.

New South Wales, Legislative Council, Parliamentary Debates, 1893, Vol. 66, pp. 8016 ff.

New South Wales, Legislative Council, “Progress Report from the Select Committee on Pitt Town Settlement” in Votes and Proceedings, 1896, Vol. V, pp, 745–780.

New South Wales, Legislative Council, Votes and Proceedings, 21 November 1899.

New South Wales, Official Year Book of New South Wales, No. 53, 1950–1951, Sydney, Government Printer, 1955.

New South Wales, Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages, Death Certificate 1901/011254 (James Green).

New South Wales, Royal Commission on Strikes, Report, Sydney, Government Printer, 1891.

New South Wales, Statistical Registers for 1876, 1881, 1900.

414 Social History New South Wales, Department of Public Instruction, Technical Education Branch, A Quarter Century of Technical Education in New South Wales, Sydney, Government Printer, 1908.

United Kingdom, Emigrants’ Information Office,Professional Handbook Dealing with the Professions in the Colonies, London, HMSO, 1890.

United Kingdom, Royal Commission on Labour, Fifth and Final Report, Part I, London : HMSO, 1894.

Victoria, Parliamentary Debates 119, 18 November 1908, pp. 1398–1402, quoted in Select Documents in Australian History 1851–1900, edited by Manning Clark, Vol. II, 395–399, Sydney, Angus & Robertson, 1955.

Victoria, Royal Commission on Technical Education in Victoria, Final Report, Melbourne, Government Printer, 1901.

Victoria, Royal Commission on the University of Melbourne, Minutes of Evidence, Melbourne, Government Printer, 1902.

5. ARCHIVAL SOURCES FOR AUSTRALIAN SOCIAL HISTORY [note: ml refers to mitchell library, state library of new south wales]

Bendigo School of Mines and Industries, Annual Report for the Year Ending 30 June 1890, ML 607/B. Includes lectures on Ruskin:

Mackay, J B Lillie, “Clouds and Cloudland”, Lecture delivered to Bendigo School of Mines and Industries, October 1889, in Annual Report for the Year Ending 30 June 1890, pp. 199–234. Tucker, T G, “Literary Judgement”, Lecture delivered to Bendigo School of Mines and Industries, 5 September 1889, in Annual Report for the Year Ending 30 June 1890, pp. 123–149.

Cole, E W, Master Messages from John Ruskin, n.d., ML 824.86/1.

Cole, E W, Worlds for 1/3d, n.d., ML 017.4/12.

Grafton church library, Catalogue, 1863, ML Pam File 027.3/D.

Maitland School of Arts, Rules for the Maitland School of Arts, 1854, ML 374.8/1A1.

BIBLIOGRAPHY 415 Mechanics’ Institutes in New South Wales, Catalogues

Bega 1890 ML 027.4/3 Braidwood 1897 ML 017.1/8 Broken Hill 1899 ML 017.1/B Deniliquin n.d. ML 018.1/D Goulburn 1888 ML 017.1/13 Grafton 1901 ML 017.1/G Gunnedah 1909 ML Pam File 027.4/S Kiama 1910 ML 018.1/K Maclean 1892 ML 018.1/M Orange 1914 ML 027.505/1 (missing 8/3/2002) Rylstone 1903–1905 ML Pam File 027.4/S Shellharbour 1875 ML Pam File 027.3/D Sydney 1862–1874 ML 019.1/S Sydney 1880 ML 019.1/2 Thornleigh 1908 ML Pam File 027.4/S Young 1900? ML Pam File 027.4/S

Melbourne International Exhibition, Official Catalogue of the Exhibits, with Introductory Notices of the Countries Exhibiting, Melbourne, Mason Firth & McCutcheon, 1880.

Mullins, John Lane, Catalogue of library sale, 1893, ML Q017.2/1.

National Gallery of Victoria, Catalogue, 1879, ML Q708.9/P.

New South Wales Parliamentary Library, Catalogues for 1857, 1866, 1871; supplementary catalogues for 1886–1894, 1894–1898; supplementary catalogue for 1901.

Parkes, Sir Henry, Parkes Papers, ML CY Reel 74, Vol. 52, A922.

Rae, William, Catalogue of library sale, 1873, ML 018.2/4.

Redfern Free Public Library, Catalogue, 1882, ML 017.1/R.

Smith, James, Catalogue of library sale, 1910, ML 018.2.

Smith, James, Collection of lectures, ML 208/P10.

Sydney International Exhibition, Catalogue, 1879, ML 708.9/S.

Victoria Parliamentary Library, Catalogues for 1864, 1886.

416 Social History 6. CONTEMPORARY AUSTRALIAN POETRY AND PROSE

Ackland, Michael, That Shining Band : A Study of Australian Colonial Verse Tradition, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, Qld., 1994.

Adams, Francis, Songs of the Army of the Night, Wm Reeves, London, 1894.

Anderson, Hugh, The Poet Militant : Bernard O’Dowd, Hill of Content, Melbourne, 1965.

Barnes, John (ed.), Portable Australian Authors : Joseph Furphy, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, Qld., 1981.

Bedford, Randolph, Aladdin and the Boss Cockie, Bookstall Publishing, Sydney, 1919.

Bedford, Randolph, Naught to Thirty Three, first pub. 1944, reprint edn, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1976.

Beveridge, M K, Gatherings Among the Gum-Trees, James Reid, Melbourne, 1863.

Dennis, C J, The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke, first pub. 1915, reprint edn, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1940.

Elliott, Brian, and Adrian Mitchell (eds), Bards in the Wilderness: Australian Colonial Poetry to 1920, Thomas Nelson, Melbourne, 1970.

Furphy, Joseph (pseud, Tom Collins), Rigby’s Romance: A “Made in Australia” Novel, first pub. 1905, reprint edn, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1946.

Furphy, Joseph, Such Is Life: Being Certain Extracts from the Diary of Tom Collins, first pub. 1903, reprint edn, Lloyd O’Neil, Hawthorn, Vic., 1970.

Gilmore, Mary, Marri’d and Other Verses, George Robertson, Sydney, 1910.

Goodge, W T, Hits! Skits! and Jingles, first pub. 1899, reprint edn, Pollard Publishing, Wollstonecraft, NSW, 1972.

Holburn, Muir, and Pizer, Marjorie (eds), Creeve Roe : Poetry by Victor Daley, Pinchgut Press, Sydney, 1947.

Lane, William (pseud, John Miller), The Workingman’s Paradise: An Australian Labour Novel, first pub. 1892, reprint edn, University of Sydney Press, Sydney, 2004.

Lawson, Henry, In the Days When the World Was Wide: Poetical Works of Henry Lawson, Lloyd O’Neill, Hawthorn, Vic., 1970.

Lawson, Henry, Prose Works of Henry Lawson, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1979.

Lawson, Henry, The Romance of the Swag, first pub. c. 1902, reprint edn, Ure Smith, Sydney, 1974.

BIBLIOGRAPHY 417 Mack, Louise, Dreams in Flower, Bulletin Newspaper Co., Sydney, 1901.

O’Dowd, Bernard, Dawnward? 2nd edn, TC Lothian, Melbourne, 1909.

O’Dowd, Bernard, Poetry Militant, TC Lothian, Melbourne, 1909.

Richardson, H H, The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, William Heinemann, London, 1930.

Rudd, Steele, A City Selection, University of Queensland Press, St. Lucia, Qld., 1984.

Symmons, Davison, Satires and Verses, The Argus, Melbourne, 1903.

Wilmot, Frank, Poems by Furnley Maurice, Lothian, Melbourne, 1944.

7. STORIES BY RUSKIN IN CONTEMPORARY AUSTRALIAN SCHOOLBOOKS

“Appearance of the Sky” in The Fifth Book For Girls, Collins School Series: The Australian Reading Books, 1876–1877.

“Dawn to Dusk on the Rigi” in Fifth Reader, Brooks’ New Australian School Series: The New Standard Histories, 1910.

“The Fields” and “Stones” in The Fifth Book For Boys, Collins School Series: The Australian Reading Books, 1876–1877.

“The King of the Golden River” inFourth Reader, Collins School Series: The Australian Reading Books, 1910.

“Treasure Valley” in Fifth Reader, Brooks’ New Australian School Series: The New Standard Histories, 1916.

8. BOOKS ON SOCIAL HISTORY

Alomes, Stephen, and Catherine Jones (eds), Australian Nationalism: A Documentary History, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1991.

Austin, A G, Australian Education 1788–1900, Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, Melbourne, 1961.

Australian Dictionary of Biography, on-line at: http://www.adb.online.anu.edu.au/adbonline.htm Alexander, Fred, “Murdoch, Sir Walter Logie Forbes (1874–1970)” in Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol. 10, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1986, pp. 630–632.

418 Social History Cable, K J, “Backhouse, Benjamin (1829–1904)” in Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol. 7, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1979, pp. 127–128. Cable, K J, “Woolley, John (1816–1866)” in Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol. 6, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1976, pp. 435–437. Cobb, Joan, “Nangle, James (1868–1941)” in Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol. 10, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1986, pp. 661–663. Jordens, Ann-Mari, “Smith, James (1820–1910)” in Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol. 6, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1976, pp. 145–146. McKay, K J, “Tucker, Thomas George (1859–1946)” inAustralian Dictionary of Biography, Vol. 12, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1990, pp. 277–278. O’Carrigan, Catherine, “Barlow, Mary Kate (1865–1934)” in Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol. 7, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1979, pp. 177–178. Turnley, E Cole, “Cole, Edward William (1832–1918)” in Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol. 3, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1969, pp. 438–440.

Best, Geoffrey, Mid Victorian Britain 1851–1875, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1971.

Birrell, Robert, Federation: The Secret Story, Duffy & Snellgrove, Potts Point, NSW, 2001.

Bliss, W D P (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Social Reforms, 2nd edn, Funk & Wagnalls, New York, 1898.

Branch, John, Picture Study in Schools, NSW Government Printer, Sydney, 1913.

Burgman, Verity, and Jenny Lee (eds), Constructing a Culture: A People’s History of Australia since 1788, McPhee Gribble/Penguin Books, Fitzroy, Vic., 1988.

Butlin, N G, Investment in Australian Economic Development 1861–1900, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1964.

Callaway, Anita, Visual Ephemera: Theatrical Art in Nineteenth Century Australia, University of New South Wales Press, Sydney, 2000.

Cannon, Michael, Australia in the Victorian Age, Vol. 3: Life in the Cities, Thomas Nelson, Melbourne, 1975.

Cannon, Michael, The Land Boomers, 2nd edn, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1967.

Cannon, Michael, That Damned Democrat: John Norton, An Australian Populist, 1858–1916, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1981.

Carpenter, Edward, England’s Ideal, and Other Papers on Social Subjects, Swan Sonnenschein, London, 1887.

BIBLIOGRAPHY 419 Clark, Francis, Rev., Our Journey around the World, AD Worthington, Hartford, CT, 1895.

Clarke, I F, The Pattern of Expectation 1644–2001, Jonathan Cape, London, 1979.

Clarke, I F, Tale of the Future: From the Beginning to the Present Day, 3rd edn, Library Association, London, 1978.

Clark, Manning (ed.), Select Documents in Australian History 1851–1900, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1955.

Cunneen, Christopher, William John McKell : Boilermaker, Premier, Governor-General, University of NSW Press, Sydney, 2000.

Davitt, Michael, Life and Progress in Australasia, Methuen, London, 1898.

Dodds, John W, The Age of Paradox, Victor Gollancz, London, 1953.

Dutton, Geoffrey, Snow on the Saltbush, Viking Press, Melbourne, 1984.

Dyson, Anthony, Pictures to Print: The Nineteenth Century Engraving Trade, Farrand Press, London, 1984.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, “Eloquence”, in Letters and Social Aims, first pub. 1875, reprinted in Emerson, Works, George Routledge & Sons, London, 1905.

Evans, Raymond, et al. (eds), 1901: Our Future’s Past: Documenting Australia’s Federation, Pan Macmillan Australia, Sydney, 1997.

Froude, James Anthony, Oceana, London, 1886.

Garran, Andrew (ed.), The Picturesque Atlas of Australasia, The Picturesque Atlas Publishing Company Ltd., Sydney, 1886.

Gide, Charles, and Rist, Charles, A History of Economic Doctrines, George Harrap & Co., London, 1947.

Gould, E R L, The Housing of the Working People : Special Report of the Commissioner of Labor, Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1895.

Gould, Joseph H, The Chautauqua Movement, State University of New York, Fredonia, NY, 1961.

Grant, James, and Geoffrey Serle (eds), The Melbourne Scene 1803–1956, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1978.

Guise, Hilary, Great Victorian Engravings, Astragal Books, London, 1980.

Halevy, Elie, A History of the English People, Epilogue, II, 1905–1910, Ernest Benn, London, 1934.

420 Social History Hall, Samuel Carter, Retrospect of a Long Life, London, 1883.

Hamerton, Philip, The Intellectual Life, new edn, Macmillan, London, 1889.

Haskell, Frances, Rediscoveries in Art: Some Aspects of Taste, Fashion and Collecting in England and France, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 1976.

Heaton, Barbara, Greg Preston and Mary Rabbitt, Science, Success and Soirees: The Mechanics’ Institute Movement in Newcastle and the Lower Hunter, Newcastle History Monograph No. 14, Newcastle Region Library, Newcastle, 1997.

Hergenhan, L R (ed.), A Colonial City: High and Low Life: Selected Journalism of Marcus Clarke, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1972.

Hertzka, Theodor, Freeland: A Social Anticipation, trans. Arthur Ransom, Chatto & Windus, London, 1891.

Holgate, C W, An Account of the Chief Libraries of Australia and Tasmania, C Whittingham & Co., London, 1886.

Holloway, Mark, Heavens on Earth: Utopian Communities in America, 1680–1880, Library Publishers, New York, 1951.

Houghton, Walter, The Victorian Frame of Mind 1830–1870, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 1957.

Hughes, W M, Crusts and Crusades : Tales of Bygone Days, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1947.

Hutchison, Sydney, The History of the Royal Academy 1768–1986, Robert Royce, London, 1986.

James, William, Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals, Longman Green & Co., London, 1908.

Jolly, William (ed.), Education: Its Principles and Practice, by George Combe, Macmillan, London, 1879.

La Nauze, J A, and Elizabeth Nurser (eds), Walter Murdoch and Alfred Deakin on Books and Men: Letters and Comments 1900–1918, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1974.

Lansbury, Coral, Arcady in Australia: The Evocation of Australia in Nineteenth-Century English Literature, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Vic., 1970.

Lyons, Martyn, and Taksa, Lucy, Australian Readers Remember : An Oral History of Reading 1890–1930, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1992.

Maas, Jeremy, Victorian Painters, Barrie & Jenkins, London, 1988.

BIBLIOGRAPHY 421 McCulloch, Alan, Encyclopedia of Australian Art, 2nd edn, Hutchinson of Australia, Richmond, Vic., 1977.

Mansfield, Bruce, Australian Democrat : The Career of Edward William O’Sullivan, Sydney University Press, Sydney, 1965.

Michie, Archibald, Readings in Melbourne, with an Essay on the Resources and Prospects of Victoria for the Emigrant and Uneasy Classes, Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, London, 1879.

Miller, E Morris, and Frederick T Macartney, Australian Literature: A Bibliography to 1938, extended to 1950, rev. edn, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1956.

Murdoch, Walter, Collected Essays, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1938.

Norman-Butler, Belinda, Victorian Aspirations: The Life and Labour of Charles and Mary Booth, Allen & Unwin, London, 1972.

Oliver, Robert T, Public Speaking in the Reshaping of Great Britain, University of Delaware Press, Newark, NJ, 1987.

Palmer, Vance, The Legend of the Nineties, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1954.

Phillips, Walter, Defending “A Christian Country”: Churchmen and Society in New South Wales in the 1880s and After, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, Qld., 1981.

Preston, Greg, “The Nature of Success” in Barbara Heaton, Greg Preston and Mary Rabbitt, Science, Success and Soirees: The Mechanics’ Institute Movement in Newcastle and the Lower Hunter, Newcastle History Monograph No. 14, Newcastle Region Library, Newcastle, 1997.

Roberts, Stephen Henry, The History of Australian Land Settlement 1788–1920, Macmillan/ Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1924.

Rose, Jonathan, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 2001.

Rossetti, W M, Some Reminiscences, Brown Langham & Co., London, 1906.

Rowland, Percy, The New Nation: A Sketch of the Social, Political and Economic Conditions and Prospects of the Australian Commonwealth, Smith, Elder & Co., London, 1903.

Scates, Bruce, A New Australia: Citizenship, Radicalism and the First Republic, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1997.

Schaer, Roland, Gregory Claeys and Lyman Tower Sargent, Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World, New York Public Library/Oxford University Press, New York, 2000.

422 Social History Sennett, A R, Garden Cities in Theory and Practice, Vol. II, Bemrose & Sons, London, 1905.

Serle, Geoffrey, The Golden Age: A History of the Colony of Victoria 1851–61, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1963.

Shann, Edward, An Economic History of Australia, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1930.

Simpson, G L, “Reverend Dr, John Woolley and Higher Education” in C Turney (ed.), Pioneers of Australian Education, Vol. I, Sydney University Press, Sydney, 1969, pp. 81–114.

Smiles, Samuel, Self Help, with Illustrations of Conduct and Perseverance, first pub. 1859, reprint edn, John Murray, London, 1908.

Smith, Bernard, Australian Painting, 1788–1970, 2nd edn, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1971.

Smith, Bernard, The Critic as Advocate: Selected Essays 1948–1988, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1989.

Smith, Bernard (ed.), Documents on Art and Taste in Australia: The Colonial Period 1770–1914, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1975.

Smith, George Adam, The Life of Henry Drummond, Doubleday & McClure, New York, 1899.

Smith, Goldwin, Questions of the Day, Social and Political, 2nd rev. edn, Macmillan, London, 1894.

Souter, Gavin, A Peculiar People: The Australians in Paraguay, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1968.

Stephen, Ann (ed.), Visions of a Republic: The Work of Lucien Henry, Powerhouse Publishing, Sydney, 2001.

Stuart, Lurline, James Smith: The Making of a Colonial Culture, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1989.

Tadd, J L, New Methods in Education, Australian edn, G & C Merriam Co., Sydney, 1906.

Thompson, Roger C,Australian Imperialism in the Pacific: The Expansionist Era, 1820–1920, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Vic., 1980.

Trahair, Richard C S, Utopias and Utopians: An Historical Dictionary, Greenwood Press, Westport, CT, 1999.

Trollope, Anthony, The Way We Live Now, Chapman & Hall, London, 1875.

Tucker, T G, Platform Monologues, Thomas Lothian, Melbourne, 1914.

BIBLIOGRAPHY 423 Tucker, T G, Things Worth Thinking About,George Robertson & Co., Melbourne, 1890.

Tucker, T G, and W Murdoch (eds), A New Primer of English Literature, Whitcombe & Tombs, Melbourne, 1912.

Turney, C (ed.), Pioneers of Australian Education, Vol. I, Sydney University Press, Sydney, 1969.

Vicinus, Martha, The Industrial Muse, Croom Helm, London, 1974.

Vincent, John H, The Chautauqua Movement, Chautauqua Press, Boston, MA, 1886.

Walker, R B, The Newspaper Press in New South Wales 1803–1920, Sydney University Press, Sydney, 1976.

Ward, John M. (ed.), Town Life in Australia, by Richard Twopeny, first pub. 1883, reprint edn, Sydney University Press, Sydney, 1973.

Woolley, John, Lectures Delivered in Australia, Macmillan, Cambridge and London, 1862.

9. JOURNALS ON SOCIAL HISTORY

Victorian Studies (Indiana University)

Helsinger, Elizabeth, “Millennial Ruskins”, Victorian Studies, vol. 44, no. 2, 2002, pp. 275–286.

Roskill, Mark, “Holman Hunt’s Differing Versions of ‘The Light of the World’”, Victorian Studies, March 1963, pp. 229–244.

Sonstroem, David, “Millett versus Ruskin: A Defense of Ruskin’s ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’”, Victorian Studies, Spring 1977, pp. 283–297.

Yearbook of English Studies (Modern Humanities Research Association, London)

Birch, Dinah, “’Who Wants Authority?’: Ruskin as a Dissenter”, Yearbook of English Studies, 1 January 2006.

424 Social History C. ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY

1. CONTEMPORARY AUSTRALIAN JOURNALS

ANZAAS Reports (1888–1928) (Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science)

Barlow, John, “Architecture and the Allied Arts in New South Wales”, ANZAAS Report, 1898, pp. 991–993.

Hockings, Percy F, “Architectural Sculpture”, ANZAAS Report, 1895, pp. 745–753.

Joseland, Howard, “The Grotesque and Picturesque in Australian Architecture”, ANZAAS Report, 1898, pp. 1009–1011.

Nangle, James, “The Ornamental Treatment of Iron and Steel in Building Work”, ANZAAS Report, 1898, pp. 994–995.

North, Alexander, “The Truthful Treatment of Brickwork”, ANZAAS Report, 1892, pp. 912–931.

Seager, Hurst, “The Study of Art as a Factor in General Education”,ANZAAS Report, 1904, pp. 590–598.

Sulman, John, “The Twentieth Century House: A Suggestion Towards the Solution of the Servant Problem”, ANZAAS Report, 1902, pp. 669–678.

Walker, Alan C, “Building and Architecture : A Definition and Vindication”, ANZAAS Report, 1892, pp. 868–876.

Australasian Art Review (1899–1900)

Green, James [ “J.G. De Libra”], “The Fine Arts in Australasia – New South Wales”, Australasian Art Review, 1 May 1899, pp. 17–21. Green, James [“J.G. De Libra”], “The Fine Arts in Australasia – Victoria”, Australasian Art Review, 5 October 1899, pp. 1–6.

Australasian Builder and Contractors’ News (ABCN) (1887–1895)

Addison, George, “Evolution in Architecture”, ABCN, 28 September 1889, p. 296, and 5 October 1889, p. 234.

Editorial, “The House That Jerry Built – I”, ABCN, 26 October 1889.

BIBLIOGRAPHY 425 Editorial, “The House That Jerry Built – III”, ABCN, 9 November 1889.

Editorial, “The House That Jerry Built – V”, ABCN, 30 November 1889.

Editorial, “Ruskin and Architecture”, ABCN, 30 November 1889.

Editorial, “The Sydney Architectural Association”,ABCN , 24 January 1890.

Report, “Presentation to the Ex-Manager of ‘The Builder’”, ABCN, 21 February 1891, p. 126ff.

Australian Technical Journal of Science, Art and Technology (1897–1903) (Technical Education Branch, Department of Public Instruction, New South Wales)

Blacket, Cyril, “The Education of an Architect”, Australian Technical Journal of Science, Art and Technology, 31 May 1897, p. 98.

Building and Engineering Journal (BEJ) (1888–1897); Building Engineering and Mining Journal (BEMJ) (1897–1905)

Annear, Harold Desbrowe, “John Ruskin and Architecture”, BEJ, 23 November 1889, pp. 445–446.

Annear, Harold Desbrowe, “Royal Victorian Institute of Architects”, BEJ, 1 April 1893, p. 122.

Annear, Harold Desbrowe, “Some Methods of Architectural Criticism”, BEJ, 15 July 1893, pp. 26–27.

Barlow, John, “A Plea for Colour in Colonial Architecture”, BEJ, 10 December 1892, pp. 240–241.

Barlow, John, “Marble and Mosaic Decorations”, BEJ, 12 May 1894, p. 148ff.

Barlow, John, “Institute of Architects of NSW Presidential Address”, BEMJ, 26 February 1898, pp. 54–55.

Butler, Walter, “The Prospect of the Development of the Arts among the Handicrafts”, BEJ, 1 April 1893, pp. 126–127, and 15 April 1893, pp. 145–146.

Dobbs, E Wilson, “John Ruskin”, BEJ, 21 September 1889, pp. 242–245.

Dobbs, E Wilson, “An Australian Style of Architecture”, BEJ, 21 February 1891, pp. 65–68.

Dobbs, E Wilson, “Architecture and Poetry”, BEJ, 30 September 1893, pp. 134–136.

426 Architectural History Editorial, “Architects and Contractors”, BEJ, 15 September 1888.

Editoral, “The Demon of Dispute”, BEJ, 17 November 1888.

Editorial, “Architects and Builders”, BEJ, 22 June 1889.

Editorial, “Modern Architecture”, BEJ, 22 November 1890.

Editorial, “An Australian Style of Architecture”, BEJ, 7 March 1891.

Editorial, “The Training of an Architect”,BEJ , 2 May 1891.

Editorial, “Technical Education”, BEJ, 23 January 1892.

Editorial, “The Future of Architects and Their Art – I”,BEJ , 30 April 1892.

Editorial, “The Future of Architects and Their Art – II”, BEJ, 7 May 1892.

Editorial, “The Future of Architects and Their Art – III”, BEJ, 14 May 1892.

Editorial, “The Future of Architects and Their Art – IV”, BEJ, 21 May 1892.

Editorial, “The Future of Architects and Their Art – V”, BEJ, 4 June 1892.

Editorial, “Institute of Architects of New South Wales”, BEJ, 10 September 1892.

Editorial, “The Arts and Crafts Exhibition, Sydney”,BEJ , 5 November 1892.

Editorial, “Art in Melbourne”, BEJ, 26 November 1892.

Editorial, “The Architect and the Engineer”, BEJ, 24 December 1892.

Editorial, “Architectural Accomplishment”, BEJ, 18 February 1893.

Editorial, “Working Men’s College, Melbourne”, BEJ, 11 March 1893.

Editorial, “The Prospect of the Development of the Arts Among the Handicrafts”, BEJ, 22 April 1893.

Editorial, “Sydney Architectural Association – Presidential Address”, BEJ, 29 April 1893.

Editorial, “Labour and Capital”, BEJ, 27 January 1894.

Editorial, “Sydney Architectural Association – Presidential Address”, BEJ, 14 April 1894.

Editorial, “Self Restraint”, BEJ, 28 July 1894.

Editorial, “The Wedding and Divorce of Architecture and the Sister Arts”, BEJ, 25 August 1894.

Editorial, “Certified Engineers”, BEJ, 6 April 1895.

BIBLIOGRAPHY 427 Editorial, “Registration of Architects”, BEJ, 30 November 1895.

Editorial, “The President’s Inaugural Address, NSW Institute of Architects”,BEMJ , 26 February 1898.

Editorial, “The Dignity of Labour”, BEMJ, 4 June 1898.

Hunt, John Horbury, “Presidential Address to IANSW”, BEJ, 3 September 1892, pp. 93–95.

Inskip, G C, “Royal Victorian Institute of Architects – President’s Report”, BEJ, 30 July 1892, pp. 49–50.

Joseland, Howard, “Domestic Architecture”, BEJ, 13 August 1892, pp. 63–64.

Joseland, Howard, “Sydney Architectural Association Presidential Address”, BEJ, 7 April 1894, pp. 113–114.

McCubbin, Frederick, “The Training of an Artist – I”, BEJ, 2 June 1894, pp. 169–170.

McCubbin, Frederick, “The Training of an Artist – II”, BEJ, 9 June 1894, pp. 174–175.

McCubbin, Frederick, “The Training of an Artist – III”, BEJ, 16 June 1894, p. 184.

Nangle, James, “Some Notes on the Ornamental Treatment of Bricks and Iron in New South Wales”, BEJ, 20 May 1893, pp. 190–191.

Oakden, Percy, “Royal Victorian Institute of Architects”, BEJ, 20 August 1892, p. 79.

Oakeshott, George, “Sketching”, BEJ, 6 June 1891, pp. 221–222.

Oakeshott, George, “Sydney Architectural Association”, BEJ, 15 April 1893, pp. 142–143.

Report, “Lieutenant-Colonel Rowe, FRIBA, President of the NSW Institute of Architects”, BEJ, 15 September 1888, pp. 205–206.

Report, “Royal Victorian Institute of Architects”, BEJ, 23 November 1889, p. 429.

Report, “Arts and Crafts Exhibition in Sydney”, BEJ, 30 April 1892, p. 178.

Report, “New Offices Metropolitan Gas Company Melbourne”, BEJ, 17 September 1892, pp. 114–115.

Report, “Sydney Architectural Association Arts and Crafts Exhibition – I”, BEJ, 29 October 1892, pp. 182–183.

Report, “Sydney Architectural Association Arts and Crafts Exhibition – II”, BEJ, 5 November 1892, pp. 192–193.

428 Architectural History Report, “Sydney Architectural Association Arts and Crafts Exhibition – III”, BEJ, 12 November 1892, pp. 199–200.

Report, “Royal Victorian Institute of Architects”, BEJ, 1 April 1893, p. 122.

Report, “Death of Thomas Rowe”, BEMJ, 21 January 1899, pp. 27–28.

Rieusset, A B, “On the Study of Architecture”, BEJ, 10 August 1889, pp. 111–113.

Seager, Samuel Hurst, “Sydney Architectural Association”, BEJ, 11 April 1891, pp. 137–140.

Seager, Samuel Hurst, “The Future of Architects and Their Art”,BEJ , 16 April 1892, pp. 156–158.

Selfe, Norman, “The Relative Position of the Architect, Engineer and Builder in Modern Work”, BEJ, 17 June 1893, pp. 223–224.

Sisley, Thomas, “Art in Daily Life”,BEJ , 15 February 1890, pp. 61–63.

Sisley, Thomas, “The Ethics of Architecture”, BEJ, 15 November 1890, pp. 404–406.

Sisley, Thomas, “Thoughts on the Present State of Art in Melbourne –I”, BEJ, 26 November 1892, pp. 225–226.

Sisley, Thomas, “Thoughts on the Present State of Art in Melbourne –II”, BEJ, 3 December 1892, p.236.

Storer, Felix, “Manual and Technical Training of Architects and Engineers”, BEJ, 2 May 1891, pp. 171–172.

Storer, Felix, “The Training of an Architect”, BEJ, 23 May 1891.

Walker, Alan, “Building and Architecture: A Definition and a Vindication”, BEJ, 23 January 1892, pp. 39–40.

Centennial Magazine of New South Wales (1888–1889)

Green, James, “Model Suburbs – Harcourt, Burwood”, Centennial Magazine of New South Wales, pp. 150–153.

Green, James, “The Art Society of New South Wales”,Centennial Magazine of New South Wales, pp. 271–284.

BIBLIOGRAPHY 429 Journal of the Institute of Architects of New South Wales (1904); Art and Architecture (1905–1912); The Salon (1912–1916); Architecture (1917–1955)

Barlow, John, “The City Beautiful”, Journal of the Institute of Architects of New South Wales, vol. 1, 1904, pp. 68–73.

Barlow, John, “Sydney Street Architecture – I. Messrs Farmer & Co.’s Warehouse, Pitt Street”, Art and Architecture, vol. 3, 1906, p. 73.

Hughes, W M, “The Detached Villa”, Art and Architecture, vol. 5, 1908, pp. 190–192.

Jones, George Sydney, “Some Thoughts on Australian Architecture”, Art and Architecture, vol. 2, 1905, pp. 215–220.

Jones, George Sydney, “A Word to the Public Concerning Architecture”, Art and Architecture, vol. 2, 1905, p. 230ff.

Report, “Sydney’s Domestic Architecture – I. Eastern Suburbs”, Art and Architecture, vol. 2, 1905, pp. 27–34.

Report, “Sydney’s Domestic Architecture – II. Northern Suburbs”, Art and Architecture, vol. 2, 1905, pp. 83–89.

Report, “Sydney’s Domestic Architecture – III. Mosman and Vicinity”, Art and Architecture, vol. 2, 1905, pp. 151–155.

Report, “Sydney’s Domestic Architecture – IV. Western Suburbs”, Art and Architecture, vol. 2, 1905, pp. 186–194.

Report, “New Buildings About to be Erected in Martin Place”, Art and Architecture, vol. 3, 1906, pp. 120–121.

Editorial, “On Ruskin”, The Salon, September 1914, pp. 63–65.

Kent, Harry C, “Reminiscences of Building Methods in the Seventies under John Young”, Architecture, November 1924.

Journal of Proceedings (Royal Victorian Institute of Architects, Melbourne, 1903–1926)

Koch, John, “Presidential Address 1903”, Journal of Proceedings, May 1903, pp. 46–53.

430 Architectural History Once A Month (1884–1886)

Green, James [“J.G.”], “Art in Sydney”, Once A Month, 15 October 1884, pp. 299–306.

Green, James [“D.L.”], Art in Sydney II”, Once A Month, 15 November 1884, pp. 369–374.

Green, James [“J.G. De Libra”], “Architecture in Sydney”, Once A Month, 1 January 1886, pp. 23–26.

Society (1882–1888)

Green, James [attrib.], “Sydney Architecture” (series), Society, June–October 1887.

2. CONTEMPORARY FOREIGN ARCHITECTURAL JOURNALS

American Architect and Building News (Boston, 1876–1908) The Builder (London, 1842–1966) Building News (London, 1860–)

3. ARCHIVAL SOURCES FOR AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY

Sydney Technical College, Calendars, in Mitchell Library 1884–1888 1888–1894 1895–1905.

Vernon, Walter Liberty, Vernon Papers, ML MSS 6571, Box 9, Album 7A.

BIBLIOGRAPHY 431 4. BOOKS ON ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY

Andrews, Brian, Australian Gothic: The Gothic Revival in Australian Architecture from the 1840s to the 1950s, Miegunyah Press/Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2001.

Anscombe, Isabelle, Arts and Crafts Style, Phaidon, London, 1991.

Australian Men of Mark, s.v. “Thomas Rowe”, Charles F Maxwell, Sydney, 1888.

Blomfield, Reginald, “Architecture and the RIBA” in Richard Norman Shaw and T G Jackson (eds), Architecture: A Profession or an Art?, John Murray, London, 1892, pp. 33–54.

Boyd, Robin, Australia’s Home, first pub. 1951, 2nd edn, Penguin Books, Melbourne, 1978.

Branch, John, “Another Note on Design” in J L Tadd (ed.), New Methods in Education, Australian edn, G & C Merriam Co., Sydney, 1906.

Brown, Nicholas, “Making Oneself Comfortable, or More Rooms Than Persons” in Patrick Troy (ed.), A History of European Housing in Australia, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000, pp. 107–124.

Cannon, Michael (ed.), Our Beautiful Homes, NSW, first pub. 1904, facsimile edn, Today’s Heritage, Melbourne, 1977.

Cannon, Michael (ed.), Victoria’s Representative Men at Home: Punch’s Illustrated Interviews, first pub. 1904, facsimile edn, Today’s Heritage, Melbourne, 1977.

Clark, Kenneth, The Gothic Revival: An Essay in the History of Taste, Constable, London, 1928.

Cochrane, Grace, The Crafts Movement in Australia: A History, UNSW Press, Sydney, 1992.

Cox, Philip et al, Rude Timber Buildings in Australia, Thames & Hudson, London, 1969.

Crawford, Alan, C R Ashbee: Architect Designer and Romantic Socialist, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 1985.

Crook, J Mordaunt, The Dilemma of Style, Murray, London, 1987. Davey, Peter, Arts and Crafts Architecture, Phaidon, London, 1995. Dixon, Roger, and Muthesius, Stefan, Victorian Architecture, Thames & Hudson, London, 1978. Dobbs, E Wilson, The Rise and Growth of Australasian Architecture, Australasian Builder and Contractors’ News, Sydney, 1892.

Eastlake, Charles, A History of the Gothic Revival, Longmans Green, London, 1872.

Edquist, Harriet, Harold Desbrowe-Annear: A Life in Architecture, Miegunyah Press/ Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2004.

432 Architectural History Edquist, Harriet, Pioneers of Modernism: The Arts and Crafts Movement in Australia, Miegunyah Press, Melbourne, 2008.

Fredeman, William E, Pre-Raphaelitism: A Bibliocritical Study, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1965.

Freeland, J M, Architect Extraordinary: The Life and Work of John Horbury Hunt 1838–1904, Cassell Australia, Sydney, 1970.

Freeland, J M, Architecture in Australia: A History, Cheshire, Melbourne, 1968.

Freeland, J M, The Making of a Profession: A History of the Growth and Work of Architectural Institutes in Australia, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1971.

Fuller, Peter, The Australian Scapegoat: Towards an Antipodean Aesthetic, University of Western Australia Press, Nedlands, 1986.

Fuller, Peter, Theoria: Art and the Absence of Grace, Chatto & Windus, London, 1988.

Gaunt, William, The Pre-Raphaelite Tragedy, Jonathan Cape, London, 1942.

Goad, Philip, Bates Smart: 150 Years of Australian Architecture, Thames & Hudson, Melbourne, 2004.

Goad, Philip, Melbourne Architecture, Watermark Press, Sydney, 1999.

Haddon, Robert, Australian Architecture, George Robertson, Melbourne, 1908.

Herman, Morton, The Architecture of Victorian Sydney, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1956.

Hitchcock, Henry-Russell, Early Victorian Architecture in Britain, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 1954.

Howells, Trevor, University of Sydney Architecture, Watermark Press, Sydney, 2007.

Howells, Trevor, and Michael Nicholson (eds), Towards the Dawn: Federation Architecture in Australia 1890–1915, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1989.

Hunt, William Holman, Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Macmillan & Co., London, 1905.

Jahn, Graham, Sydney Architecture, Watermark Press, Sydney, 1997.

Johnson, Chris, Shaping Sydney, Public Architecture and Civic Decorum, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1999.

Jordy, William H, and Ralph Coe (eds), American Architecture and Other Writings, by Montgomery Schuyler, Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1961.

BIBLIOGRAPHY 433 Kelly, Max, Faces of the Street : William Street Sydney 1916, Doak Press, Paddington, NSW, 1982.

Kerr, Robert (ed.), History of the Modern Styles of Architecture, by James Fergusson, 3rd edn, John Murray, London, 1902.

King, Anthony, The Bungalow: The Production of a Global Culture, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1984.

Landow, George P, William Holman Hunt and Typological Symbolism, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 1979.

Lane, Terence, and Jessie Serle, Australians at Home: A Documentary History of Australian Domestic Interiors from 1788 to 1914, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1990.

Leeds, W H, The Orders and their Aesthetic Principles, Crosby Lockwood & Co., London, 1851.

McDonald, John (ed.), Peter Fuller’s Modern Painters: Reflections on British Art, Methuen, London, 1993.

Macleod, Robert, Style and Society: Architectural Ideology in Britain 1835–1914, RIBA Publications, London, 1971.

Menz, Christopher, Morris & Company: Pre-Raphaelites and the Arts and Crafts Movement in South Australia, Art Gallery Board of South Australia, Adelaide, 1994.

Miley, Caroline, The Arts among the Handicrafts: The Arts and Crafts Movement in Victoria 1889–1929, St Lawrence Press, Melbourne, 2001.

Montana, Andrew, The Art Movement in Australia: Design Taste and Society 1875–1900, Miegunyah Press/Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2000.

Muthesius, Stefan, The High Victorian Movement in Architecture 1850–1870, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1972.

Nangle, James, Australian Building Practice, Melbourne, George Robertson, 1900.

Oliver, Richard (ed.), The Making of an Architect 1881–1981, Rizzoli, New York, 1981.

Pevsner, Nikolaus, Some Architectural Writers of the Nineteenth Century, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1972.

Prior, Edward, “The Profession and Its Ghosts”, in Richard Norman Shaw and TG Jackson (eds), Architecture: A Profession or an Art?, John Murray, London, 1892, pp. 97–116.

Reynolds, Peter, Leslie Muir and Joy Hughes, John Horbury Hunt: Radical Architect 1838–1904, Historic Houses Trust, Sydney, 2002.

Saint, Andrew, The Image of the Architect, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 1983.

434 Architectural History Shaw, Richard Norman, “That an Artist Is Not Necessarily Impractical” in Richard Norman Shaw and T G Jackson (eds.), Architecture: A Profession or an Art?, John Murray, London, 1892, pp. 1–16.

Shaw, Richard Norman, and T G Jackson (eds), Architecture: A Profession or an Art?, John Murray, London, 1892.

Sturgis, Russell, A Dictionary of Architecture and Building, Macmillan, London and New York, 1902.

Sturgis, Russell, intro to The Seven Lamps of Architecture, by John Ruskin, D.Appleton & Co., New York, 1899.

Tibbits, George, “An Emanation of Lunacy : Victoria”, in Trevor Howells and Michael Nicholson (eds.), Towards the Dawn: Federation Architecture in Australia 1890–1915, Sydney, Hale & Iremonger, 1989, pp. 47–86.

Troy, Patrick (ed.), A History of European Housing in Australia, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000.

Watson, Donald, and Judith McKay, Queensland Architects of the 19th Century: A Biographical Dictionary, Queensland Museum, Brisbane, 1994.

5. JOURNALS ON AUSTRALIAN ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY

Architecture Australia (Royal Australian Institute of Architects) Hamann, Conrad, “Forgotten Reformer: The Architecture of George Sydney Jones 1865–1927”, Architecture Australia, vol. 68, no. 5, 1979, pp. 39–45, 64.

Fabrications (Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand) Orr, Kirsten, “The Realisation of the Sydney Technical College and Technological Museum 1878–92”, Fabrications, June 2007, pp. 46–67. Phillips, John, “Hollowforth : E Jeaffreson Jackson’s Richard Threlfall House, 1891–92”, Fabrications, June 1993, pp. 2–30.

Heritage (Australian Heritage Society) Cassidy, Brigid, “Venice in Melbourne”, Heritage, vol. 8, no. 3, 1989, pp. 16–19.

Historical Studies (Department of History, University of Melbourne) Proudfoot, Peter, “The Development of Architectural Education in Sydney 1880–1930”, Historical Studies, vol. 21, no. 83, 1981, pp. 197–211.

BIBLIOGRAPHY 435 D. LABOUR HISTORY

1. CONTEMPORARY AUSTRALIAN LABOUR PERIODICALS

Tocsin (Melbourne, 1897–1906)

“To Democratic Writers, Union Secretaries, and Others”, Tocsin, 2 October 1897, p. 6.

Worker (Associated Workers of Queensland, Brisbane, 1890–1974)

“Ruskin”, Worker, 3 February 1900, p. 5.

Worker (Australian Workers’ Union, Sydney, 1892–1913)

McManus, J E, “Marx and George: Their Theories Contrasted”,Worker , 7 January 1905.

Pearce, G F, “The Twelve Best Books”, Worker, 20 September 1906.

Spence, W G, “The Twelve Best Books”, Worker, 25 October 1906.

Stevens, Bertram, “A Library for a Working Man”, Worker, 18 March 1899.

“William Morris”, Worker, 10 October 1896, p. 1.

“All For the Cause”, Worker, 24 October 1896, p. 1.

“The Worker’s Religion”, Worker, 26 February 1898, p. 3.

“A Literary ‘At Home’ ”, Worker, 21 May 1898, p. 8.

“Tennyson’s ‘Palace of Art’ ”, Worker, 22 April 1899, p. 6.

2. ARCHIVAL SOURCES FOR AUSTRALIAN LABOUR HISTORY

Black, George, “Are the Machines to Be Masters?” Australian Socialist League pamphlet, 1893.

Intercolonial Trades Union Congress, Official Report of the Third Intercolonial Trades Union Congress, Sydney, 1885.

Intercolonial Trades Union Congress, Official Report of the Fourth Intercolonial Trades Union Congress, Adelaide, 1886.

436 Labour History 3. BOOKS ON LABOUR HISTORY

Anderson, Hugh (ed.), Tocsin: Radical Arguments against Federation, 1897–1900, Drummond, Richmond, Vic., 1977.

Anonymous, Social Architecture, or, Reasons and Means for the Demolition and Reconstruction of the Social Edifice, Samuel Tinsley, London, 1876.

Bellamy, Edward, Looking Backward, 2000–1887, first pub. 1888, reprint edn, Socialist Labor Party of Australia, Sydney, 1943.

Bongiorno, Frank, The People’s Party : Victorian Labor and the Radical Tradition 1875–1914, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1996.

Bowman, Sylvia E, et al., Edward Bellamy Abroad: An American Prophet’s Influence, Twayne Publishers, New York, 1962.

Brundage, W Fitzhugh, A Socialist Utopia in the New South : the Ruskin Colonies in Tennessee and Geogia 1894–1901, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, IL, 1996.

Carpenter, Edward, Civilization : Its Cause and Cure, Swan Sonnenschein, London, 1895.

Childe, V G, How Labour Governs : A Study of Workers’ Representation in Australia, Melbourne University Press, Parkville, Vic., 1964.

Dale, George, The Industrial History of Broken Hill, Melbourne, 1918.

Davitt, Michael, Life and Progress in Australasia, Methuen, London, 1898.

Earsman, W P, The Proletariat and Education : The Necessity for Labor Colleges, Andrade, Melbourne, 1920.

Ebbels, R N, and L G Churchward (eds), The Australian Labor Movement 1850–1907: Historical Documents, 2nd edn, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1983.

Engels, F, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, first pub. 1892, 4th edn, Swan Sonnenschein, London, 1918.

Fairfield, Charles, “State Socialism in the Antipodes” in Thomas Mackay (ed.), A Plea for Liberty, John Murray, London, 1892, pp. 124–172.

Farrell, Frank, International Socialism and Australian Labour : The Left in Australia, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1981.

Fitzgerald, John D, The Rise of the Australian Labor Party, Australian Labor Party, Sydney, 1915.

George, Henry, Social Problems, Kegan Paul, Trence, London, 1884.

BIBLIOGRAPHY 437 Gibbney, H J, Labor in Print : A Guide to the People Who Created a Labor Press in Australia between 1850 and 1939, Australian National University, Canberra, 1975.

Gide, Charles, and Charles Rist, A History of Economic Doctrines, first pub. 1909, reprint edn, trans. R Richards, George Harrap & Co., London, 1947.

Gollan, Robin, Radical and Working Class Politics: A Study of Eastern Australia, 1850–1910, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1960.

Hinden, Rita (ed.), The Radical Tradition: Twelve Essays on Politics, Education, and Literature, by R H Tawney, first pub. 1919, reprint edn, Minerva Press, London, 1964.

Kennedy, Brian, Silver Sin and Sixpenny Ale: A Social History of Broken Hill 1883–1921, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1978.

Lafargue, Paul, The Right to be Lazy, first pub. 1883, reprint edn, Charles H Kerr, Chicago, 1975.

Lane, E H, Dawn to Dusk : Reminiscences of a Rebel, first pub. 1939, reprint edn, SHAPE Publications, Brisbane, 1993.

Lane, William, The Workingman’s Paradise, first pub. 1892, reprint edn, Sydney University Press, Sydney, 2004.

Lang, J T, I Remember, Invincible Press, Sydney, 1956.

Mackay, Thomas (ed.), A Plea for Liberty: An Argument Against Socialism and Socialistic Legislation, rev. edn, John Murray, London, 1892.

Metin, Albert, Socialism Without Doctrine, trans. Russell Ward, Alternative Publishing Cooperative Ltd., Chippendale NSW, 1977.

Morris, William, News from Nowhere, Reeves & Turner, London, 1891.

Morton, A L (ed.), The Political Writings of William Morris, International Publishers, New York, 1973.

Murphy, D J, T J Ryan : A Political Biography, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, Qld., 1975.

O’Farrell, P J, Harry Holland : Militant Socialist, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 1964.

Postgate, R W, The Builders’ History, National Federation of Building Trade Operatives, London, 1923.

Price, Richard, Masters, Unions and Men : Work Control in Building and the Rise of Labour 1830–1914, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1980.

438 Labour History Richter, Eugene, Pictures of the Socialistic Future, 3rd edn, Swan Sonnenschein, London, 1907.

Ross, Edgar, These Things Shall Be! Bob Ross, Socialist Pioneer – His Life and Times, Mulavon Publishing, West Ryde NSW, 1988.

Sydney Labour History Group, What Rough Beast? The State and Social Order in Australian History, George Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1982.

Turner, Ian, and Sandercock, Leonie, In Union is Strength : A History of Trade Unions in Australia 1788–1983, 3rd ed, Thomas Nelson, Melbourne, 1983.

Wells, David A, Recent Economic Changes, and Their Effect on the Production and Distribution of Wealth and the Well-Being of Society, D Appleton & Co., New York, 1889.

Wise, B R, Industrial Freedom: A Study in Politics, Cassell, London, 1892.

Wrixon, Henry, Socialism: Being Notes on a Political Tour, Macmillan, London, 1896.

4. JOURNALS ON AUSTRALIAN LABOUR HISTORY

Labour History (Australian Society for the Study of Labour History)

Coolican, Alice, “Solidarity and Sectionalism in the Sydney Building Trades: The Role of the Building Trades Council 1886–1895”, Labour History, vol. 54, May 1988, pp. 16–29.

Crisp, L F, “’Remember the Literature, Comrades!’: Labour Party Reading Then and Now”, Labour History, vol. 36, May 1979, pp. 31–38.

Kennedy, R E W, “The Leongatha Labour Colony: Founding an Anti-Utopia”, Labour History, vol. 14, May 1968, pp. 54–58.

Markey, Ray, “New South Wales Trade Unions and the ‘Co-operative Principle’ in the 1890s”, Labour History, vol. 49, November 1985, pp. 51–60.

Markey, Ray, “New Unionism in Australia 1880–1900”, Labour History, vol. 48, May 1985, pp. 15–28.

Osborne, Graeme, “John Percy Jones 1872–1955: A Biographical Note”, Labour History, vol. 28, May 1975, pp. 33–36.

Scates, Bruce, “‘Millennium or Pandemonium?’: Radicalism in the Labour Movement, Sydney, 1889–1899”, Labour History, vol. 50, May 1986, pp. 72–94.

Walker, B, “The Ambiguous Experiment: Agricultural Co-operatives in New South Wales 1893–1896”, Labour History, vol. 18, 1970, pp. 19–31.

BIBLIOGRAPHY 439 E. FEMINIST HISTORY

1. CONTEMPORARY AUSTRALIAN FEMINIST PERIODICALS

Dawn (Sydney, 1888–1895) (Australian Federation of Women Voters)

Woman’s Sphere (Melbourne, 1900–1904)

Woman’s Suffrage Journal (Sydney, 1891–1892)

Montefiore, Dora, “Speeches by Women of Sydney”, Woman’s Suffrage Journal, 15 March 1892, p. 5.

Woman’s Voice (Sydney, 1894–1896)

2. ARCHIVAL SOURCES FOR AUSTRALIAN FEMINIST HISTORY

Boyce, F, The Drink Problem in Australia, Sydney, 1893, Pamphlet bound with others at ML DSM/178/2A1.

McNamara, Mrs W H, Three Essays on Social Issues, Sydney, Cooperative Printing Co., 1894, ML 331.8/M

Womanhood Suffrage League of New South Wales, 9th Annual Report for year ending 1 June 1900.

Womanhood Suffrage League of New South Wales, 10th Annual Report for year ending 1 June 1901.

3. BOOKS ON FEMINIST HISTORY

Ackermann, Jessie, Australia From a Woman’s Point of View, first pub. 1913, reprint edn. Cassell Australia, Sydney, 1981.

Allan, James McGrigor, Woman Suffrage Wrong in Principle and Practice, Remington & Co., London, 1890.

Auerbach, Nina, Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1982.

440 Feminist History Bomford, Janette, That Dangerous and Persuasive Woman: Vida Goldstein, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1993.

Caine, Barbara (ed.), Australian Feminism: A Companion, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1998.

Clapperon, Jane Hume, Scientific Meliorism and the Evolution of Happiness, Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., London, 1885.

Cobbe, Frances Power, Broken Lights: An Inquiry into the Present Condition and Future Prospects of Religious Faith, Trubner & Co., London, 1865.

Cobbe, Frances Power, A Faithless World, Williams & Norgate, London and Edinburgh, 1885.

Cobbe, Frances Power, The Peak in Darien: With Some Other Inquiries Touching Concerns of the Soul and the Body, Williams & Norgate, London and Edinburgh, 1882.

Cobbe, Frances Power, Religious Duty, Trubner & Co., London, 1864.

Crotty, Martin, Making the Australian Male: Middle-Class Masculinity 1870–1920, Melbourne University Press, Carlton South, Vic., 2001.

Dugdale, H A, A Few Hours in a Far-Off Age, M’Carron Bird, Melbourne, 1883.

Dunstan, David, “Boozers and Wowsers” in Verity Burgman and Jenny Lee (eds), Constructing a Culture: A People’s History of Australia since 1788, McPhee Gribble/Penguin Books, Fitzroy, Vic., 1988, pp. 96–123.

Ellis, Sarah Stickney, The Wives of England, Their Relative Duties, Domestic Influence, and Social Obligations, Fisher, London, 1843.

Emery, Victoria, “The Daughters of the Court : Women’s Medievalism in Nineteenth Century Melbourne”, in Stephanie Trigg (ed.), Medievalism and the Gothic in Australian Culture, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Vic., 2005. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, Herland, first pub. 1915, reprint edn. The Women’s Press, London, 1979.

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, The Home : Its Work and Influence, first pub. 1903, reprint edn. University of Illinois Press, Urbana, IL, 1972.

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution, Small, Maynard & Co., Boston, 1898.

Coghill, Mrs Harry (ed.), Autobiography and Letters of Mrs Margaret Oliphant, London, 1895.

BIBLIOGRAPHY 441 Goldman, Emma, Anarchism and Other Essays, first pub. 1910, reprint edn. Kennikat Press, Port Washington, New York, 1969.

Greer, Germaine, The Obstacle Race, Picador, London, 1981.

Greer, Germaine, Slip-Shod Sibyls: Recognition, Rejection and the Woman Poet, Viking, New York, 1995.

Harper, Ida H (ed.), History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 6, 2nd edn, first pub. 1922, reprint edn, Source Book Press, New York, 1970.

Hayden, Dolores, The Grand Domestic Revolution, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1981.

Kingston, Beverley, My Wife, My Daughter and Poor Mary Ann: Women and Work in Australia, Thomas Nelson Australia, Sydney, 1975.

Kingston, Beverley, The Oxford History of Australia, Vol. 3, 1860–1900: Glad, Confident Morning, General editor Geoffrey Bolton, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1988.

Kirkby, Diane, Alice Henry : the Power of Pen and Voice, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1991.

Lane, Ann J (ed.), Herland, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, first pub. 1915, reprint edn, Women’s Press, London, 1979.

Lawson, Olive (ed.), The First Voice of Australian Feminism: Excerpts from Louisa Lawson’s The Dawn 1888–1895, Simon & Schuster Australia, Sydney, 1990.

Linton, Eliza Lynn, “The Girl of the Period” inModern Women and What Is Said of Them, reprint of a series of articles in the Saturday Review, JS Redfield, New York, 1868, pp. 25–33.

Ljungdahl, Lesley Durrell (ed.), A Week in the Future, by Catherine Helen Spence, original text serialised in The Centennial Magazine: An Australian Monthly from December 1888 to July 1889, reprint edn, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1987.

McDonald, Peter F, Marriage in Australia: Age at First Marriage and Proportions Marrying 1860–1971, Department of Demography, Australian National University, Canberra, 1974.

McNamara, Mrs W H, Three Essays on Social Issues, The Cooperative Printing Co., Sydney, 1894.

Magarey, Susan, Unbridling the Tongues of Women: A Biography of Catherine Helen Spence, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1985.

Magarey, Susan, Sue Rowley and Susan Sheridan (eds), Debutante Nation: Feminism Contests the 1890s, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1993.

Matthews, Brian, Louisa, McPhee Gribble/Penguin Books, Fitzroy, Vic., 1987.

442 Feminist History Millett, Kate, Sexual Politics, Doubleday, Garden City, NY, 1969.

Montefiore, Dora, From a Victorian to a Modern, E Archer, London, 1927.

Nunn, Pamela Gerrish, Victorian Women Artists, Women’s Press, London, 1987.

O’Neill, William, Everyone Was Brave: A History of Feminism in America, Quadrangle/ NYT, New York, 1971.

Oldfield, Audrey,Woman Suffrage in Australia, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1992.

Page, Frederick, Viola Meynell, Olivia Sowerby and Francis Meynell (eds), Alice Meynell: Prose and Poetry, Jonathan Cape, London, 1947.

Paulson, Ross Evans, Women’s Suffrage and Prohibition, Scott Foresman, Glenview, IL, 1973.

Poulton, Jill, Adelaide Ironside: The Pilgrim of Art, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1987.

Roberts, Jan, Maybanke Anderson: Sex, Suffrage, and Social Reform, Hale & Iremonger, London, 1993.

Roberts, Jan, and Beverley Kingston (eds), Maybanke, A Woman’s Voice: The Collected Work of Maybanke Selfe-Wolstenholme-Anderson, 1845–1927, Ruskin Rowe Press, Sydney, 2001.

Rosen, Andrew, Rise Up, Women! The Militant Campaign of the Women’s Social and Political Union 1903–1914, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1974.

Smith, Vivian (ed.), Nettie Palmer, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, Qld., 1988.

Summers, Anne, Damned Whores and God’s Police : the Colonization of Women in Australia, Penguin Books, Ringwood, Vic., 1975.

Teale, Ruth (ed.), Colonial Eve: Sources on Women in Australia 1788–1914, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1978.

Thomson, Helen (ed.),Handfasted , by Catherine Helen Spence, first pub. 1873, reprint edn, Penguin Books, Ringwood, Vic., 1984.

Unwin, Raymond, Cottage Plans and Common Sense, Fabian Tract No. 109, The Fabian Society, London, 1908.

Walden, May, Socialism and the Home, Charles Kerr, Chicago, 1901.

Wedgwood, Julia, Nineteenth Century Teachers and Other Essays, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1909.

BIBLIOGRAPHY 443 4. JOURNAL SOURCES FOR AUSTRALIAN FEMINIST HISTORY

Historical Studies (Department of History, University of Melbourne)

Allen, Judith, “‘Mundane’ Men: Historians, Masculinity and Masculinism”, Historical Studies, vol. 22, no. 89, 1987, pp. 617–628.

Hyslop, Anthea, “Temperance, Christianity and Feminism: The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union of Victoria 1887–1897”, Historical Studies, vol. 17, no. 66, 1976, pp. 27–49.

Lake, Marilyn, “The Politics of Respectability Identifying the Masculinist Context”, Historical Studies, vol. 22, no. 86, 1986, pp. 116–131.

McConville, Chris, “Rough Women, Respectable Men and Social Reform: A Response to Lake’s ‘Masculinism’”, Historical Studies, vol. 22, no. 88, 1987, pp. 432–440

444 Feminist History TltE UNJIIERSITYOF HEW SOUTH WAtE$ Thf.Sl�t'lflrtatlnn$.hoet

51.tn.amo 01Ft,m� tl8ffl('; ST ILES flrs:I namo M11ti OIi'«namM : Do\.ola& Abbrevi::i ionfot dogree IIIS1j�in the UnlveqltyealendorPt() """"'' l F�h y: F8E

Titlo..READl"-'G RUSKIN. ARCKJ TE�E ANO SOCIALRE.FORM I N AUSTRALIA 1$8.9-19011

A8STRACT

Thia lhc!& is cxamtnestoo rooep1lan ofJOl'ln RuskJn'swo1k in A4itltrtJllltbel.We8n 1889 nnd 1908,l'Jnd st!tlkll1 tt11-n,w�rf'NQ �lion,· wha,t Aust111lla ns mild& Ausk.of 1n-, Ideas al.,etllcal momont In tho! r hl&toiy. and whalwemay mek.e of Auatrallaa ooowryago wllh Rua;kin $9 our gulde.The p,erb:Soover�d here $p&J\tl he d�(t&s bel'ofva!Mt after the federalionot ttw,Auttr'-'4 1i&ncolOfiiM in 1900. t1n<11hu(ftJt&I fo , p oliticalu nityfor ms the backgrooooto the ine·sk, 'M\al Ruakin'sperspective adds IO !hiseoooun l b hill seatch1i>r uni!yIn dNersJ!y. i'I s..ia.rch p.lri'l !lclcd In Austtalla ii\th& ttroggklet.l3bli to sh Che6(ukSIIIJOns of a juSI socioly.Secauso Riust: ln lhought art,ttlat 8Mgrtt$1$UU .uchilecl$i nlllaenood by Ruski\wilh those o, leading rigu1esin Ill@aarty AuW116an la.bout and remfli� movement,.Tnetir c:onv a5,11ng CICf1oeetiVe9 IIout lhe aCIXM!t\C given here not onlyol theundel"$.t:lnd lng OfRu;kSn' $ wo"'in Al.nlralia. btl1 MSO o-fthe hopes ol Auslr.tll.in1olorm or$ in oi Wl'buhlnlpt,t.riod fl'lol ftled byeconomic d lwess and polldcal un.resl Ruskin was nol the only writerto firn:Ieager readers In Australia as it mo-vedclOser toF«:Ser31 ion, tlu1ho was 1ead bymore people,and his opinionsdied on a widerra nge Of i$$UC$,°""' a l�l ;:inyolhcr oon1etl1)0lllryllgure.. This l hesisSh!Jhl th1ou· 9houl hisl iio,lho moralun lly ol e fragments,g world.

Ooduallonrelatlnst to di1posllion of swOfOC.tl U...a.'dJ,.,n.tf,o,n , I hCrotrt g -,il to theU rwin•� ofNIM' SolAA W/JM o, bage� l l'le r1gN tcl �o..ncto �c .:rv\11�1o mtlt.M OfOMi<alCWI if'I whOlaOl lf'I I PMn U16\k!IWltaJy lihtfltiMin Ill �me.d of im_now or hc,o .aftc, l(flOrN!'I,'411!1eci I 10N p,ovialOtllot Ille COpft'c>hl Ad196& I rebWI OI propceyrigl'IIS, wc:h fll � onl �I$. I�ret,in lhc ri}nt to U$� tirutoro•#Ofb ($!.di;1$ .i,tlcJct OftlOotl) ,11 O,C,8f\ Olis OI IN8is dlS11et111ti011 Ot

I aQauth:lriM u� lhO'oftlmsto tn0ltlc 350 wetd ebWtte1. Ol riiy UICM in DisM!talionAb!il ra:hl l'llllfnalion:W IWrilIs 8Pf)IC111blc dodor• lO l Ull!,i:s Ol'llf.,_

Tl'.18U�•�es t h:rlthcffl � becirc;ums cx�al tancesf9Cl.lr ing mtndlOl"I,on copy11g 01 colldioniJon use ROC11MII$ tor l'OSlrlcllonl or,1 ponod oC \IPIO2 )'0111'$mutt botNldie I n �1119, RoqUllil� for•lon;lnirporind o, ,..i�ion Q011$1dered""1)' be i'I exeopciQn;il cin;t.1""ianen.ind roo1o1�•IN 8�1ifor 111e Ore.n of Gtllduala Re,,�lffl FOROfFICE USE OHLY

TH'IS SMEETSSTO SE GLUEO lO'rHEI NSIDE.FRON TCOVER OF'THETHESIS