Travel Writers, Museums and Reflections of Empire 1770–1901
Roslyn Russell
A thesis submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
School of Humanities and Social Sciences
University College
The University of New South Wales at the Australian Defence Force Academy, Canberra
2011
Acknowledgements
This thesis has benefitted greatly from the generosity, support and interest of a number of people and institutions. My supervisors during my candidature – Dr David Headon, and Professors Bruce Bennett and Paul Eggert of the English Department, School of Humanities and Social Sciences (HASS), University College, Australian Defence Force Academy – gave importance advice that assisted greatly in conceptualising and shaping the work. I would especially like to thank Professor Paul Eggert for his wisdom and advice over the last few years, and his support prior to the submission of the thesis. Dr Linda Young of Deakin University was also involved in the early stages of the work.
Many people have provided useful information, and have also allowed me to discuss my work with them. In Australia, I would like to thank Margaret Birtley, the late Dymphna Clark, Dr Barry Craig, Dr Rosamund Dalziell, Louise Douglas, Dr Stephen Foster, Leah Gardam, Dr Laina Hall, Janelle Hatherly, Dr Susan Marsden, Dr Jenny Newell, Dr Maria Nugent, Robyn Oliver, Dr Mathew Trinca and Jill Waterhouse. In New Zealand, thanks go to Dr Donald Kerr, formerly Special Collections librarian at Auckland Libraries, and Dr Nigel Prickett of the Auckland War Memorial Museum, and Kath Prickett.
Several people read draft chapters and commented on them: Dr Bruce Harding and Dr Rawiri Taonui of the Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies in the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand, Ingrid Persaud, of Barbados, and Katherine Russell, of the National Gallery of Australia.
The School of Humanities and Social Sciences (HASS), University College, Australian Defence Force Academy funded my travel to Harrogate, UK to present a paper at the Tourism and Literature conference organised by Sheffield Hallam University in July 2004. My thanks go to Professor David Lovell, Head of School (HASS), and to Shirley Ramsay for facilitating my participation in this conference, and to Bernadette McDermott and Christa Cordes for their help over my time as a candidate.
Thanks also to Professor Dr Lothar Jordan, of Dresden University, Germany, for organising my visit to Sanssouci Palace, Potsdam, in September 2010. I also wish to thank him and his wife Angelika for their hospitality during my stay in Germany.
No research project could ever be undertaken without the assistance of librarians and archivists. The librarians in the Petherick Room, National Library of Australia, deserve my special thanks. Thanks also go to Auckland Libraries, the National Archives of Australia, the National Museum of Australia Library (especially Noellen Newton), and the Library of the Natural History Museum, London.
I would like to thank my daughter Katie Russell and son-in-law Wally Caruana for their love and support, and especially my husband, Dr Michael Jones, who has shouldered many other tasks so that I could complete the thesis.
Roslyn Russell, Canberra, 2011
Table of Contents
Introduction 1
Chapter One: The story of a shield 9
Chapter Two: Early museums in Britain and Australia 25
Chapter Three: Exhibitions display an empire 51
Chapter Four: Writers, empire and colonies 74
Chapter Five: Commenting on the colonies and their museums 122
Chapter Six: ‘Imperial Kew’ 149
Chapter Seven: Experiencing Australasia’s botanic gardens 189
Chapter Eight: James Anthony Froude and Sir George Grey 221
Chapter Nine: Sir George Grey, collector and collection 256
Conclusion 295
Appendices 300
Bibliography 315
List of Illustrations
Photographs and images provided by the author unless otherwise stated.
Between pages 73 and 74
1. The British Museum.
2. Aboriginal shield collected in 1770, Enlightenment Gallery, British Museum.
3. Aboriginal and Maori artefacts in the Enlightenment Gallery, British Museum.
4. Sir Joseph Banks 1808–09, by Thomas Phillips. The Royal Society
5. Pacific shells collected by Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander on the Endeavour voyage, Enlightenment Gallery, British Museum.
6. Marianne North Gallery, Royal Botanic Gardens Kew.
7. Marianne North’s paintings of Australian flora, landscapes and fauna in the Marianne North Gallery, Royal Botanic Gardens Kew.
8. William Powell Frith, A Private View at the Royal Academy, 1881, oil on canvas, Royal Academy of Arts, John Madejski Fine Rooms. Wikimedia Commons
9. Moa skeleton display, Canterbury Museum, Christchurch, New Zealand.
10. Exhibition Building, Melbourne. Courtesy of Museum Victoria
Between pages 188 and 189
11. Banksia ericifolia, Royal Botanic Gardens Sydney.
12. King William’s Temple and Mound, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, built in 1837 by Sir Jeffry Wyattville, and originally known as the Temple of Military Fame or Pantheon.
13. Classical statuary adorns Frederick the Great’s Sanssouci Palace at Potsdam, Germany.
14. The Venus Fountain and Lake, Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney, in the early 1900s.
15. Plants from Australasia in the Palm House at Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, where exotic plants from all over the world are kept in controlled environments.
16. Sydneysiders depicted enjoying ‘rational amusement’ in the Sydney Botanic Gardens in the late nineteenth century, in a watercolour by A. H. Fullwood (1863– 1930). 17. Social order on display in Sydney Botanic Gardens at the turn of the twentieth century.
18. Bamboo Avenue, Brisbane Botanic Gardens.
19. James Shaw (born Scotland 1815, arrived in SA in 1850, died Adelaide 1881), [Adelaide] Botanic Gardens, 1865, oil.
20. Wedgwood medallion.
21. Cadi Jam Ora, Royal Botanic Gardens Sydney.
22. Mere pounamu in Enlightenment Gallery, British Museum.
23. The ivy-clad façade of the Northern Club in Auckland, New Zealand, in 2002.
24. Mansion House, Kawau Island, New Zealand, from a sketch by Lord Elphinstone, in J. A. Froude, Oceana, or, England and Her Colonies, 1886.
25. A Maori Banquet Hall, from a sketch by Lord Elphinstone, in J. A. Froude, Oceana, or, England and Her Colonies, 1886.
Introduction
Understanding the former British Empire is a daunting task. Over the last two centuries a host of commentators have offered their interpretations from a wide variety of perspectives. Journalists, novelists, natural and political scientists, literary critics and cultural theorists, historians and travel writers have all embarked on this enterprise. This thesis focuses on one seemingly small element within the global enterprise that constituted the British Empire – colonial museums and their collections as imperial institutions, and thus as reflections of that empire. Historian of science, Roy MacLeod, has described colonial museums as ‘once a metonym for empire itself’.1 This thesis views these institutions through the eyes of travellers to Britain’s Australasian colonies during the nineteenth century, by examining their written accounts of their visits.
The nineteenth-century museum was not subject to the evaluation of visitor intentions and experiences that is now a routine part of museum practice. Kenneth Hudson, in A Social History of Museums: What the Visitors Thought, claims that Consumer research was altogether foreign to the way in which the heads of most nineteenth-century museums thought about their task. They measured their success by the number of people who came through the turnstiles. What the people thought about the museum, or whether they were coming for the first or the last time was of no particular consequence.2
John Mackenzie, a leading commentator on the impact of its empire on the national imaginary of Britain, has written in relation to visitors’ response to colonial museums, ‘Perhaps the great unknowable remains the whole question of
1 Roy MacLeod, review of John M. Mackenzie, Museums and Empire: Natural History, Human Cultures and Colonial Identities, 2009, reCollections: A Journal of Museums and Collections, http://recollections.nma.gov.au/issues/vol_5_no_1/book_reviews/museums_and_empire, viewed 20 May 2010. MacLeod uses a more expansive description in his introduction to Nation and Empire: Science and the Colonial Enterprise, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2001, p. 10, where he states that ‘by the Treaty of Berlin [1885] … science had become a metonym for empire. Museums and learned societies throughout Europe represented the achievement of a rule of knowledge, coincident with the rule of law. In differing measure, the colonies of Europe outré-mer were to embody both.’ 2 Kenneth Hudson, A Social History of Museums: What the Visitors Thought, Macmillan, London, 1975, Macmillan, London, 1975, pp. 6–7. 1 visitor reaction’ in the colonial period.3 In the absence of the structured questionnaires that have since the mid-twentieth century provided the basis for the analysis of visitor expectations of a museum or an exhibition,4 or elicit a response afterwards, there is, as Mackenzie asserts, little chance of discovering, apart from raw visitor numbers, how visitors in both the colonies and the metropole responded to museums and their exhibitions. Mackenzie continues, ‘the users of museums (apart perhaps from the elite that spawned them and theorised about their value) remain essentially shadowy’.5
How successful were museums in achieving their educative, civic and imperial mission during the nineteenth century, and is it possible to gain a perspective on how colonial museums in particular were performing relative to their metropolitan counterparts? Kenneth Hudson suggested a way through the impasse in 1975. He argued that ‘in attempting to discover what kind of impact museums have had on their visitors, one is compelled to rely on evidence which is in no way scientific’. He continued: One searches for comments wherever they are to be found, realising that only the exceptional person is ever likely to write down his feelings and find a published outlet for them ... Yet, however imperfect or untypical it may be as evidence, what these seventeenth-, eighteenth and nineteenth-century people took the trouble to record provides a useful guide to the success or failure of the owners and organisers of the collections. This, we may say, was being aimed at; and this was the effect on at least one person.6
In adopting a similar approach to that taken by Hudson, this thesis shows revealing evidence of the successes and failures of colonial museums in Australia and New Zealand, and the nature and display of their collections, in the
3 John M. Mackenzie, Museums and Empire: Natural History, Human Cultures and Colonial Identities, Manchester University Press, Manchester and New York, 2009, p. 275. 4 Hudson, Social History of Museums, p. 7 states that the earliest identified visitor survey was conducted in 1897, but it took until the 1950s for such surveys ‘to become commonplace all over the world, but even so, only a small minority of museums appear to have commissioned them’. 5 Mackenzie, Museums and Empire, p. 275. Recent literature has dealt with some aspects of visitation to colonial museums: for example, Kathleen Fennessy, A People Learning: Colonial Victorians and Their Public Museums 1860–1880, Australian Scholarly Publishing, North Melbourne, Vic, 2007, draws part of her analysis from visitor reactions to museums in Melbourne in the nineteenth century. 6 Hudson, Social History of Museums, p. 7. 2 accounts of nineteenth-century writers who travelled to these colonies and wrote about their experiences of their museums. These writers – many of whom could well be described as ‘exceptional’ people – brought specific and, in several cases, highly informed viewpoints to the task.
Analysis of writers’ accounts of museums and collections conveys an additional benefit in the cases of better-known individuals whose lives and views have been extensively documented and analysed. The analysis of their responses can thus be grounded in biography and literary history – within, more broadly, the writers’ epistemological frameworks, both in relation to their views of museums and their views of empire. While the total number of writers whose opinions of museums and collections are considered in this thesis is not nearly as large as the number of respondents to museum visitor surveys today, the fact that they recorded their responses carefully, upon reflection, as the result of the impression made on them by a museum institution or collection, adds a qualitative dimension to their testimonies.
A twenty-first century perspective that raises moral questions about the right of one race to dominate another would have been perplexing to the people of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and those of probably the first half of the twentieth century, and even beyond. The moral and intellectual superiority of western civilisation and the white race was, for most British people of those times, an unexamined and all but universally shared assumption.7 A recent work on the colonisation of the Pacific summarises this prevailing attitude: ‘For virtually all Britons of the period, colonization was an unalloyed good, a way of bringing to others the benefits of European civilization’.8 The natural world and its resources were considered to exist to serve the purposes of sustaining this civilisation,
7 The campaign to abolish the Transatlantic slave trade and slavery itself, which had been achieved in the British Empire by the end of the 1830s, did not begin with the premise that the culture from which the African slaves had come was equal or superior to that of Britain. It was seen instead as a humanitarian crusade, in which acknowledging the slave as ‘a man and a brother’ did not imply his equal status. 8 Stuart Banner, Possessing the Pacific: Land, Settlers, and Indigenous People from Australia to Alaska, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2007, p. 40. 3 which was by and large regarded, at least in its nation of origin, as benevolent in its intentions and firm but fair in its actions and disposition. Traces of these attitudes persist, and continue to fuel some of the greatest conflicts of our times. They are challenged by those who do not regard the mores, beliefs and priorities of western civilisation to be an intellectual and spiritual default position.
The British Empire at the height of its power, even in an age when technology could not command instant access to the other side of the world, was a model of what we now refer to as ‘globalisation’, with a totalising reach that calls to mind that other great ‘world’ dominator of the past, imperial Rome. Whereas Rome had the pax Romana, the Roman legions and the cursus publicus – the system of roads that plunged straight across the regions under its sway and allowed couriers to distribute imperial edicts to all corners of the Empire – Britain had the pax Britannica, the Royal Navy, and a network of colonial administrators who carried out their civilising mission, often in a series of appointments that could take them from the Caribbean to Australia, New Zealand, Canada, or southern Africa. In all these places they oversaw the attempted creation of near-facsimile versions of British culture; and performed a series of tasks and responsibilities that were uniform across the Empire. An Australian traveller to the Caribbean today, like James Anthony Froude and Anthony Trollope on their travels there in the nineteenth century, will find on islands colonised intensively by the British (and exploited by them to generate enormous wealth by the use of slave labour) the same names for parishes and places, and the same Georgian, Regency, neo-Gothic and Victorian era architecture familiar in the older established areas of Australia. Even the same surnames for governors, colonial botanists and other administrators crop up when one delves into the histories of these places, witnessing the range and complexity of the imperial administrative network that linked the colonies.
Before considering the origins and nature of the colonial museum institutions that are the principal subject of this thesis, it is necessary to step back to the origins
4 of European Australasia. Chapter One begins with an analysis of a single object and the stories that interpret it. This is an Aboriginal shield, gathered up on the shores of Botany Bay by a crew member on Captain Cook’s Endeavour in April 1770, donated by Joseph Banks and now on display in the British Museum’s Enlightenment Gallery that recreates the style of museum display of two centuries ago, at the height of the European Enlightenment. The significance of the shield, and the way it has been interpreted, anticipate the discussion of museum objects later in the thesis, in particular the dominance, until recently, of European explanations and attributions of meaning to objects from Indigenous cultures.
Chapter Two considers the role of influential individuals such as Sir Joseph Banks in the formation of museum institutions in Britain, as the models for those that would later be established in the Australasian colonies. It then moves to the early years of settlement and exploration of the colonies of New South Wales and New Zealand, and describes and analyses responses by travellers to the Australasian colonies in the early decades of the nineteenth century, at a time when museum institutions were beginning to be established there. Chapter Three examines the great exhibitions of the second half of the nineteenth century, the verdicts of literary visitors to exhibitions and their displays, and the way in which the Australasian colonies and their products were represented and viewed by exhibition visitors in Britain.
Chapters Four and Five move forward to the period after 1850, when waves of travellers came to the Australasian colonies as visitors, scientists and collectors, more-or-less informed observers, and social commentators. The accounts these travelling writers penned were circulated in their northern hemisphere homelands, the British Isles, and also in North America. Their stories, conveyed to these audiences, not only entertained and informed the mostly stay-at-home populations about these new outposts of British civilisation. They also described
5 and assessed the relative successes of Britain’s colonies in their efforts to plant civic institutions – such as the museum – in this alien soil.
Archaeologists Claire L. Lyons and John K. Papadopoulos have written that Classical literature describing the foundations of apoikiai (literally, home away from home; colonies) has been regarded as journalism, when its underlying message was at least in part propaganda. Later tales of discovery and travelogues relay similarly motivated messages, but at the same time are essential guides to the social context in which they were read.’9
The same can be said of the works of the writers who journeyed to the antipodean colonies in the nineteenth century.
Some of the travellers who came to the Australasian colonies, authors such as Anthony Trollope, James Anthony Froude and Mark Twain, were celebrated literary figures, whose verdicts on the colonial enterprise could be expected to have a considerable impact on the reading public. Others were more obscure or represented specialised areas of interest. They include individuals writing for a small circle who, encouraged to share their travel stories, published them in limited editions that have been preserved in public libraries. They also include travellers who embarked on specific missions, to collect scientific or ethnographic specimens, or to view a particular category of institution. Travelling botanists and horticulturalists, for example, naturally gave significant attention to botanic gardens.
Writers in the first category – the celebrity authors Trollope, Froude, and Twain – are examined in more detail than those who were less well known to the reading public in general. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, there is vastly more biographical and critical material available on the lives and works of the most celebrated travelling writers, and thus their writing can be contextualised more satisfactorily. Secondly, their command of the reading markets of both Britain and
9 Claire L. Lyons and John K. Papadopoulos (eds), The Archaeology of Colonialism, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, 2002, p. 11. 6 the colonies meant that any statements they made about colonial societies and institutions would be read in the light of their other works, and assumed to be invested with specific and recognisable attitudes. Those familiar with the novels of Anthony Trollope or the travel accounts of Mark Twain would already know much about these authors’ attitudes to a range of subjects, including their opinions on the rights and wrongs of imperial expansion and imperialism generally. Readers of James Anthony Froude’s Oceana, or, England and Her Colonies would also be aware that a particular view of the relationship of the imperial metropole to the colonial periphery would be articulated within its pages. The titles themselves often suggested the intent of the work: the full title of Froude’s Oceana was sufficiently indicative.
The later chapters of the thesis are organised around two major case studies. Chapter Six introduces the first of these, on botanic gardens, describing their role as museum institutions that imposed European taxonomic regimes and styles of planting on specific locations in the colonies, in order to achieve imperial goals such as plant transfer and economic botany, and also to provide reassuringly familiar environments for recreation for transplanted Britons. The extent of the dominance of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew – beginning with the unofficial directorship of Sir Joseph Banks and continued by his successors – over botanic gardens in the British Empire; the development of botanic gardens in the Australasian colonies; and conflict between scientific goals and the desire for attractive recreational spaces in botanic gardens, form the principal themes of this chapter. Chapter Seven continues this case study, examining the responses of travelling writers to colonial botanic gardens, especially their opinions as to whether these botanic gardens fulfilled their perceived mission, be it scientific or recreational. The position of writers on one side or the other of this debate produced some of the more vehement opinions expressed in the works explored in this thesis. Their views diverge remarkably.
7
The second case study, beginning in Chapter Eight and concluding in Chapter Nine, resumes the analysis of a single travel account describing a single collection, a technique first employed in Chapter One to articulate the complexities of a cross-cultural encounter at Botany Bay in 1770 that resulted in the collection of an Aboriginal shield.
The case study takes a paragraph describing Sir George Grey’s Maori artefact collection from a travel account written by his friend and admirer James Anthony Froude. I examine its underlying assumptions, in particular its author’s desire to represent and promote Grey as an imperial hero, and ‘father of the Maori race’ by reference to his activities as a collector and the origins of the collection itself. I analyse the multiple meanings of the words employed by Froude in this passage; and the provenance and significance of the artefacts themselves, within the dual contexts of Grey’s shifting historical reputation from that time to the present, and the meanings of these artefacts for their Maori creators and former owners.10
The interdisciplinary nature of the subject, and the techniques employed to analyse it, have involved engagement with ideas and methodologies across several disciplinary areas – literature, museology, history and, to a lesser extent, anthropology. Embedded in the scholarly literature within each of these disciplines are positions that have been derived from cultural studies and postmodern perspectives. They have been subjected to intense debate around the discourses of imperialism, colonialism and post-colonialism. These ideas and theoretical positions are woven into the discussion as they arise in analysis of the primary source material, and are referenced in the appropriate chapters.
10 James Anthony Froude, Oceana, or, England and Her Colonies, Longmans, Green and Co., London, 1886, p. 265. 8
9
Chapter One: The story of a shield
A visit to the Enlightenment Gallery
The most appropriate point of entry for this thesis is a museum – one of the greatest imperial institutions of all, the British Museum. Within that vast compendium of the cultural riches of the world, what better place to start than the Enlightenment Gallery, that sets out in physical form the intellectual background of the age of imperial colonisation that began in eighteenth-century Britain. In this gallery are objects that can provide starting points for an examination of multiple strands of enquiry and interpretation of the way that meanings were and are made in museums – firstly in the age of imperialism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and then in the world of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. [See Illustration 1: The British Museum]
The Enlightenment Gallery: Discovering the World in the Eighteenth Century is a permanent exhibition located in the former King’s Library1 of the British Museum. It opened in 2003 as part of the celebrations for the Museum’s 250th anniversary.
The Enlightenment Gallery encapsulates the period when museum collecting practice developed from the compilation of ‘cabinets of curiosities’ into the systematic collection and classification of natural and cultural objects. The Gallery contains objects from the collection of Sir Hans Sloane – physician, naturalist and collector extraordinaire – that formed the original collections of the British Museum. There are also many objects associated with other collectors, including a large number of Greek vases collected by Sir William Hamilton, British Consul in Naples and
1 The King’s Library formerly housed King George III’s Library, which is now displayed at the new Euston Road premises of the British Library. 9
connoisseur of the arts, better known to history as the husband of Admiral Lord Nelson’s mistress, Emma Hamilton.2
The British Museum’s website introduces the Enlightenment Gallery in similar terms to those used above: as a site that displays the meanings given to objects in the period from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries; and the shift to how we understand those objects today. It acknowledges the mutability of meanings, and the multiple ways in which objects can be ordered to fit into the epistemologies that prevailed in specific historical periods:
The Enlightenment was an age of reason and learning that flourished across Europe and America from about 1680 to 1820. This rich and diverse permanent exhibition uses thousands of objects to demonstrate how people in Britain understood their world during this period. Objects on display reveal the way in which collectors, antiquaries and travellers during this great age of discovery viewed and classified objects from the world around them. The displays provide an introduction to the Museum and its collections, showing how our understanding of the world of nature and human achievement has changed over time.3
Tony Bennett has described the Enlightenment Gallery’s aim as ‘a self- consciously relativising one: in seeking to discover how the world was intellectually ordered at the time of the British Museum’s foundation, the Enlightenment’s claims to universality are discrowned by being revealed in all their historical particularity and peculiarity.’4 This chapter argues that, while the intent of the Enlightenment Gallery is to reveal the epistemology and the collecting practices and display techniques of the eighteenth- century Enlightenment in order to critique them, its display actually tends to validate them for all but the most discerning of visitors.
2 The author has visited the Enlightenment Gallery on four occasions: July 2004, March 2006, March 2007 and June 2011. 3http://www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk/explore/galleries/themes/room_1_enlightenment.asp x, viewed 25 May 2010. 4 Tony Bennett, ‘Civic Laboratories: Museums, Cultural Objecthood and the Governance of the Social’, Chris Healy and Andrea Witcomb (eds), South Pacific Museums, Monash University ePress, Melbourne, 2006, p. 8.16. 10
Bennett’s words in relation to universality refer to the ongoing debate on the validity of the idea of the universal museum, whose champions, notably the directors of the British Museum, the Hermitage Museum, the National Museum in Berlin, the Louvre, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, defend their custodianship of their often-contested collections for their capacity to allow people to ‘see the world as one’, and to exhibit diversity in exhibitions ‘that would not be possible but for the ways of accumulating and storing the world developed by Enlightenment forms of collecting’.5 Mark O’Neill, in challenging the case made by the directors of universal museums, argues instead for ‘an alternative view of what a universal museum might be – one which is open about the conflicted histories of some objects, which acknowledges historical context as well as aesthetics, explores violent as well as peaceful cultural encounters and reveals the imperial as well as the Enlightenment history of collections’.6 An object from Aboriginal Australia in the Enlightenment Gallery can be interpreted in all the ways that O’Neill has suggested.
Encounter at Botany Bay
The section of the Enlightenment Gallery dealing with ‘Trade and Discovery’ displays material from eighteenth and nineteenth-century Australia and New Zealand. In one showcase an undecorated oval bark shield – described as having originated with the Eora nation’s Gweagal Aboriginal people of what is now the Botany Bay area of Sydney – rests alongside a fanned arrangement of boomerangs.7 [See Illustration 2: Aboriginal shield collected in 1770, Enlightenment Gallery, British Museum] This is no everyday object, wrenched from its original context, collected and
5 Bennett, ‘Civic Laboratories, p. 08.19. 6 Mark O’Neill, ‘Enlightenment Museums: Universal or Merely Global?, Museum and Society, November 2004, 2 (3), p. 190. 7 The shield’s location within the showcase has changed since the author’s earlier visits. In June 2011, her last visit, it had been relocated to eye level and labelled as one of the exhibits featured in the BBC Series, ‘A History of the World in 100 Objects’. 11
exhibited in a representation of a taxonomic display of weapons used by Australia’s original inhabitants. Its modest appearance belies its significance, for this shield, collected by the British visitors to Botany Bay in April 1770, is the only three-dimensional object in the British Museum’s collection that has a direct connection to the first cross-cultural encounter of Australia’s Aboriginal people with representatives of the future colonising power, Great Britain. The other material expressions of this event are documents – the accounts of James Cook, and some of his companions on the Endeavour; and works of art by the Endeavour’s artist, Sydney Parkinson, who died before the voyage ended.
Joseph Banks’s account
The story of how the shield was collected is the subject of several written texts: first-hand accounts by Joseph Banks, Captain James Cook and Sydney Parkinson of a challenge and a response on the shores of Botany Bay in April 1770. The account of this incident selected for this work comes from the two-volume journal Joseph Banks kept on the Endeavour voyage from 1768 to 1771, described by Paul Brunton, Curator of Manuscripts at the State Library of New South Wales, as ‘the single most important document relating to Australia held anywhere in the world’, and the one that ‘gives the first accurate and extensive description of Australia, and the first of the east coast’.8
Banks’s journal has been chosen over the others for another reason: it comes from the pen of a man whose later activities were to give rise to many of the institutions that will be described later in this work, and indeed
8 Paul Brunton, ‘One hundred objects for 100 days’, in One Hundred: Celebrating the Mitchell Library Centenary 1910–2010, 2010 Centenary Guide, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, 2010. Brunton also mentions Banks’s journal as a reference work for Matthew Flinders’ circumnavigation of Australia in 1801 in the Investigator and its subsequent adventures: ‘The volumes travelled with Flinders around Australia and then languished on Mauritius where Flinders was imprisoned in 1803. They were later sent back to Banks in a trunk.’ 12
to the settlement of Australia itself, for which he became ‘the power behind the throne as far as the young colony was concerned’ until his death in 1820.9 Although it was not published until 1896, under what Brunton has called the ‘slipshod and delinquent’ editing of Joseph Dalton,10 it was lent to literary scholar and journalist John Hawkesworth, who compiled the first account of the Endeavour voyage (‘with notable incompetence’, according to Brunton), because he ‘was evidently considered a safe pair of hands’.11 It thus contributed to Hawkesworth’s popular but much-criticised work, Account of Voyages Undertaken … for Making Discoveries in the Southern Hemisphere and Performed by … Captain Cook … , published in 1773. Despite its manifold flaws, it contributed greatly to the reputations of both Cook and Banks as explorers who had expanded the bounds of the British Empire.12
Banks described an incident after which, it is believed, the shield was gathered up by a member of the Endeavour’s crew. This incident occurred on 28 April 1770, not long after the sailors and scientists on the
9 Ibid. 10 Paul Brunton (ed.), The Endeavour Journal of Joseph Banks: The Australian Journey, Angus & Robertson/HarperCollins, Sydney, NSW, 1998, Editor’s note, p. 8. Jonathan Lamb has described Hawkesworth as ‘The Unfortunate Compiler’, stating that some of his problems arose ‘from the definite and unflattering views he took of human behaviour’. His adoption of the common convention of describing voyages in the first person, to create an impression of direct communication between explorer and reader, had an unfortunate effect: ‘Seemingly, all the bad things that Cook saw, and all the equivocal situations into which Banks inserted himself, were laid at Hawkesworth’s door, while all the heroism of discovery and scientific curiosity was reserved to the originals.’ Jonathan Lamb, Vanessa Smith and Nicholas Thomas, Exploration and Exchange: A South Seas Anthology 1680–1900, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2000, p. 74. 11 Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science, Harper Press, London, 2008, p. 44. 12 Richard Holmes briskly disposes of Hawkesworth’s efforts: ‘The subject was a gift, and the material was magnificent, if sometimes a little risqué. All that was required were accuracy, objectivity and the ability to assemble a vivid narrative. After nearly two years’ labour, Hawkesworth achieved none of these. [Hawkesworth’s Account of Voyages …] was prolix, abstract, and much given to philosophical digression. Its author was easily shocked, and quick to moralise. He had no scientific or naval experience to draw on, and his views on foreign customs and native morality were prejudiced and illiberal.’ Ibid.; W.H. Pearson, ‘Hawkesworth’s Voyages’, in R. F. Brissenden (ed.), Studies in the Eighteenth Century II, Papers presented at the Second David Nicol Smith Memorial Seminar Canberra 1970, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 1973, pp. 239–257. 13
Endeavour had sighted an Aboriginal village on the shores of Botany Bay, whose inhabitants had appeared to display no curiosity whatsoever at the strange sight of the large European vessel floating so close to them.13 This seeming indifference prompted the British voyagers, their Captain anxious to make a landing on this new shore, to venture closer to the Aboriginal people:
After dinner the boats were mann’d and we set out from the ship intending to land at the place where we saw these people, hoping that as they regarded the ships coming in to the bay so little they would as little regard our landing. We were in this however mistaken, for as soon as we approached the rocks two of the men came down upon them, each armed with a lance of about 10 feet long and a short stick which he seemd to handle as if it was a machine to throw the lance. They called to us very loud in a harsh sounding Language of which neither us or Tupia14 understood a word, shaking their lances and menacing, in all appearance resolved to dispute our landing to the utmost tho they were but two and we 30 or 40 at least. In this manner we parleyed with them for about a quarter of an hour, they waving to us to be gone, we again signing that we wanted water and that we meant them no harm. They remained resolute so a musquet was fird over them, the Effect of which was that the Youngest of the two dropd a bundle of lances on the rock at the instant in which he heard the report; he however snatchd them up again and both renewd their threats and opposition. A Musquet loaded with small shot was now fired at the Eldest of the two who was about 40 yards from the boat; it struck him on the legs but he minded it very little so another was immediately fird at him; on this he ran up to the house about 100 yards distant and soon returnd with a shield. In the mean time we had landed on the rock. He immediately threw a lance at us and the young man another which fell among the thickest of us but hurt nobody; 2 more musquets with small shot were then fird at them on which the Eldest threw one more lance and then ran away as did the other. We went up to the houses, in one of which we found the children hid behind the shield and a piece of bark in one of the houses. We were conscious from the distance the people had been from us when we fird that the shot could have done them no material harm; we therefore resolvd to leave the children on the spot without even opening their shelter. We therefore threw into the house to them some beads, ribbands, cloths &c as presents and went away.
13 Maria Nugent, Captain Cook Was Here, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 2009, pp. 12–14. Nugent describes what the Endeavour voyagers saw as indifference by the Aboriginal people of Botany Bay as ‘a study in nonchalance’, and sees it as ‘a performance nonetheless’. 14 Tupia (Tupaia) was a nobleman from Raiatea who accompanied the Endeavour southward and helped to communicate with Indigenous peoples encountered on the voyage to what later became known as Australasia. He was able to communicate relatively easily with Maori; but had no success with Aboriginal people. (Brunton, Endeavour Journal of Joseph Banks, p.6) 14
We however thought it no improper measure to take away with us all the lances which we could find about the houses, amounting in number to forty or fifty.15
Banks’s account of this sudden outbreak of violence thus locates the use of the shield in two contexts. One of the Aboriginal men, after he and his companion had faced the musket fire of the invaders, had fetched it as a defence against the guns of the Endeavour’s crewmen; and then it had been propped up as a shelter for children left hiding from the intruders in a hut. In this account there is no hint that the shield was taken at this point; Banks’s implication here is that the children’s crude shelter was left undisturbed, and he only mentions the large number of spears (‘lances’) that were carried away by the Endeavour’s crew.
The British Museum on its website uses a shorter and slightly different version of the story when explaining the shield’s appearance, notably the presence of a hole in its centre, and cites a different passage from Banks’s journal to the longer account given above:
The shield has very few distinguishing features, but these do seem to tally with a contemporary illustration and description. The naturalist Sir Joseph Banks wrote in his journal:
‘Defensive weapons we saw only in Sting-Rays [Botany] bay and there only a single instance – a man who attempted to oppose our Landing came down to the Beach with a shield of an oblong shape about 3 feet long and 1½ broad made of the bark of a tree; this he left behind when he ran away and we found upon taking it up that it plainly had been pierced through with a single pointed lance near the centre.’
Such a hole, close to the handle, is visible on this shield. There is also a sketch by John Frederick Miller dated 1771, after the sketch by Sydney Parkinson, the Endeavour’s official artist, which depicts a shield with a hole in it, just like this one.16
15 Brunton (ed.) Banks Endeavour Journal, pp. 23–4. Grammar and spelling in this passage are those of the original work. 16 http://www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk/explore/highlights/highlight_objects/aoa/b/bark_shield viewed 25 May 2010. 15
A recent book by British Museum Director, Neil MacGregor, contains a description of the physical properties of the shield:
It has the hole near the centre mentioned by Banks, and traces of white colouring, as recorded by the expedition’s illustrators. It’s rough-hewn, a rich reddish brown, about a metre (40 inches) high and 30 centimetres (12 inches) wide – quite narrow for protecting a man – and gently curved. You can sense the trunk from which it was cut. It is made of red mangrove wood, one of the woods chosen for making Australian shields, because it is tough enough to absorb the impact of a spear or deflect a club or boomerang and is extremely resistant to insects and rot, even when submerged in sea water. At the back is a handle made out of flexible green mangrove wood that has dried to a firm shape for a good grip. The person who made this shield knew precisely what materials were fittest for purpose.17
Maria Nugent, in her recent book, Captain Cook Was Here, examines in detail that first encounter between the Aboriginal people of Botany Bay and the crew of the Endeavour. She provides an alternative reading of the actions of the Aboriginal defenders to the one implied in the several accounts of this incident – that they ran away after being peppered with shot from the muskets of the landing party. Nugent’s analysis of the violent encounter that led to shots being fired and the shield being collected by the Aboriginal defender from a hut demonstrates that, contrary to the implications of the language in the various accounts, which use words such as ‘he ran away’, the spirited resistance these individuals made to this unknown form of assault, and the fact that the only gap in this resistance was one man running off to secure a shield, showed ‘Courage not cowardice’. She then notes that it was in this interval that Cook and his party advanced to land on the shore – the man’s departure to snatch up his shield, she writes, ‘created the clearing that made the landing possible’. Nugent also points out small differences between Cook, Parkinson and Banks’s accounts of what happened next. Cook’s account had the defenders throwing two spears; Sydney Parkinson claimed that a spear had actually landed between his feet; and Banks’s account added
17 Neil MacGregor, A History of the World in 100 Objects, Allen Lane, Penguin Books, with the British Museum, London, 2010, p. 582. 16
an additional spear to the tally thrown at the invaders. But the result remained the same, as Nugent concludes:
So Cook and Banks disagree about who actually had the last word on the beach that day. This inconsistency registers the confusion of the moment. No matter; the end result was certain. Cook and company had landed.18
Whosoever’s account – Banks’s, Cook’s or Parkinson’s – approximates most closely to the circumstances of that fateful April day in 1770, the incontrovertible fact remains: the shield was removed from its original context of use in Indigenous society. It was taken, probably from the beach, or maybe from the hut after the children had left, and carried on to the vessel from which the white intruders had come. It was on board when the Endeavour departed from Botany Bay, and was given by Banks to the British Museum at the end of the voyage. For nearly two hundred years it has existed in a very different environment – as a museum object.
The Aboriginal shield in the twenty-first century
The seemingly abandoned shield collected from the shore of Botany Bay is now recognised as the only Indigenous Australian object in the British Museum’s collections to which a reliable provenance to the Endeavour voyage can be assigned.19 It represented Australia as one of the significant objects in the British Museum’s History of the World in 100 Objects BBC Radio 4 series, broadcast in 2010, that aimed to tell ‘a global narrative history’ through the Museum’s collection, and ‘tap in to the unique power of objects to tell stories and make connections across the
18 Maria Nugent, Captain Cook Was Here, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 2009, pp. 21–22. 19 Bark shield. From Botany Bay, New South Wales, Australia. Before AD 1770. This bark shield has been identified, reasonably convincingly, as having been collected in 1770 on Captain Cook’s First Voyage in HMS Endeavour (1768-71). It is, to date, the only Australian artefact in the British Museum that has been attributed to the voyages. http://www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk/explore/highlights/highlight_objects/aoa/b/bark_shield 17
globe’.20 In the companion book to the series British Museum Director Neil MacGregor describes the shield as ‘one of the most potent objects in the book, one which has become symbolically charged, freighted with layers of history, legend, global politics and race relations’.21
The shield and the stories associated with it evoke the liminal space in which cross-cultural encounters were transacted in the earliest moments of the colonising project in Australasia. At this stage in the imperial narrative, at the moment when an entire continent and its people began to be incorporated within an alien culture, both the shield and the accounts that cluster around it mark a key historical moment. As the overwhelming weight of British culture was brought to bear on the Indigenous people of Australia and New Zealand over the next two centuries, the latter’s memories, embodied in oral tradition, were overwhelmed by a Eurocentric emphasis on the primacy of the written word. There are no Indigenous versions of the story in existence that could counter the written representations of the Endeavour’s journal writers. In any case, had an oral tradition about these events existed among the Aboriginal people of Botany Bay, it would have been ignored for most of the period between this incident and the present day as having insufficient value in an intellectual milieu that relied heavily on tangible documentation for historical evidence. Debate over the acceptability or otherwise of Aboriginal oral tradition as an historical source still rages, most notably in
20 British Museum Director, Neal McGregor, in announcing this collaboration, made a specific connection between the goals of the Museum’s founders in the eighteenth century and the global project facilitated by twenty-first century modes of communication: ‘This partnership between the BBC and the British Museum is the fulfilment of an Enlightenment dream. Parliament set up the British Museum to allow all ‘studious and curious persons’ both ‘native and foreign born’ to construct their own history of the world and find their own place in it. Thanks to the incomparable reach of the BBC – radio, television, World Service and web – as the series develops, everybody across the UK and across the world will be able to participate, using not just the things in museums, but their own objects as well, to tell their history of the world.’ British Museum, History of the World in 100 Objects media release, viewed 12 February 2010, http://www.britishmuseum.org/the_museum_news_and_press_releases/press_releases/2 009 21 MacGregor, History of the World in 100 Objects, p. 581. 18
the arguments and counter-arguments of the ‘history wars’ around the interpretation of the history of contact between Indigenous Australians and European settlers, particularly in the First Australians gallery in the National Museum of Australia.22
The small shield is thus, for many Australians – Indigenous and non- Indigenous alike – potentially the most powerful object in the Enlightenment Gallery, if one accepts the interpretation that it focuses and represents the encounter of the two opposing cultures that confronted each other on the beach at Botany Bay on that day in April 1770. The British culture that later obtained the ascendancy over the Indigenous people of the land now called Australia also obtained – and still retains – the shield. It is housed within the grandest imperial institution of them all, the British Museum, and within the Enlightenment Gallery, where it is placed in a temporal and intellectual context that, albeit unwittingly, gives most of the emphasis to the incident of its collection and the British individuals who collected it.
For many years museum displays depicted objects seized under conditions such as those in which the shield was collected as ‘ethnographic’ specimens, rather than as objects that possess specific qualities and cultural meanings external to, and intrinsically different from, those imposed by the conventions of European museology. These meanings lay buried beneath the stark simplicity of a neatly printed label that gave the barest description of the object, and the date it was collected, and possibly the name of the person who collected and donated it as well. In many cases objects such as these were exhibited – and some can still be seen displayed in this way today – in series according to object
22 For opposing views of the validity of Indigenous oral history as historical evidence see Keith Windschuttle, ‘Doctored Evidence and Invented Incidents in Aboriginal Historiography’, in Bain Attwood and S.G. Foster (eds) Frontier Conflict: the Australian Experience, National Museum of Australia, Canberra, 2003, pp. 99–112, and Deborah Bird Rose, ‘Oral Histories and Knowledge’, in ibid., pp.120–131. 19
type, a practice developed and popularised by the founder of the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt Rivers. The anthropological collections displayed in his eponymous museum and two others in the course of the second half of the nineteenth century were organised on a typological or morphological system for comparative purposes, with similar object types displayed in series so as to illustrate their development from natural and organic to more complex and specialised forms .23
Anthropologists now admit that their discipline had lost sight of the importance of the context in which objects were collected in the field. Michael O’Hanlon has noted that ‘earlier anthropology’ had viewed ‘artefacts as self-sufficient scientific specimens, which required no commentary as to the political and economic circumstances in which they had been gathered’.24 He asserts that in the 1980s ‘a sea change within the discipline once more turned artefacts into objects of anthropological interest’, as anthropologists became increasingly interested in ‘representation, especially in issues of power and equity’, and began to look seriously at ethnographic museums and collections. In the opinion of some anthropologists, ‘museum collections came to be viewed as the last colonial captives, and field collecting purely as their abduction.’25
Museologists in the 1980s also began to examine the assumptions that underpinned displays such as those in the Pitt Rivers Museum and its counterparts in ethnographic museums around the world. Charles Saumarez Smith, in his 1989 essay ‘Museums, Artefacts and Meanings’ in
23 Alison Petch, ‘Assembling and Arranging: The Pitt Rivers’ Collections, 1850–2001, in Anthony Shelton (ed.), Collectors, Individuals and Insititutions, The Horniman Museum and Gardens, London, 2001, p. 242; Annie E. Coombes, ‘Museums and the Formation of National and Cultural Identities’, Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 11, Issue 2, 1988, p. 61. 24 Michael O’Hanlon, ‘Introduction’, in Michael O’Hanlon and Robert L. Welsch (eds), Hunting the Gatherers: Ethnographic Collectors, Agents and Agency in Melanesia, 1870s–1930s, Berghahn Books, New York, 2000, p. 2. 25 Ibid. 20
The New Museology, made a rallying call for ‘an adequate agenda for the establishment of a new museology, one in which one is always conscious of, and always exploring, the nature of the relationship between social systems and the physical, three-dimensional environment, and always aware of the ethnography of representation’.26 Nearly two decades later, Andrea Witcomb reflected on the ambitions of the new museologists:
As a movement, the new museology was an attempt to recognise the political nature of museum representations – how, historically, museum practices ‘othered’ non-dominant groups, and how museums supported the interests of capitalism and patriarchy. As well as the role of critique, new museologists sought to change these practices by advancing the notion that museums might become forums rather than temples, that their proper social role might be to represent and foster cultural diversity.27
In the closing decades of the twentieth century a methodology for dealing with objects in museums placed particular emphasis on the context in which objects have been produced, and the layers of meaning and multiple stories that can be attached to them. Museum curators in Australia and elsewhere began to acknowledge the complex nature of the cross-cultural exchanges that objects such as the Aboriginal shield represented, and the need to express as far as possible the full range of meanings that such objects are able to convey. The collections policies of most Australian museums now insist on knowing the story associated with an object. The object’s historical and physical contexts are paramount aspects of its significance; without these, and without a firm provenance, an object is diminished in significance. Significance, as the term is applied to museum objects and collections, is defined as ‘The meaning and values of an item or collection, or what makes it important. Significance is the
26 Charles Saumarez Smith, ‘Museums, Artefacts and Meanings’ in Peter Vergo (ed.) The New Museology, Reaktion Books, London, 1989, p. 21. 27 Andrea Witcomb, ‘How Style Came to Matter: Do We Need to Move Beyond the Politics of Representation?’, Andrea Witcomb and Chris Healy (eds), South Pacific Museums, Monash University ePress, Melbourne, 2006, p. 21.2. 21
historic, aesthetic, scientific and social values that an item or collection has for past, present and future generations’.28
Museums and curators have also become intensely aware that the creators of an object, or their descendants, have rights in the way it is interpreted, and the conditions in which it is displayed. The subtleties of the relationships between people and objects, and the different understandings, in earlier periods of history and in the present, of the role of objects in diverse social situations will be examined further in Chapter Nine. A key issue in this discussion is the way in which objects have, in the past, been used to privilege the role of European collectors over those of a different culture who created and used them. And it is not only objects on display that have validated the reputation of the collectors rather than the creators and users of the objects. It is the stories that have circulated about them, either from the pens of the original collectors – as in the case of Banks’s account of the Aboriginal shield – or accounts of objects in individual collections, such as the Maori weapons collected by Sir George Grey that are discussed in Chapter Nine.
Despite the intentions of the curators of the Enlightenment Gallery to show ‘how our understanding of the world of nature and human achievement has changed over time’,29 the label that gives the cross-cultural story of the encounter on the beach at Botany Bay, and the British Museum website account that talks of the shield as being carried by a man whose urgent desire was to drive the white interlopers out, the eighteenth- century-styled environment of the Enlightenment Gallery, recreated in the
28 Roslyn Russell and Kylie Winkworth, Significance: A Guide to Assessing the Significance of Cultural Heritage Objects and Collections, Heritage Collections Council, Canberra, 2001, and Significance 2.0: A Guide to Assessing the Significance of Collections, Collections Council of Australia, Adelaide, 2009, p. 63. The term ‘item’ in this definition has the same meaning as ‘object’ where it is used in this work. 29 http://www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk/explore/galleries/themes/room_1_enlightenment.aspx , viewed 25 May 2010. 22
twenty-first century, still effectively reduces the shield to the status of a plundered object. It is displayed close to an array of other Aboriginal Australian objects, boomerangs arranged in the fan shape that has been a feature of ethnographic displays in museums and private collections for two centuries. In close proximity are New Zealand Maori greenstone mere and other weapons and an intricately carved feather box and bowl. Other objects from societies formerly regarded as ‘primitive’ are located close by. [See Illustration 3: Aboriginal and Maori artefacts in the Enlightenment Gallery, British Museum]
The mellow wooden museum cabinets that give the Enlightenment Gallery its nostalgic ambience still perform their centuries-old role of asserting the primacy of European epistemological frameworks over those of societies from which objects such as the shield were taken. The objects they contain can still be regarded by visitors – expertly written and objectively balanced labels notwithstanding – as imperial spoils, the material expression of the proud boast of an empire ‘on which the sun never sets’. How many visitors understand the subtleties of the combination of label and object? How many actually get as far as reading the label at all, as they quickly pass by the beautifully crafted cabinets full of ‘curiosities’ in their program of seeing as much of the vast Museum as they can in a limited time? How many of them heard Neil MacGregor on radio in 2010 describing the bark shield as standing ‘at the head of centuries of misunderstanding, deprivation and genocide’,30 or will read these words in the companion book to the History of the World in 100 Objects series?
The nuanced interpretation of the Enlightenment Gallery as a recreation of an historical moment may not impact on the consciousness of many visitors at all, and its status as a thoughtfully reproduced artefact of museum history may well be misunderstood. Only by a close analysis of the Indigenous and European contexts of the shield’s collection, such as
30 MacGregor, History of the World in 100 Objects, p. 585. 23
Maria Nugent has provided, along with an examination of the narratives written by Banks and others on the Endeavour voyage, can its meanings and values be properly understood.
24
Chapter Two: Early museums in Britain and Australia
The period examined in this thesis – from the encounter of British seamen and naturalists with the Indigenous inhabitants of Australia and New Zealand on the Endeavour voyage in 1769–1770, to the federation of the Australian colonies in 1901 – was one of expansion for Britain‟s overseas territories. It also saw museums in Britain undergo a transformation from essentially private collections, or institutions restricted to the members of the upper and middle classes of British society, to the publicly accessible institutions with which we are familiar, with great faith reposed in their perceived educative and improving qualities as agents in the imperial civilising mission. Along with these changes came corresponding transformations in attitudes to Britain‟s empire, and to the way in which the colonial possessions acquired in the earlier part of this period – and the societies that were created there – were regarded by the British public, and in particular British opinion-makers, including writers.
This 130-year-timespan saw the British gaze directed to the southern hemisphere, prompted to turn there by a number of problems created by geopolitical changes in the northern hemisphere, and societal pressures at home. Britain was keen to find an alternative to the transatlantic trade, now severely compromised by the presence of a newly independent United States of America; to defend its East India Company interests; and to discover new areas to exploit for raw materials and for trade. The wars with revolutionary and Napoleonic France, and designs on Spanish South America as an unexploited area for commercial expansion, meant that the creation of new military bases, and in particular the pre-empting of French colonial expansion in the Pacific, were priorities for the British State.1
1 N. A. M. Rodger, The Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain 1649–1815, Allen Lane, London, 2004, pp. 365–6. 25
Its domestic judicial policy had also created a problem of excessive numbers of convicted felons sentenced to transportation. Once the United States had thrown off its colonial dependency, the previous destination for transportees, Virginia, was no longer an option. At the recommendation of Sir Joseph Banks, the Home Secretary agreed to the establishment of a penal colony in New South Wales, at a place known familiarly in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain as Botany Bay. In reality, the convict settlement that began on the Australian continent in January 1788 was located, not on the shallow and sandy Botany Bay, whose flora had so captivated the young Joseph Banks eighteen years before, but on the shores of a magnificent harbour of great strategic value, which took its new name from the Home Secretary who had authorised the enterprise, Lord Sydney.
The story of the survival and growth of the new settlement at Sydney and later outposts at Newcastle, Hobart, Launceston and Port Phillip, the displacement of the Indigenous population, the influx of free immigrants to dilute the convict strain in the population, culminating in mass immigration in the mid-nineteenth century when gold was discovered in New South Wales and, even more spectacularly, in Victoria, the development of a pastoral industry, agriculture and mining, and the acquisition of representative government and the growth of a sufficiently strong sense of national identity to achieve Federation at the dawn of the twentieth century, has been the master narrative of Australian history, at least since 1788. New Zealand was sporadically settled by traders, whalers and missionaries in the early decades of the nineteenth century. They „made their way in a Maori environment, not only tolerated but valued for their tools, commercial practices and acumen which the robust Maori assimilated for their own independent ends‟.2
New Zealand was not, however, to be left alone as a site of sporadic and opportunistic contact between Maori and Pakeha (originally the Maori word for foreigners). Colonisation schemes and systematic programs of white settlement
2 Bill Nasson, Britannia’s Empire: Making a British World, Tempus Publishing Limited, Stroud, UK, 2004, p. 127. 26 after questionable land purchases, as well as an increasing officiousness by British officialdom including growing interference in Maori affairs, led to unrest between the two groups. Britain was forced to intervene, and officially incorporated New Zealand in the British Empire through the mechanism of the Treaty of Waitangi, signed with the representatives of Maori iwi (tribal groupings) in 1840. As Bill Nasson has commented, „New Zealand was annexed to impose order and the sovereign authority of imperial civilisation‟.3 Bitter Land Wars in the 1860s posed a challenge to the inexorable displacement from their land of the Maori people by waves of new arrivals from the British Isles, with the Maori losing formal control of even more of their land as a result. Nevertheless, in the comparatively short period covered by this thesis, Britain‟s two Pacific territories of Australia and New Zealand received thousands upon thousands of settlers from the home country, who in just over a century in the case of Australia, and even less in that of New Zealand, created societies in the antipodes which closely paralleled those from which they originated.
This sketch of the first hundred or so years of the British Empire in Australia and New Zealand has outlined the temporal and thematic framework within which the more detailed transactions explored throughout this thesis were negotiated. To begin this exploration, I must return to the period of the late eighteenth century, and look again at the contribution of Sir Joseph Banks, not only to the settlement in New South Wales that began the British occupation of Australia (and led, through its geographical proximity, to that of New Zealand as well), but to the creation and fostering of some of the most potent cultural expressions of the Enlightenment project carried from Britain to its expanding empire – museum institutions.
3 Ibid. 27
Sir Joseph Banks and the expansion of empire
Of the two leading men on the Endeavour, it is Sir Joseph Banks who features most prominently as a presence in the present-day British Museum‟s Enlightenment Gallery. He is represented by two portrait busts – more than any other collector, including Sir Hans Sloane, whose collection was the basis from which the British Museum grew.4 His role in the Endeavour voyage had catapulted Banks into the position of a celebrity. As Richard Holmes, among many others, has noted, it was Banks and his botanist, Daniel Solander, who garnered most of the kudos of the Endeavour voyage:
Though Captain Cook was praised, Banks and Solander had rapidly become the scientific lions. They had brought back over a thousand new plant specimens, over five hundred animal skins and skeletons, and innumerable native artefacts. They had brought back new worlds: Australia, New Zealand, but above all the South Pacific.5
Capitalising on this early start to a career in the public eye, over time Banks evolved from the ardent young man of the Endeavour voyage into an elder statesman of the worlds of culture and science in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century England. He was elected President of the Royal Society in November 1778 at „the remarkably early age of thirty-five‟. His role as unofficial Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, which he had assumed in 1773, was capped in 1781 with a knighthood „for his energetic scientific work‟ there; this aspect of Banks‟s scientific career will be treated in more detail in a later chapter.6 His portrait, by Thomas Phillips, amply displays the mature man of intellectual – and indeed physical – substance. [See Illustration 4: Sir Joseph Banks 1808–09, by Thomas Phillips.]
The second object of note in the Enlightenment Gallery is almost as evocative as the Aboriginal shield described in the previous chapter in its power to suggest
4 The story of the British Museum‟s genesis in the eclectic collection of physician and naturalist Sir Hans Sloane is told in David M. Wilson, The British Museum: A History, British Museum Press, London, 2002, pp. 11–21. 5 Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science, Harper Press, London, 2008, p. 43. 6 Ibid., pp. 54–5. 28 historical connections. It is at the other end of the Gallery, close to a bust of Banks, and is a tray of Pacific shells, perhaps including some from Botany Bay, gathered by him and his naturalist, Daniel Solander, on the Endeavour voyage. As is well known, Banks‟s enthusiasm for the unusual flora and fauna of New South Wales was one of the reasons why he promoted the place as a potential site for colonisation. It is also the reason why a fast-growing and significant branch of eighteenth-century science gave its name to a bay in Sydney now chiefly known for its oil refineries and port. The little tray of shells, divided into sections with each variety tagged with a hand-written label, speaks volumes to those with an eye for the origins of European Australia in the scientific enthusiasms of a young travelling British aristocrat, one who had divorced himself from the stereotypical behaviour of his gender, age and class by eschewing the Grand Tour of Europe for adventure in the Pacific; and botany for more characteristically „manly‟ pursuits.7 [See Illustration 5: Pacific shells collected by Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander on the Endeavour voyage, Enlightenment Gallery, British Museum]
The first travel account that this thesis has already examined is Banks‟s description of cross-cultural conflict on the shores of Botany Bay in 1770, an encounter manifested physically by the presence of the Aboriginal shield in the British Museum‟s Enlightenment Gallery. Now I must turn to a consideration of Banks‟s role, not only as the first „travel writer‟ whose works are examined in this work, but as a great imperial figure in his own right, one who set in motion some
7 Before Banks‟s rise to prominence in the scientific world of eighteenth and early nineteenth century Britain, natural history collecting was regarded as a feminine pursuit, as Maya Jasanoff notes in Edge of Empire: Conquest and Collecting in the East 1750–1850, Harper Perennial, London, 2006: „… this widely practiced “womanly” pursuit was considered distinctly marginal both to the collecting world and to the scientific world of eighteenth-century Britain … So much was natural science considered the province of women and amateurs that when the celebrated naturalist and president of the Royal Society, Sir Joseph Banks, began his own study of botany in the 1760s (inspired by a herbal he found in his mother‟s bedroom), the only teachers he could find were the local women who collected wild plants for apothecaries. Banks played a decisive role in raising the status of natural science in Britain …‟ (p. 187); see also Patricia Fara, Sex, Botany and Empire: The Story of Carl Linnaeus and Joseph Banks, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003, p. 49. 29 of the developments that later came to characterise the British version of the Enlightenment project and its expression within its Empire‟s culture.
The substantial figure of Sir Joseph Banks stands at the threshold of the second great wave of British territorial and cultural expansion from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. It is difficult to overestimate the influence of this man on the shape and nature of what has become known as the second British Empire. The name of Banks is ubiquitous in the historical literature on the period: at the threshold of an age of scientific specialisation and professionalisation, he was one of the last and greatest of the gentleman amateurs. Evidence of his wide connections to the nodes of influence in the society of his time can be found in numerous sources. As David Mackay has written, „No other man outside government in the last 20 years of the eighteenth century exercised such a pervasive influence over such a wide area of government activity.‟8 Roy Porter, in Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World, declared that „Banks‟s long career throbbed with activity on behalf of science, which he valued as progressive knowledge and a national asset‟.9
Banks‟s role in promoting and organising the convict settlement at Botany Bay is perhaps his best known association with Australia. A recent work on Banks claims that „Despite his enormous importance for science and empire, Banks is virtually unknown in Britain, whereas in Australia he has been converted into a national hero.‟10 One of Banks‟s biographers, J. H. Maiden, a director of the Royal Botanic Gardens Sydney in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, first suggested that the title of „The Father of Australia‟ should be bestowed on Banks „in recognition of his promotion of New South Wales as the place for a penal settlement in the eighteenth century and his tireless oversight and guidance in the exploration, scientific investigation and political development
8 David Mackay, In the Wake of Cook: Exploration, Science and Empire, 1780–1801, Victoria University Press, Wellington, New Zealand, 1985, p. 22. 9 Roy Porter, Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World, Penguin Books, London, 2000, pp. 148–9. 10 Fara, Sex, Botany and Empire, p. 68.
30 of that settlement‟. Nevertheless, this distinction has not led to extravagant commemoration of Banks in the country which claims him as a parent: Lieutenant (later Captain) James Cook has long held the premier position in the memorialising of the Endeavour voyage and its consequences. The first individual memorial to Banks was a simple plaque erected in 1947 at the Landing Place Reserve at Kurnell, Botany Bay, which acknowledged that „His advocacy of British settlement in New South Wales, his beneficial influence on its early administration, his comprehensive researches into its flora, his vigorous personality and breadth of vision, merit his recognition as THE PATRON OF AUSTRALIA‟.11 The 250th anniversary of Banks‟s birth was marked in the Australian National Botanic Gardens, Canberra with a bust and memorial, „one of the few memorials in this country to his honour‟; and an outer Canberra suburb is now named „Banks‟.12
In the United Kingdom Banks is credited with being the motivating force behind many other historically significant enterprises, even for acting as „a sort of unofficial minister of science‟ in the government of Britain.13 His role in the realm of botany has already been mentioned in relation to Kew Gardens, and will be further explored in a later chapter of this thesis. The fateful Bounty voyage to bring breadfruit plants as a new food source for slaves to the sugar plantations of the Caribbean was an initiative promoted, planned and sponsored by Banks as a pioneering exercise in plant transplantation and economic botany.14 As President of the Royal Society for a record forty-two years, he has been described as an
11 Cited in Maria Nugent, Botany Bay: Where Histories Meet: Allen and Unwin, Crows Nest, NSW, 2005, p. 70. 12 Rae Else-Mitchell, „The Father of Australia: A Tribute to Sir Joseph Banks on the 250th Anniversary of his Birth, Canberra Historical Journal, New Series No. 32, September 1993, p.19. 13 Rodger, Command of the Ocean, p. 366. 14 Bank‟s role in the organisation of the voyages under Captain William Bligh, first in the Bounty (1787) and then the Providence (1791–93) to bring breadfruit trees to the West Indies as a new food source for plantation slaves at the behest of the planters is outlined in Richard Drayton, Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain and the ‘Improvement’ of the World: Yale University Press, New Haven, 2000, pp. 113–14; and John Gascoigne, Science in the Service of Empire: Joseph Banks, the British State and the Uses of Science in the Age of Revolution: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1998, p. 124. 31
„all-purpose nerve center of the British scientific and natural collecting worlds‟.15 His position as a trustee in the early days of the British Museum is a starting point for a discussion of the development of museums in the British world in general.
Banks and the British Museum
In a recent work on the history of collecting in the British Museum, the period from 1770 to 1830 has been identified as the time when „the British Museum grew from being the first national museum to be established, one based on a small number of large collections formerly in private hands, into an international repository that was truly global in scope‟. While not claiming that Banks, as one of its trustees at that period, was individually responsible for this transformation, Neil Chalmers states that „His character and outlook make him a useful figure on which to concentrate at a critical period in the history of the British Museum, and indeed of collecting generally.‟ 16
Banks had at his effective disposal the vast haul of plant, animal and ethnographic material amassed by the Endeavour voyage, which was delivered to his home at 14 New Burlington Street, London once the Endeavour returned to England in 1771. With his botanist, the Swedish taxonomist and Linnaeus disciple Daniel Solander, Banks then began the task of imposing a European system of classification on the natural world of the Pacific. They were assisted by a young man who later pioneered the technique of vaccination for smallpox, Edward Jenner. The Endeavour voyage, from the perspectives both of museum collections and imperial expansion, was a personal benchmark for Banks, and a
15 Jasanoff, Edge of Empire, p. 237. In addition to Banks‟s associations with the expanding world of science in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Britain mentioned above, the definitive biography of Banks by Harold B. Carter cites several other significant Banksian initiatives: „the foundation of the Ordnance Survey; the astronomy of William Herschel; …the importation and improvement of the Spanish Merino sheep that became the basis of the Australian economy; Mungo Park and the exploration of Africa; the Royal Botanic Garden at Calcutta and the botany of India; scientific relations with France during the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars; the protection of Iceland and the Arctic search for a north-west passage‟: H. B. Carter, Sir Joseph Banks, 1743– 1820: British Museum (Natural History), London, 1988. 16 Neil A. Chambers, Joseph Banks and the British Museum: The World of Collecting, 1770– 1830, London: Pickering and Chatto, 2007, preface pp. xi–xii. 32 new departure in practice on voyages of exploration, not only in Britain, but for its rivals for imperial acquisition, in particular the French. Chambers summed up its impact across Europe: „Overall, the mission set a pattern for those that followed, and heralded not only a dramatic increase in the quantity of Pacific collections returning to Europe for analysis, but also the rapid growth of European control and organization of the distant lands being described.‟17
Richard Holmes has provided a description of Banks‟s Endeavour collections in their first London home in New Burlington Street, based on a letter written by William Sheffield, the Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, to Britain‟s archetype of the natural historian clergyman, Gilbert White, author of The Natural History of Selborne in Hampshire:
Contrary to expectation, these were far more than just botanical specimens. They formed in effect a complete museum of Pacific culture, combining natural history with ethnology and human artefacts in a quite new way. They were housed in three enormous, overflowing rooms, each with its own theme. The first, the „Armoury‟, belonged symbolically to the human male, dedicated to weapons, utensils and sailing equipment from all over the South Seas. The second was more female in theme, a huge domestic collection of clothes, headdresses, cloaks, woven cloths, ornaments and jewellery, together with 1,300 new species of plant „never seen or heard of before in Europe‟. The third room was dedicated simply to Nature in all her diversity. It contained „an almost numberless collection of animals; quadrupeds, birds, fish, amphibian, reptiles, insects and vermes, preserved in spirits, most of them new and nondescript [unclassified].18
The plant collections, and Banks‟s ethnographic collections, were moved into their respective future homes in 1777, when their collector moved house, from New Burlington Street to 32 Soho Square. At that point the botanic collection went to Kew; while the ethnographic collection went to the British Museum. He also donated to the Museum other ethnographic material sold or given to him by participants in subsequent voyages of exploration. This action presaged a duality in the museum treatment of natural and man-made productions that would be perpetuated in classificatory regimens and institutions from that time until now: „A
17 Ibid., p. 9. 18 Holmes, Age of Wonder, p. 48. 33 clear pattern was emerging in which Banks directed the „artificial products‟ obtained from voyages of discovery generally towards the British Museum, while he tended to distribute the „natural‟ collections of living plants and seeds to Kew Gardens‟.19 Banks became essentially a conductor of cultural material to appropriate locations around London: his influence „was fast becoming an important shaping factor in the distribution and development of collections across the capital.‟20
This was not always to the ultimate good of the ethnographic collections in particular: David Wilson‟s recent history of the British Museum heads its section on Banks „Joseph Banks – Dictator‟, and records instances of Banks allowing his associates to remove objects from the ethnographic collections, as he did himself. Nevertheless Wilson, while clearly no fan of Banks and critical of his relative neglect of ethnography as opposed to natural history, acknowledged that
It is difficult to overestimate Banks‟s services to the institution, both politically and academically. Amid his many other interests, he worked hard to better its standing in the eyes of the great and the good and to increase its natural historical collections … His lofty attitude towards some of the artificial curiosities is less deserving of praise, although he gave and bequeathed to the Museum many antiquities and ethnographical specimens, and was influential in the acquisition of some major collections … After Sloane, his was the most important influence on the fledgling Museum in the first sixty years of its existence.21
Donation by collectors and the spoils garnered by voyages of exploration were not the only sources of the objects that began to swell the British Museum‟s collections (and those of other museums in the country) in the early years of the nineteenth century. War booty also played its part, as Britain and France pursued their imperial agendas off-shore in countries such as India and Egypt. Maya Jasanoff‟s book, Edge of Empire: Conquest and Collecting in the East 1750– 1850 gives an account of the understandable chagrin of Napoleon‟s savants when the vast collections they had assembled during the French invasion of
19 Ibid., p. 12. This aspect of Banks‟s scientific activity is covered in more detail in Chapter Six, „Imperial Kew‟. 20 Ibid., p. 13. 21 Wilson, British Museum, pp. 43–5. 34
Egypt from 1799–1801 were seized by the victorious British after the Battle of the Nile. These spoils of war – which included the Rosetta Stone – formed the basis of the British Museum‟s magnificent Egyptian collections, one of the major holdings, along with the Parthenon sculptures, for which it is best known.22 Military triumphalism translated into imperial grandeur and display, as Jasanoff says of the introduction of the Egyptian collections to the British Museum:
With their arrival, too, the old cabinet of curiosities-style British Museum was shaken up and slowly redefined to become a public institution, more accommodating to different objects and visitors than before. This shift in the Museum‟s function paralleled the redefinition of empire as something more heterogeneous, inclusive and shaping of British identity than ever before.23
The acquisition of the Egyptian antiquities was also a transformative moment in the British Museum‟s history, marking in effect its transition from a repository of collections assembled by private individuals to a national museum: „The Egyptian collections were effectively [after the Cook voyages material] the first public collection to arrive at the British Museum, acquired by the nation, for the nation.‟ The Museum was not prepared for this rate of expansion: in 1803 the Townley Gallery was added to accommodate the Egyptian antiquities, the British Museum‟s „first-ever purpose-built wing‟.24
Banks played a further role in adding to the Egyptian collections, when in his capacity as a trustee of the British Museum he encouraged Henry Salt, British Consul General in Cairo, to collect even more Egyptian objects. Salt managed to persuade the Viceroy of Egypt, Mohammed Ali Pasha, to allow him to take a massive granite head, now known to represent one of the greatest of all Egyptian Pharaohs, Rameses II, to London, where its installation in the British Museum in 1816 contributed to the institution‟s reputation as „one of the world‟s greatest
22 For Maya Jasanoff this identification of the British Museum with the antiquities of Egypt holds true even today: „For many visitors, the British Museum is an Egyptian museum, impressed on the mind and memory through these miraculous, mysterious, and remarkably well preserved remnants from a distant past‟. Jasanoff, Edge of Empire, p. 212. 23 Ibid., p. 226. 24 Ibid., p. 224–5. 35 centres of Egyptology‟.25 The implicit point about the British Empire as a successor to one of the great empires of antiquity was embodied in the objects mustered within the walls of its national museum.
Just over a decade after the head of Rameses was installed in the British Museum, one of Britain‟s young colonies was about to begin the process of museum creation for itself, and to perpetuate this institutional type in the antipodes.
Creating museums in the Australasian colonies
Sir Joseph Banks died in 1820, seven years before the first establishment with the word „museum‟ in its title – now known as the Australian Museum – was founded in Sydney, the first settlement on the Australian continent, and one that owed its existence to Banks‟s advocacy with the government of Britain. In common with all the early museums created in the Australasian colonies, it was focused on collections of natural history specimens.26 The impetus for the establishment of this first museum came from a noted collector and protégé of Sir Joseph Banks, Alexander Macleay.27 Despite the earlier endeavours of the small coterie of scientifically minded people in Sydney, and the creation of a
25 Wilson, British Museum, p. 75. 26 Susan Sheets-Pyenson, Cathedrals of Science: The Development of Colonial Natural History Museums During the Late Nineteenth Century, McGill-Queen‟s University Press, Montreal, Canada, 1988, p. 10 cites British Museum curator F. A. Bather‟s survey of colonial museums of 1893, in which he argued that the „first characteristic of a colonial museum … was its emphasis on local specimens‟. 27 For Macleay‟s association with Banks, see Robyn Stacey and Ashley Hay, Museum: the Macleays, Their Collections and the Search for Order, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 2007, pp. 10–11; Peter Stanbury and Julian Holland, Mr Macleay’s Celebrated Cabinet, The Macleay Museum, The University of Sydney, 1988, p. 11. McLeay is the original spelling of the family name, and many references perpetuate this form. It was changed to Macleay at some point „to avoid confusion‟. This form of the spelling is used throughout, and is the one used for the eponymous museum established at the University of Sydney in 1888, and of which the collections amassed by Alexander Macleay, his son William Sharp Macleay and nephew William John Macleay form the core of the holdings. See Mr Macleay’s Celebrated Cabinet, p. 6. It is also the form of the name applied to the Macleay River and its district in New South Wales, for which Alexander Macleay was the first Member elected to the Legislative Council in 1843. See „Alexander Macleay: Colonial Secretary of New South Wales‟, Macleay River Historical Society Journal, May 2009, pp. 1, 4. 36
Philosophical Society there in 1821, the history of the Australian Museum credits Macleay with the honour of being its prime instigator, stating that „it is to the enthusiasm and influence of … Alexander Macleay … that one must look for its formation‟.28
It is interesting to speculate as to whether this institution would have had such an early birth, just under forty years after a collection of convicted felons and their military guards had formed a penal colony in New South Wales, had not a person with Macleay‟s scientific interests and connections been obliged to go there for starkly material reasons.In accepting the appointment as Colonial Secretary of New South Wales, „I felt‟, he confessed, „that in duty to my family I was bound to accept it, but I cannot think it any subject of Congratulations to be sent at my time of life with a large family to the very antipodes‟. Macleay had been Secretary of the Linnean Society in London from 1798 to 1825, and had become a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1809 and a member of its Council in 1824.29
Macleay sailed on the Marquis of Hastings with his wife Elizabeth and six daughters, arriving in the colony on 3 January 1826. Two younger sons remained at school in England, while his eldest son, William Sharp Macleay, himself a noted scientific thinker who would also contribute to the development of Australian museum institutions, had been posted to Cuba in 1825 as British commissioner of arbitration to the conjoint British and Spanish Court of Commission for the abolition of the slave trade, and remained in Havana until
28 Ronald Strahan et.al., Rare and Curious Specimens: An Illustrated History of the Australian Museum 1827–1979, Australian Museum, Sydney, 1979, p. 6. 29 Alexander Macleay and his wife actually had 11 surviving children out of 17 born to the couple. By the time he came to Sydney he was 58 years old, so a number of them were grown up, but his collecting enthusiasms were also costly, a family banking venture in his native Scotland had failed, and he had been trying to manage on a pension he had received after being retrenched from his public service position at the end of the Napoleonic wars. Museum, pp. 13–14; Mr Macleay’s Celebrated Cabinet, pp. 18–19; No author cited, „McLeay, Alexander (1767–1848)‟, Australian Dictionary of Biography – Online Edition, http://adbonline.anu.edu.au/biogs/A020156b.htm, viewed 31 March 2010. 37
1836.30 Alexander Macleay‟s appointment as Colonial Secretary, as well as providing the salary necessary to maintain his family‟s middle-class lifestyle, gave him the opportunity to pursue his scientific passions – entomology, botany and zoology. Macleay also brought with him to New South Wales an insect collection described as „without parallel in England … remarkable not merely for its size but also for its range and the importance of its specimens‟, coupled with an extensive knowledge of entomology.31
As Colonial Secretary, Macleay and his family, whose members also participated in scientific activity,32 joined an elite social circle in the growing colony, centred on Government House. The quintessential „gentleman collector‟, Macleay soon set about creating another circle, that of people with scientific passions similar to his own. He expanded his already considerable range of scientific interests into ornithology, and began to make the case for creating a colonial museum, botanic
30 David S. Macmillan, „Macleay, William Sharp (1792–1865)‟, Australian Dictionary of Biography – Online Edition, http://adbonline.anu.edu.au/biogs/A020158bh.htm, viewed 31 March 2010. 31 Stanbury and Holland point out just how significant Macleay‟s entomological holdings were: „Many of them were the specimens from which the first published descriptions were made. These are now known as type specimens, the ultimate reference specimens when taxonomic disputes arise‟, Mr Macleay’s Celebrated Cabinet, p. 19. 32 Although William Sharp Macleay, and Alexander Macleay‟s nephew William John Macleay received public recognition for their scientific contributions, one of the daughters of the Macleay family, Frances Leonora (Fanny) Macleay also played a significant but, until recently, unsung part. Fanny was „a bright and clever girl‟ who helped her father with the organisation of his collection, and maintained a correspondence on scientific matters with her brother William Sharp Macleay, and with botanist Robert Brown who had accompanied Matthew Flinders on the Investigator voyage of 1801, and who became guardian of Sir Joseph Banks‟s collections in 1810. She was also a highly talented botanical artist. An example of her work, sent to Brown, is held in the collection of the Natural History Museum in London. Robyn Stacey and Ashley Hay, Museum: the Macleays, their collections and the search for order, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 2007, ps. 10, 26; Elizabeth Windschuttle, Taste and Science: The Women of the Macleay Family, 1790–1850, Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales, Sydney, 1988, wrote of Fanny Macleay: „Fanny‟s intellectual interest in natural history was unusual for a woman of the period. Few women had a knowledge of these subjects and fewer still engaged in such a wide range of fields. Most women of the time limited their interest in studying nature to botany and horticulture and confined their activities to collecting and drawing plants, pressing flowers and collecting shells. Fanny pursued these normal activities but added the new scientific fields of the period to her interests: entomology, zoology, ornithology, paleontology, mineralogy, astronomy and landscape gardening … While the other sisters studied botanical drawing and painting and collected seeds, none were as absorbed in natural history as Fanny. Hence many of the tasks involved in maintaining their father‟s scientific collections fell to her. She was his main assistant in his research and in collecting specimens in both England and New South Wales.‟ (p. 48.) 38 gardens and public library.33 His efforts bore early fruit when in 1827 the forerunner of what became the Australian Museum, the Sydney Museum or Colonial Museum, was inaugurated with a small display in the small office he occupied as Colonial Secretary. The Secretary of State for the Colonies, Lord Bathurst, authorised the expenditure of £200 per annum for a „Publick Museum at New South Wales‟ on 30 March that year.34
Alexander Macleay became the founding Chairman of the Museum; its first Curator and Secretary, appointed in 1837, was Dr George Bennett, an enthusiastic natural history collector and author of Gatherings of a Naturalist in New South Wales, published in 1860. The Sydney Museum was renamed the Australian Museum in June 1836. William Sharp Macleay, who had retired from his position, arrived in the colony in 1839 to join the rest of his family, and drew on his extensive knowledge of museums of natural history in Britain and Europe when drafting the Museum Act of 1853.35 The Museum moved into its current building, designed by Colonial Architect James Barnet for a site on the corner of College and William Streets opposite Sydney‟s Hyde Park in 1849, and opened to the public in May 1857.36
The Australian Museum was not, however, the first museum institution in the Australian colonies: botanic gardens had been established in Sydney (1816) and Hobart (1818) before Banks‟s death; an examination of their role in the Banksian botanical system follows in Chapter Six. Nevertheless, the opening of the first
33 Shar Jones and Jennifer Stackhouse, in the conclusion to their catalogue essay for an exhibition at Elizabeth Bay House on Gentleman Scientists: Natural History in N.S.W., claim that „The whole Australian scientific tradition evolved from the activities of the gentlemen collectors. Beginning as observers of a new and strange natural environment, they worked to classify and record the specimens they collected. Separated from their European sources, they were acutely aware of the need for the establishment of local institutions to support their endeavours. They met together in an effort to set up a museum, a herbarium, a library and teaching institutions.‟ (Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales, Sydney, 1983, inside back page, no page number.) 34 Australian Museum, „The Museum‟s Early Days‟, viewed 15 February 2010, http://australianmuseum.net.au/The_Museums_Early_Days; Windschuttle, Taste and Science, p. 65. 35 Stanbury and Holland, Mr Macleay’s Celebrated Cabinet, p. 33. 36 „The Museum‟s Early Days‟, Australian Museum website, http://australianmuseum.net.au/The_Museums_Early_Days, viewed 15 February 2010. 39 natural history museum in Sydney was an affirmation that the colony‟s scientific culture was sufficiently developed to support such an institution. While the creation of a museum was a significant marker of the success of the imperial civilising mission as the society created only a few decades before as a penal colony on the far fringe of the British Empire began to develop the intellectual establishments characteristic of metropolitan culture, it is important not to overlook the contingent nature of its birth. Had Alexander Macleay not been forced for financial reasons to emigrate to New South Wales, would the museum institutions that were planned, established and gained strength in Sydney in the first half of the nineteenth century have become realities so soon after the colony‟s foundation? Macleay was operating within the international structures that supported and promoted both science and empire, but his own enthusiasm and expertise, and that of other family members, ought not to be undervalued in any assessment of the genesis and growth of museum institutions in the Australasian colonies. Macleay was the first of a number of people to be considered in this work whose personal passions for their particular form of scientific or other cultural activity fuelled their desire to create museums. These personal interventions complicate the anticipated picture of this process as a primarily imperialistic activity.
At this period of Australia‟s colonial history, the boundaries between public institutions and private collections, contacts and scientific expertise were, by their nature, highly permeable. The same individuals operated across both public and private spheres; at a period when the sciences were becoming increasingly professionalised, there was still ample scope for the talented (and well- resourced) amateur to make their mark. While the Macleays‟ collections and botanic garden at Elizabeth Bay were not public institutions, it is clear from the literature that access both to the people and the place was made freely available to those with scientific interests. The Macleay family‟s home at Elizabeth Bay with its botanic garden, as well as the public institutions with which they were so vitally involved, acted as an introduction to scientific activities in New South
40
Wales for travellers who were beginning to make their way there for the purposes of collecting and investigation. From the 1830s onwards travellers other than colonial officials, convicts and free settlers came to the Australasian colonies. Alexander Macleay in particular was sought out by travellers with scientific interests, as „his reputation as a highly intelligent man, well versed in natural history‟, was well known – and not only in British scientific circles.37
By the end of the century the Macleay family‟s collection had become a public good, when Sir William John Macleay donated it to the University of Sydney in 1888, as the foundation collection of the Macleay Museum, along with an endowment of £6000 to fund the curator‟s position. An estimated 100,000 specimens (not including innumerable insects) collected by three generations of Macleays throughout the nineteenth century took close to two years to make the journey from Elizabeth Bay to be installed in their new purpose-built home in the University.38 While the magnificent garden that so captivated visitors was subdivided and sold off, the family‟s home, Elizabeth Bay House, designed by colonial architect John Verge, has now become a house museum, thus bringing all the Macleay family‟s former assets into the public domain.39
Charles Darwin visits Australia
Many arrivals in the Australian colonies before the mid-nineteenth century indeed tended to come with a scientific purpose – or at least happened to be there as part of a scientific enterprise. Among their ranks was the young Charles Darwin,
37Austrian botanist Baron Charles von Hügel, who travelled around the Australian colonies from November 1833 to October 1834, and made many visits to Alexander Macleay, and to his garden at Elizabeth Bay, used these words to describe Macleay after he visited him for the first time on 17 February 1834. Baron Charles von Hügel, New Holland Journal November 1833–October 1834, translated and edited by Dymphna Clark, Miegunyah Press, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Victoria, 1994, pp. 194–5. 38 Stacey and Hay, Museum, p. 39. 39 ‘Elizabeth Bay House opened to the public as a museum on 12 March 1977. In 1981 it became one of the first properties of the Historic Houses Trust. In 1988, the Trust adopted a policy to interpret the house according to the evidence available of its occupancy by Alexander Macleay and his family between the years 1839 to 1845. The interiors continue to be refined to this end.‟ Historic Houses Trust NSW, viewed 7 April 2010, http://www.hht.net.au/discover/highlights/guidebooks/elizabeth_bay_house_guidebook. 41 who came to the Australasian colonies in 1836 on the homeward leg of the voyage of HMS Beagle; and John and Elizabeth Gould, who went there two years later for the purpose of making sketches and collecting birds for the compilation of The Birds of Australia.
„No other literary visitor to Australia has brought with him such a highly trained naturalist‟s eye‟ is the verdict of a recent work on literary travelers to Australia when discussing Charles Darwin‟s brief visit to the country from January to March 1836.40 Darwin is not usually discussed nowadays in terms of his contribution to literature, but in an age when science and literary pursuits were more closely aligned, and scientists prided themselves on their ability to write in a competent manner, works of science – especially those that described voyages of exploration and discovery – became popular literature. The young Darwin was an avid reader of a wide range of literature, including novels and poetry as well as scientific books, and was a particular devotee of travel writing.41 His friendship at Cambridge with Reverend John Stevens Henslow, Professor of Mineralogy and Botany, was responsible for introducing him to the work of the celebrated Prussian scientist, Alexander von Humboldt. The budding natural history enthusiast was enthralled by von Humboldt‟s Personal Narrative of a Journey to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent, in its „flowery English translation by Romantic English writer Helen Maria Williams‟.42 This work, according to Iain
40 Susannah Fullerton, Brief Encounters: Literary Travellers in Australia 1836–1939, Picador, Sydney, 2009, p. 14. 41 Iain McCalman, in Darwin’s Armada, Viking, Camberwell, Victoria, 2009, p. 19, describes Darwin at Shrewsbury Grammar School where he had been sent as a boarder at the age of nine: „Charles had never settled at the school; he‟d taken advantage of every unmonitored period in the daily routine to dash the mile home to gossip with his sisters and play with his dogs. When not making these risky little escapes, he mooned about reading poems and romances by Byron or Scott, or sensational travel and adventure stories in boys‟ magazines. He had a vivid imagination and something of an aesthetic bent, which showed up in his stories, his reading and his „poetic fancy‟. Keith Thomson, in The Young Charles Darwin, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2009, pp. 63–4, gives details of some of his reading of travel accounts at the time he was studying medicine at Edinburgh University. These included Sir John Franklin, Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea (1823), William Scoresby, Account of the (Polar) Arctic Regions (1820), Thomas Pennant‟s Arctic Zoology (1784), and Charles Cochrane, Journal of a Residence and Travels in Colombia During the Years 1823 and 1824. 42 McCalman, Darwin’s Armada, ps. 23, 31; Thomson, Young Charles Darwin, p. 93. 42
McCalman, „taught him that the aesthetic pleasures of the picturesque traveller and the intellectual satisfactions of the empirical scientist could be complementary‟.43
Darwin was destined to make two notable contributions to the literature of science and travel himself, but at the point he arrived in Sydney, after a brief stay in New Zealand on the homeward leg of the Beagle voyage, he could look back on a previous literary connection between his own family and Australia. His grandfather Erasmus Darwin‟s poem of 1789, „Voyage of Hope to Sydney-cove‟, regarded as the first poetic work to be written about Australia,44 will be discussed further in Chapter Six. His grandson Charles, meanwhile, faced his encounter with the subject of the poem, Sydney, with his grandfather‟s vision of the place in mind. He was not to be disappointed – at first. Darwin‟s biographer, Janet Browne, says of his response to his initial view of Sydney that „he thought the scene on the medallion made by the first Josiah Wedgwood out of clay brought from New South Wales, and the verses written by Erasmus Darwin on “Hope‟s visit to Sydney-cove,” in which he prophesied a bright future for the new colony, had all come true‟.45
The first note Darwin sounded when he landed in Sydney from HMS Beagle on 12 January 1836 was one of almost rapturous pride. Australia, in contrast to New Zealand, was „the epitome of civilization‟, and Sydney „presented every appearance of a great capital city: windmills, warehouses, forts, big stone
43 McCalman, Darwin’s Armada, p. 32. 44 Tom Frame, Evolution in the Antipodes: Charles Darwin and Australia, University of New South Wales Press, Sydney, NSW, 2009, p. 53: „The poem was included as the frontispiece to Captain Phillip‟s published report on the voyage of the First Fleet and its arrival in Sydney. It would also appear in FitzRoy‟s account of the Beagle‟s expedition.‟ 45 Janet Browne, Charles Darwin, Voyaging: An Autobiography, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 1995, p. 314. 43 houses, a botanic garden, a civic museum‟,46 and other characteristic features of urbanity.47 He confided to his diary:
I walked through the town & returned full of admiration at the whole scene. – It is a most magnificent testimony to the power of the British nation … My first feeling was to congratulate myself that I was an Englishman.48
This rosy glow was not to last: Darwin began to notice other, less attractive features of Sydney‟s society, particularly those related to its fundamental role as an economy and society based on convicts. His growing distaste at the type of society that had developed in Sydney was exacerbated by the company he was keeping. A fortnight after he had landed in Australia, he went to „Dunheved‟, a property near Penrith owned by Captain Philip Parker King, and ate lunch the following day with the Hannibal Macarthurs at the „Vineyard‟, their Palladian villa with a view of the Parramatta River. Fraternising with these leading members of the free-settler elite in the colony, he found that he shared their views on the social elevation of those who had not come to the colony as free men, but were now rich emancipists.49 As Iain McCalman has commented:
Darwin‟s chief interest in the colony had been to assess the character and impact of a unique, convict-based British society, an invasive species like no other. Everything he learned, however, outraged his gentry sensibilities. Ex-convicts had become some of Sydney‟s wealthiest men; they rode in gilt carriages, built extravagant houses, and warped the character of the whole society. Rich or poor, they were obsessed with money: bookshops, fine music, and other aspects of civilisation had no appeal. Darwin anticipated that the gross and sensual manners of convict servants would rub off on future generations and lead to an overall moral decline.50
Darwin recorded his second thoughts on Sydney in his diary:
On the whole … I was disappointed in the state of Society. – The whole community is rancorously divided into parties on almost every subject. Amongst those who from their station of life ought to rank with the best, many live in such open profligacy, that
46 Frame, Evolution in the Antipodes, p. 55 notes that „Darwin‟s servant Syms Covington wrote in his journal „went in Museum while here‟, but there was no comment by Darwin himself on this, nor any observations about the specimens it contained.‟ 47 Browne, Charles Darwin, Voyaging, p. 314. 48 Charles Darwin‟s Beagle Diary, 12 January 1836, in Charles Darwin: An Australian Selection, National Museum of Australia Press, Canberra, 2009, p. 8. 49 McCalman, Darwin’s Armada, 70–1. 50 Ibid., p. 70. 44 respectable people cannot associate with them. There is much jealousy between the children of the rich emancipist & the free settlers, the former being pleased to consider honest men as interlopers. The whole population poor & rich are bent on acquiring wealth; the subject of wool and sheep grazing amongst the higher orders is of preponderant interest. The very low ebb of literature is strongly marked by the emptiness of the booksellers [sic] shops;51 these are inferior to the shops of the smaller country towns of England … The balance of my opinion is such, that nothing but rather severe necessity should compel me to emigrate.52
The Beagle‟s patrician captain, Robert FitzRoy, agreed with Darwin‟s verdict on Sydney for much the same reasons:
It is difficult to believe that Sydney will continue to flourish in proportion to its rise. It has sprung into existence too suddenly. Convicts have forced its growth, even as a hot-bed forces plants, and premature decay may be expected from such early maturity. There must be great difficulty in bringing up a family well in that country, in consequence of the demoralizing influence of convicts [sic] servants, to which almost all children must be more or less exposed. Besides, literature is at a low ebb; most people are anxious about active farming, or commercial pursuits, which leave little leisure for reflection, or for reading more than those fritterers of the mind, daily newspapers and ephemeral trash.53
Darwin preferred Van Diemen‟s Land (later Tasmania), which he visited for ten or eleven days in February 1836 as, although it was also a convict colony, an emancipist culture had not developed there to the same extent as it had in the older colony in New South Wales, and the governing regime was sound. In common with many other English travellers to Tasmania, he found that the climate suited him better as well. Darwin‟s visit to Tasmania restored his faith in the essential qualities of his countrymen. Janet Browne has remarked, „It was curious, he reflected, how travelling and seeing the British colonies made him appreciate what “wonderful people the English are.”54 Nevertheless, when
51 Fullerton, Brief Encounters, has remarked that the fact that the bookshops were „empty and inferior‟ was „a serious problem for a lifelong reader of scientific books, travel, poetry and novels‟ (p. 19). 52 Charles Darwin‟s Beagle Diary, 29 January 1836. 53 Quoted from Robert Fitzroy, Narrative of the Surveying Voyages of His Majesty’s Ships Adventure and Beagle ..., in Peter Nichols, Evolution’s Captain, HarperCollins Publishers, Sydney, 2003, p. 211. 54 Browne, Charles Darwin: Voyaging, pp. 315–16. 45
Darwin left Australia in mid-March 1836, he delivered a further parting shot that comprehended the whole country in its dismissive scope:
Farewell Australia, you are a rising infant & doubtless some day will reign a great princess in the South; but you are too great & ambitious for affection, yet not great enough for respect; I leave your shores without sorrow or regret.55
As Michael Pickering has commented, „Australia was not the little bit of England that Darwin had expected‟.56 Darwin‟s enduring fame, however, does not rest on his talents as a social commentator; he would have been just another young man visiting the colonies unless he had also become the greatest naturalist of his age. His observations during his stay in the Australian colonies would fuel the thoughts that gave rise ultimately to his theory of evolution through natural selection, as he pondered the strangeness of Australian species by comparison to those he had seen elsewhere in the world.57 Janet Browne has summed up the questions about the nature of Creation and the Creator that Darwin‟s Australian experience provoked:
Was it one hand at work, uniting the living kingdoms, no matter how disparate they looked? Or did each country, so to speak, generate its own particular creatures? Without knowing it at the time, Darwin was edging towards the kind of questions which ultimately led him to evolution. Australia was a puzzle that occupied his thoughts more and more in the years to come.58
Tom Frame has described Darwin‟s contribution to The Voyage of the Beagle as „both a scientific work and a polemical one‟, in which he „wanted to present certain geological and biological arguments and make a case for the importance
55 Charles Darwin‟s Beagle Diary, 14 March 1836. 56 Michael Pickering, „Darwin and Australia‟, ABC The Drum Unleashed – Darwin and Australia, 12 February 2009, viewed on 1 July 2010 at http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/stories/s2480013.htm Pickering nevertheless claims that Darwin‟s view of Australia had „softened‟ by the time he reached England and in his later years, when writing to his Australian contacts, he „corresponds with all people as equals, regardless of social status‟. He concludes: „Indeed, if anything stands out in a modern reading of Darwin‟s works and diaries it is how likeable Darwin becomes throughout his later life.‟ 57 Browne, Charles Darwin, Voyaging, p. 315. 58 Ibid. 46 of science to culture and civilization‟.59 It was also a bestseller, described by the Victorian Naturalist as the „most interesting volume of travels ever written‟. But Darwin‟s seemingly negative descriptions of features of the Australian environment created the inevitable reaction in Australia – then as now – when travellers appeared to be criticising the place.60 The hurt rankled: even after Darwin‟s death an Australian naturalist recalled his wounding words:
We are somewhat sensitive to the accounts which travellers publish of our colonies. And it is to me … a sad reflection that perhaps the most repellent description of this strange southern land should have been penned by Charles Darwin, the most eminent naturalist of the century.61
Darwin may have been the earliest, but was by no means the last travelling writer to report back on the Australasian colonies and in so doing offend his reading audiences there.
John Gould and the Australian Museum
Elizabeth Gould, wife and artistic collaborator of the celebrated nineteenth- century ornithologist, John Gould, who visited Australia from 1838 to 1840, echoed Darwin‟s accusation that money-making consumed most of the attention of the people she met in the Australian colonies: „The fact is that most persons come here with a determination to get money and return to England as soon as they can … This has been a famous place for money making – and I think money spending.‟62 For her husband, John Gould, it was the place where he would carve out for himself a reputation as the premier ornithologist in Britain in the nineteenth century; a substantial part of this reputation rested on his work on the Australian fauna.63
59 Frame, Evolution in the Antipodes, p. 66. 60 Ibid., pp. 66–8. 61 L. H. S. Lucas, „Charles Darwin on Australia‟, The Victorian Naturalist, vol. II, p. 21, quoted in ibid. 62 Letter from Elizabeth Gould to Mrs Mitchell, 4 January 1839, A. H. Chisholm, The Story of Elizabeth Gould, Hawthorne Press, Melbourne, 1944, pp. 45–6. 63 Historian of Australian science, Ann Moyal, has summed up the significance of Gould‟s work for Australian science: „Though Gould‟s Australian publications represented little more than a quarter of his total work, they marked the area of his special expertise … His work on Australian mammals, supported by 47
John Gould, Curator of the Zoological Society of London‟s Museum, was probably the first professional museum curator to come as a visitor to Australia. He came with his wife and several others in 1838 to collect bird and mammal specimens, and to amass the sketches and field notes for his volumes of ornithological studies illustrated with beautiful lithographs, executed by Elizabeth Gould and by other artists after her death in 1841. Gould also examined many bird skins and other ornithological items in the Australian Museum, and the evidence he gathered was incorporated in his multi-volume work of illustration and commentary, The Birds of Australia.
Gould‟s description of one species, Bourke‟s Grass-Parakeet, was based entirely on two specimens of this bird held by the Museum, as he was unable to see or collect it in the field.64 He formed a friendship with the Australian Museum‟s Curator, Dr George Bennett, and stayed with him whenever he was in Sydney. Gould studied specimens of the Australian fauna in the Museum before heading off into the field to draw and collect specimens for his publications and his sideline, taxidermy. Bennett became one of Gould‟s collectors, and his publishing agent in Sydney, and purchased for the Museum copies of The Birds of Australia careful field notes, was the first attempt to bring these unique fauna under review … Gould … conferred large benefits on Australian science. His pioneering works of reference combined scientific accuracy with aesthetic appeal while his influence reached down into the present century to have a stimulating influence on ornithological and zoological science.‟ Ann Mozley Moyal (ed. and intro.), Scientists in Nineteenth Century Australia: A Documentary History, Cassell Australia, Stanmore, NSW, 1976, pp. 62–3. The doyen of Gould studies, Gordon C. Sauer, wrote of Gould that „In the field of natural history the accomplishments of this man in his 76 years of life from 1804 to 1881 are truly monumental. No other ornithologist has ever exceeded (or will ever exceed) the number of Gould‟s bird discoveries and the magnitude and splendor of his folio publications.‟ Gordon C. Sauer, John Gould: The Bird Man: A Chronology and Bibliography, Lansdowne Editions, Melbourne, 1982, p. xv. See also Roslyn Russell, The Business of Nature: John Gould and Australia, National Library of Australia, Canberra, 2011. 64 John Gould, The Birds of Australia, 36 parts, published from 1841 to 1848. George Bennett described Gould visiting the Australian Museum in 1839 and seeing a bowerbird‟s bower collected by his own brother-in-law, Charles Coxen, „which determined him to direct his attention to it, and to ascertain every particular relating to this peculiar feature in the bird‟s oeconomy‟. George Bennett, Gatherings of a Naturalist in Australia, first published 1860, this edition Currawong Facsimile Classic, The Currawong Press, Milson‟s Point, NSW, 1982, p. 235; „Gould and the Australian Museum‟, John Gould Inc., online exhibition, http://gould.australianmuseum.net.au/museum/ viewed 28 December 2009. 48 and The Mammals of Australia, the two publications that brought Gould lasting fame in Australia as „the father of Australian nature study‟.65 Bennett and later Curators of the Australian Museum maintained contact with Gould, exchanging specimens and correspondence with him. Elizabeth Gould‟s brother, Charles Coxen, also collected for Gould, and was later a leading figure in the establishment of the Queensland Museum.66 John and Elizabeth Gould also visited Alexander and William Sharp Macleay at Elizabeth Bay House and made use of their collections, and the gratitude Gould owed them for their assistance was expressed in his preface to The Birds of Australia.67
Travellers such as Darwin and the Goulds and the Austrian botanist Baron Charles von Hügel are representative of those who came to the Australasian colonies with a primarily scientific purpose, whether for exploration, collecting or investigating the natural environment. The works they published, while often elegant and informative, and in the case of Darwin, revealing much about his perceptions of the nature of the societies he visited, differ in their emphasis from those that were written by a much larger group of travelling authors who arrived in the Australasian colonies from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. Visits by these writers were made over the years in which museum institutions in the Australasian colonies continued to proliferate.68 As Susan Sheets-Pyenson writes, „Images of Victorian palaces of science danced in the heads of museum
65 The Gould League celebrated its centenary in 2009. It now honours the work of both John and Elizabeth Gould in Australian nature study. Gould League viewed 1 March 2009, http://www.gould.org.au/html/GouldLeagueCentenary2009.asp. 66 Ibid.; Coxen, Charles (1809–1876), Australian Dictionary of Biography – Online Edition, http://adbonline.anu.edu/au/A030453b.htm, viewed 28 December 2009 67 Jones and Stackhouse, Gentleman Scientists, p. 10 68 Discussions of the creation of colonial museums in Australia and New Zealand subsequent to the establishment of the Australian Museum, and of some of their influential directors – a substantial story in itself – can be found in a range of sources, including Susan Sheets-Pyenson, Cathedrals of Science: The Development of Colonial Natural History Museums During the Late Nineteenth Century, McGill-Queen‟s University Press, Montreal, Canada, 1988, Ann Moyal , A Bright and Savage Land: Scientists in Colonial Australia, Collins, Sydney, 1986, John M. Mackenzie, Museums and Empire: Natural History, Human Cultures and Colonial Identities, Manchester University Press, Manchester and New York, 2009, and histories of individual museums such as Carolyn Rasmussen (ed.), A Museum for the People: A History of Museum Victoria and its Predecessors, 1854–2000, Scribe Publications, Carlton, Vic, 2001. 49 directors in the hinterland, and they sought to create reasonable facsimiles under adverse circumstances‟.69
The second wave of authors to visit Australia and New Zealand in the second half of the nineteenth century, including some of the literary leading lights of the Victorian world such as Anthony Trollope, James Anthony Froude, and Mark Twain, gave their opinions on the colonial museums they encountered in the colonies. These are discussed in Chapter Five, „Commenting on the Colonies‟. Some of the authors, in common with a large proportion of the British public, would have encountered the Australasian colonies in material form during a visit to the Great Exhibition of 1851. It is to this key moment in the story of empire and museums that this thesis now turns, including the views of members of British literary society on this material expression of imperialism.
69 Sheets-Pyenson, Cathedrals of Science, p. 11. 50
Chapter Three: Exhibitions display an empire
Colonial museums were in the vanguard when it came to representing the Australasian colonies abroad in the great international exhibitions that flourished from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth century. They played a major role in ensuring that the products and natural wonders of their colonies were made accessible to the world through this new promotional mechanism, the origins and impact of which must now be considered.
International exhibitions – displays of empire
By the mid-nineteenth century a new instrument had been created to showcase the material culture of the imperial metropole and its colonial periphery – the international exhibition. The international exhibitions of the nineteenth century, writes historian Graeme Davison, ‗were the main symbolic battleground on which nations demonstrated their prowess and tested the strength of their rivals‘.1 From Britain‘s first prototypical event in 1851 – the Great Exhibition staged in the Crystal Palace in London‘s Hyde Park – and later iterations of the same idea in Britain‘s imperial capital, to Expositions Universelles in Paris and International Exhibitions in the principal cities of colonies of the British Empire – Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland, Calcutta, Adelaide, Hobart, Christchurch, Dunedin – to Philadelphia, and to Chicago‘s World‘s Columbian Exposition in 1893, the exhibition phenomenon constituted a prime staging ground for displays of national and imperial pride. Ewan Johnston calls these international exhibitions ‗both an example of, and a metaphor for the imperial idea‘. They were ‗carefully planned and arranged set pieces of imperial
1 Graeme Davison, ‗The Culture of the International Exhibitions‘, in David Dunstan (ed.), Victorian Icon: the Royal Exhibition Building, Melbourne, Exhibition Trustees/Australian Scholarly Publishing, Kew, Victoria, 1996, p. 11. 51 propaganda‘ that acted to justify ‗imperial expansion, the subjugation of indigenous peoples, and the consumption of their natural resources‘.2
Maryanne McCubbin says of nineteenth-century international exhibitions, in a passage that amply demonstrates the mélange that they were ‗a mixture of international diplomatic ritual, agricultural show, trade show, shop, museum, technological college, fair, sideshow, food hall, drinking festival, concert, art gallery, mechanics‘ institute, garden promenade, the international exhibition genre was a multi-dimensioned phenomenon, jam- packed with a dizzying array of symbols and materials‘.3
International exhibitions, in addition to providing a performative platform for national and imperial aggrandisement by means other than warfare, also adumbrated a peculiarly nineteenth-century method of utilising material culture. As Davison points out, the exhibition idea arose in the mid-nineteenth century from the humble context of provincial exhibitions staged by mechanics‘ and industrial design institutes in the industrial north of England. These were based on the principle of ‗learning by looking‘, itself a function of the Victorian age‘s belief in the value and necessity of ‗improvement‘ as an essential ingredient of personal and social progress:
Only if we appreciate the capacity of objects to stir the curiosity and imagination of nineteenth-century people will we understand the popular appeal of the
2 Ewan Johnston, ‗‘A Valuable and Tolerably Extensive Collection of Native and Other Products‘: New Zealand at the Crystal Palace‘, in Jeffrey A. Auerbach and Peter H. Hoffenberg (eds), Britain, the Empire, and the World at the Great Exhibition of 1851, Ashgate, Aldershot, UK, 2008, p. 77. 3 Maryanne McCubbin, ‗International Exhibitions‘, review of Peter Proudfoot, Roslyn Maguire and Robert Freestone (eds), Colonial City Global City: Sydney’s International Exhibition 1879, Crossing Press, Sydney, 2000, in Museum National, Vol 10, No 1, August 2001, p. 27. Andrea Witcomb, in Re-Imagining the Museum: Beyond the Mausoleum, Routledge, London and New York, 2003, pp. 19–21 has also commented on the ‗jumble of foreignness‘ that characterised international exhibitions, particularly those such as the World‘s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, and generated a ‗modern cosmopolitan sensibility‘ more attuned to popular leisure pastimes such as promenading the streets of the modern city than ‗classifications of anthropology or with governmental programs for civic reform‘. This interpretation is strengthened by the ways in which display techniques in museums and department stores were both influenced by each other, and by the exhibits in international exhibitions. 52 international exhibition … The nineteenth-century exhibition extended the scientific principles of classification and comparison from the world of nature to the built environment.4
While the Great Exhibition wields the most iconic power of any in the nineteenth century, it was not in actuality the first event to display the fruits of industry and artistry in this fashion. This honour goes to the French: their displays of the arts and industries of France began in 1789, with the eleventh held in 1849.5 After the Great Exhibition in London the French would seize the baton again temporarily with their series of ever-more- sumptuous Expositions Universelles, culminating in 1889 with the Paris Exposition that had as its centrepiece the Eiffel Tower.
The credit for taking up the French idea in 1849 and promoting it to arguably the most influential man in England, Prince Albert the Prince Consort, belongs to Sir Henry Cole. He had become a member of the Royal Society of Arts after winning a silver medal for a tea-set at an exhibition staged by the Society in the 1840s. Once the Society – effectively Cole in this instance – had gained the Prince Consort‘s ear, this earnest and hard-working man, 6 who was looking for ways to influence his adopted British society for good and to try to stem the tide of revolution that had engulfed Europe only two years earlier in 1848, was finally persuaded that a great International Exhibition could promote both the
4 Davison, ‗Culture of International Exhibitions‘, p. 12. 5 This view is challenged by Graham Pont and Peter Proudfoot, who admit that the ‗immediate inspiration for the international exhibition was French; but that ‗It was England that initiated the industrial society and England provided the original models of the industrial exhibition, as well as creating the conceptual foundation of the universal exhibition’. Graham Pont and Peter Proudfoot, ‗Sacred and Secular: Fairs, Markets, National Exhibitions and Mechanics‘ Institutes‘, in Peter Proudfoot, Roslyn Maguire and Robert Freestone (eds), Colonial City Global City: Sydney’s International Exhibition 1879, Crossing Press, Sydney, 2000, pp. 231–237. 6 Simon Schama, A History of Britain 3 1776–2000: The Fate of Empire, BBC Worldwide, London, 2002, p. 169, describes the ‗seriousness with which he [Prince Albert] took his royal duties‘. This included ‗throwing himself into a madness of statistical investigations, plans, inquiries … By the time Victoria arrived at her desk each morning there was a neat tower of pre-sorted, pre-screened papers for her to peruse, approve, sign.‘ Martyn Downer, in his biography of Lord Howard Elphinstone, The Queen’s Knight, Corgi Books, London, 2008, p. 111, writes of ‗Albert‘s ceaseless urge to educate and inform, and of his desire to win the approval of his wife‘s still sceptical subjects‘. 53
‗gospel of work and the gospel of peace‘.7 Both of these high desiderata were to be embodied in the material culture produced by the whole industrialised world and amicably displayed under one gigantic roof. In his inaugural address, redolent of what one commentator has called a ‗giddy positivism‘,8 Albert implied that the moral lesson about the virtue of progress should go even further, stating that the Exhibition‘s purpose was to present ‗a true test and a living picture of the point of development at which the whole of mankind has arrived … and a new starting point, from which all nations will be able to direct their further exertions‘.9
This vision came to earth and was grounded in a vast cathedral of glass designed by Joseph Paxton, the designer of a large conservatory at the Duke of Devonshire‘s seat of Chatsworth. The building that housed the Great Exhibition was effectively a giant conservatory too, and has provided a bonanza for those who enjoy listing the vital statistics of buildings and comparing them to others from that day to this. It covered over 7.6 hectares: a favourite comparison, then and now, is to give its area as ‗six times that of St Paul‘s Cathedral‘.10
7 The received view of Prince Albert‘s enthusiasm for the Exhibition – and indeed his responsibility for the idea – has been challenged by recent scholarship. According to Jeffrey Auerbach, in his book, Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on Display, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1999, Prince Albert ‗was reluctant to become involved in the planning process‘, and ‗Many Britons responded with apathy if not outright opposition, even after the exhibition opened … The exhibits were a hodge-podge at best and severely criticized in many quarters.‘ (p1). Nevertheless, on the Exhibition‘s opening day, 1 May, the Queen, enthusing over her adored Consort‘s project, wrote to King Leopold of the Belgians that it was ‗the greatest day in our history, the most beautiful and imposing‘. Quoted in Simon Schama, A History of Britain 3: 1776–2000 The Fate of Empire, BBC Books, London, 2002, p.111. 8 Michael Sorkin (ed.), Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space, Hill and Wang, New York, 1992, p.209. Sorkin, in his essay in this book, ‗See you in Disneyland‘, described the 1851 Great Exhibition as ‗the first great utopia of global capital‘ and, in a delightful metaphor describes the sober German Prince Albert as ‗a Mouseketeer avant la lettre’ (ibid.) 9 Quoted in Asa Briggs, Victorian People: Some Reassessments of People, Institutions, Ideas and Events 1851–1867, Oldhams Press Limited, Long Acre, London, 1954, p. 48. 10 ‗The Great Exhibition of 1851‘, viewed 30 January 2011 at http://www.britainexpress.com/History/great_exhibition.htm is only one web reference among many that cites the dimensions and construction details of the Crystal Palace. 54
As befitted the intention of the host country to showcase its wares, half the exhibition space was devoted to the products of British industry: the rest of the world occupied the remainder. The whole ensemble, with a glittering glass fountain at its centre, was overwhelming – there were over 100,000 exhibits from 13,937 exhibitors. An equally massive outpouring of words described them, in numerous journals, commentaries and catalogues. The Exhibition ran from 1 May to October 1851, by which time six million visitors had paid to see it: as one historian has commented, this number, ‗allowing for foreign and repeat visits, represented almost one-fifth of the population of Britain‘.11 Shilling entry days facilitated the participation of the less affluent members of society, creating considerable nervousness amongst the governing classes at this democratic experiment (and expressions of revulsion from some at its physical manifestations).The Duke of Wellington feared an influx of revolutionary foreigners.12 These apprehensions were not fulfilled: as Kenneth Hudson remarked in his survey of the conditions of entry to museums and exhibitions in the nineteenth century, ‗The working people of Britain turned out to be better disciplined and more intelligent than was generally considered possible, or proper.‘13
Writers respond to the Great Exhibition
How did Britain‘s literary and cultural opinion makers respond to the Great Exhibition and its colossal container in Hyde Park? Douglas Jerrold, the editor of Punch, dubbed Paxton‘s glass structure the ‗Crystal Palace‘, described by historian Asa Briggs as ‗the perfect designation: it seemed to
11 Briggs, Victorian People, p. 48. 12 Schama, Fate of Empire, pp.115–116; Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas: the Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World’s Fairs, 1851–1939, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1988, p. 31. 13 Kenneth Hudson, A Social History of Museums: What the Visitors Thought, Macmillan, London, 1975, p. 43. 55 catch not only the work-a-day realities but also the hidden dreams of England in 1851‘.14
William Makepeace Thackeray hymned it in his ‗May Day Ode‘:
But yesterday a naked sod The dandies sneered from Rotten Row; And cantered o‘er it to and fro; And see ‗tis done! As though ‗twere by a wizard‘s rod A blazing arch of lucid glass Leaps like a fountain from the grass To meet the sun.15
Other members of the Victorian literati were not so effusive: John Ruskin, who had attacked the exhibition display policy, refused to go at all and ‗remained at home, ignoring the public birth of the international exhibition movement‘, choosing instead to listen to the birds sing, and to work on the second volume of the Stones of Venice.16 Elizabeth Barrett Browning was another literary naysayer: in her poem ‗Casa Guidi Windows‘, her political views coloured her perception of the Great Exhibition. In the view of literary historian Deirdre David, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, in her ‗impressionistic meditation on Italian culture and politics … disdains Britain‘s celebration at the Crystal Palace in 1851 of her commercial victories and indicts her refusal to support Italian national aspirations‘. David has described Browning‘s poem, ‗Casa Guidi Windows‘, as an ‗attack upon worldly greed and upon Britain‘s isolationist policies, both fed by imperial expansion‘, and quotes the relevant stanza, with its concluding line heavily laced with sarcasm:
14 Asa Briggs, Victorian People, p. 45. 15 Quoted in ibid., p. 45; Douglas Jerrold and W. M. Thackeray also quoted in Sylvia Marchant, ‗The Crystal Palace and the Great Exhibition of 1851‘, National Library News, April 2002, pp. 7–10. 16 Peter H. Hoffenberg, An Empire on Display: English, Indian and Australian Exhibitions from the Crystal Palace to the Great War, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2001, p. 1; Robert Hewison, John Ruskin: The Argument of the Eye, Thames and Hudson, London, 1976, p. 186. 56
But now, the world is busy; it has grown A Fair-going world. Imperial England draws The flowing ends of the earth from Fez, Canton, Delhi and Stockholm, Athens and Madrid, The Russias and the vast Americas, As if a Queen drew in her robes amid Her golden cincture,—isles, peninsulas, Capes, continents, far inland countries hid By jasper-sands and hills of chrysopras, All trailing in their splendours through the door Of the gorgeous Crystal Palace.17
Novelist and travel writer Anthony Trollope, on the other hand, was not disturbed by any qualms about mercantile expansion but, as a true observer of humanity, was more interested in seeing the people who attended the Great Exhibition than in the masses of goods on display. He wrote to his brother Tom in Florence:
We intend going to see the furriners in June. I think it will be great fun seeing such a crowd. As for the Exhibition itself, I would not give a straw for it, – except the building itself, and my wife‘s piece of work which is in it.18
Trollope became more enthusiastic about the Great Exhibition after his wife Rose won a bronze medal for her embroidered triptych screen of a knight bearing the Trollope family crest. He expressed to his mother and fellow novelist and travel writer, Fanny Trollope, his regret that Tom was too busy to come to the Exhibition: ‗I am sure it is a thing a man ought to see … It is a great thing to get a new pleasure. We are all agog about going to London. Rose is looking up her silk dresses and I am meditating a new hat.‘19 Surprisingly, since he was so positive about it in his correspondence, Trollope only alluded to the Exhibition in passing in his novels, using it, for example, as the setting for a scene in The Three Clerks, in which ‗two ambitious young civil servants Alaric Tudor and Harry
17 Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ‗Casa Guidi Windows‘, 2:577–87, quoted in Deirdre David, Rule Britannia: Women, Empire, and Victorian Writing, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, USA, 1995, p. 22. 18 Richard Mullen, Anthony Trollope: a Victorian in his World, Duckworth, London, 1990, p. 232. 19 Ibid. 57
Norman spent an evening walking up and down between the works of statuary in the great central aisle of the Exhibition, talking ―with something like confidence of their future prospects‖‘.20
Charles Dickens was involved with the early planning for the Exhibition, as a member of the Central Committee of the Working Classes. Four months after his appointment to the Committee he persuaded its other members to dissolve it on his motion. For Dickens, this attempt to define the role of the working classes and facilitate arrangements for their participation in the Exhibition was a sham, as there would be no special efforts, aside from the shilling entry fee on certain days, to achieve what is now termed ‗social inclusion‘. Dickens‘ biographer Peter Ackroyd summed up his subject‘s disenchantment with the goals of the Great Exhibition: ‗he feared that the emphasis on England‘s commercial glories would blind governors and governed alike to the real needs and demands of the country‘.21 Once Dickens saw the Exhibition – which he visited twice – he was unimpressed: his words anticipated those of many who would visit this and the other great international exhibitions over the next half-century (and those who have visited large museums from that day to this): ‗… so many things bewildered me. I have a natural horror of sights, and the fusion of so many sights in one has not decreased it.22
Dickens took a different view of a natural history display arranged concurrently with the Great Exhibition by ornithologist John Gould, who had not long before completed the serial publication of The Birds of Australia, and had embarked on the publication of The Mammals of Australia.23 It was not, however, the fauna of Australia that Gould displayed, but his enormous collection of hummingbirds from the Americas. Gould‘s hummingbird exhibition was seen by over 80,000
20 Victoria Glendinning, Anthony Trollope, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1993, p. 191. 21 Peter Ackroyd, Dickens, Minerva, London, 1990, p. 618. 22 Ibid., pp. 665–666. 23 The Mammals of Australia was published in parts issued from 1845 to 1863. 58 visitors, and complemented the industrial wonders displayed in the Crystal Palace.24 Displaying considerable showmanship, Gould mounted the glittering little birds (they retain their colours in death because of the particular anatomy of their feather barbs25) in revolving showcases, lit so their plumage would glisten. The exhibition attracted royal patronage: Queen Victoria enthused in her journal after visiting it on 10 June 1851 that she could not ‗imagine anything so lovely‘ as the hummingbirds, with ‗their variety, & the extraordinary brilliancy of their colours‘.26 Dickens conjured up a vivid metaphor, ‗Tresses of the Day Star‘, for the title of his adulatory article on Gould‘s hummingbird exhibition in Household Words.27 John Ruskin lamented after seeing the hummingbird exhibition that he had wasted his life in studying mineralogy, and should have studied the lives and plumage of birds instead: ‗If I could only have seen a humming-bird fly, it would have been an epoch in my life,‘ he wrote.28
John Gould‘s hummingbird exhibition sealed his reputation as ‗one of the greatest ornithologists alive‘.29 Isabella Tree, in her biography of John Gould, articulated the wider meaning of the hummingbird display in the context of imperial science: the display, she wrote, ‗was a testimony, not only to the genius of John Gould, but to the spirited determination of his collectors, to the conquering of mountains, and the penetration of the darkest jungles, to the far-reaching arms of the British Empire itself‘.30 While Britain no longer possessed the North American colonies where
24 Gordon C. Sauer and Ann Datta (ed. and compiled), John Gould, the Bird Man: correspondence, with a chronology of his life and works, Mansfield Centre, CT, USA, in association with the Natural History Museum, London, p. 4. 25 Judith Pascoe, The Hummingbird Cabinet: A Rare and Curious History of Romantic Collectors, Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London, 2006, p. 33. 26 Queen Victoria. Manuscript. 1851. Queen Victoria‘s Journal. Collection: The Royal Library, Windsor Castle, through the courtesy of Her Gracious Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, entry 10 June 1851, quoted in Sauer and Datta, op. cit., p. 323. 27 Charles Dickens‘ article on Gould‘s hummingbird exhibition, ‗The Tresses of the Day Star‘, was published in Household Words, No. 65, 1851. 28 Quoted in Pascoe, Hummingbird Cabinet, p. 43. 29 Isabella Tree, The Bird Man: the Extraordinary Story of John Gould, first published 1991, this edition Ebury Press, London, 2004, p. 235. 30 Ibid., p. 231. 59 hummingbirds lived (although it did have colonial possessions such as British Guiana and the Anglophone Caribbean islands where hummingbirds are still present today), the discovery and naming of a new species ‗was one of the most prestigious forms of plunder to be had from a foreign country‘,31 as Dickens acknowledged in Household Words. Gould had significantly advanced the species count for hummingbirds: ‗Only ten species of hummingbirds were known to Linnaeus; Gould had collected over 300, many of which were only recently made known to science.‘32 Tree commented that ‗John Gould‘s part in the Great Exhibition fulfilled the greatest of Victorian expectations‘.33
Novelist Charlotte Brontë at first disdained the Great Exhibition, until she was invited to London to stay with the family of her publisher, George Smith. She wrote to Mrs Smith:
Before I received your note, I was nursing a comfortable and complacent conviction that I had quite made up my mind not to go to London this year: the Great Exhibition was nothing – only a series of bazaars under a magnified hot- house – and I myself was in a pharisaical state of superiority to temptation. But Pride had its fall. I read your invitation and immediately felt a great need to descend from my stilts.34
Charlotte‘s first of five visits to the Great Exhibition saw her recant her previous view: ‗It was very fine – gorgeous – animated – bewildering‘, she wrote to Patrick Brontë. Her next letter to him amplified her breathless first impressions: ‗Its grandeur does not consist in one thing, but in the unique assemblage of all things – Whatever human industry has created – you find there.‘35
Nevertheless, for Charlotte Brontë the Exhibition experience palled, despite the fact that on one occasion she was escorted by a distinguished
31 Ibid. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid., p. 230. 34 Quoted in Juliet Barker,The Brontës, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1994, p. 673. 35 Ibid., p. 676. 60
Scottish scientist (and inventor of the kaleidoscope), Sir David Brewster, who explained to her the nature of the curiosities on display. Charlotte later told her friend and former headmistress at Roe Head School, Miss Wooler, in direct contradiction to her words to her father: ‗I was never able to get up any raptures on the subject. It is an excessively bustling place – and after all its wonders appeal exclusively to the eye and rarely touch the heart or head.‘36
The ‗bustling‘ qualities of the Great Exhibition and the appeal to the eye disdained by Charlotte Brontë were not viewed as negatives by the organisers. Industrious bustle and ‗learning by looking‘37 summed up many of the positives of the event for them; while the desire to see these conditions reproduced elsewhere fuelled the half-century boom in similar exhibitions that looked to the Great Exhibition as the real progenitor and best exemplar of the form. A passage from Thomas Hardy‘s 1894 short story, ‗The Fiddler of the Reels‘, captures both the Great Exhibition of 1851‘s enduring reputation as the greatest show of all; and the watershed between two eras of history it was thought to have represented. The ‗old gentleman‘ quoted here expresses sentiments about the imaginative hold of the Great Exhibition of 1851 that are still shared by most British historians and popularisers of that nation‘s history, for whom the event has, according to historian Peter Hoffenberg, in An Empire on Display, a ‗nearly religious aura‘.38
36 Ibid., p. 677. 37 Graeme Davison, ‗Exhibitions‘, Australian Cultural History, No. 2 1982/3 Institutions & Culture in Australia, Australian Academy of the Humanities and the History of Ideas Unit, ANU, Canberra, pp. 5–21. Davison writes ‗It was the Victorians who perfected the science of learning by looking, and it is to them that we owe the development of its characteristic institutions: the museum, the art gallery, the diorama, the cyclorama and the tableau vivant.‘ (p. 6) 38 Hoffenberg, Empire on Display p. 5. Davison, ‗Exhibitions‘, also ascribes this quality to the Great Exhibition: ‗As the contemplation of nature, and reflection upon its wonderful order and complexity, were calculated to inspire feelings of religious devotion, so did the contemplation of the man-made universe inspire feelings of pride in human achievement. Not for nothing had the exhibition movement been linked, in its origins, with Owenite and Comtean aspirations towards a new ―religion of humanity‖‘. (p. 6) 61
‗Talking of Exhibitions, World‘s Fairs, and what not, ‗said the old gentleman, ‗I would not go round the corner to see a dozen of them nowadays. The only exhibition that ever made, or ever will make, any impression upon my imagination was the first of the series, the parent of them all, and now a thing of old times – the Great Exhibition of 1851, in Hyde Park, London. None of the younger generation can realise the sense of novelty it produced in us who were then in our prime. A noun substantive went so far as to become an adjective, in honour of the occasion. It was ―exhibition‖ hat, ―exhibition‖ razor strop, ―exhibition‖ watch; nay, even ―exhibition‖ weather, ―exhibition‖ spirits, sweethearts, babies, wives – for the time. ‗For South Wessex, the year formed in many ways an extraordinary chronological frontier or transit line, at which there occurred what one might call a precipice in Time. As in a geological fault, we had presented to us a sudden bringing of ancient and modern into absolute contact, such as probably in no other single year since the Conquest was ever witnessed in this part of the country.‘39
The Great Exhibition, and those that followed throughout the nineteenth century, gave a powerful boost to museums. Kenneth Hudson, in A Social History of Museums, describes their impact on public opinion:
… international exhibitions, on both sides of the Atlantic, gave museums a social power that they had never had before. They attracted very large numbers of visitors and they compelled both governments and the leaders of fashion and taste to recognise that the sciences and the useful arts were proper concerns of the community as a whole. Formal learning and social needs were brought closer together and the definition of culture was considerably broadened.40
The Great Exhibition also delivered tangible benefits to museum in the short term: the ‗very considerable profit‘ of £186,000 was spent on a block of land to house a complex of museums and cultural institutions at South Kensington that would become known as ‗Albertopolis‘.41 The Great Exhibition had brought home to the British government ‗the frightening realization that British Manufacture did not produce goods of the same aesthetic quality as its European counterparts‘.42 Now a world famous
39 Thomas Hardy, ‗The Fiddler of the Reels‘, in Life’s Little Ironies, and A Few Crusted Characters, Osgood, McIlvaine & Co, London, 1894, p. 179–180. 40 Hudson, Social History of Museums, p. 41. 41 Liza Picard, Victorian London: the Life of a City 1840–1870, Phoenix, London, 2005, p. 275. 42 Witcomb, Re-imagining the Museum, p. 22. 62 museum devoted to art and design, the South Kensington Museum (renamed the Victoria & Albert Museum in 1899, and now familiarly termed the ‗V&A‘), was built to house the permanent collections from the Great Exhibition, and to educate British manufacturers and the consuming public in the principles of good design. Along with the Royal Albert Hall and the Imperial College of Science and Technology, the V&A still perpetuates the spirit of the 1851 event, continues to display examples of fine design from around the world, and immortalises Prince Albert‘s memory.43 Two more museums, the British Museum (Natural History), now known as the Natural History Museum (and repository for John Gould‘s hummingbirds); and the Science Museum are also part of the South Kensington complex.
Australia at the Great Exhibition and later international exhibitions
Thackeray, in his ‗May Day Ode‘ celebrating the opening of the Great Exhibition, focused on temporal and climatic differences between the imperial centre and the Australian colonial periphery, rather than on those colonies‘ representation by way of any impressive material culture at the Exhibition:
This moment round her empire‘s shores The winds of Austral winter sweep, And thousands lie in midnight sleep At rest today. Oh! awful is that crown of yours, Queen of innumerable realms Sitting beneath the budding elms Of English May!44
Louise Douglas has suggested that a certain degree of ambivalence underlined the ways in which the Australian colonies negotiated their identities and put them on display in the Great Exhibition and those that followed: ‗Australia‘s colonies were caught between their desire to present
43 A. N. Wilson, The Victorians, Hutchinson, London, 2002, p. 144. 44 Quoted in Christopher Hobhouse, 1851 and the Crystal Palace: Being an Account of the Great Exhibition and its Contents, John Murray, London, 1950, p. 171. 63 a picture of modernity, democracy and civilisation and the perception of them as places for exploitation, and at the very best, of opportunity and potential.‘45
In truth, the four Australian colonies – New South Wales,46 Victoria, Van Diemen‘s Land (Tasmania) and South Australia – that put their goods on display in the Great Exhibition‘s colonial courts did not create an overpowering impression at this first foray on the international stage. Peter Hoffenberg has commented that
Many contemporaries found Australia‘s poor showing rather ironic. After all, those colonies were increasingly important to Victorian Britain‘s political economy, global power, national identity and social order. Considerable public attention, admittedly not all of it favourable, was being paid back home in England to such ‗possessions‘ in the press and literature. News items and fictional stories covered an array of Australian topics, such as the end of convict transportation, Aboriginal–white relations, the establishment of new colonies (South Australia in 1836 and Victoria in 1851) and ‗responsible government‘, and the discovery of gold on the eve of the Great Exhibition.47
One of the many commentators on the Exhibition, John Tallis, verged on sarcasm in his description of the Australian displays:
The colonies of Australia, although among the most important of our possessions as producers of raw materials required for our staple manufactures, as large consumers of our manufactures, and as great fields for emigration, had nothing very new or very showy to exhibit. New South Wales, Port Phillip, and South Australia, all sent barrels of fine wheat and flour, which were satisfactory as
45 Louise Douglas, ‗Representing Colonial Australia at British, American and European International Exhibitions‘, reCollections: Journal of the National Museum of Australia, Volume 3 number 1, viewed on 27 March 2008, http://recollections.nma.gov.au/issues/vol_3_no_1/papers/representing_colonial_australia 46 On 1 May 1851, when the Great Exhibition opened, the colony of New South Wales included the Port Phillip district. On 1 July the Port Phillip District was proclaimed as the separate colony of Victoria. 47 Peter Hoffenberg, ‗‘Nothing Very New or Very Showy to Exhibit‘?: Australia at the Great Exhibition and After‘, in Auerbach and Hoffenberg (eds), Britain, the Empire, and the World at the Great Exhibition of 1851, pp. 94–5. 64 proving that the intending colonist might depend on cheap bread in those distant regions.48
Australian wool and tallow, he continued, could be seen in London and Liverpool warehouses; while timber from Van Diemen‘s Land, while ‗very ornamental‘, was not economically viable as an item of trade as ‗The distance is too great to enable it to stand the competition of countries nearer at hand‘. More noteworthy for this observer was a ‗set of clever water-colours‘ in the South Australian section, showing the country around the Burra copper mine and – iconic images of Australia even now – ‗bullocks in drays and stockmen riding after cattle‘. There was also a ‗beautiful view of Camden, where Macarthur first introduced the fine- woolled sheep, which has proved a living mine of wealth to the whole continent of Australia‘. Mention of this key primary product was enough to cause the commentator to resume his sardonic tone:
Our colonial brethren, who know well how they are appreciated in the City, will excuse us from dwelling on sources of greatness which are more felt than seen: there is nothing picturesque in a sack of wheat, though the grain be ―heavy and bright-coloured;‖ there is nothing interesting in a tin of preserved Australian beef, excellent though it be, unless to a hungry man; little variety of ―tone or colour‖ in a fleece fine enough to make the fortune of a Yorkshire manufacturer; and as for copper ore, the worst specimens are often the most sparkling. Bottles of Australian wine informed those who were before ignorant, that wine is as easily grown in that country as cider is here.49
Clearly Australian primary produce lacked the essential aesthetic elements for effective and eye-catching display: it was worthy, but dull. Simon Schama, in his coverage of ‗the showcases of imperial trade at the Great Exhibition of 1851‘ noted that the bounty of tradeable goods from the colonies, on show in London, had also come at a price:
Any account of the successful operation of free-trade colonialism in these countries needs to see the immense dislocation of native cultures not just as an unfortunate sideshow, but as the precondition of that success. If securing huge
48 John Tallis, History and Description of the Crystal Palace: and the Exhibition of the World’s Industry in 1851, printed and published by John Tallis & Co, London and New York, c1851, p. 53. 49 Ibid. 65 areas of grazing pasture for Australian merino sheep meant moving on or slaughtering the occasional tribe of Aborigines, so be it.50
Australia‘s contributions to international exhibitions also included Indigenous Australian artefacts. At least one commentator on the Great Exhibition had grasped the irony of the display of four models of canoes used by Tasmanian Aboriginal people. As Douglas has noted, he had ‗deplored the decimation of Indigenous Tasmanians‘, giving those responsible for organising displays from the Australian colonies ‗an early indication that some parts of the international community were aware of the decline in Aboriginal society, making their presence in overseas exhibitions potentially problematic‘.51
By virtue of their inclusion in these displays, and those that followed, Indigenous Australian objects entered what Hoffenberg calls ‗a political economy of material culture in which officials created new values for those imperial and national objects. Exhibits were provided with meaning from the ways in which the commissioners displayed and described them.‘52 In this context, Aboriginal artefacts such as weapons acquired a range of meanings and values extrinsic to their cultural significance for their original creators and owners. These new values – ‗as contrasts to settler manufactures and fine arts, representations of the colonial commissioners‘ power to preserve the ―authentic‖ past for display, and as goods to be exchanged for other exhibition displays‘53 – acted to submerge that significance in the bustle and variety of the imperial marketplace of an international exhibition. Aboriginal artefacts were also deployed as part of a narrative of colonial progress, and interpreted as the crude technology of a culture that was ‗fast dying out‘.54 Alternatively, Douglas suggests, they
50 Schama, Fate of Empire, pp. 240–241. 51 Douglas, ‘Representing Colonial Australia‘, p. 11. 52 Hoffenberg, Empire on Display, p. 75. 53 Ibid. 54 Hoffenberg, Empire on Display, pp. 143–4. 66 served to illustrate the heroism of Australia‘s settlers on the frontier in confronting hostile Aboriginal people defending their traditional lands, ‗who were to be feared and overcome‘.55 There is no suggestion that Aboriginal people played any part at all in negotiating how their culture should be displayed in international exhibitions, nor as exhibitors themselves. The reverse was the case: in international exhibitions held in later years in Australia, Aboriginal people‘s participation was limited to performing ‗savage‘ ceremonies and demonstrating tools and weapons classified as ‗primitive‘ along the Social Darwinist continuum.56
Despite the initial discouraging response to the antipodean displays at the Great Exhibition, the international exhibition idea had taken off. Australian exhibitors began to take the whole enterprise far more seriously, as ‗it had become evident that the level of competition at international exhibitions required objects to be more conspicuous‘.57 They were assisted by the fact that the imperial organisers offered them more display space and made greater efforts generally to include them, along with other colonies.58 In 1862, at the London International Exhibition, the efforts of the Australian colonies – and those of the Commissioners who organised the displays – evoked a more positive response.
Of all the Australian colonies exhibiting at international shows, Victoria – newly rich from the 1850s goldrushes – was ‗particularly aggressive‘,
55 Douglas, ‗Representing Colonial Australia, p. 11; Valda Rigg, ‗Curators of the Colonial Idea: the Museum and the Exhibition as Agents of Bourgeois Ideology in Nineteenth- Century NSW‘, Public History Review, Vol. 3, 1994, pp. 188–203 has accused the Australian Museum and the organisers of the Sydney International Exhibition of 1879 of displaying Aboriginal material culture for ideological ends: ‗The display of Aboriginal material, consisting largely of weapons and tools to highlight the Aborigines‘ hard primitivism, was useful to the state to underline the triumph of advancing civilization in supplanting the ―savage‖ and ―primitive‖ culture of the indigenous people with the civilization of the English empire-builders.‘ (p. 193) 56 Hoffenberg, Empire on Display, pp. 222–9. 57 Jonathan Sweet, ‗Colonial Exhibition Design: The Tasmanian Timber Tower at the London International Exhibition, 1862‘, Tasmanian Historical Research Association Papers and Proceedings, vol. 44, no. 4, December 1997, p. 244. 58 Hoffenberg, Empire on Display, p. 8. 67 according to Peter Hoffenberg in An Empire on Display. One of Victoria‘s Commissioners for international exhibitions was its senior puisne judge, Sir Redmond Barry, the driving force behind the establishment of several of Victoria‘s major cultural institutions including the University of Melbourne, the State Library and the National Gallery of Victoria.59 Participating in international exhibitions also gave Commissioners the opportunity to secure items to bring home to their colonies to enhance the collections of their cultural institutions: Hoffenberg remarks that ‗Barry was at the forefront of borrowing from overseas cultures to form public taste in the colonies‘.60 He instructed Victoria‘s Agent-General in London to collect material for the Melbourne Public Library, Museum and Art Gallery at the London International Exhibition to ‗exhibit the history of the growth of refinement and intellectual excellence in the arts‘;61 and himself secured ‗very extensive contributions‘62 to those institutions while he was in England for the Exhibition in 1862.
Victoria‘s gold inspired the most striking Australian exhibit at the 1862 London International Exhibition, confounding those who had sneered at Australia‘s unexciting produce displayed in the Great Exhibition in 1851. This was a gilded pyramid designed by prominent architect and exhibition commissioner, J. G. Knight, to represent the amount of gold discovered in the colony since 1851, amounting to 800 tons. The Illustrated London News described this ‗pillar of gold‘ admiringly as ‗set a-glittering by the
59 Peter Ryan, ‗Barry, Sir Redmond (1813–1880), in D. Pike (ed), Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 3 1851-1890 A-C, Melbourne University Press, 1969, pp. 108–111. See also Hoffenberg, ‗Australian Exhibition Commissioners‘, Empire on Display, pp. 42–5. 60 Ibid., p. 45. 61 Sir Redmond Barry to Hugh Childers, August 25, 1860, Redmond Barry Papers, La Trobe Collection, State Library of Victoria, MS 8380, Box 599/1 (B), quoted in ibid., p. 45. 62 Sir Redmond Barry to Mrs. Louisa Barrows, May 20 and August 25, 1862, Redmond Barry Correspondence, La Trobe Collection, State Library of Victoria, MS 8380, Box 599/5, quoted in ibid., p. 45. 68 midday sun‘.63 Jonathan Sweet has described the gold pyramid as ‗one of the most significant exhibits of the century‘:
It was the kingpin of an exhibition narrative that emphasised the discovery of gold in the Colony of Victoria. It affirmed Australia as a rewarding place of settlement, and it symbolised the economic welfare of the British Empire.64
Gold undoubtedly had glamour, but it was not the only Australian product on display that had been fashioned to catch the visitor‘s eye. The Victorian Commissioners had learned a thing or two about display since Australian wool had been disparaged as dull-looking by the commentator at the Great Exhibition eleven years before. Two imposing arches created entirely from bales of Port Phillip wool marked out the Victorian court. The ‗golden fleece‘ was as potent a symbol of colonial wealth as the glitter of gold itself.65
The display in international exhibitions of other articles of primary production from Victoria included exhibits prepared by Ferdinand von Mueller, Director of the Melbourne Botanic Gardens, to which he devoted a great deal of time and effort until late in his life. Mueller had a keen understanding of the rationale for these displays: to encourage trade by showing off the colony‘s produce, and to emphasise its developmental potential:
Mueller … designed his contribution to Victoria‘s displays to show off a range of the colony‘s plant-based products or potential products. He did so with considerable flair, even though the products exhibited varied little over the years, and his exhibits continued to be awarded trophies and commendations. Typically, his display would include a range of dressed timber specimens, prepared from Australian trees, distillation products – especially eucalyptus oil – from Australian plants, and a set of plaster models he had prepared at an early stage of fruits grown in Victorian orchards. An innovation of which he was particularly proud
63 Jonathan Sweet, ‗The Gold Pyramid‘, in T. Stannage (ed.), Gold and Civilisation, Art Exhibitions Australia/National Museum of Australia, Melbourne, 2001, p. 91. 64 Ibid. 65 Roslyn Russell, Literary Links: Celebrating the Literary Relationship Between Australia and Britain, Allen and Unwin, St Leonards, 1997, pp. 41–2. 69 was to have timber specimens prepared in the shape of books which could then be displayed as if they formed a library.66
Not to be outdone by the Victorians, their neighbours across Bass Strait in Van Diemen‘s Land built their own impressive structure, a tower of timber, as the centrepiece of their court in London in 1862. Its design, the work of the Secretary of the Tasmanian Commissioners, George Whiting, had been the matter of much careful thought. It was ‗an innovative object which admirably illustrated the notion of the colonies as the source of raw materials, the Empire sustaining them and an international exhibition bringing them together‘. The hundred-foot tower in its own built environment, which utilised both new and weathered wood from such sites as the Old Hobart Gaol (to demonstrate the durability of the Tasmanian product and also reflect the colony‘s history), ‗provides one of the earliest examples of the application of design to the representation of Australian interests abroad‘.67
And so it went on, throughout the rest of the nineteenth century. Gold and ore pyramids and columns, works of art and craft, machinery and manufactured goods, ranks of tinned meat, bottles of wine, fresh plants and fruit, stuffed animals, photographs and objects from Indigenous Australia, all went on display around the world. As soon as an Australian colony had mustered sufficient goods to display them, its commissioners were off travelling overseas promoting their bailiwick. Queensland, constituted as a separate colony in 1859, was quick off the mark, and by 1862 made its premiere appearance at the London International
66 R. W. Home, A. M. Lucas, Sara Maroske, D. M. Sinkora and J. H. Voigt, Regardfully Yours: Selected Correspondence of Ferdinand von Mueller, vol. III, 1876–1896, Peter Lang, Bern, 2006, pp. 16–17. 67 Jonathan Sweet, ‗Colonial Exhibition Design: The Tasmanian Timber Tower at the London International Exhibition, 1862‘, Tasmanian Historical Research Association Papers and Proceedings, vol. 44, no. 4, December 1997, pp. 242, 249. 70
Exhibition. By the end of the century it had participated in fourteen more as an official exhibitor.68
New Zealand on the world stage
As in the case of the Australian colonies, the products and wares sent from New Zealand ‗formed an exhibit that subordinated the colony to the empire with the emphasis firmly placed on the potential for profit in the natural resources of the new colony‘.69 Nevertheless, there were efforts to mark out ‗a distinctive and appealing identity‘ to differentiate New Zealand from the other Australasian colonies by emphasising the natural environment with its spectacular geothermal regions, displaying skeletons of the extinct moa bird, and above all by making use of the cultural objects of Maori people.70
New Zealand displays in nineteenth-century international exhibitions included objects created by Maori from the very beginning, in the Great Exhibition of 1851, at which Maori productions were displayed: carvings and woven flax kete, woods and tanning barks from a Maori exhibitor, Aperahama Taonui, one of the Maori chiefs who had signed the Treaty of Waitangi eleven years before;71 and flour samples from Maori mills.72
68 They were the 1867 Paris Exposition Universelle, London Annual International Exhibitions 1871-74, 1873 Vienna Universal Exposition, 1876 United States Centennial Exhibition, Philadelphia, 1878 Paris Exposition Universelle, 1879-80 Sydney International Exhibition, 1880-81 Melbourne International Exhibition, 1886 Colonial and Indian Exhibition, London (‗The Colinderies‘), 1888-89 Australian Centennial International Exhibition, Melbourne, 1897 Queensland International Exhibition, Brisbane, 1899 Greater Britain Exhibition, Earl‘s Court, London. Judith McKay, Showing Off: Queensland at World Expositions 1862 to 1988, Central Queensland University Press/Queensland Museum, Rockhampton, 2004, pp.113–114. 69 Johnston, ‗New Zealand at the Crystal Palace‘, p. 78. 70 Ibid. 71 Amiria J. M. Henare, Museums, Anthropology and Imperial Exchange, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2005, pp. 149–150. The fact that Aperahama Taonui‘s name has come down to us as an individual exhibitor is significant: the same cannot be said of any Australian Aboriginal person whose work was exhibited at international exhibitions in the nineteenth century. 72 Conal McCarthy, Exhibiting Maori: A History of Colonial Cultures of Display, Te Papa Press, Wellington, 2007, p. 33. 71
Contrary to the ways in which exhibitors from the Australian colonies used the material culture of their Indigenous people in international exhibitions without either their agency or informed consent, Maori were actively involved in exhibiting their manufactures. As Conal McCarthy has noted, ‗By participating in local and international fairs, Maori saw themselves as partners in colonial development rather than subjects of it‘, thus complicating the picture of international exhibitions as essentially serving ‗the interests of imperialism through the subjugation of native peoples‘.73
Nevertheless, as Amiria Henare has shown, the dominant impulse behind the display of New Zealand‘s products was to promote emigration. A display of greenstone artefacts and other traditional objects juxtaposed with Maori-made European products, along with depictions of Maori ‗engaged in peaceful and industrious tasks‘ sent a strong message to Britons looking for somewhere to emigrate or to deposit their capital that this place was ripe for settlement and investment.74 Ewan Johnston has claimed that ‗Liberties were taken to portray New Zealand – and the sites of intended Wakefield settlements in particular – as a peaceful, almost tropical, prosperous location, ideal for colonization‘.75
While the contributions from the Australasian colonies were at first very much a second order attraction in the Great Exhibition and those that followed throughout the nineteenth century, colonial representation contributed in some way towards raising awareness of the nature and products of Britain‘s imperial possessions – and in reminding Britons that they indeed had an empire. By the close of the nineteenth century the British public had been able to view the natural and man-made productions originating in their Empire in museums and in international
73 McCarthy, Exhibiting Maori, p. 38. Some of the New Zealand exhibits for the Great Exhibition were coordinated by Governor George Grey, who is a major protagonist in Chapters Eight and Nine of this thesis. 74 Henare, Museums, Anthropology and Imperial Exchange, pp. 150–1. 75 Johnston, ‗New Zealand at the Crystal Palace‘, p. 80. 72 exhibitions for nearly a hundred years. The Australasian colonies had been made manifest by objects in museums relating to the original cultures that inhabited their territories before their invasion by Europeans; and by displays in international exhibitions that placed before the British public the products of the new colonial societies that had taken root there, planting ideas in the minds of travel writers who viewed them about what they might expect to see there.
Now this thesis must turn to an examination of how travel writers who came to the Australasian colonies from the mid-nineteenth century onwards appraised the success of the imperial cultural institutions – specifically museums – that had developed there. What assumptions about colonies and empire, and museums and botanic gardens, did travelling writers such as Antony Trollope, James Froude, Marianne North, Mark Twain and many others bring with them to the Australasian colonies?
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Chapter Four: Writers, empire and colonies
The focus in this work so far has been on the early period of travel to Australia and New Zealand, principally by Sir Joseph Banks and others on Captain James Cook‘s Endeavour voyage, and on Banks‘s later involvement with the expansion of the British Museum and its collections. It has also dealt with the development of museum institutions in Australia and New Zealand, the British colonies in the antipodes that were established as a result of the Cook voyages; and with the advent and impact of international exhibitions and the response of British literary figures to the Great Exhibition of 1851 in particular, as well as the showcasing of the products of the Australasian colonies at these events. Now I will examine a number of travel writers who came to the Australasian colonies from the mid-nineteenth to the beginning of the twentieth century and who commented on the outcome of what came to be described – though in more recent times the term has been set in ironic quotation marks – as the civilising mission of British colonisation.
The principal focus of the chapter is biographical, with particular emphasis, where these are known, on the attitudes to empire displayed by the travelling writers. This chapter is intended to provide background material for subsequent chapters. They will examine the writers‘ comments on the Australasian colonies and, in particular, museum institutions there, including their views of the success or otherwise of botanic gardens.
The writers whose works are cited in this and subsequent chapters are a diverse group. A first category includes two novelists who also wrote travel books, Anthony Trollope and Mark Twain; and a historian who wrote works of history and political commentary and travel books as well, James
74
Anthony Froude.1 Of all the writers discussed, these three are the most prominent, and their careers, and perspectives on empire and museums in the Australasian colonies are of necessity treated in more detail than most of the other travelling writers, for whom biographical information is meagre or, in some cases, unobtainable.
A second category of writers whose works are referenced in this thesis includes a number for whom commenting on imperial matters was a consideration of a lesser order than it was for the three in the first category. They include three journalists, Frank Fowler, Richard Twopeny and George Augustus Sala; James Edge Partington, a young and socially well-connected traveller who became a noted ethnographic collector; John Ure, a retired ex-Provost of Glasgow; Nundo Lall Doss, an Indian representative of the London Missionary Society; Emily Katharine Bates, a British novelist, and author of books on metaphysical subjects, and travel writer; three women travellers, Alice Frere, Catherine Bond and Mrs Wyndham, who penned their travel narratives in the context of visiting the colonies with their husbands; and botanical artist Marianne North. North‘s remarks are significant in the consideration of botanic gardens later in this thesis, as well as for the views they express on the state of society in the Australasian colonies in the 1880s. Another writer with a specific interest in botanic gardens was James Veitch, a member of a family of leading horticulturists in England.
Most of these writers were middle-class in social background, as defined by the prevailing code of Victorian Britain; and many of them had easy access to the top tiers of colonial society. One was a citizen of the United States, and thus brought a different national (and republican) perspective to the analysis of life in the antipodean British colonies. What the majority of these writers had in common, though, was a world view that, in spite of
1 James Anthony Froude also wrote one novel, the controversial Nemesis of Faith (1848). 75 differences of emphasis often related to political views or current events, did not challenge the essential validity of Britain‘s imperial mission and its imposition of western values on colonised lands.
Patrick Brantlinger has remarked that ‗Imperialism, understood as an evolving but pervasive set of attitudes and ideas toward the rest of the world, influenced all aspects of Victorian and Edwardian culture‘.2 Elleke Boehmer, in Colonial and Postcolonial Literature, concurred with Brantlinger‘s view: ‗The integrity, superiority, and strength of the West, the expanded new geography of the Empire – these were Victorian givens.‘3 Some of the writers considered in this thesis have been regarded as being anti-imperialist at various stages of their careers, and the nuances of their views of empire are considered below when they are discussed individually. Nevertheless, ‗imperial ideology‘, commentators such as Edward Said have written, informed ‗all nineteenth-century European and American culture‘.4
According to this argument, texts – and literature – played their parts in the development of this imperial culture: ‗The Empire in its heyday‘, wrote Boehmer, ‗was conceived and maintained in an array of writings – political treatises, diaries, acts and edicts, administrative records and gazetteers, missionaries‘ reports, notebooks, memoirs, popular verse, government briefs, letters ―home‖ and letters back to settlers.‘ She included the ‗triple- decker novel‘ as a form of literature ‗infused with imperial ideas of race pride and national prowess‘.5 Edward Said, who in his germinal 1993 work, Culture and Imperialism, pioneered the analysis of nineteenth-
2 Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914, Cornell University Press, Ithaca., NY, 1988, p. 8. 3 Elleke Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1995, p. 24. 4 Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness, p. 10; Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, Vintage, London, 1994; first published 1993. 5 Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature, p. 13. 76 century British literature for its pervasively imperialist sub-text, went further:
The great cultural archive, I argue, is where the intellectual and aesthetic investments in overseas dominion are made. If you were British or French in the 1860s you saw, and you felt, India and North Africa with a combination of familiarity and distance, but never with a sense of their separate sovereignty. In your narratives, histories, travel tales, and explorations your consciousness was represented as the principal authority, an active point of energy that made sense not just of colonizing activities but of exotic geographies and peoples.6
For ‗India and North Africa‘ one should also read ‗Australia and New Zealand‘.
While it can be argued that Said and those who follow his lead in identifying submerged imperialist messages in the works of some of the best known authors in the British literary canon take a monolithic view of the pervasiveness of imperial ideology, an imperial sub-text nevertheless can be detected in much of the travel writing produced about the Australasian colonies. However, in an analysis of colonial museums, including botanic gardens, the individual circumstances and viewpoints of writers at times acted to subvert and complicate this sub-text, as did the reactions of their colonial audiences.
Anthony Trollope
Anthony Trollope (1815–1882), now regarded as one of the giants of Victorian fiction, could not have been predicted as a future success in the earlier part of his life. Although of genteel background, his well-being was significantly affected by his lawyer father‘s incapacity to sustain his family in an adequate manner, leading Anthony‘s resourceful mother, Frances (known as Fanny) to embark on unsuccessful speculative ventures in the United States. Close to destitute, Fanny turned to writing to recover her family‘s finances, first of all publishing a travel book, Domestic Manners of
6 Said, Culture and Imperialism, pp. xxiii–xvi. 77 the Americans, and then a series of novels, as one by one several of her children and her husband succumbed to tuberculosis, and creditors pursued the family to the Continent. Anthony, a large and clumsy boy, was not his mother‘s favourite – she even left him behind when she embarked on her American venture. The role of favoured son fell to his older brother Tom, who also bullied Anthony mercilessly while they were both day boys at Harrow, a miserable experience for young Anthony, who was mocked for his poverty and shabby clothing.7
Trollope‘s school experience though, may have had an effect on his later ability to range widely as a travel writer. Time spent in a British public school, in both the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, has been credited for engendering the toughness necessary to face the conditions of solitary travel. A contemporary travel writer, Colin Thubron, has described a British boarding school as the affliction that is perhaps one of the reasons the British have taken so naturally to travel writing … It imposes self-reliance, confidence, perhaps a dangerous sense of invulnerability, sometimes harrowing loneliness. Its products are often well-suited for solitary travel. Even today most British travel-writers are middle-class creatures of the system. 8
In Trollope‘s case, his schooling at Harrow certainly did not imbue him with confidence; but he became a self-sufficient man whose life was distinguished by extraordinary self-discipline. This, however, did not occur until some years later: Trollope‘s early manhood did not indicate that he possessed the self-discipline and focus he later brought both to his career in the Post Office and then, famously, to his writing, producing a quota of
7 Trollope‘s life story is chronicled in his An Autobiography, Michael Sadleir and Frederick Page (eds), Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1980; and in numerous biographies, including Richard Mullen, Anthony Trollope: a Victorian in his World, Duckworth, London, 1990, Victoria Glendinning, Anthony Trollope, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1993, and C. P.Snow, Trollope, New Amsterdam Books, New York, first published 1975, this edition 1991. His mother‘s (Frances, known as Fanny Trollope) life has been examined in Pamela Neville-Sington, Fanny Trollope: The Life and Adventures of a Clever Woman, Viking, New York, 1997. 8 Colin Thubron, ‗A Prince of the Road‘, New York Review of Books, 17 January 2008, pp. 29–31. 78
250 words per quarter hour over several hours before breakfast. Trollope later declared in his Autobiography that ‗I was once told that the surest aid to the writing of a book was a piece of cobbler‘s wax on my chair‘.9
Trollope‘s Post Office career had not been a glittering one until he was sent to Ireland as an inspector, where his talents for investigation and organisation came to the fore. There he married Rose Heseltine and began to write novels, though with no conspicuous success at first. Fame and increasing fortune did not come until the mid-1850s with the publication of The Warden and the subsequent Barsetshire novels. He continued to produce novels, commentary and travel books for the rest of his life. As the literary critic David Skilton comments:
The West Indies and the Spanish Main, North America, Australia and New Zealand and South Africa all received widespread and serious attention in all quarters, as the observations of a fluent, intelligent and practical man, who had wide experience in public administration … this second sphere of literary fame … does illuminate one aspect of his fictional output, and that is his compulsion to communicate to his readers about people and places with which they were not familiar.10
Trollope‘s views of the present and future of the British Empire were articulated in his first travel account, The West Indies and the Spanish Main (1860). He travelled there on Post Office business in January 1859, beginning to write on 25 January, and achieving what biographer Victoria Glendinning has called ‗the best and liveliest of his travel books‘.11 C. P. Snow described the work as ‗one of the most splendid travel books of the nineteenth century, still worth reading‘.12 Trollope himself believed it to be ‗the best book that has come from my pen‘.13
9 Trollope, Autobiography, p. 121. 10 David Skilton, Anthony Trollope and His Contemporaries: A Study in the Theory and Conventions of Mid-Victorian Fiction, Longman, London, 1972, pp. xiii–xiv. 11 Glendinning, Anthony Trollope, p. 246. 12 Snow, Trollope, p. 97. 13 Trollope, Autobiography, p. 128. 79
Glendinning comments on a new experience that this trip posed for the novelist, one which was repeated in Australia and New Zealand when he encountered Aboriginal and Maori people: ‗Anthony had never been in contact with black people before, and much of his West Indies book was concerned with working out his attitudes.‘14 Trollope made a distinction between what he saw as the civilising benefits of Christianity and imperial expansionism, and he looked forward to the time when Britain‘s self- governing colonies of settlement could be independent:
We Britishers have a noble mission. The word I know is unpopular, for it has been foully misused; but it is in itself a good word, and none other will supply its place. We have a noble mission, but we are never content with it. It is not enough for us to beget nations, civilize countries, and instruct in truth and knowledge the dominant races of the coming ages. All this will not suffice unless also we can maintain a king over them! What is it to us, or even to them, who may be their king or ruler–or, to speak with a nearer approach to sense, from what source they be governed–as long as they be happy, prosperous, and good? And yet there are men mad enough to regret the United States! Many men are mad enough to look forward with anything but composure to the inevitable, happily inevitable day, when Australia shall follow in the same path.‘15
Bradford Booth described Trollope as ‗an internationalist, who in his concept of a maturing social order exhibits a universal philanthropy‘.16 He would go on to write more travel books: North America, published in 1862; Australia and New Zealand, published in 1873; and South Africa, published in 1878. In Australia and New Zealand he restated his conviction that Australia would one day be an independent nation, and that this eventuality should be contemplated with equanimity in the mother country:
I am not aware that any British statesman has as yet entertained the idea of dividing the mother country from her Australian colonies, – has ever thought that the time has now come in which he himself might go to work and arrange the terms of separation. But I imagine that no British statesman ever employs himself in the affairs of these colonies without a conviction that, in all that he does, he
14 Glendinning, Anthony Trollope, p. 249. 15 Anthony Trollope, The West Indies and the Spanish Main, Chapman and Hall, London, 1860, pp. 84–5. 16 Booth, Anthony Trollope, pp. 20–22. 80 should have before his eyes the fact that separation will come at some future day … Does anybody believe that a population of twenty millions in Australia would remain subject to a population of forty millions in the British Isles?17
With the publication of The West Indies and the Spanish Main can be seen the beginnings of a distinctive Trollopian voice:
Here also there is a King, Lords, and Commons, or a governor, a council and an assembly … The assembly consists of twenty-two, who are annually elected by the parishes. None but white men do vote at these elections, though no doubt a black man could vote, if a black man were allowed to obtain a freehold. Of course, therefore, none but white men can be elected. How it is decided whether a man be white or not, that I did not hear.18
The voice is authoritative, but not omniscient. Trollope is, first of all, comparing the parliamentary institutions of the British colony of Barbados with those of Britain. Barbados has the third oldest parliament in the British Commonwealth after Westminster itself and the island of Bermuda; the Barbados House of Assembly was established in 1639. He then hazards the remark that ‗None but white men do vote‘, which can be disproved by reference to the historical record.19
Trollope nevertheless captured the underlying truth about the parliamentary institutions of Barbados and the inability of most Barbadians of the time to choose their representatives. This passage is typical of a Trollopian analysis in his works of travel writing: a statement of fact, followed by the conclusions to be drawn from it, and then an ironic twist in the last sentence, in which an apparently self-deprecatory remark – ‗that I did not hear‘ – reinforces Trollope‘s point about the invisibility, even the impossibility, of true black representation in the electoral system of
17 Anthony Trollope, Australia, P. D. Edwards and R. B. Joyce (eds), University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, Qld, 1967, first published by Chapman and Hall, London, 1873, p. 351. 18 Trollope, West Indies and the Spanish Main, pp. 215–6. 19 Two excellent general histories of Barbados give the background to its parliamentary institutions and the limitations of the franchise after Emancipation in 1834: F. A. Hoyos, Barbados: A History from the Amerindians to Independence, Macmillan, Oxford, 1978, and Hilary Beckles, A History of Barbados: From Amerindian Settlement to Nation-State, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1990. 81
Barbados. The passage also lends itself to effective dramatisation,20 a sure sign that the author‘s personal voice is strongly present in the written word.
It is not surprising that Anthony Trollope, with his keen eye for observation, and indeed his pedigree as the son of the author of The Domestic Manners of the Americans and other travel books, should have treated his visits to foreign places as essentially study tours on which he should present reports to the reading public. In these books his voice commands centre stage, and his own views are often unambiguously on display in his commentary on the places he visits.
Trollope certainly had his prejudices, at least one of them inherited from his mother: he detested Evangelicalism. Victoria Glendinning in her 1993 biography of Trollope wrote, ‗All extremism or ―enthusiasm‖, from whatever quarter, smacked to Anthony of bullying and bigotry‘.21 Such negative qualities displayed by some individuals of the Evangelical persuasion had already been trenchantly satirised in a novel by Fanny Trollope, The Vicar of Wrexhill (1837). Her purpose in writing the novel was, according to Ian Barclay in The Call to Seriousness: The Evangelical Impact on the Victorians, ‗to show the terrible power of Evangelical influence in society‘. Its major character was a thinly disguised portrait of a former vicar of St Mary‘s, Harrow, the Reverend J. W. Cunningham, who had gained local notoriety by his refusal to allow Lord Byron to install a plaque in the church commemorating the death of his illegitimate daughter, Allegra, on the grounds that, as Anthony Trollope later wrote, it would ‗teach boys to get bastards‘.22
20 This passage forms a portion of the script for an audiovisual presentation in the Museum of Parliament of Barbados in the West Indies. 21 Glendinning, Anthony Trollope, p. 382. 22 Ian Barclay, The Call to Seriousness: The Evangelical Impact on the Victorians, Jonathan Cape, London, 1976, p. 14. 82
According to Pamela Neville-Sington, ‗Fanny believed evangelicalism to be fundamentally hypocritical‘.23 Anthony would later echo his mother‘s sentiments in regard to the Reverend Cunningham: ‗I used to talk to Cunningham a good deal at one time, and recall he used to be very civil to me, but he is a cringing hypocrite and a most confounded liar, and would give his eyes to be a bishop.‘24 It is not difficult to see a connection here between the real life vicar of Harrow and one of Anthony Trollope‘s own celebrated hypocrites of an evangelical persuasion, the Reverend Obadiah Slope in Barchester Towers, memorably described by his creator as having ‗an anathema lurking in the corner of his eye‘,25 and yet as susceptible to the sensual charms of Signora Vesey Neroni as any other man in Barchester, and as reckless of his reputation as those he condemned for worldliness.
Trollope was not opposed to attempts to lead a Christian life, or to churchgoing. Bradford Booth noted that ‗I do not find evidence to show that he was other than a staunch member of the Church of England who took his spiritual duties and responsibilities with proper but not unseemly seriousness‘.26 Victoria Glendinning claimed that he attended church every Sunday, and was ‗an alert and reverent and audible worshipper‘; and any reader of the Barchester series of novels cannot fail to be moved by his sympathetic portrayal of such sincere and genuinely Christian characters as, for example, Septimus Harding in The Warden. It was the ‗prejudiced, priggish, anti-life (as he saw it) evangelicals‘ that he could found unpalatable and roundly satirised.27 Ruth apRoberts, in Trollope, Artist and Moralist, claimed that
23 Neville-Sington, Fanny Trollope, pp. 68–9. 24 Ibid., p. 70. 25 Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers, Wordsworth Classics: Ware, UK, 1994, first published 1857, p. 23. 26 Booth, Anthony Trollope, p. 25. 27 Glendinning, Anthony Trollope, pp. 382, 479. 83
… when religion is obsessive in Trollope‘s novels, the religion is an evangelical one. He would claim for the old High Anglicanism that in its non-enthusiasm it is unlikely to become obsessive. It is one of his favourite ironies that the easygoing High Church clergyman is more charitable, in fact, or in cases, and exercises more of the Christian virtues than the reforming evangelicals, who make the greater claim to them. As a general rule, throughout the novels, we do not like the evangelicals, from Slope on.28
Trollope‘s novels demonstrate his distaste for the over-enthusiastic application of such evangelical tenets as a rigid insistence on Sabbath observance and the denial of all pleasurable pastimes. Two of his most repellent characters, Mrs Proudie and the Reverend Slope, in Barchester Towers – bigots and bullies, both – are examples of this tendency, with their obsession with stopping Sunday train travel to and from Barchester, and their nagging insistence on the compulsory creation of Sunday Schools. So are such characters as Dorothea Prime and her would-be husband, Mr Prong, in Trollope‘s 1863 novel, Rachel Ray. When Trollope encountered killjoy attitudes or rigid thinking in other spheres of life, he was apt to satirise these in similar terms to those he used to castigate Evangelical practices.
Trollope is an author who is very much present in his fictional texts as well as his travel books, an omniscient narrator par excellence, who editorialises at length in the midst of the action. Attentive readers of Trollope‘s fiction would become aware of his personal opinions and prejudices to a far greater extent than would be the case with many other novelists. An example of this tendency in Trollope‘s fiction is his treatment of sermons. Reference to the tedium of a long sermon soon becomes a familiar refrain, although in real life this did not extend to the whole of the service for he enjoyed singing hymns, his booming voice dominating the rest of the congregation.
28 Ruth apRoberts, Trollope, Artist and Moralist, Chatto and Windus, London, 1971, p. 117. 84
Victoria Glendinning‘s biography of Trollope attested to her subject‘s dislike of sermons and speeches: ‗He always hated to be held captive while someone else had licence to talk; he avoided sitting through speeches, lectures and sermons all his life.‘29 Trollope even reminisces, when describing Mr Slope‘s first cathedral sermon in his novel of clerical life, Barchester Towers, on his childhood habit of making imaginative forays among the ecclesiastical furniture as he ‗whiled away the tedium of a sermon‘.30 Trollope wrote an extended diatribe in Barchester Towers on clergymen‘s cruelty in imposing long sermons on their congregations:
There is, perhaps no greater hardship at present inflicted on mankind in civilised and free countries, than the necessity of listening to sermons. No one but a preaching clergyman has, in these realms, that power of compelling an audience to sit silent, and be tormented … no one can rid himself of the preaching clergyman. He is the bore of the age, the old man whom we Sindbads cannot shake off, the nightmare that disturbs our Sunday‘s rest, the incubus that overloads our religion and makes God‘s service distasteful. We are not forced into church! No, but we desire more than that. We desire not to be forced to stay away. We desire, nay, we are resolute, to enjoy the comfort of public worship; but we desire also that we may do so without an amount of tedium which ordinary human nature cannot endure with patience; that we may be able to leave the house of God, without that anxious longing for escape which is the common consequence of common sermons.‘31
Trollope returned to this theme briefly in his Autobiography, stating categorically ‗That sermons are not in themselves often thought to be agreeable we all know‘, clearly assuming that his readers had become familiar with his prejudices, and indeed shared them.32
29 Glendinning, Anthony Trollope, p. 230. 30 This passage deals with the first occasion of Bishop Proudie ascending the bishop‘s throne in Barchester Cathedral. The relevant sentences read: ‗The old carved oakwood of the throne, ascending with its numerous grotesque pinnacles half-way up to the roof of the choir, had been washed, and dusted, and rubbed, and it all looked very smart. Ah! how often sitting there, in happy early days, on those lowly benches in front of the altar, have I whiled away the tedium of a sermon in considering how best I might thread my way up amidst those wooden towers, and climb safely to the topmost pinnacle!‘ Trollope, Barchester Towers, p. 39. 31 Ibid., p. 42. 32 Trollope, Autobiography, p. 222. 85
This biographical background is a necessary preliminary to the analysis of Trollope‘s works on the Australasian colonies, and the ways in which his prejudices, as revealed in his fiction, found their way even into his assessments of museum institutions in the Australasian colonies. This analysis is pursued in Chapters Five and Seven. Relevant aspects of James Anthony Froude‘s background are treated next.
James Anthony Froude
James Anthony Froude (1818–1894) had also suffered, like Trollope, the psychologically scarifying circumstances of an unhappy childhood and a brutal experience of schooling. Born in 1818 as the last child of the Archdeacon of Totnes and his wife, and motherless before he was three, Anthony, as he was known, was also subjected to cruel jokes by his older brother Hurrell, later to become a prominent member of the Tractarian movement in the Church of England. Anthony went to study at Oxford late in 1836, the same year as Hurrell Froude died, and for a time was influenced by Newman. He was diverted from the path to high Anglicanism by reading the work of Carlyle, of whom he became a disciple and later biographer. Carlyle‘s religious views ‗discarded doctrine and described a world full of wonders created by God but not required to be understood in terms of any church‘. 33 While at Oxford Froude also became friendly with Arthur Hugh Clough, and together they contemplated emigration to New Zealand.
The conflict between the religious views of Newman and Carlyle and the impact of this on Froude‘s faith had two results: it led to his resigning his fellowship at Exeter College and not taking orders in the Church of England in the first instance; and plunged him into controversy and notoriety in the second. He revealed his religious doubts in a ‗bad but
33 Rosemary Ashton, 142 Strand: A Radical Address in Victorian London, Vintage Books, London, 2008, p. 55. Ashton devotes a chapter to Froude and The Nemesis of Faith, pp. 51–81, and the details relating to Froude‘s childhood and youth come from pages 51–3. 86 spectacular novel‘, The Nemesis of Faith, published by John Chapman in 1849 ‗to a storm of protest‘, and burned in public at Oxford by the Sub- Rector of Exeter College, William Sewell, for its ‗manifest blasphemy‘.34
Rosemary Ashton, whose book, 142 Strand: A Radical Address in Victorian London is based on the life and activities of Froude‘s publisher, John Chapman, has described The Nemesis of Faith as ‗a confused and confusing, but compellingly raw account of the travails of a young man unable to continue preaching in the Church of England‘.35 In addition to his account of this topical struggle – many young men in the Church of England at that period were torn between opposed doctrinal positions – Froude included another, for the time, explosive ingredient to the novelistic mix, a potentially adulterous love affair between his clerical protagonist and a married woman. Morality is preserved when tragedy intervenes, but the damage was done: ‗The excited response to The Nemesis of Faith made it one of the publishing sensations of the century,‘ according to Ashton.36
The publication and subsequent notoriety of The Nemesis of Faith also put paid to Froude‘s chances of coming to Australia earlier in his life. Only a few months before the novel was published, and in the realisation that his own religious doubts would preclude his ordination and therefore his capacity to remain a Fellow of Exeter College, Froude looked around for another job. He applied for a position as a schoolmaster in Hobart but, as the news of the controversy spread, the school‘s agents cooled on the idea of having such a man as a teacher there.
34 Margaret Drabble (ed.), Oxford Companion to English Literature, Fifth Edition, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1985, p. 371; John Sutherland, The Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction, Longman, London, 1988, p. 458; Ashton, 142 Strand, ps. 50, 59. 35 Ashton, 142 Strand, p. 53. 36 Ibid. 87
Froude maintained himself with journalism and historical writing, and edited Fraser’s Magazine from 1860 to 1874. His reputation rested on his History of England from the Death of Cardinal Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada, a magisterial work of scholarship extending over twelve volumes written and published between 1860 and 1874. As a controversialist he was no less well known: his lecture tours in America in 1872 and attempts at political intervention in South Africa in 1874 had created storms. But these were mild compared to the ‗uproar‘ on the publication in 1881 of Reminiscences of Carlyle and, two years later, the Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle, described in the entry on Froude in the 1985 edition of the Oxford Companion to English Literature as ‗distinguished by their shattering frankness‘.37 Froude was also a celebrated public speaker. This was the man who set out from England in late 1884 ‗to see the empire of Oceana‘.38
By the time he travelled to the Australasian colonies in early 1885, Froude was reputed to be ‗one of the greatest English prose writers of the nineteenth century‘.39 Anything he said in, or wrote about, the Australasian colonies would be subject to thorough examination, and accorded a greater or lesser degree of credibility, depending on whether the reader or listener admired him and his ideas or otherwise. He was also publicly identified with the movement known as ‗imperial federation‘ which, as Bill Nasson has described, advocated a fundamental and dynamic link between Britain and her colonies:
For the campaigning reformers of ‗new imperialism‘, dealing with a changing balance of world power required that Britain organise its overseas possessions more efficiently and that it renovate its industry through the protectionism of
37 Drabble, Oxford Companion to English Literature, p. 372. 38 Froude, Oceana, p. 329. 39 Ruth Teale, ‗J. A. Froude‘, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol. 4: 1851–1890 D–J, Douglas Pike (ed.), Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Vic, 1972, pp. 221–2; ‗Froude, James Anthony‘, in Dominic Head (ed.), The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English, Third Edition, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2006, pp. 413–14, also mentions Froude‘s ‗narrative gifts ... and his excellent prose style‘. 88 colonial preference. Binding its empire into an enormous commercial union, free trade could rule internally while duties could block goods from outside. British captains of industry and traders wanted a completely open door to all colonies, not least to those self-governing settler territories which were now seeing fit to nurture and protect their own fledgling industries for modern development. A more formal imperial ring would also ensure the efficient fencing in of vital supplies of food and raw materials for the home population and their staple industries.40
The security of vital commodities leading to economic benefit for both the Mother Country and the colonies was but the first and least emotive plank in the imperial federation platform. The second was a need to allay growing unemployment by exporting people to the colonies. A more elevated, indeed sentimental agenda also informed imperial federationists‘ enthusiasm for a closer union and more colonisation. This was nothing less than the renovation of the ‗British racial stock‘, and it was with this view that Froude was particularly identified.41 Nasson has outlined the views that underpinned Froude‘s perspective on the Australasian colonies:
Overseas, Britons could populate healthy offshoots of an older and healthier England, and be better able to preserve its sterling heritage because they were free of the virus of urban squalor and decay that was now creeping through the nation‘s veins. In this and in other views, tariff reformers called on earlier notions of transforming the empire into a fully sustainable Anglo-Saxon world empire. An expansionist British Christendom offered the opportunity to create this truly integrated organism … Ideally, an imperial federation of this kind might even come to fulfil roseate visions of the balance and unity of Britain itself.42
Froude‘s account of his travels to Britain‘s southern imperial possessions, Oceana, or, England and Her Colonies, was published in 1886 in London. The book is replete with statements bearing witness to the fact that
40 Bill Nasson, Britannia’s Empire: Making a British World, Tempus Publishing Limited, Stroud, UK, 2004, p. 132. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid., pp. 132–3. Imperial federation foundered in Britain in the early 1890s, where ‗the ideas of a federated empire based on preferential tariffs, or of a political organisation which gave the colonies representation at Westminster, were less clearly articulated, and there was a certain degree of ambiguity about what imperial federation really meant‘. The Imperial Federation League was disbanded in Britain in 1893, but survived in Victoria, where Alfred Deakin became its president in 1904. Roslyn Russell and Philip Chubb, One Destiny! The Federation Story – How Australia Became a Nation, Penguin Books, Ringwood, Vic, 1998, p. 135. 89
Froude had in general found what he had been looking for – a facsimile of English society in the antipodes – when he came to the Australasian colonies. One example among many gives the flavour of Froude‘s appreciation of their essential Englishness:
Meanwhile indoors we were studying the Victorians and Victorian society. Party followed party, and it was English life over again: nothing strange, nothing exotic, nothing new or original, save perhaps in greater animation of spirits. The leaves that grow on one branch of an oak are not more like the leaves that grow upon another, than the Australian swarm is like the hive it sprang from. All was the same–dress, manners, talk, appearance. The men were quite as sensible, the women as pretty, and both as intelligent and agreeable.43
After a visit to Ballarat, Froude found his initial view of Australian colonists, as being akin to himself and his countrymen, had been reinforced and, furthermore, that he identified with their successes:
… the people had but one wish–to make us feel, wherever we went, that we were among our own kinsmen … As an Englishman, I was proud of what they had accomplished within a brief limit of half my own years. Of their energy, and of what it had achieved, there can be no question, for the city and its surroundings speak for themselves.44
Nevertheless, not all Froude‘s comments in Oceana were so positive. Emily Katharine Bates, in her travel account, Kaleidoscope: Shifting Scenes from East to West, published three years after Oceana, demonstrated that Froude had lost none of his talent for provoking controversy over the close to four decades since he published The Nemesis of Faith:
No doubt, in the case of New Zealand, his very pessimistic account of that country‘s financial state came too near the truth to be pleasant. Although Froude may have rightly considered it his duty to warn the ‗old country‘ of the rotten condition of many New Zealand investments, there is still something to be said from the point of view of New Zealand capitalists who
43James Anthony Froude, Oceana, or, England and Her Colonies, Longmans, Green, and Co., London, 1886, p. 89. For the publication and reception of the book, see Chapter Eight, J. A Froude and Sir George Grey. 44 Ibid., p. 115. 90 maintain that many investments of a perfectly bona fide character, suffering merely from temporary depression, were hopelessly wrecked by the wild panic which set in on the publication of Oceana.45
Nothing daunted by the storms he had raised with one travel book, Froude set out in 1886 to prepare another, this time on the West Indies and, again, dealing with the state of Englishness in these former founts of British fortunes. He had by now had the opportunity to see many of Britain‘s colonies, and had formed conclusions as to the effectiveness of her colonising mission and what he believed were the essentially beneficial effects of the British Empire. In The English in the West Indies, published in 1888, he set out in the most emphatic terms his continued endorsement of Britain‘s imperial enterprise:
Here is the answer to the question so often asked, What is the use of the colonies to us? The colonies are a hundredfold multiplication of the area of our own limited islands. In taking possession of so large a portion of the globe, we have enabled ourselves to spread and increase and carry ourselves, our language and our liberties, into all climates and continents. We overflow at home; there are too many of us here already; and if no lands belonged to us but Great Britain and Ireland, we should become a small insignificant power beside the mighty nations which are forming around us. There is space for hundreds of millions of us in the territories of which we and our fathers have possessed ourselves. In Canada, Australia, New Zealand we add our numbers and our resources. There are so many more Englishmen in the world able to hold their own against the mightiest of their rivals.46
Here, then, is Froude‘s clarion call to recognise a ‗greater Britain‘ over the seas that he saw as represented by the white settler colonies in North America and Oceania, those self-governing polities that would over the next few decades become known as ‗dominions‘, and were ripe for stocking with surplus Britons. Now he turned to another type of colonial situation, exemplified by British India, in which he believed – and asserted in ringing tones – that the finest British virtues were on display:
45 E. Katharine Bates, Kaleidoscope: Shifting Scenes from East to West, London, Ward and Downey, 1889, pp. v–vi. 46 James Anthony Froude, The English in the West Indies, or The Bow of Ulysses, Longman, Green, and Co., London, 1888, pp. 206–7. 91
Never have rulers been less self-seeking than we have been in our Asiatic empire … In India the rule of England has been an unexampled success, glorious to ourselves and of infinite benefit to our subjects, because we have been upright and disinterested, and have tried sincerely and honourably to do our duty.47
Froude concluded his panegyric on British imperialism with a warning that the duty carried with it the obligation to approach this task with courage and in a spirit of high moral probity leavened with national self-interest:
When we are brought into contact with races of men who are not strong enough or brave enough to defend their own independence, and whom our own safety cannot allow to fall under any other power, our right and our duty is to govern such races and to govern them well, or they will have a right in turn to cut our throats. This is our mission. When we have dared to act up to it we have succeeded magnificently; we have failed when we have paltered and trifled; and we shall fail again, and the great empire on which the sun never sets will be shattered to atoms, if we refuse to look facts in the face.48
Froude was by no means alone in his praise of Britain‘s empire and the stern mission of those who manned its far-flung outposts. His sentiments were shared by many public men of his era, including ‗liberal‘ commentators such as John Stuart Mill.49 They were memorably rendered into poetry by ‗the Empire‘s greatest poet‘,50 Rudyard Kipling, eleven years after Froude published The English in the West Indies, in his exhortation to:
Take up the White Man's burden-- Send forth the best ye breed-- Go bind your sons to exile To serve your captives' need; To wait in heavy harness,
47 Froude, English in the West Indies, p. 207. In recent years the view of the British Empire has, among some historians, circled back to one not far removed from that of Froude, albeit expressed less passionately, for example, the work of Niall Ferguson in books such as Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World, Penguin Books, London, 2003 and the television series of the same name; and Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire, Penguin Books, London, 2004. In the latter work Ferguson mounts a defence of ‗liberal imperialism‘ that, while not indulging in some of Froude‘s more extravagant language, makes essentially the same argument. 48 Ibid., pp. 208–9. 49 Ferguson, Empire, p. xxi. 50 Ibid., p. 380. 92
On fluttered folk and wild-- Your new-caught, sullen peoples, Half-devil and half-child.51
For all that they voiced the view of many of his countrymen that they served those who required their beneficent rule,52 Kipling‘s words were not directed to them specifically. They were, instead, intended for another audience, the public of the next world empire to bestride the global stage in the coming century – the United States of America.53 The next author to be considered, Mark Twain, took a very different view to Kipling on the subject of imperialism.
Mark Twain
Not every American endorsed his or her country‘s move towards assuming the imperial mantle as the nineteenth century drew to a close. Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835–1910) – better known (and referred to in this thesis) by his nom-de-plume of Mark Twain, and described by one of his American biographers as ‗a touchstone of our cultural identity‘ and ‗an American icon‘54 – viewed the military and political actions that set the United States on the path to imperial destiny in the twentieth century with increasing dismay.
Mark Twain came to Australia and New Zealand as part of a lecturing tour in 1895 and 1896. The tour was designed to restore his fortunes after the
51 Rudyard Kipling, ‗The White Man‘s Burden‘, first published McClure’s Magazine 12, February 1899. 52 Kipling‘s father was an artist and later the Director of the Lahore Museum, which is depicted as the ‗Wonder House‘ in his son‘s novel of British India, Kim, published in 1901. 53 Kipling‘s famous poem of 1899 was, according to Niall Ferguson, ‗a powerful appeal to the United States to shoulder its imperial responsibilities‘ after the Spanish-American War of 1898, in which Spain lost control of Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Guam, and other islands. Ferguson, Empire, p. 380. 54 Andrew Hoffman, Inventing Mark Twain: The Lives of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, Phoenix, Orion Books, London, p. 504. 93 failure of one of his many speculative ventures, a typesetting machine, the Paige Compositor, his enthusiasm for investing in gadgetry and innovations being not infrequently loss-making.55 The journey would also produce yet another of the travel books that had contributed to his reputation as a humorist with a keen eye for the colourful anecdote that often teetered on the brink of absurdity (and at times tipped into the realm of the hoax).56 The acerbic wit of Twain‘s writing could lull his readers into complacency, only to be jarred into the realisation that his words at times conveyed a savage criticism of situations that aroused his ire. One of these was imperialism and its concomitant effects.
Early in his career as a writer, in 1866, the young Mark Twain had visited Hawaii, and observed at first hand the effects of imported western commercial and missionary activity on the lives and culture of its indigenous people. At the time when the United States was considering the annexation of Hawaii, Twain, while acknowledging that his nation‘s strategic interests might dictate this action, in published letters and public lectures delivered a scathing condemnation of what he called ‗The Blessings of Civilization Trust‘: ‗The white men came, brought civilization and several other diseases, and now the race is fast dying out, and will be extinct in about fifty years hence.‘57
Thirty years later, on his lecturing tour of the British Empire – India, Sri Lanka, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa – Twain encountered once again the toll taken by European colonial expansion on indigenous
55 These included a self-pasting scrapbook, an adjustable garment strap, a board game and grape scissors. Forrest G. Robinson, ‗Mark Twain 1835–1910: A Brief Biography‘, in Shelley Fisher Fishkin (ed.), A Historical Guide to Mark Twain, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, p. 43. For a full account of Twain‘s business ventures see Peter Krass, Ignorance, Confidence and Filthy Rich Friends: The Business Adventures of Mark Twain, Wiley, New York, 2010. 56 The Innocents Abroad (1869) and A Tramp Abroad (1880). Melissa Katsoulis, Telling Tales: A History of Literary Hoaxes, Hardie Grant Books, Melbourne, 2010, p. 61. 57 Quoted in Jim Zwick, ‗Mark Twain and Imperialism‘, in Fishkin, Historical Guide to Mark Twain, p. 231. 94
peoples. The book that resulted from this tour, Following the Equator, published in 1897, ‗blasts through conventional stereotypes of ―savage‖ and ―civilized‖‘,58 in Australia and New Zealand in particular. The book was written in the aftermath of his successful lecturing tour during which he received ‗nearly unbroken ovation‘; followed by the most stunning tragedy of Twain‘s life, the death of his daughter Susy of meningitis at the age of twenty-four on 18 August 1896, at a time when he was settled into a house in Guildford, Surrey, preparing to write the account of his travels.59
As a citizen of the United States, Twain serves as an interesting counter to the British writers that form the majority of those considered in this thesis. His first public acclaim had come as a writer of humorous short stories, then of travel accounts – The Innocents Abroad sold nearly 70,000 copies in its first year60 – then as a public lecturer and, ultimately, as the creator of what has come to be regarded as the quintessential nineteenth-century American novel, Huckleberry Finn, published in 1884 as a sequel to Tom Sawyer (1876). While the serious sub-text of his novelistic masterpiece has attracted attention since his time,61 Shelley Fisher Fishkin maintains that, during his lifetime ‗Much to Twain‘s chagrin, he was known more as a humorist and minor bon vivant … than a serious writer‘, and that his ‗greatest literary success was with what might be called a ―middle-brow‖ reading audience.‘62
Later in his life Twain would risk alienating this audience and challenge what he saw as racism and imperialism wherever he saw it, whether it be
58 Shelley Fisher Fishkin, ‗Mark Twain and Race‘, in ibid., p. 146. 59 Justin Kaplan, Mark Twain and his World, Michael Joseph, London, 1974, p. 160. 60 Robinson, ‗Mark Twain‘, p. 41 61 For example, the entry on Huckleberry Finn in The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English claims that this novel ‗achieves a moral dimension which its predecessor [Tom Sawyer] generally lacks through its harsh satire and its treatment of slavery‘. (p. 539) 62 Robert E. Weir, ‗Mark Twain and Social Class‘, in Fishkin, Historical Guide to Mark Twain, p. 198. 95 in Hawaii, the Philippines, or Australia and New Zealand.63 In Twain‘s last work of travel writing, Following the Equator, he abandons at times his usual style of combining breezy reportage and quirky anecdote, and employs what Justin Kaplan has called ‗a certain note of protest and criticism‘ of ‗the white man‘s secure dominion over alien races, black, brown, and yellow‘.64
Twain does not hesitate to apply the term ‗exterminate‘ to the treatment meted out by British settlers to the people he called ‗the Australians and the Tasmanians‘, in contrast with their actions towards Maori – they ‗were content with subduing them, and showed no desire to go further‘.65 The full force of his attack on the process of displacing native populations from land desired by settlers, unmediated by his usual humorous tone or any modicum of satirical detachment, can be felt in the following passage. It is worth quoting in its entirety as a demonstration of Twain‘s capacity for moral outrage, even while he empathised with both sides of a situation:
A couple of curious war-monuments here at Wanganui. One is in honor of white men ―who fell in defence of law and order against fanaticism and barbarism.‖ Fanaticism. We Americans are English in blood, English in speech, English in religion, English in the essentials of our governmental system, English in the essentials of our civilization; and so, let us hope, for the honor of the blend, for the honor of the blood, for the honor of the race, that that word got there through lack of heedfulness, and will not be suffered to remain. If you carve it at Thermopylae … or upon Bunker Hill monument, and read it again – ―who fell in defence of law and order against fanaticism‖ – you will perceive what the word means, and how mischosen it is. Patriotism is patriotism. Calling it Fanaticism cannot degrade it; nothing can degrade it. Even though it be a political mistake, that does not affect it; it is honorable – always honorable, always noble – and privileged to hold its head up and look the nations in the face. It is right to praise these brave white men who fell in the Maori war – they deserve it; but the presence of that word detracts from the dignity of their cause and their deeds, and makes them appear to have spilt their blood in a conflict with ignoble men , men not worthy of that costly sacrifice. But the men were worthy. It was no shame to fight them. They fought for their homes, they fought for their country; they bravely fought and bravely fell; and it would take nothing from the honor of
63 Fishkin, ‗Mark Twain and Race‘, in ibid., p. 151. 64 Kaplan, Mark Twain and His World, p. 163. 65 Twain, Following the Equator, p. 319. 96 the brave Englishmen who lie under that monument, but add to it, to say that they died in defense of English laws and English homes against men worthy of the sacrifice – the Maori patriots. The other monument cannot be rectified. Except with dynamite. It is a mistake all through, and a strangely thoughtless one. It is a monument erected by white men to Maoris who fell fighting with the whites and against their own people, in the Maori war. ―Sacred to the memory of the brave men who fell on the 14th of May, 1864,‖ etc. On one side are the names of about twenty Maoris. It is not a fancy of mine; the monument exists. I saw it. It is an object-lesson to the rising generation. It invites to treachery, disloyalty, unpatriotism. Its lesson, in frank terms is, ―Desert your flag, slay your people, burn their homes, shame your nationality – we honor such.‖66
After the publication of Following the Equator in 1897 Twain flung himself into the organisation of the Anti-Imperialist League, in response to the United States‘ involvement in the Spanish-American War of 1898, whereby his country gained effective control of the Philippines. Historian Niall Ferguson, in Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire (2004), describes Twain as ‗the most influential American man of letters of the day‘; and declares that his ‗attitudes anticipate those of future generations of American antiwar intellectuals‘. Ferguson quotes Twain‘s savage imagery condemning the unleashing of American power on other lands, and acknowledges his effective stance on this divisive national issue:
He had begun by welcoming the ―liberation‖ of the Philippines from Spain … But by October 1900 he had ―read carefully‖ the Treaty of Paris and concluded ―that we do not intend to free but to subjugate the people of the Philippines … And so I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons in any other land.‖ … His disapprobation carried weight. Opponents of a war do not need to command majority support to undermine a war effort.67
66 Ibid., pp. 321–2. The situation of what were called ‗Kupapa‘ or ‗loyalist‘ Maori was more complex than Twain appreciated, as M. P. K. Sorrenson has shown in his 1976 article, ‗Colonial Rule and Local Response: Maori Responses to European Domination Since 1860‘, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, Vol. IV, No. 2, January 1976, pp. 133–4. Sorrenson suggests that ‗the Kupapas performed a very valuable role. Had all of the Maoris fought the British, they would still have been beaten … the Kupapas, by fighting on the British side, could not be totally excluded from the peace; they had earned themselves a stake in the future, however precarious this was to be‘ (p. 133). However, Twain‘s outrage at this terminology shows how he viewed the encouragement by the British of such seeming treachery by Maori. 67 Ferguson, Colossus, pp. 50–1. 97
Twain, always sensitive to the dangers of imperialist domination, had no desire to see his own country replicate the behaviour of older empires, nor to observe its inevitable impacts on indigenous populations. Having seen these effects at first hand during his tour of the British Empire, this move by his own country into the same pathway disturbed him profoundly. Both his nationality and his anti-imperialism therefore generally provide an alternative perspective to those of other travel writers dealt with in this thesis.
Other travel writers
A range of other travelling writers penned and published their accounts of visits to Australia and New Zealand during the nineteenth century. Three early travellers who arrived before mid-century – Charles Darwin and Elizabeth and John Gould – have been noted in a previous chapter. From 1850 onwards the rate of visitation increased, peaking in the last two decades of the century. Some of these visitors, such as Frank Fowler, Richard Twopeny, George Augustus Sala, James Edge Partington, Marianne North and James Veitch, have well-documented backgrounds; others are known to history only through volumes of reminiscences that they published, often privately, which have been preserved in libraries.68 The latter category includes women writers such as Catherine Bond, Emily Katharine Bates, Alice Frere, and Mrs Wyndham, and male travel memoirists such as John Ure, ex-Lord Provost of Glasgow, and Nundo Lall Doss, a London Missionary Society representative from Calcutta, whose testimony is especially fascinating as that of an imperial subject who travelled first to the United Kingdom and Europe, then came to Australia.
68 While there is little biographical material available on most of these writers, their books can be located on such Internet sites as Amazon.com, so remain in circulation to a limited degree. All books by these writers cited in this thesis are held in the National Library of Australia. 98
The paucity of detailed biographical information on many of these writers means that it can be difficult to ascertain their broader views on imperial expansion. Nevertheless, sufficient internal evidence exists in their accounts to form an impression of their overall views of the imperial project.
The journalistic pen – Frank Fowler, Richard Twopeny and George Augustus Sala
Journalist and editor Frank Fowler (1833–1863) was the first of the writers to make his way to the Australasian colonies, in his case for health reasons, arriving in Sydney in December 1855.69 He intended to stay for around five months and write a ‗popular‘ book on his travels, but he remained for over two years, supporting himself in a variety of roles: ‗lecturer, government shorthand-writer, playwright, magazine projector, editor, ―our own correspondent,‖ and, last of all, candidate for political laurels‘.70 Fowler declared that ‗I can safely affirm that no man ever strove more zealously to make himself acquainted with a country, than I did with the colony during my two years‘ sojourn beneath its fig-trees‘.71 His declared intention in his book on the Australian colonies was to ‗studiously avoid all those arid details, the ever-repeated and never-remembered statistics … my aim will be to present, in as lively and pleasant a manner as I can command, a faithful, if hurried, etching of the everyday life and avocations of our friends at the antipodes‘.72 He engaged enthusiastically with the political and literary culture of the colonies, as a writer and public
69 ‗Fowler, Frank (1833–63)‘, in William H. Wilde, Joy Hooton and Barry Andrews, The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature, Second Edition, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1994, p. 298. 70 Frank Fowler, Southern Lights and Shadows, Being Notes of Three Years’ Experience of Social, Literary and Political Life in Australia, Sampson, Low, Son and Co., London, 1859, pp. 2–3. Fowler stood unsuccessfully for the Legislative Assembly of New South Wales in January 1858, then went back to England, writing Southern Lights and Shadows on the return voyage. 71 Ibid., p. 3. 72 Ibid., p. 5. 99 orator and, as R. G. Geering has noted, ‗made a reputation for himself and, in the process, vociferous enemies and staunch friends‘.73
Fowler delivered a rousing recommendation of Australia as he had experienced it over his comparatively lengthy stay in the colonies:
Australia, just now, is the most interesting and important of all our colonial possessions … Her imports and exports are larger by far than those of any other British dependency; her vast pastoral resources are comparatively undeveloped; her soil is affluent in gold and other precious metals; her cities, though reared but yesterday, are large, well populated, and adorned from end to end with noble public buildings and palatial dwellings that Belgravia and Tyburnia might proudly own; her marts and warehouses are handsome combinations of our city emporiums and West-end bazaars; and finally, her population is active, industrious, self-reliant; in mode and manner, government and religion, even more English than the English.74
Fowler‘s views, or variants of them, were repeated by some later travellers to the Australian colonies. They were also vehemently contradicted by others, who were far more critical of both the achievements and the character of the antipodean colonists.
Richard Twopeny75 (1857–1915) spent even more time than Fowler in the Australian colonies, arriving in 1879 and living and working there for twenty years, until from 1896 he began spending more time in Europe and England, where he died in 1915. He worked as a journalist and newspaper proprietor in Australia and New Zealand, and as an exhibition organiser and manager. While therefore not strictly a travel writer, Twopeny aspired to the same goal as other writers, to report on the conditions of society in the urban areas of three Australian colonies from an objective perspective. The fact that his book, Town Life in Australia, was published in London in
73 R. G. Geering, introduction to facsimile version of Frank Fowler, Southern Lights and Shadows, Sydney University Press, Sydney, 1975, p. 6. 74 Fowler, Southern Lights and Shadows, pp. 5–6. 75 Twopeny‘s name is frequently rendered as ‗Twopenny‘. This thesis follows the spelling given on the facsimile version of Town Life in Australia, 1883, and the entry in the Oxford Companion to Australian Literature, Second Edition, 1994. 100
1883 reinforces his appropriateness for inclusion, as his candid work was designed primarily to inform English audiences.76
George Augustus Sala (1828–1895) – or G.A.S. as he signed his articles that were read ‗throughout the whole of the British Empire and America as well, wherever in fact the English language, its literature and its newspapers were to be found‘77 – is the third of this journalistic trio. The man who coined the enduring terms, ‗Land of the Golden Fleece‘ and ‗Marvellous Melbourne‘ has been described by Judy McKenzie as ‗probably the best known-figure of the Victorian newspaper scene‘, and ‗probably the first example of what is now called a ―media personality‖, receiving both the adulation and vilification that went with it‘.78 He came to Australia in early 1885 to embark, as did a number of the travelling writers considered in this thesis, on a lecture tour of Australasian colonies and the United States. He had also been commissioned by the London Daily Telegraph to contribute articles as a ‗special correspondent‘ on the topic, ‗Australia and the Australians‘. The usual fate of articles along these lines was collection into a book, thus avoiding the ephemerality of newspaper coverage, but it did not happen in this case.
Nevetheless, the fact that no book emerged from Sala‘s tour at its conclusion does not mean that his words were not widely circulated in Australia: McKenzie lists a total of thirteen metropolitan and regional newspapers that reported his lectures; and his articles sent home to the Telegraph were widely syndicated. Australians did not have to wait long to hear Sala‘s verdict on them and on the society they had created.79
76 ‗Twopeny, Richard (1857–1915)‘, William H. Wilde, Joy Hooton and Barry Andrews, Oxford Companion to Australian Literature, Second Edition, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1994, p. 766. 77 Judy McKenzie, ‗G.A.S. in Australia: Hot Air Down Under?‘, Australian Literary Studies, Vol. 15, No. 4, October 1992, p. 315. 78 Ibid., p. 313. 79 McKenzie, ‗G.A.S. in Australia‘, p. 316. 101
Sala‘s visit to Australia was not the financial success that he had anticipated: audiences, initially enthusiastic, failed to show up in sufficient numbers; his material was considered to be dated; and after early reports of his lectures he was accused by one newspaper, the Leader, ‗of adopting a condescending attitude towards his audience by offering them inferior material because they were colonials‘.80 For his part, Sala was puzzled by Australian reverence for monarchy and empire in tandem with an aggressive insistence on equality – and he was an advocate of neither:
Out here in Australia your loyalty charms me. At all your public meetings your loyalty seems electrically produced. At every little gathering, you will sing ‗God Save the Queen‘ and trot out ‗Rule Britannia‘ till further orders. While I heartily chime in with your patriotism and loyalty, I must confess their tremendousness puzzles me. It must be that you live in an atmosphere of inversion. You know your political ideas are Radical — absolutely Democratic … I can only understand these peculiarities on one fanciful theory, viz., that Australia is the Land of Topsy-turvy-dom. Being at the antipodes of England, one finds everything upside down.81
Sala left Australia saddened by more than his failure to understand the colonies and to endear himself to their citizens: his wife Harriett died suddenly of peritonitis in Melbourne on the day the couple was due to leave Australia at the end of 1885. Given the circumstances, it is not at all surprising that he lost enthusiasm for bringing his articles together in a book called The Land of the Golden Fleece, and it remained unfinished when he died in December 1895.82
80 Ibid., p.317. 81 Queensland Figaro, 30 May 1885, quoted in ibid., p. 321. 82 Robert Dingley, who first collected Sala‘s articles in 1995 and published them as George Augustus Sala, Land of the Golden Fleece: George Augustus Sala in Australia, Robert Dingley (ed.), Mulini Press, Canberra, 1995, p. xx, has speculated that ‗the popular success of Froude‘s Oceana, published in Britain just as Sala was leaving Australia, might have seemed to have discouraged the production of a competitor‘.82
102
From young traveller to ethnographer – James Edge Partington
Unlike the three journalists whose involvement with the Australian colonies is outlined above, James Edge Partington (1854–1930) visited in early 1880 with no intention of being seen as a literary figure, to build or enhance a journalistic reputation, or to have a public role of any kind. In his mid-twenties and well-connected, he came to the colonies from Manchester on what he represents as whim in his travel memoir, Random Rot: A Journal of Three Years’ Wandering About the World, published privately in 1883.83 Neither as inchoate nor as easily dismissed as its title would suggest, Random Rot is the daily journal of an observant and acute man, whose views are characteristic of those of his class and time, but whose youthful energy and lack of ties and responsibilities allowed him to tackle situations that would deter those of more mature years. The three years Partington spent in the Australasian colonies, and in the islands of the Pacific, particularly Fiji, collecting ‗curios‘ and generally hobnobbing with the governing class of the societies he encountered, had an unusual effect. They turned him into a serious collector of artefacts produced by the indigenous peoples of the lands he visited, and into a noted bibliophile specialising in works on the Pacific, 84 including Australia and New Zealand.85
Random Rot also reveals its author‘s endorsement of the more robust methods of ‗civilising‘ the indigenous people of the islands from which he was so keen to gather ‗curios‘. He had nothing but scorn for colonial governors such as Sir Arthur Gordon who advocated a more conciliatory approach to those who had been incorporated into the British Empire
83 James Edge Partington, Random Rot: A Journal of Three Years’ Wanderings About the World, The Guardian Office, Altrincham, 1883, p. 1. 84 O. M. Dalton, ‗Obituary – James Edge Partington, born 8th February, 1854, died 4th November, 1930, Man, Vol. 31, July 1931, pp. 129–131. 85 His obituary in Man, the journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, says of Random Rot that its pages ‗reveal the irresponsible traveller in process of conversion into a serious collector‘, ibid. 103 without their informed consent, nor for what he called ‗Exeter Hall‘, once the location in the Strand of meetings of the Anti-Slavery Society and now a synonym for humanitarian concerns. His account of a punitive expedition against Solomon Islanders after an attack on a government schooner places him at the opposite end of the ideological spectrum from Mark Twain:
What a farce this all seems. They will probably burn a few villages, and cut down a cocoa-nut tree or two, while the natives are away in the bush laughing at them. The only way to do any good at all is by giving them a much more severe lesson, shooting a large number of them, and after that a man-of-war should pay regular visits to all these islands. If these savage islanders are ever to be civilized, Exeter Hall must have no voice in the matter, as they can only be civilized by force of arms, not by burning a few mud huts. It is the fear of the revolver that brings these men to their senses. The same remark applies to the aborigines of Australia. 86
After reading this and similar passages scattered through the book,87 it comes as no surprise to read in Partington‘s obituary that, despite participating in island dances and ceremonies, drinking kava with chiefs and watching corroborees, ‗for him the supreme attraction lay less in the people than in their things‘.88 Realising once he had brought his curios home that he had amassed a significant collection of Pacific artefacts, Partington began researching them. His interest led him to the British Museum, where he became acquainted with its Director, A. W. Franks, and the Keeper of Ethnographical Collections, C. H. Read, a connection ‗soon ripening into friendship‘ that ‗marked a turning point in his life; it ensured his transformation into a real student of ethnography‘ . He negotiated an arrangement with the British Museum whereby he ‗worked as a supernumerary in Mr. Franks‘ department for a certain number of days a year‘, a mutually beneficial arrangement which gave him status in
86 Partington, Random Rot, p. 264. 87 For example, ‗The fear of being hauled over the coals at home for inhumanity and such like is a very frequent cause of weak measures in out-of-the-way parts, where quick and ready retribution is required, and the only thing that will do any good.‘ Partington, Random Rot, p. 198. 88 Dalton, ‗Obituary – James Edge Partington‘, Man, p. 130. 104 the institution, and also provided its staff with a valuable source of first- hand knowledge of the Pacific artefacts in the collection.89
Partington‘s interest in ethnography also sent him to other museums and collections, where he made fine line-drawings of artefacts from the Pacific. He compiled these and the accompanying explanatory notes into a large album, assisted by a colleague, Charles Heape, and had it lithographed in his native Manchester in 1890.90 With his ‗natural gift for rapid presentation and a quick eye for salient features … he achieved his purpose, to illustrate a great number of types and help collectors to identify their specimens‘. The enterprise was a great success, and copies of Partington‘s album were eagerly purchased by museums with Pacific collections around the world, where they were ‗a godsend to many a perplexed curator‘.91 In the introduction to the album Partington set out his reasons for providing sketches of artefacts relating to Australia and the Pacific: apart from making identification easier, his work would assist the preservation of artefacts from societies in the process of rapid change resulting from European incursion into the region:
It seemed to us desirable that Oceania should be thus first dealt with owing to the variety in the specimens, the general interest attaching to them, and the frequent uncertainty regarding the precise localities from which they come. In addition to this, the labour trade which bids fair to spread over the whole of the Pacific is rapidly destroying all the most characteristic work of the natives. Men of mature age are deported from their own Islands to others, often many hundreds of miles away, and they thus carry with them and introduce what may be described as foreign arts into the culture of their new homes. It becomes therefore specially important to render permanent with the least possible delay all the information which can be obtained with regard to this part of the World. There are without doubt in many houses small collections of specimens which are often little valued and by no means carefully preserved. It is hoped that one result of
89 Ibid. 90 James Edge Partington, An Album of the Weapons, Tools, Ornaments, Articles of Dress &c of the Natives of the Pacific Islands Drawn and Described from Examples in Public and Private Collections in England by James Edge Partington. Issued for private circulation by James Edge Partington and Charles Heape, 1890. Lithographed by J. C. Norbury, Manchester. 91 Dalton, ‗Obituary – James Edge Partington‘, Man, pp. 130–1. 105 the present publication may be to cause owners to take increased interest in their collections and to exercise greater care in their preservation.92
After the positive reception of this work and the release of a second volume in 1895, Partington set off once again for the Pacific region to investigate collections there. This visit produced no light-hearted sequel to Random Rot, but in 1898 a third album of drawings was published, with the same serious purpose as the previous two. This time Charles Read, the British Museum‘s Keeper of Ethnography, contributed the Preface, and reiterated the need for reference works to capture the details of artefacts from societies undergoing transformation; and the responsibility of those who had brought this about to preserve the knowledge of the pre- European material culture of those societies. Read wrote in prophetic terms of the fate of traditional cultures in the Pacific:
It is a commonplace that within a limited number of decades the study of Ethnography will only be possible within the walls of museums. Where the native races are not dying out, they are rapidly changing as an inevitable result of the overwhelming influence of the white race. It behoves all nations therefore and most especially the English, to look to it that they are well provided with the material for such study while it can still be obtained. It is not a little singular that our own country which rules more primitive races than any other, should be so apathetic in the study of man.93
From Read and Partington‘s point of view, the rationale for collecting and careful recording was to enhance the capacity of British collectors, and their colleagues in European museums, to preserve and make better identifications of the artefacts in their Pacific collections. When James Edge Partington died in 1930, his colleague Harry Beasley wrote an appreciative preface to the auction catalogue for the former‘s enormous bibliographic collection of works related to Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific generally:
92 Ibid., Preface. What Partington is referring to here is the indentured labour trade in the Pacific, whereby islanders were recruited, sometimes forcibly, in a system known as ‗blackbirding‘, and worked on plantations growing sugar and other crops in other islands and in mainland Australia, mostly in Queensland, where they were known as ‗kanakas‘. 93 Partington, An Album of the Weapons, Tools, Ornaments, Articles of Dress ... of the Natives of the Pacific Islands ..., Vol. III, 1898, Preface. 106
James Edge Partington will live on as one who has done a great service to the study of man‘s handiwork in the Pacific. If ever there was a pioneer of research, Partington was one, and his three great volumes will stand as a memorial for all time.94
A century after his collecting and identifying forays into the Pacific, the descendants of the indigenous peoples whose artefacts were gathered into European museums are able to reconnect with the cultures of their forefathers by accessing the collections assembled by white collectors such as Partington, and to relearn the techniques of manufacture employed by their ancestors.95 Their descendants now have an influential voice in how their culture is accessed and displayed and by whom, a notion that would have been unthinkable in Partington‘s time.96
Marianne North – an unconventional botanical artist
In July 1896 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine published an article on ‗Lady Travellers‘ that celebrated the intrepidity of some women travellers of the late Victorian age. While the books these women had written were
94 Harry G. Beasley, James Edge Partington: An Appreciation‘, in Catalogue of the Australasian Collection of Books and Pictures Formed by the Late James Edge Partington, Francis Edwards Ltd, Marylebone, London, 1934. 95 For example, the art of weaving baskets made formerly by Tasmanian Aboriginal women before European colonisation has been revived using the models provided by baskets from museum collections. An exhibition curated by Julie Gough of the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery and exhibited at the National Museum of Australia, Tayenebe, displayed baskets made by a group of Tasmanian Aboriginal women that have been created in the same way as those of their ancestors. This is only one instance among many of cultural revivals that were possible only because objects had been collected into museums in the colonial era. See Andy Greenslade, ‗Tayenebe: Tasmanian Aboriginal Women‘s Fibre Work Exchange – In Workshops, Exhibition and Collection‘, Friends of the National Museum of Australia Magazine, June 2010, pp. 6–7. 96 For an examination of the issues of cultural inclusivity in relation to museum displays and practices, see Moira G. Simpson, Making Representations: Museums in the Post- Colonial Era, Routledge, London and New York, 1996; and Adrienne L. Kaeppler, ‗Paradise Regained: The Role of Pacific Museums in Forging National Identity, especially pp. 25–29 on the treatment of Maori material culture in New Zealand museums and exhibitions, in Flora E. S. Kaplan (ed.), Museums and the Making of “Ourselves”: The Role of Objects in National Identity, Leicester University Press, London and New York, 1994. 107 valued for their distinctive qualities, the article also delineated a boundary between male and female interests:
In such an age as this we need wonder at nothing that women will dare. In some cases the impelling motive may have been simply curiosity, coupled with the love of adventure. But in other cases higher considerations also have been at work. A genuine desire to add to our knowledge of the earth and its people has had a strong influence on some. Others have been moved by a philanthropic wish to improve the condition of the race, both materially and spiritually. The study of their books has a double interest. From a physical point of view it is interesting as exemplifying the fitness of women, or at least some women, to rival the rougher sex in a field which till now it has monopolised. Intellectually it reveals the features of life and scenery that most attract the female eye, for we know that women see many things that the other sex is not likely to observe.97
The article profiled Ida Pfeiffer, Alexandrine Tinne, a Dutch writer, Florence, Lady Baker, Isabella Bird, Constance Gordon Cumming, Helen Peel, and Annie R. Taylor – but not Marianne North. This is a surprising omission, as this artist and writer exemplified most of the characteristics outlined above, and her travel book had been published three years before this article was written. Marianne North (1830–1890) was the daughter of a Member of Parliament, Frederick North, and had a well- connected if unconventional childhood, as her father was acquainted with the leading literary and artistic figures of the day, and also introduced her to travel at an early age. She studied flower painting in London, but a meeting with the Tasmanian painter Robert Dowling at one of her father‘s large house parties changed her life, as Dowling introduced her to the medium of oil painting – botanical artists generally used watercolour – and this ‗became the main object in her life‘.98 Once she had learned to handle the different qualities of oil painting, she began to apply it to studies of flowers – the more flamboyant the better. The flowers of tropical regions best suited her style, and she became possessed with the idea of travelling to where they grew to paint them.
97 ‗Lady Travellers‘, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, July 1896, pp. 49–50. 98 Helen Vellacott (ed.), Some Recollections of a Happy Life: Marianne North in Australia and New Zealand, Edward Arnold Australia, Caulfield East, Vic, 1986, p. 2. 108
North‘s beloved father died in 1869 and, with no reason for her to linger in England, she set off for a life of travel that would continue for fourteen years, visiting the United States, Canada and the West Indies, Brazil, Japan, Borneo, Singapore, India, Sri Lanka, and journeying to Australia and New Zealand in the early 1880s. She was by all accounts a most resilient woman, able to mix with the upper echelons of society in the places she visited, or stay in rough accommodation and paint outside in all weathers and conditions where necessary. Cheerful and enthusiastic, she had the capacity to attract people to her and gain their assistance.99
She brought back from her journeys over those years her vivid paintings of flowers, often with other natural features and fauna included. These were not in the conventionally delicate style characteristic of most botanical painting in watercolour, showing on a plain or muted background as many features of a plant‘s formation as possible for taxonomic verification. Nevertheless, Lynn Barber in The Heyday of Natural History cites ‗Marianne North‘s oil paintings of flowers in the Kew Museum‘ as one example of women‘s natural history art that could ‗stand comparison with any male work‘.100 North finally amassed a total of 832 paintings of plants, many located in landscapes and some also showing local fauna. Although her paintings were criticised as ‗almost wholly lacking in sensibility‘ by one critic,101 they were sufficiently accurate to enable one of them to be used for species identification.102 She had exhibited them at various times to public acclaim, and decided to make them permanently accessible by providing a gallery for them within the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew,
99 Joanna Trollope, Britannia’s Daughters: Women of the British Empire, Pimlico, London, 2006, p. 157 records that North was ‗Excellent company‘. 100 Lynn Barber, The Heyday of Natural History 1820–1870, Jonathan Cape, London, 1980, p. 126.
101 Wilfrid Blunt, quoted in Vision of Eden: The Life and Work of Marianne North, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, in collaboration with the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 1980, p. 13. 102 Crinum northianum, from Borneo, was described from North‘s drawing, Anthony Huxley, introduction to Vision of Eden, p. 13. 109 funding its construction and ongoing curation from her considerable fortune. Her friend James Fergusson, a progressive architect, designed the building, and North hung the pictures herself and painted decorative friezes in any unoccupied spaces, including around the doors.103 [See Illustration 6: Marianne North Gallery, Royal Botanic Gardens Kew.]
North‘s decision to travel to Australia and New Zealand in 1880 was prompted by Charles Darwin, by now an elderly man. His critical views of Australia after his visit there in 1836 had long since been tempered by his consistent contact with scientific circles in the colonies and by his enhanced appreciation of the significance of the unique flora and fauna of the island continent. When he heard of North‘s endowment of a gallery at Kew to house her flower paintings, Darwin contacted her. When she visited him at Down House in Kent, he ‗declared that her paintings would not be complete until she had seen and painted the flora of Australia, which was unlike that of any other country in the world‘.
North needed no further encouragement: her respect for Darwin as ‗the greatest man living‘ sent her forth to paint in the Australasian colonies, on a journey in 1880 and 1881.104 The paintings she brought back from Australia and New Zealand can now be seen in her eponymous gallery in the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew.105 [See Illustration 7: Marianne North‘s paintings of Australian flora, landscapes and fauna in the Marianne North Gallery, Royal Botanic Gardens Kew.]
Notwithstanding her gallery and the colourful and striking work it contains, Marianne North‘s reputation by no means rests only on her paintings. Three years after she died her sister, Mrs John Addington Symonds,
103 Trollope, Britannia’s Daughters, p. 157; Vellacott, Some Recollections of a Happy Life, p. 3. 104 Ibid., p. 4. 105 William Botting Hemsley, The Gallery of Marianne North’s Paintings of Plants and Their Homes, Royal Gardens, Kew, Descriptive Catalogue, Third Edition, Kew Gardens, London, 1883, pp. 94–117 names and describes plant species from Australia and New Zealand painted by North and on display in her Gallery at Kew. 110 edited North‘s travel journals and published them as Recollections of a Happy Life (1893) – a title she had chosen herself – in which her attractive and lively personality and her curiosity about people and places are made manifest.106 As a result, Helen Vellacott has claimed, North ‗would have been remembered as a traveller and a writer even if she had never held a paintbrush‘.107
James Veitch – horticulturist
James Veitch (1868–1907), who came to the Australasian colonies as part of a tour of botanic gardens and private horticultural establishments in India, the Straits Settlements, Japan, Korea and Australia and New Zealand between 1891 and 1893, was a member of a prominent family of nurserymen, James Veitch and Sons, who conducted the Royal Exotic Nursery in the King‘s Road from 1853. Veitch‘s Nursery was ‗internationally famous and the most important in England‘108 Novelist Penelope Lively in A House Unlocked, her memoir of ‗Golsoncott‘, her grandparents‘ Edwardian country home, wrote of the Veitch horticultural business that ‗the Veitch dynasty and its nurseries had dominated British horticulture for nearly a century … Their handsome catalogues are a chart to the contents of Victorian and Edwardian gardens.‘109
The Veitch family also sent out plant collectors to enrich the gardens of their British clients.110 It was one thing, however, to bring home an exotic plant safely – propagating it successfully and creating the ideal conditions in which it could thrive in a foreign climate was an equally challenging task. James Veitch‘s journey was made with two objectives in mind: to
106 Trollope, Britannia’s Daughters, p. 158. 107 Vellacott (ed.), Recollections of a Happy Life, p. 1. 108 'Economic history: Farm-Gardening and Market Gardening', A History of the County of Middlesex: Volume 12: Chelsea, 2004, pp. 150–5, viewed 28 June 2010, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=28707 109 Penelope Lively, A House Unlocked, Grove Press, New York, 2001, p. 123. 110 Ibid. 111 understand the conditions in which exotic plants grew; and to locate even more plants that could be added to the family‘s sale catalogues.111
The material brought together in Traveller’s Notes had previously been published in the Veitch family publication, the Gardener’s Chronicle. James Veitch, as many have done before him and since, claimed that he had had no intention of any further publication of his travel memoirs, and that ‗at the outset not the slightest idea was entertained of placing them before the public in a concrete form, and that it is only at the pressing request of horticultural friends that I have been induced to do so‘.112
Veitch‘s travel notes reflect his and his family‘s eminence in the world of horticulture. In his Preface he thanked the Directors and Superintendents of the gardens he visited; his conversations with them and detailed descriptions of their gardens form an invaluable resource as an ‗insider‘s‘ view of the operations – and the quality – of Australasia‘s botanic gardens.
Emily Katharine Bates – a critical observer
Emily Katharine Bates was an English author of a range of books, from a novel, Nine Days or Egyptian Bonds, published in 1879, to works on spiritualist and metaphysical topics (Do The Dead Depart?, Some Instances of Spirit Return, Reincarnation, Seen and Unseen), a two- volume travel book on the United States, A Year in the Great Republic (1887), and a book on her tour of Australia and New Zealand, Japan, Alaska and the United States, Kaleidoscope: Shifting Scenes from East to
111 James Herbert Veitch, A Traveller's Notes, or, Notes of a Tour Through India, Malaysia, Japan, Corea, the Australian Colonies and New Zealand During the Years 1891–1893, with map and photogravures and also numerous illustrations from photographs by the author, James Veitch and Sons, Royal Exotic Nursery, Chelsea, 1896, Preface. 112 Ibid. 112
West, published in London in 1889. 113 Her views of the Australian colonies in the latter work were almost uniformly negative, with complaints about their intellectual tone, the varying weather, and the obsession with money-making. Bates‘ waspish comments on Australian colonial society – unlike the more generous reflections of other commentators from the same period who, while they found occasion to criticise, were also prepared to praise some aspects of colonial endeavour in the area of cultural provision – provide a bracing alternative view of the success of the civilising mission in Australia. She was more flattering about New Zealand as a country, and about its cultural institutions.
Nundo Lall Doss – a colonial subject touring the Empire
A travel account by an Indian Christian of his tour, among other places, of Australia and New Zealand in the early 1890s provides yet another perspective – that of a man who described himself candidly as ‗a member of an alien and conquered race‘114 – on the success of the colonial enterprise (and museum institutions) in the Australasian colonies. Before coming to Australia and New Zealand, Doss, who was a London Missionary Society representative, had visited the British Isles and had seen the great museums of London and other cities. He had also made a two-day visit to Paris. Inevitably Doss compared museums and historic sites in these places with those he knew back home in India, and drew other parallels and contrasts with his homeland.
Some things in Britain shocked him. He was disconcerted to see the dried- up carcasses of what seemed to be rats in the Chapter House of Westminster Abbey. ‗What led such things to be deposited in a place
113 ‘30. Bates, E. Katharine‘, Walsh and Hooton, Australian Autobiographical Narratives, Vol. II, p. 9. 114 Nundo Lall Doss, Reminiscences, English and Australasian: Being an Account of a Visit to England, Australia, New-Zeland [sic], Tasmania, Ceylon, &c, Herald Press, Calcutta, 1893, Foreword. 113 connected with a sacred edifice like the Abbey I could not understand‘,115 wrote Doss. He was also disconcerted, and his former Hindu sensibilities affronted, by the sight of prize cattle owned by Queen Victoria being offered for sale as meat: ‗The selling of an ox or sheep by Her Majesty, and exposing it thus for sale in a butcher‘s shop, with Her name attached to it, seem very undignified in my humble opinion.‘116 He was impressed by the British Museum, where he found the ethnographic and antiquities collections of most interest, especially the Egyptian mummies: ‗I felt myself brought face to face with people in the flesh who lived three thousand years ago.‘117 While he enjoyed these sights and many others, Doss was ‗struck with the unsocialness, if I may call it so, of the English railway traveller‘:
Sitting side by side with others and confined in the narrow space of a railway compartment, they seldom speak to each other. They may travel over scores of miles together, but they remain mute. They seldom speak to each other unless they be acquaintances. Each seems to be taken up with his own thoughts, or the book or paper he happens to read … I do not find fault with the reading, but I think all reading and no talking in a railway carriage is too much of a good thing for the time and place.118
While Doss had experienced private hospitality and friendship in England and the colonies when visiting the homes of his church connections, when ‗the greatest kindness and cordiality were shown to me‘,119 he found that he was cold-shouldered by his fellow-passengers on the ship to England, by contrast with his experience of travelling to the Australasian colonies:
The passengers in that case were people who had never been to India, and had therefore never tasted its Nabobship, nor learned its Anglo-Indian vices, which are so vigorously fostered by their race-pride and despotism, in a land where the checks and restraints imposed on them by Christian Society and enlightened public opinion are absent. There I felt as one of their equals, and was also
115 Ibid., p. 49. 116 Ibid., pp. 67–8. 117 Ibid., p. 56. 118 Ibid., pp. 84–5. 119 Ibid., Foreword. 114 treated as such. There was no reserve, no coldness, or the keeping of distance between my fellow passengers and me.120
Doss, however, did not allow this taste of Australian egalitarianism to blind him to the essential Englishness of the colonies. For Doss the contrast between the utterly different physical environment of Australia with the familiarity of the built and social environments was a compelling one:
City life in the capitals and larger towns of Australia is very similar to what it is in England. Large ware-houses and stores, hotels and banks, athenaeums and clubs, libraries and museums, brilliant shops and other public buildings, exist, as in any large town in the old country. The shop-keeping element, the constitutional principle of the Englishman, prevails everywhere … the whole presents a sight which none will be able to distinguish from a town scenery in England, except that the sky over head in Australia is very clear and blue, a thing so rarely seen in England, and the foliage of the trees, where you meet any, is altogether different. Nature may seem different in Australia, but the Englishman there is the same busy, bustling man, bent on making money, as he ever is in his old home in the British isles.121
Other travellers
Alice Frere and her father, who had been an official in Bombay for thirty- five years, took a roundabout route back home to England in 1865, visiting Australia, the East, and the United States. Her book, The Antipodes and Round the World: or Travels in Australia, New Zealand, Ceylon, China, Japan, and California, published in two volumes in 1870, is drawn from letters she wrote at the time, and is essentially a tourist‘s account of places and institutions, ‗laced with caustic remarks about people she encountered, particularly those who considered themselves to be of high social standing‘.122
There is even less information available about the last three writers whose work is considered in this thesis: Catherine Bond travelled with her
120 Ibid., p. 2. 121 Ibid., p. 180. 122 ‗198. Frere, Alice M. (Mrs Godfrey Clerk), Walsh and Hooton, Australian Autobiographical Narratives, Vol. II, p. 90. 115 husband to Australia and Japan in the late 1890s, and published Goldfields and Chrysanthemums: Notes of Travel in Australia and Japan in 1898. Mrs F. W. Wyndham came to Australia with her husband, a theatre manager, and sent letters back to the Newcastle Daily Journal that were collated and published in 1889 as A Voyage to the Antipodes. And John Ure, ex-Lord Provost of Glasgow, viewed his experience of the Australian colonies in the 1880s through the lens of a former high official in metropolitan government. Once back in Scotland he gave a lecture on his experiences at the National Library, published in 1885 as A Tour Round the World by an Ex-Lord Provost of Glasgow.
The view from Government House and the Club
With the exception of Nundo Lall Doss and Mark Twain, most of the travel writers described here were middle-class and British, and a significant number of them had an entrée to the homes and dinner tables of Britain‘s vice-regal representatives in Australia and New Zealand. This inevitably influenced their views of these colonial possessions; and they were criticised in some quarters for a partial or blinkered view of the situations obtaining there. Nevertheless, while they undoubtedly enjoyed privileges and advantages that would not have been available to the average traveller to the colonies, they did attempt to see beyond the privileged walls and the plush railway carriages made available to them through their socially eminent connections.
The term ‗middle-class‘ is used here in the sense in which it was understood in nineteenth-century Britain, not in twenty-first century Australia. A more accurate term that would have been recognised by all the travel writers of British origin would be ‗gentry‘. Trollope and Froude, for example, were accepted by (most of) their peers as having the status of a ‗gentleman‘; Marianne North, despite her unconventional and bohemian appearance at times, was recognised as ‗genteel‘. An
116 immediate recognition of her status would possibly be confined to those of British stock, with their sensitivity to the minutiae of the gradations of social class. Helen Vellacott records that, in order to at least maintain a semblance of the appearance of North‘s social rank, her similarly genteel hostesses ‗hastily washed and mended her dresses‘, as she was ‗quite oblivious of personal appearance, and her own scanty wardrobe was so often ragged through constant wear‘. Foreigners were not so sure about her social standing – or her solvency: ‗In Brazil, in fact, an official was curious to know where she obtained the money for her fares as they would obviously be beyond the means of such a poorly dressed person!‘ Clearly the Brazilian official was not familiar with the British tradition of sartorial eccentricity masking the identity of a person of status or wealth.123 The multiple levels at which the British class system operated at that time (and since) can be difficult to understand today, at a period in history and in a country where distinctions of birth, occupation and rank have largely given way to an assessment of social status based on the possession of material wealth.
Anthony Trollope, in his autobiography, stated his social preferences with characteristic bluntness, and attributed his devotion to his work to his desire to live among those of elevated position:
… I do not scruple to say that I prefer the society of distinguished people, and that even the distinction of wealth confers many advantages. The best education is to be had at a price as well as the best broadcloth. The son of a peer is more likely to rub his shoulders against well-informed men than the son of a tradesman … The discerning man will recognise the information and the graces when they are achieved without such assistance, and will honour the owners of them the more because of the difficulties they have overcome;—but the fact remains that the society of the well-born and of the wealthy will be as a rule worth seeking. I say this now, because these are the rules by which I have lived, and these are the causes which have instigated me to work.124
123 Vellacott (ed.), Some Recollections of a Happy Life, p. 56. 124 Trollope, Autobiography, pp. 169–70. 117
It follows that he had an entrée to the haunts of people of this social class when he journeyed outside of his native England. Nevertheless, Trollope did not allow his personal preference for associating with the higher echelons of colonial society in the antipodes to cloud his sense of justice. Although he had friends among the affluent squatters, and admired the way in which they had translated the graces of home to their broad acres in Australia, stayed in their elegant homes and hobnobbed with them in their gentlemen‘s clubs, his sympathies were with the less affluent free selectors. This is not surprising, as the class of people from whom free selectors were drawn was the same as that inhabited by the people to whom his account of life in Australasia was directed – those who struggled to maintain a respectable lifestyle in Britain, but who could find prosperity in the colonies as long as they were prepared to apply themselves to honest toil. Trollope believed that it was members of this class that should emigrate: the well-born had no need to exile themselves to the colonies (as long as they had not disgraced themselves; in that case they emigrated as ‗remittance men‘). It is one of the ironies of Trollope‘s life that his son Frederick, himself a squatter – and the model for Harry Heathcote in his father‘s novel of 1874, Harry Heathcote of Gangoil – failed to make sufficient money in that occupation in spite of unrelenting and arduous work.
James Froude had stayed at both the Melbourne and Australian Clubs (the Sydney version, then located in Macquarie Street) during his visit to Australia; and at the Northern Club in Auckland, New Zealand. These clubs, in common with their counterparts in the mother country, were institutions created for the benefit of the ruling classes in the Australasian colonies;125 and have been described as ‗an oasis of European culture in the colonies, functioning to reproduce the comfort and familiarity of ―home‖
125 All three clubs still exist, and serve essentially the same purpose. There is also an Australian Club in Melbourne, established in 1878. 118 for Europeans living in an alien land‘.126 Froude referred to them as ‗that colonial institution so peculiarly precious to travellers, who are thus spared the nuisances of hotels‘, and where ‗visitor(s) … if the club is a good one, are introduced at once to the best society in the place‘.127 James Edge Partington also patronised the Australian Club, the Melbourne Club and the Northern Club in Auckland during his time in the Australasian colonies in the early 1880s. He recorded that he had ‗played racquets at the Melbourne Club court‘ on 20 January 1880 and, later that year, having realised that ‗Hotels in Sydney are remarkable for their badness‘, had ‗removed to the Australian Club, to my mind by far more comfortable than the Union, and where you meet a nice set of men, although grey heads preponderate.‘128
Clubs, however, were not for all travellers, but for a select category of people who were offered ‗honorary membership‘ during their stay in the colonies. J. R. Angel, historian of the Australian Club in Sydney, has noted that this membership category provided mutual benefits to local members and visitors alike, as it provided access to ‗top colonial officials‘ for ‗a constant stream of eminent visitors, thus serving the interests of members, of the visitors, and of the colony‘. The Australian Club in its early years ‗provided a comfortable, congenial and relatively inexpensive base in Sydney when other acceptable accommodation was expensive‘. The criterion for honorary membership was membership of an equivalent club in Britain, or in one of the other colonies. Angel cites Froude as one example of an eminent visitor who stayed at the Australian Club.129
126 Mrinalini Sinha, ‗Britishness, Clubbability and the Colonial Public Sphere‘, Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton (eds), Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History, Duke University Press, London and New York, 2003, p. 184. Sinha quotes Leonard Woolf‘s view of the club as the ‗center and symbol of British imperialism‘ (ibid.) 127 Froude, Oceana, ps. 130, 210. Froude referred here to the Melbourne Club and the Northern Club (Auckland) respectively. 128 Partington, Random Rot, ps. 133, 251. 129 J. R. Angel, The Australian Club: The First 150 Years, John Ferguson in association with the Australian Club, Sydney, 1988, p. 104. 119
Patronage of these gentlemen‘s clubs and other accounts of Froude‘s hobnobbing, as a celebrated guest, with the higher echelons of colonial society, led to criticism of his view of the Australasian colonies, as conveyed in Oceana. It has been alleged that he only mixed with the socially well-connected, and thus reflected a narrow elite perspective. It is difficult not to endorse a view such as this, when one reads in Oceana passages such as the following, with its hint of a social Darwinist perspective that identified natural selection as the key to social eminence and material wealth:
The principal men in Melbourne are of exceptional quality. They are the survivors of the generation of adventurers who went out thither forty years ago, on the first discovery of the gold fields—those who succeeded and made their fortunes while others failed. They are thus a picked class, the seeming fittest, who had the greatest force, the greatest keenness, the greatest perseverance. These are not the highest qualities of all, but they are sufficient to give the possessors of them a superiority in the race, and to make them interesting people to meet and talk to.130
Later criticism of Froude‘s elitism appears in the Australian Dictionary of Biography entry on Froude; and Geoffrey Serle in his 1971 book, The Rush to Be Rich, claimed in relation to the Australian colonies that ‗Froude‘s book is a classic case of myopia; he faithfully reflected the views and hopes of those he met at Government House, the Melbourne Club, ―Ercildoune‖ and Sir William Clarke‘s Sunbury estate‘.131 Geoffrey Blainey cited these criticisms in the ‗Aftermath‘ of his 1985 edited version of Oceana: ‗The picture which critics of the 1880s, and historians of nearly a century later, paint of Froude is of someone out of touch, who travelled with the blinds down, who spent too much time at the dinner table of government house and the gentlemen‘s clubs, who allowed his prejudices and the company he kept to shield the outside world from him‘. Blainey‘s
130 Froude, Oceana, pp. 134–5. 131 Geoffrey Serle, The Rush to be Rich: A History of the Colony of Victoria, 1883–1889, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Vic, 1971, p. 216. 120 view is that this verdict is patently false: he believes that ‗The day should come when the loaded entry on Froude in the Australian Dictionary of Biography is rewritten, sentence by sentence‘.132
The next chapter turns to the responses of all these writers to their experiences of visiting the Australasian colonies, and to the colonial museums that had been created there.
132 Blainey (ed.), Oceana, the Tempestuous Voyage of J. A. Froude, p. 205. 121
Chapter Five: Commenting on the colonies and their museums
Advice wanted and unwanted
In 1883 journalist Richard Twopeny, in Town Life in Australia, gave some advice to those intending to visit the Australian colonies:
It is a law in every Australian town that no visitor shall be allowed to rest until he has seen all its sights, done all its lions, and, above all, expressed his surprise and admiration at them. With regard to their public institutions, the colonists are like children with a new toy—delighted with it themselves, and not contented until everybody they meet has declared it to be delightful. There are some people who vote all sight-seeing a bore, but if they come to Melbourne I would advise them at least to do the last part of their duty—express loudly and generally their admiration at everything that is mentioned to them. Whether they have seen it or not is, after all, their own affair.1
Twopeny‘s advice was over a decade too late for Anthony Trollope and for many other travelling writers who came to the Australasian colonies and penned and published their opinions on the state of culture in the antipodes. The need for candour and accurate representation may, for many, have outweighed the duty of being a gracious guest. Nevertheless, in company with many writers who have seen it as their obligation to tell the truth as they see it, some of those whose views became widely known – particularly if those views could be construed as negative – found many of their colonial readers singularly unprepared to accept their opinions. After the passage of more than a century, a reading of these views – that in some cases created an apoplectic reaction in the colonies at the time of their publication – can be undertaken in a more dispassionate frame of mind that sees them as a fascinating window into the tastes and cultural priorities and attitudes of both the observers and the observed.
1 R. E. N. Twopeny, Town Life in Australia, first published Elliot Stock, 1883, facsimile version by Penguin Books, Ringwood, Vic, 1973, pp. 5–6. 122
Whether or not one agrees with Edward Said‘s assertion that an imperialist sub-text underlies much nineteenth-century British literature, there is a strong case for asserting that the opinions of travel writers could provide, for both their local and colonial audiences alike, written evidence of the success (or otherwise) of the ways in which the citizens of a colony had reproduced the museum institutions of their home country in the antipodes, at the same time expanding the reach of imperial culture. These opinions were certainly interpreted as such at the time, particularly in those colonies that were the objects of an investigative gaze, whose citizens were anxious to be seen as successful in recreating the culture of their homeland. Indeed, it can be argued that this attitude in relation to comments from the outside world existed well into the second half of the twentieth century, and still persists in residual form in Australia and New Zealand in the twenty-first. This does not imply that these judgements were assimilated passively, and their authors‘ words accepted as a true assessment of a colonial situation. This was far from being the case.
In the nineteenth century, when ties to Britain were far closer in both Australia and New Zealand than they are now, it is not at all surprising that the impact of the opinions of travel writers from the mother country should be felt most keenly. Reactions to what was perceived as criticism by travelling writers were correspondingly vigorous – then, as now, significant numbers of people took issue with the verdicts they handed down. Writers whose works on the antipodean colonies expressed overwhelmingly favourable opinions of the cultures of Australia and New Zealand were nevertheless castigated in the colonies for expressing the occasional critical or dismissive view. Anthony Trollope‘s generally positive work, Australia and New Zealand, is known not only for its copious amounts of advice for the prospective emigrant (his major target audience), but, notoriously, for his advice to the colonials not to ‗blow their own trumpets‘ quite so loudly. Trollope had written:
123
I suppose that a young people falls naturally into the fault of self-adulation … They blow a good deal in Queensland—a good deal in South Australia. They blow even in poor Tasmania. They blow loudly in New South Wales, and very loudly in New Zealand. But the blast of the trumpet as heard in Victoria is louder than all the blasts—and the Melbourne blast beats all the other blowing of that proud colony. My first, my constant, my parting advice to my Australian cousins is contained in two words—―Don‘t blow‖.2
Marcie Muir in her 1949 book, Anthony Trollope in Australia, summed up the effects of Trollope‘s frank advice on his Australian audience:
In spite of the generous praise bestowed so enthusiastically by Trollope throughout his book, this passage, in particular, and one or two other criticisms he had to make, touched Australians on the raw, for the boastfulness Trollope deplored, and the resentment of criticism came from the same gauche secret lack of confidence characteristic to a young country.3
Muir quoted a paraphrase in verse by Arthur Patchett Martin: ―I remembered Trollope‘s parting words/‗Victorians: do not blow,‘‖ and said of Trollope‘s paragraph that ‗it was to have as great an effect on popular opinion in Australia as the whole of the rest of his book.‘4
James Anthony Froude fell foul of the same tendency when his book dealing with the Australasian colonies was published in January 1886. While Oceana, or, England and Her Colonies was broadly and generously sympathetic, ‗admired by some for the beauty of its prose, scenic descriptions and evocation of atmosphere‘,5 and described by Froude‘s
2 Anthony Trollope, Australia, ed. P. D. Edwards and R. B. Joyce, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, Qld, 1967, pp. 375–6. First published by Chapman and Hall, London, 1873. 3 Marcie Muir, Anthony Trollope in Australia, Wakefield Press, Adelaide, 1949, pp. 82–3. Chapter VIIII of Muir‘s book, ‗Publication of ―Australia and New Zealand‖, gives a detailed account of the newspapers‘ reception of the book, and criticisms of Trollope‘s perceived inaccuracies and omissions (pp. 82–92) 4 Ibid., p. 82. 5 ‗199: Froude, James Anthony‘, Kay Walsh and Joy Hooton, Australian Autobiographical Narratives: An Annotated Bibliography, Vol. II: 1850–1900, Australian Scholarly Editions Centre, University College, University of New South Wales, Australian Defence Force Academy, National Library of Australia, Canberra, 1998, p. 91. 124 biographer Hilary Waldo Dunn as ‗a happy record of a happy journey‘,6 its perceived inaccuracies prompted some stringent criticisms in the colonies it reviewed.7
Some of Froude‘s remarks touched raw nerves in Australia and New Zealand, as Emily Katharine Bates wrote several years later in her own account of her travels in these colonies:
A rabid Evangelical clergyman might as well attempt a Life of Shelley as for anyone to write upon America or our own colonies who is not conscious of some bond of attraction between himself and these countries. Mr Froude, in his popular Oceana, went to the other extreme, as many think, of fulsome flattery, and yet failed to please everybody. Possibly the butter was too thickly spread, even for colonial throats, or perhaps the general howl of indignation arose, in the first place, amongst those who were unfortunately, but inevitably, left out of the account altogether, to consume their dry bread in the background. However this may be, poor Froude‘s name in Australasia is as the red rag to the Colonial bull.8
Bates took the risk of making her own name as notorious as Froude‘s for her negativity about the Australian colonies, although she was more generous about New Zealand. The former she considered to be ‗most uninteresting; a second or third rate England, with the substitution of a ―climate‖ for our own fogs and bitter winds‘.9 Australia, she decided, was a ‗caricature‘ of America, which she had visited and written about in A Year in the Great Republic (1887) not long before she came to Australia, and had ‗all the ―bumptiousness‖ and self-assertion of America without her originality; all the energy for money-grubbing without her enthusiastic ambition to possess what is noblest in art and literature when the money is
6 Waldo Hilary Dunn, James Anthony Froude: A Biography, 1857–1894, Vol. II, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1963, p. 539. 7 See Chapter 8 of this thesis for details of the response to Oceana in New Zealand. Walsh and Hooton in Australian Autobiographical Narratives Vol. II state that Oceana was also ‗much criticised in Australia at the time of its publication for what were seen as superficial views on such subjects as social conditions, imperial federation and the raising of the Sudan contingent, and for a number of factual errors and inaccuracies‘ (p. 91). 8 Emily Katharine Bates, Kaleidoscope: Shifting Scenes from East to West, London, Ward and Downey, 1889, pp. v–vi. 9 Ibid., p. vi. 125 made‘.10 Bates admitted the absurdity of ‗attempting anything like an exhaustive description of the Australian Colonies on the strength of my brief visit to them‘. Nevertheless, her first encounter with the colonies provided sufficient indication for her of what was to come: ‗My own first impressions were so strong that I sent home my biggest trunk the first week of my visit to Australia, feeling quite sure that I should not wish to prolong this indefinitely.‘11 Bates‘s works were not sold in the numbers that Trollope and Froude‘s enjoyed,12 and her views did not create a significant degree of public outrage in the Australian colonies that she so roundly condemned.
Travel writers‘ words were scrutinised not only for their approval or otherwise of Australia and New Zealand society and the cultural institutions they had created: all visitors were expected to admire the natural environment as well. Botanical artist and writer Marianne North reported an amusing aspect of local pride in the beauty of Sydney Harbour – the insistence of Sydneysiders that all visitors should express their admiration of it:
That famous Sydney Harbour! Every stranger is so much bored everywhere by the question, ―How do you like Sydney Harbour?‖ that some English naval visitors at a picnic printed up over their tent, ―We do like Sydney Harbour!‖.‘ 13
New Zealand was as bad, she reported, quoting its governor, Sir Arthur Gordon, as saying ‗something must be wrong with a country which
10 Ibid., pp. vi–vii. 11 Ibid., p. 50. 12 The survival of copies of books by particular authors, and their presence in library collections, are some indication of their popularity and availability in the absence of circulation statistics. The National Library of Australia holds only one copy of Kaleidoscope, and A Year in the Great Republic is available only in microfilm. By contrast, the National Library catalogue shows 66 records for J. A. Froude, 141 for Anthony Trollope and 237 for Mark Twain. 13 Marianne North, Recollections of a Happy Life: Being the Autobiography of Marianne North, edited by her sister, Mrs John Addington Symonds, Macmillan, London, 1892, Vol. II, p. 139. 126 required so much laudation‘. North agreed: ‗Everyone was asserting its supreme beauty and superiority wherever I went. Every blade of grass was to be especially admired, and was different from anything anywhere else.‘ 14
The young and well-connected Mancunian traveller, James Edge Partington, took up a contrarian position in response to colonial demands that he enthuse over Sydney Harbour, ‗thinking that, as a whole, Hobart Town is finer‘.15 While admitting that ‗Certainly, with regard to its bays, nothing can equal Sydney Harbour‘,16 he was amused by the Sydney colonists‘ insistence on its superiority:
Poor people! they have little else to talk about, and interest themselves in little else, the first question you are always asked when introduced to anyone here is, ―Well, what do you think of our harbour?‖ There might be no other place in the world which possessed anything worth seeing.17
Emily Katharine Bates, however, was prepared to extend to Sydney Harbour the affection she so signally failed to manifest for the Australian colonies in general, declaring that ‗you take Sydney Harbour straight into your heart and love it for once and for ever‘:
The low-lying hills around, the numerous small bays, the lovely green islands dotted all over the broad bosom of the harbour, form a truly magnificent sight; and yet you could take it in without effort, and feel as though you could quickly grow familiar with all the beautiful bends and turns of the sea. This, I think, must be the secret of the almost passionate devotion of all Australians for this favoured spot. Other harbours may be as lovely, some few may be as grand, but it would be difficult to name one that combines the magnificent and the lovable in any like proportion.18
14 Ibid., Vol. II, 189–190. 15 James Edge Partington, Random Rot: A Journal of Three Years’ Wanderings About the World, The Guardian Office, Altrincham, 1883, p. 175. 16 Ibid., p. 177. 17 Ibid., p. 252. 18 Bates, Kaleidoscope, p. 34. 127
After another page of description of the glories of Sydney Harbour, though, Bates reverted to form in her opinion of the Australian colonies: ‗I am loth to leave the beauty and charm of Sydney Harbour, feeling there is so little else about the place that I can honestly admire.‘19
Travelling writers’ views of museums
So far the discussion of travel writers in this thesis – particularly the more prominent among them – has focused on their previous literary careers, their social backgrounds and the implications of these for the ways in which they travelled and the people they travelled amongst. My principal focus in this chapter and hereafter is on what these writers had to say in particular about the success or otherwise of museum institutions, which include those with the word ‗museum‘ in their names, as well as art galleries and botanic gardens, which do not.20 Again and again we find that colonial museums act as bellwethers for what the writer finds wrong with the colony‘s social and spiritual life.
Some of the writers had a natural affinity – and in some cases just as strong an antipathy – to one or another of these museum types and the objects that they cared for, and this inevitably coloured their judgements. The success or otherwise of these institutions nevertheless provided a tangible indication of the extent to which the colonial environment had been transformed into one that mirrored that of the colonising society. The
19 Ibid., p. 36. 20 The definition of a museum endorsed today by the International Council of Museums (ICOM) comprises a much wider range of collections than this word may have suggested to a nineteenth-century reader. The ICOM statutes, Section 1, define a museum as ‗a non-profit, permanent institution in the service of society and its development, open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment for the purposes of education, study and enjoyment‘. Under the ICOM definition, the term ‗museum‘ is applied to art galleries, science and technology museums, living collections such as botanic gardens, aquaria, vivaria and zoos, social history museums, archaeological and ethnographic museums, and historic houses and places (including Indigenous keeping places). The same understanding of the term ‗museum‘ also informs this thesis. 128 transformative effect was both physical and cultural, and was much remarked upon by travelling writers. Comments that suggested that this transformation had not been achieved to the anticipated level thus had the potential to create a significant degree of anxiety in segments of colonial audiences, even while they vehemently rejected some of the criticisms made by travelling writers.
How familiar were these travelling writers with museums and art galleries, and with estimating the qualities of the contents and presentation of both? In 1883 the Victorian artist, William Powell Frith, exhibited a large painting at the Royal Academy of Arts. Entitled ‗A Private View at the Royal Academy, 1881‘, Frith‘s painting includes among its many subjects – depicted as either viewing the artworks or each other – Anthony Trollope and George Augustus Sala. 21 By the time the painting was exhibited Trollope was dead;22 Sala made his visit to the antipodean colonies two years later, in 1885. [See Illustration 8: William Powell Frith, A Private View at the Royal Academy, 1881]
The presence in Frith‘s painting of at least two of the travel writers with which this thesis is concerned is evidence that these individuals were a recognisable part of the London cultural scene. Trollope is portrayed by Frith in the act of consulting a catalogue, but diverted by a brightly dressed group of women adherents to the Aesthetic movement. Australia and New Zealand did not possess equivalents of the Royal Academy, but public art galleries in the Australasian colonies (and their benefactors) were enthusiastic patrons of the work of academicians. Of the artists represented in Frith‘s painting, several were represented by works in the collections of colonial galleries in the antipodes. The Art Gallery of New
21 William Powell Frith‘s painting, ‗A Private View at the Royal Academy, 1881‘, also includes representations of other writers, including Oscar Wilde and Robert Browning, actors Henry Irving and Ellen Terry; zoologist Thomas Huxley, and other artists such as John Everett Millais, Academy President Frederic, Lord Leighton, and Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema. 22 Anthony Trollope died on 6 December 1882, in London. 129
South Wales, for example, holds a number of works by Frederic, Lord Leighton, including seven drawings, one painting by John Everett Millais, and two by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, many of which are still on display in the Gallery‘s nineteenth-century galleries. These works were all purchased a decade after Trollope‘s visit, but within Sala‘s time in the Australian colonies.
The quality of the works favoured by the purchasers of art for public display was frequently analysed and at times criticised by travelling writers. Richard Twopeny, in his 1883 work, Town Life in Australia, declared that ‗Australia has not yet produced any artist of note‘, apart from ‗Mr E. C. [sic] Dowling,23 and he is a Tasmanian‘, an interesting indication of how the island colony was viewed from the mainland. Twopeny admitted that the Victorian resident, Louis Buvelot, was ‗a landscape artist of considerable merit‘, a view endorsed by posterity, as Buvelot is now regarded as one of Australia‘s first realistic interpreters of the Australian landscape, admired by the rising generation of Heidelberg School painters such as Frederick McCubbin and Tom Roberts.24 Apart from Buvelot, Twopeny opined, ‗we have no artists here whose works rise beyond mediocrity‘.25 He gave his opinion of the level of artistic taste in the Australian colonies, and the way in which the nature of colonial life militated against more elevated perceptions of aesthetic value:
23 Actually Robert Hawker Dowling. He had come to Australia in 1834, worked as a saddler and trained as an artist with convict artist Thomas Bock, becoming a professional artist in 1850. He then moved to London in 1857 to study and exhibit at the Royal Academy. He returned to Australia between 1884 and 1886 and executed a number of commissioned portraits as well as exhibiting his work. Dowling is now most highly regarded for his works depicting groups of Tasmanian Aboriginal people. Gwenda Robb and Elaine Smith, Robert Smith (ed.), Concise Dictionary of Australian Artists, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Vic, 1993, p. 73. 24 Louis Buvelot was born in Switzerland in 1814 and came to Australia after working in Brazil and then back in his native land, where he became aware of the influence of the Barbizon School of French painting, with its emphasis on painting out of doors. He came to Australia in 1865, and was soon established as a landscape painter and art teacher. By 1866 two of his landscapes had been purchased by the National Gallery of Victoria, among its earliest works by local artists. He died in Melbourne in 1888. Robb and Smith, Concise Dictionary of Australian Artists, p. 41. 25 Twopeny, Town Life in Australia, p. 246. 130
By means of Schools of Design and Art, the colonial Governments have, during the last few years, been doing all in their power to encourage the growth of artistic taste, but the whole bent of colonial life is against it. Art means thought and care, and the whole teaching of colonial life is to ‗manage‘ with anything that can be pressed into service in the shortest time and at the smallest expense. It is only fair to mention as a tribute to the laudable desire of the people to see good works of art, that no parts of the International Exhibitions26 were so well attended as the Art Galleries, and that although the pictures shown there were for the most part quite third not to say fourth-rate. The press is very energetic in fostering taste, but I don‘t think it is natural to the people. They like pictures somewhat as the savage does, because they appeal readily to the imagination, and tell a story which can be read with very little trouble … the pictures most admired at the exhibitions were those which were most dramatic … Next to dramatic pictures, those in which horses, cows, or sheep appeared were most admired, for there the colonist felt himself a competent critic, and was delighted to discover any error on the part of the artist. Scenery came next in the order of appreciation, especially pieces with water in them, or verdure. Genre and figure-painting were quite out of their line.27
Other writers were less dismissive of the colonial art scene as represented in its galleries. James Edge Partington demonstrated his knowledge of both the British and colonial art scene (including Louis Buvelot‘s work) when he visited the Melbourne Public Library and Picture Gallery, both established under the aegis of Sir Redmond Barry:
… went on to the Public Library and Picture Gallery, in which are some capital pictures, the most remarkable of which is Long‘s ―Esther,‖ the replica of which is in this year‘s Academy.28 The fact of its being a replica I have never heard mentioned in London. Among the collection are two very good historic pictures by Folingsby, one of the passengers of the ―Kent,‖ in fact the second picture he brought out with him this time. He has obtained some appointment out here
26 The first international exhibitions in the Australian colonies were held in Sydney in 1879 and Melbourne in 1880. 27 Twopeny, Town Life in Australia, pp. 246–7. 28 Edwin Longsden Long, 1829–1891, was a popular Victorian artist who painted in the Academic Classical style, drawing his subjects from the ancient world and from Biblical stories. He also painted portraits and in 1887 produced a series of twenty idealised figures, ‗Daughters of our Empire‘, described as ‗a sort of Miss World competition of the imperial imagination‘. In 1878 he painted ‗Queen Esther‘, a subject taken from the eponymous Old Testament Book of Esther, the first version of which was acquired by the National Gallery of Victoria. ‗Biography and Paintings Long, Edward Longsden‘, World Classics Gallery, viewed 11 June 2010, http://www.allartclassic.com/author_biography.php?p_number=86; ‗Edward Longsden Long‘, NGV Collection, viewed 11 June 2010, http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/explore/ngv- collection/artist-a-z?sq_content_src%BdXJ,. 131 connected with painting.29 Buvelot‘s pictures are very good indeed: he is an artist resident here.30
James Anthony Froude detected in the citizens of Sydney ‗a taste for art which in time may come to something considerable‘; and felt no compunctions about casting himself in the role of a connoisseur. He visited the Art Gallery of New South Wales with the President of the Art Gallery Trust (and later its second Director), Eliezer Montefiore:31
They have a picture gallery of considerable merit. Mr Montefiore … took me to see it. There are many good watercolour sketches of Australian scenery by Sydney artists, one or two fair oil landscapes, with an admirable collection of engravings and casts from the finest classical works. I especially admired a set of drawings which showed real genius. I inquired for the hand which had executed them, and I learnt, to my surprise, that it was Mr. Montefiore‘s own. He had been modestly silent about his own accomplishments, and only my accidental question had led him to speak of himself.32
Froude‘s complimentary words on the quality of the works in the Art Gallery of New South Wales were, however, located within his analysis of the ‗deficiencies‘ of the ‗Sydney colonists‘ – ‗they have no severe intellectual interests‘. While Froude found them to be ‗courteous and polite, as well to one another as to strangers‘, their principal aim was ‗to make money and buy enjoyment with it‘. They spent money and effort on creating the bases for prosperity – educational institutions, good health and a clean environment for the citizens of Sydney – but the driving force behind this was ‗to conquer the enemies of material comfort, that their own
29 George Frederick Folingsby, 1828–1891, studied in New York and Munich and gained a reputation as a history painter. The National Gallery of Victoria commissioned The First Meeting between Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn from Folingsby, and this is the painting to which Edge Partington is referring, as the artist brought it to Australia with him when he emigrated in 1879. In 1882 he became director of the National Gallery‘s art school, and transformed its painting methods. ‗Folingsby, G. F.‘, Robb and Smith, Concise Dictionary of Australian Artists, pp. 89–90. 30 Partington, Random Rot, p. 37. 31 Eliezer Montefiore had migrated to Australia, after an education in England, from the British West Indies island of Barbados. An accomplished engraver, he became a founding Trustee of the Art Gallery of New South Wales and President of the Trust from 1874–1892; and its second Director from 1892–1894. Roslyn Russell, ‗Eliezer Montefiore: From Barbados to Sydney‘, National Library of Australia News, December 2008, pp. 11–14. 32 Froude, Oceana, p. 166. 132 lives may be bright and pleasant‘. Froude, after digressing to discuss the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the artistic skills of Eliezer Montefiore, handed down his verdict on the people of Sydney: ‗… with the exception of two or three leading lawyers and the more eminent statesmen, there were no persons that I met with who showed much concern about the deeper spiritual problems, in the resolution of which alone man‘s life rises into greatness.‘33 James Edge Partington had developed a similar opinion of the people of Sydney several years before Froude‘s visit: ‗Taken as a whole its people are not interesting … They mostly have plenty of money, but want teaching how to spend it.‘34
Mrs F. W. Wyndham, of Newcastle, United Kingdom, travelling with her theatre manager husband to Australia in the late 1880s, was inclined to be critical of Melbourne, regarding it as lacking in two essentials:
Firstly, its inhabitants, well dressed though they are, lack civility and good manners; and secondly, and more important, there is no drainage whatever, and until there is some dreadful fever epidemic, which assuredly must come in time, this great deficiency to public health has every appearance of remaining. When one sees some of the noble structures in this new city, one would scarcely credit that such an over-look to sanitary arrangements would be possible. The aromatic bouquets that greet one‘s nose at every moment are better imagined than described.35
Mrs Wyndham found more to approve in Sydney, with the city viewed from the Harbour ‗rising high in the distance with its fine buildings of stone‘; and its Art Gallery with ‗a very good collection of pictures and statues‘, among which she ‗noticed Sir Frederick [sic] Leighton‘s ―Wedded‖ … and Miss Thompson‘s ―Rorke‘s Drift‖.36 Mrs Wyndham‘s account of Sydney‘s Art
33 Ibid., pp. 165–6. 34 Partington, Random Rot, p. 180–1. 35 Mrs F. W. Wyndham, A Voyage to the Antipodes, reprinted from Newcastle Daily Journal, 1889, pp. 20–1. 36 Ibid., ps. 22, 24. Both these paintings can still be seen in the nineteenth-century galleries of the Art Gallery of New South Wales. ‗Wedded‘, by Frederic, Lord Leighton (1830–1896), a romantic depiction of young married love, was purchased in 1882 in London, possibly from the Royal Academy. The latter work depicts the heroic stand of the small garrison of eighty soldiers of the Warwickshire Regiment at Rorke‘s Drift in Natal 133
Gallery was far more generous than Emily Katharine Bates‘ view. The latter was unsparing in her condemnation of the gallery, from the quality of its building to the content of the collection:
My remembrance of a visit to the Art Museum is almost too melancholy to be recalled. The building reminds one irresistibly of a red brick stable, and speaks more for the absence of feeling for art in the Colonies than a hundred articles written upon the subject could do. The collection of sculpture is very poor. Some war pieces by De Neuville, and a few originals of well-known works by Millais and Leighton, represent the pictures, but there is little evidence of local talent with the exception of one or two Tasmanian views and one of the Goulburn River. There are some good engravings, but these are all by English and European artists, and there is without doubt a wide opening to be filled in the future, let us hope, by talent native to the soil.37
Bates was more impressed by the Melbourne Art Gallery, which was ‗on a far finer scale than the Sydney ―Art (stable)‖. Her strictures against the paucity of local talent on display were not repeated in Melbourne‘s case; in fact, she mentioned ‗a loan exhibition of pictures from London … was going on when I paid my visit there‘.38 Richard Twopeny, however, took an opposite view to Bates as to the relative quality of the works in these two art galleries:
Thanks to Sir Redmond Barry, Victoria possesses a very fair National Gallery attached to the Public Library. Some of the paintings in it are excellent, notably Mr. Long‘s ―Esther;‖ the majority very mediocre. For my own part I prefer the little gallery at Sydney, which, though it has not nearly so many paintings, has also not nearly so many bad ones, and owns several that are really good, purchased from the exhibitions.39
Province, South Africa, against Zulu warriors led by Cetawayo, in which no fewer than eleven Victoria Crosses were won. The defence of Rorke‘s Drift was a favourite pictorial subject in the Victorian era, as it occurred at the height of the British imperial presence in South Africa. The Art Gallery of New South Wales‘s work is not, however, by the well- known Victorian painter of battle scenes, Miss Thompson, better known as Lady Butler, as Mrs Wyndham has assumed, but is the work of Parisian Salon painter Alphonse de Neuville (1835–1885), painted in the same year as the famous action, 1879, and purchased by the Gallery in 1882. Details of these two works can be found on the Art Gallery of New South Wales website, viewed 4 July 2010, http://collection.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection 37 Bates, Kaleidoscope, pp. 51–2. 38 Ibid., p. 54. 39 Twopeny, Town Life in Australia, p. 246. 134
Indian traveller and London Missionary Society representative Nundo Lall Doss had found his cultural sensitivities affronted during the first part of his journey around the world in the early 1890s. He had begun his world tour in Britain, and had been somewhat shocked by nude classical statuary on display in the Crystal Palace, relocated from Hyde Park after the Great Exhibition of 1851 to the south London suburb of Sydenham, and at the time of his visit ‗a vast museum‘. Doss recorded his reactions to encountering copies of Greek and Roman sculpture:
The place is so full of naked female figures in the shape of the graces, nymphs, venuses, and other mythological characters, that it is almost impossible for a person of delicate sensibilities to walk there in the company of ladies. Perhaps an Englishman with all his refined sense of decency will not feel any hesitation in doing so, but we orientals do.40
By the time he reached Melbourne, after side trips from Britain to the Continent, Doss had a better understanding of the place of such works in the European cultural canon. He visited the Public Library, under whose roof the Art Gallery was also housed, and this time was more relaxed about this component of the Gallery‘s collection:
In another part of the same building is a Picture gallery and Statuary room, in which there is a considerably larger collection of pictures and statues made of marble or plaster of Paris. Among the pictures are the likenesses of some of the notabilities of the colony, including a few of the early explorers and squatters who helped in opening up the country and bringing it within the knowledge and reach of its present occupiers. A good many of the statues represent characters of ancient Greek and Roman mythology, while not a few of them are figures of naked females in the shape of nymphs, Venuses and others, without which a statuary collection either in Europe or elsewhere is not deemed complete. Such a large collection, made in so short a time, reflects great credit on the energy and patriotic zeal of the colonists. Their ambition is to make their metropolis not lack in anything that would entitle it to be ranked as a first class city.41
40 Nundo Lall Doss, Reminiscences, English and Australasian: Being An Account of a Visit to England, Australia, New-Zeland [sic], Tasmania, Ceylon, &c, Herald Press, Calcutta, 1893, p. 61. 41 Ibid., p. 204. 135
Mark Twain was always a keen observer, both visually and aurally. He was quick to pick up technical or high-flown language associated with specific activities, particularly if this meant he could be more effective in exposing pretensions. Twain employed his usual ‗discursive method‘42 in his second travel book, A Tramp Abroad, based on a European trip he took with a friend in 1879, when describing an Old Master painting in Venice. While he lampooned the formal analysis of works of art associated with the practice of connoisseurship, he showed that he could wield its language and concepts with considerable force. His analysis of a large history painting by Bassano, while satirical in intent (and very funny) is replete with the precise terminology used by experts to interpret works of art. The formal title of the work is ‗Pope Alexander III and the Doge Ziani, the conqueror of the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa‘;43 but Twain chose to ignore this, and called this painting ‗Bassano‘s immortal Hair Trunk‘, interpreting the painting‘s content and composition as a celebration of a piece of luggage.
Twain devoted several pages to an elaborate description of how he imagines that Bassano has composed the painting to lead the eye ineluctably to the true focus of the painting, a humble hair trunk, which he denominates ‗the World‘s Masterpiece‘. He then launches into a description of the object itself, which is worth quoting at length for the manner in which Twain blends the language of art commentary with
42 William Dean Howells, ‗Mark Twain‘s New Book‘, review of A Tramp Abroad, The Atlantic, May 1880, viewed 24 January 2010, http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/1880may.howells.htm 43 A contemporary guide to the Doge‘s Palace, Venice, gives the location of this painting as the Sala del Consiglio dei Dieci (the Room of the Council of Ten, or ‗Star Chamber‘ of the Venetian Republic), which contains pictures that ‗are for the most part late in date and inferior in merit‘ and ‗represent episodes (more or less real) in the past history of Venice, supposed to reflect special glory upon the Republic‘. The guide describes this work as ‗a huge and somewhat confused canvas representing Pope Alexander III on his return from his victory over Frederic Barbarossa, in the war which Venice undertook against the Emperor in defence of the fugitive Pope.‘ Venice – The Doge‘s Palace‘ (originally published early 1900s), Old and Sold Antiques Digest, viewed 24 January 2010, http://www.oldandsold.com/articles29/venice-27.shtml. 136 whimsical asides. The description concludes with an ironic coda that completely undercuts the pompous rhetoric of connoisseurship that Twain has employed throughout the passage:
Descriptions of such a work as this must necessarily be imperfect, yet they are of value. The top of the Trunk is arched. The arch is a perfect half-circle, in the Roman style of architecture, for in the then rapid decadence of Greek art the rising influence of Rome was already beginning to be felt in the art of the Republic. The Trunk is bound or bordered with leather all around where the lid joins the main body. Many critics consider this leather too cold in tone but I consider this its highest merit, since it was evidently made so to emphasize by contrast the impassioned fervor of the hasp. The high lights of this part of the work are cleverly managed, the motif is admirably subordinated to the ground tints, and the technique is very fine. The brass nail-heads are in the purest style of the early Renaissance. The strokes here are very firm and bold–every nail- head is a portrait. The handle on the end of the Trunk has evidently been retouched–I think with a piece of chalk–but one can still see the inspiration of the Old Master in the tranquil, almost too tranquil, hang of it. The hair of this Trunk is real hair–so to speak–white in patches, brown in patches. The details are finely worked out. The repose proper to hair in a recumbent and inactive attitude is charmingly expressed. There is a feeling about this part of the work which lifts it to the highest altitudes of art. The sense of sordid realism vanishes away–one recognizes that there is soul here … … So perfect is the Hair Trunk that it moves even persons who ordinarily have no feeling for art. When an Erie baggagemaster saw it two years ago he could hardly keep from checking it. And once when a customs inspector was brought into its presence, he gazed upon it with silent rapture for some moments, then slowly and unconsciously placed one hand behind him with the palm uppermost and got out his chalk with the other. These facts speak for themselves.44
Visiting writers were thus not shy of displaying their connoisseurship, and art galleries in Australia and New Zealand were visited by most of them, and their contents remarked upon in greater or lesser detail, but mostly with approval (barring a couple of exceptions). Museums – at that time the word was applied to collections of, respectively, antiquities; and natural history – were a different matter, and evoked quite vehement comments from some writers who clearly regarded the obligation to process through a museum as an invitation to criticise. After viewing the stuffed African ‗wild beasts‘ in the South African Museum in Cape Town, which even its
44 Mark Twain, A Tramp Abroad, first published 1880, this edition abridged and edited by Charles Neider, Harper & Row, New York, 1977, pp. 305–6. 137 own director45 admitted were a ‗poor lot‘, Trollope admitted that ‗I am but a bad sightseer in a museum, being able to detect the deficiencies of a mangy lion, but unable from want of sight and want of education to recognise the wonders of a humming bird‘. On that occasion, Trollope found that ‗A skeleton of a boa-constrictor with another skeleton of a little animal just going to be swallowed interested me perhaps more than anything else‘.46
Trollope confessed that his distaste of natural history museums had once earned him the ‗disgust‘ of an eminent figure in nineteenth-century science, the Swiss biologist Louis Agassiz (1807–1873), who held an academic position at Harvard, ‗when I asked permission not to be shown his museum at Cambridge, Massachusetts‘.47 He did, however, write approvingly of one natural history museum in the Australian colonies, Frederick McCoy‘s museum in the University of Melbourne, that was ‗open to the public gratuitously‘. Trollope bestowed on this institution what for him was high praise: ‗I am not, myself, qualified to speak of the value of museums, but this one seems to have the special and somewhat unusual merit of being so arranged that its contents are intelligible to ordinary capacities.‘48
Nundo Lall Doss supplied the details of the University Museum‘s display techniques that had been omitted by Trollope, and added his estimate of the museum by comparison with others around the world:
Attached to the University building is a museum with a large collection of animals, birds, fishes and reptiles, both Australian and foreign. They have been
45 Ronald Trimen, Director of the South African Museum at Cape Town from 1873 to 1895. A noted entomologist and author of works on South African lepidoptera, he served as President of the Entomological Society of London from 1897–1898. 46 Anthony Trollope, South Africa; a reprint of the 1878 edition with an introduction and notes by J. H. Davidson, A Balkema, Cape Town, 1973, pp. 80–1. 47 Ibid., p. 84. 48 Trollope, Australia, p. 380. 138 most systematically arranged and numbered. Those of one genus or species are numbered and grouped together, and their numbers and names in Latin are written on the walls close by … The collection is a large one, and it has been made and arranged no doubt at the expense of much labour and time, as well as money. It will favourably compare with that of any Museum in any of the older cities of the world. While there I could not help thinking of our own museum in Calcutta, and noticing how far it lags behind that of Melbourne, although her senior in age.49
James Froude shared Trollope‘s view of museums. In Victoria he had suffered from the kindly meant ministrations of the hospitable citizens of Ballarat, who insisted that he see every public institution including museums and picture galleries that their town had to offer. This had left him exhausted with what is now known as ‗museum fatigue‘. Froude‘s comments will resonate with many who have been forced to prolong a museum visit beyond the time when one is capable of appreciating the objects on display:
My senses lose their perception when many objects of many kinds are thrust upon them one after the other. It is like flying through a country on a railway, or tasting successively a number of different wines. The palate loses its power of distinction, and one flavour is like another. I can spend a day over a single case in a museum: one picture at a time is as much as I can attend to. A day spent in walking from room to room, from books to paintings, from paintings to sculpture, from sculptures to crystals and minerals and stuffed birds and beasts, leaves me bewildered.50
Froude recalled a visit to the British Museum which had induced this condition; and his similar experience when he was shown the treasures of Melbourne‘s museum:
I remember once taking a poor lady over the British Museum. She would see everything: printed books and MSS., engravings and illuminated missals, beetles and butterflies, ichthyosauri and iguanadons, Greek and Roman statues, Egyptian gods and mummies, Assyrian kings on the alabaster tablets. It was over at last; we passed out between the great winged bulls from Nineveh. She observed to me, ‗Those, I presume, are antediluvian.‘ I was reduced to the same state of mind after being taken through the Melbourne treasures, and I can give no rational account of them, save that they were abundant and varied, and had
49 Doss, Reminiscences, pp. 204–5. 50 Froude, Oceana, p. 96. 139 been collected regardless of expense; that the managers were full of knowledge, and were most polite in communicating it.51
When Mark Twain travelled through Australia and New Zealand in 1897, he commented many times on the content and presentation of museums and art galleries, as he had done wherever he had travelled. Twain was as wearied as Froude by the experience of looking at Melbourne‘s museums, seeing them as characteristic of their type the world over:
In the museums you will find acres of the most strange and fascinating things; but all museums are fascinating, and they do so tire your eyes, and break your back, and burn out your vitalities with their consuming interest. You always say you will never go again, but you do go.52
Despite his ennui, Twain nevertheless continued to visit museums throughout the colonies, diligently noting their distinctive objects. On the visiting list was Hobart, where he visited the museum and recorded its ‗samples of half-a-dozen different kinds of marsupials‘ and ‗a parrot that killed sheep …a notable example of evolution brought about by changed conditions‘.53 He reserved his most polished irony, possibly fuelled by his deep sympathy for their creators‘ fate, for his description of some Tasmanian Aboriginal artefacts on display:
And there was another curiosity – quite a stunning one, I thought: Arrow-heads and knives just like those which Primeval Man made out of flint, and thought he had done such a wonderful thing – yes, and has been humored and coddled in that superstition by this age of admiring scientists until there is probably no living with him in the other world by now. Yet here is his finest and nicest work exactly duplicated in our day: and by people who have never heard of him or his works: by aborigines who lived in the islands of these seas, within our time. And they not only duplicated those works of art but did it in the brittlest and most treacherous of substances – glass: made them out of old brandy bottles flung out of the British camps; millions of tons of them. It is time for Primeval Man to make a little less noise, now. He has had his day. He is not what he used to be.54
51 Ibid. 52 Mark Twain, Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World, Dover Publications, Inc, New York, 1989, facsimile version of work originally published in 1897 by the American Publishing Company, Hartford, Connecticut, p. 168. 53 Ibid., p. 283. 54 Ibid., pp. 283–4. 140
Twain‘s admiration for the artistry of Aboriginal Australians, and their capacity to adapt their technique of crafting stone tools to an introduced material, glass discarded by thoughtless British invaders, is palpable in the tone he has adopted in this passage. Twain has satirised the scholarship of archaeologists and museum curators, while highlighting the achievements of Aboriginal people of the recent past.
Across the Tasman in Christchurch Twain found more examples of artistry by people whose lives had been impacted by British settlement and whose objects had been gathered into colonial museums. This time it was Maori artistic and carving skills on display in the Canterbury Museum. Twain lavished high praise on the Museum‘s assemblage of Maori material culture:
In the museum we saw many curious and interesting things; among others a fine native house of the olden time, with all the details true to the facts, and the showy colours right and in their proper places. All the details: the fine mats and rugs and things; the elaborate and wonderful wood carvings – wonderful, surely, considering who did them – wonderful in design and particularly in execution, for they were done with admirable sharpness and exactness, and yet with no better tools than flint and jade and shell could furnish; and the totem-posts were there, ancestor above ancestor, with tongues protruded and hands clasped comfortably over bellies containing other people‘s ancestors – grotesque and ugly devils, every one, but lovingly carved, and ably …55
Marianne North also saw the ‗curious Maori House‘ in the Colonial Museum in Wellington – that museum‘s most significant object, ‗Te Hau ki Turanga‘56 – which she was shown by the Director, Dr James Hector. Either she was given a privileged private viewing, or the museum was open at night, as she described it as ‗lit at night by magnesium-light‘. North appreciated the numinous qualities of carvings that had appeared ‗grotesque and ugly‘ to Twain when he had encountered similar work in
55 Twain, Following the Equator, pp. 297–8. 56 Conal McCarthy, Exhibiting Maori: A History of Colonial Cultures of Display, Te Papa Press, Wellington, 2007, pp. 22–3 gives a detailed description of the ‗Maori House‘ in the Colonial Museum, Wellington, now Te Papa Tongarewa/National Museum of New Zealand. 141
Christchurch: ‗it looked most mysterious and awesome in the flickering brightness, with its myriads of huge eyes made of mother of pearl shining out of the dark wooden figures,‘ North wrote.57
Twain and North, in their separate ways, thus registered their appreciation of the skill of Maori carving and, in North‘s case, its aesthetic and spiritual qualities. New Zealand‘s museums also offered natural wonders at which travelling writers could marvel, and on which, in Twain‘s case, they could also exercise their wit. A prime example of this was another of the Canterbury Museum‘s prized exhibits, a moa skeleton. [See Illustration 9: Moa skeleton display, Canterbury Museum, Christchurch, New Zealand.] The visiting American author also showed that he had taken the time not only to read the information on the moa, but also to align this with his knowledge of Maori legends and history:
Also we saw a complete skeleton of the giant Moa. It stood ten feet high, and must have been a sight to look at when it was a living bird. It was a kicker, like the ostrich; in fight it did not use its beak, but its foot. It must have been a convincing kind of kick. If a person had his back to the bird and did not see who it was who did it, he would think he had been kicked by a wind-mill. There must have been a sufficiency of moas in the old forgotten days when his breed walked the earth. His bones are found in vast masses, all crammed together in huge graves. They are not in caves, but in the ground. Nobody knows how they happened to get concentrated there. Mind, they are bones, not fossils. This means that the moa has not been extinct for very long. Still, this is the only New Zealand creature which has no mention in that otherwise comprehensive literature, the native legends. This is a significant detail, and is good circumstantial evidence that the moa has been extinct 500 years, since the Maori has himself – by tradition – been in New Zealand since the end of the fifteenth century.58
Twain was following a consistent pattern of travelling writers who came to Christchurch: comment on the moa was a ubiquitous feature of all their
57 North, Recollections of a Happy Life, Vol. II, p. 189. 58 Twain, Following the Equator, pp. 298–9. 142 accounts of the Canterbury Museum.59 Emily Katharine Bates had also commented on the moa – and the shrewd use by its inaugural Director, Julius von Haast (1822–1887), of the excavated moa bones that were surplus to his museum‘s requirements.60 Her comments on Canterbury Museum provide an interesting contrast to her views of Australian museum institutions that had ranged from condemnation to lukewarm praise:
… the Museum is the ne plus ultra of Christchurch, and the inhabitants have good cause to be proud of it. It would do credit to any large town in England or on the continent. There is a fine collection of minerals and metals, skeletons of prehistoric animals, and a whole room full of the ―Moa,‖ a bird now extinct in New Zealand, but which was known here within the last hundred years. The skeleton looks something like an ostrich, but it is on a larger scale, and the legs look even stronger than those of an ostrich. It is thanks to these strange birds that Christchurch possesses such a fine collection of other things, for the authorities have been constantly enabled to make valuable exchanges with other European collections by sending them specimens of the Moa, which is peculiar to this country.61
Public provision of cultural institutions in the Australasian colonies
As Mark Twain progressed on his lecture circuit throughout the Australasian colonies, he remarked from time to time on the extent of public munificence when it came to providing cultural and recreational amenities for the populations of Australia and New Zealand. He found this somewhat puzzling, as he regarded these places – although they were still colonies and those in Australia had not yet federated – as republics. These two polities were not, Twain thought, adhering to the norms that he
59 Nundo Lall Doss, for example, also commented in detail on the moa skeletons, and the exchange of others to build up the Canterbury Museum‘s collection. Doss, Reminiscences, pp. 169–70. 60 John M. McKenzie, Museums and Empire: Natural History, Human Cultures and Colonial Identities, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2009, ‗The Munificent Moa‘, pp. 217–19, describes the moa skeletons discovered by Julius von Haast – particularly the over 1000 skeletons found in a swamp fifty miles from Christchurch – as ‗the museum‘s ―currency‖ by which exchanges could be made with other museums‘ (p. 217), by this means augmenting Canterbury‘s collections with choice specimens from around the world. 61 Bates, Kaleidoscope, pp. 82–3. 143 associated with republican political and civic behaviour, at least not in the way that it expressed itself at home. A visit to the museum and art gallery in Dunedin, in New Zealand‘s South Island, with the president of its Society of Arts,62 sparked a reflection upon the difference between the republic he knew so well – the United States of America – and these republics-in-all-but-name in the antipodes:
Some fine pictures there, lent by the S. of A. – several of them they bought, the others came to them by gift. Next, to the gallery of the S. of A. – annual exhibition, just opened. Fine. Think of a town like this having two such collections as this, and a Society of Artists. It is so all over Australasia. If it were a monarchy one might understand it. I mean an absolute monarchy, where it isn‘t necessary to vote money, but take it. Then art flourishes. But these colonies are republics – republics with a wide suffrage; voters of both sexes, this one of New Zealand.63 In republics, neither the government nor the rich private citizen is much given to propagating art. All over Australasia pictures by famous European artists are bought for the public galleries by the State and by societies of citizens. Living citizens – not dead ones. They rob themselves to give, not their heirs. This S. of A. here owns its own buildings – built it by subscription.64
Twain was being rather unfair to his compatriots in this passage. Admittedly, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington was established in 1846 as the result of a legacy from a British scientist, James Smithson, who had never visited the United States. However, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York was established in trust for the public and opened in 1870; and the Art Institute of Chicago opened in late 1893, and received a large gift of paintings from Mrs Henry Field the following year.65 These are only two prominent examples among many generous benefactions that established museums and art galleries in cities and
62 Now called the Otago Art Society, the Society was founded in 1876 ‗by a small group of ―gentlemen, favourable to the formation of a Society of Arts in Dunedin‖‘. By 1897, when Twain‘s account of the Society was published in Following the Equator, the Society comprised 140 artists and 50 honorary members. Otago Art Society website viewed 25 January 2011 at http://www.otagoartsociety.co.nz/About 63 New Zealand women had been granted the vote in 1893, four years before Twain‘s visit, and a year before the women of South Australia (1894). New Zealand was the first self-governing nation to give women the right to vote. 64 Twain, Following the Equator, p. 289. 65 Websites of the Smithsonian Institution, Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago viewed 30 January 2010. 144 towns around the United States. Nevertheless, Twain‘s praise of the civic spirit and governmental policy that had created and sustained cultural institutions in the Australasian colonies is significant. It recurs later in this thesis in relation to botanic gardens, and demonstrates that such a consistent approach to cultural provision by local authorities, city administrations, and colonial governments was not something with which Twain was overly familiar in his own country.
A traveller from the northern part of the British Isles, John Ure, an ex-Lord Provost of Glasgow, was if possible even more impressed than Twain by the quality of public institutions – including museums and art galleries – that he saw during a visit to the Australian colonies in the early 1880s. He remarked first of all on the quality of Adelaide‘s ‗wide and regular streets‘, ‗ample pleasure grounds‘, a ‗free library of 20,000 volumes, and a reference library of 2,000 standard works‘. Despite this progress in just over forty years of settlement, Ure continued, ‗the citizens were not content with these, and I found them expending £95,000 in the erection of a new public library, with art gallery and museum combined, which have since been opened‘.66
Melbourne‘s ‗prominent buildings‘ caught Ure‘s eye as his ship neared Williamstown pier, chief among them the Exhibition Building erected for the Melbourne International Exhibition of 1880 and used for that purpose ever since.67 Not only did the Exhibition Building impress Ure, it also recalled for him St Paul‘s Cathedral and, in general, ‗in many respects
66 John Ure, A Tour Round the World by an Ex-Lord Provost of Glasgow, Robert Anderson, Glasgow, 1885, p. 36. 67 The Exhibition Building in Melbourne was the first example of European built heritage in Australia to be listed on the UNESCO World Heritage Register. It is of world significance as the only surviving example of a nineteenth-century exhibition building still in use for its original purpose. Many other examples of nineteenth-century international exhibition buildings – including the Crystal Palace of 1851, Sydney‘s Garden Palace of 1879, and many of the buildings of the World‘s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago in 1893, were lost to fire. 145
Melbourne brought up the recollection of London more than any city I have seen‘.68 [See Illustration 10: Exhibition Building, Melbourne.]
Ure gave full credit to the colonists of Victoria, not only for constructing the Exhibition Building, but also for the transformation of the natural environment into an appearance that was comfortingly familiar to someone from the British Isles (an aspect of travelling writers‘ appraisal of colonial success that recurs in later chapters):
The International Exhibition Building belongs to the Colony, and has cost upwards of two hundred and fifty thousand pounds. It is a magnificent structure, and being on the highest ground in the city, it is well seen from a great distance all around … There is a large open space around it laid out in pleasure ground, and being near the centre of the city, it is much resorted to, and, along with the building, is used in the same manner as our Crystal Palace at Sydenham … It is almost impossible to realize that not more than 40 years ago that part near the centre of the city, on which the Exhibition Building now stands, was all covered with the Australian bush, and that lawless freebooters had as secure shelter there as in old times Sherwood Forest afforded to Robin Hood.69
Ure then paid Melbourne what must have been, for many of its more public-spirited citizens, the ultimate accolade: ‗I would have no one harbour the thought that in going to the Colonies he is required to make sacrifice of the usual amenities of social life, for with confidence I give the assurance that in the large towns at least he will find what will satisfy him in all respects‘.70 These included an Opera House, theatres and music halls, an Athenaeum, libraries and reading rooms. Ure concluded his encomium to Melbourne‘s cultural provision with a tribute to its Library, Museum and Art Gallery:
Melbourne has set Glasgow a noble example for it has provided a splendid building, costing upwards of a hundred thousand pounds, in which there is sitting accommodation for 600 readers, and has more than a hundred thousand volumes in it. There is also a Picture Gallery and a Statue Gallery, in which are
68 Ure, A Tour Round the World, p. 41. 69 Ibid., pp. 43–4. 70 Ibid., pp. 55–6. 146 many rare works of art; a Museum also, in which there are more than forty thousand specimens, all labelled and classified.71
After magnificent and culturally well-endowed Melbourne, older, less well laid out and rather bedraggled Sydney was disappointing to John Ure, with its ‗streets in a sad condition with mud‘ so that they were almost ‗impassable‘. Nevertheless, they did contain ‗numerous fine buildings – both public and private‘, including the Museum, the Picture Gallery and the Free Library, that Ure conscientiously noted contained 50,000 volumes and was a ‗handsome structure‘.72 Ure did not allow his mixed impressions of the principal city of the mother colony to dim his pleasure in the overall achievements of the Australian colonies he had seen on his visit. He reported that ‗we were amply rewarded in going to the Colonies … in seeing the marvellous progress which these young communities are making.‘73
While some of the travelling writers who visited the Australasian colonies in the second half of the nineteenth century found scant reason to commend their overall cultural tone, most found something to praise in their museums and galleries, such as works of art by artists familiar to them from their own homeland, emerging colonial artists whose reputations have stood the test of time, and museum displays that were well ordered and presented, or simply novel, such as Christchurch‘s much-remarked-upon moa skeleton. Most writers were generous in their commendations of the laudable intentions of the colonists to provide their citizens with facilities that would equal if not exceed those available in the home country, even if these expectations had not quite been met yet – in some cases declaring that the achievements of specific colonial museums
71 Ibid., p. 56. 72 Ibid., pp. 65–6. Emily Katharine Bates also admired the Melbourne Public Library, and was pleased to find it well patronised, but ‗disappointed to find that most of them were reading novels at 11.30 A.M., very few scientific or literary books being in request on the morning of my visit.‘ Bates, Kaleidoscope, p. 54. 73 Ibid., p. 70. 147 excelled those in their home countries. Some, notably Mark Twain and Marianne North, were appreciative of displays of finely crafted work by Aboriginal and Maori people.
The testimonies of informed amateurs, as these writers were, while scarcely constituting anything approaching a comprehensive survey of the positive and negative aspects of colonial museums in Australia and New Zealand, do allow some insights into how successfully these museums were achieving their mission. While some writers were sharply critical of some museums – and some professed themselves indifferent to or exhausted by extensive museum displays generally – their responses to colonial museum institutions generally demonstrate that, in spite of the prevailing colonial culture of intellectual indifference, especially in parts of Australia, those who had endowed and promoted these institutions had made a promising start overall. Now we must turn to a consideration of a specific museum type – the botanic garden – to which responses both by local people and visiting writers tended to be complicated by conflicting assumptions as to its functions and management.
148
Chapter Six: ‘Imperial Kew’
“So sits enthroned in vegetable pride Imperial Kew by Thames‟s glittering side; Obedient sails from realms unfurrow‟d bring For her the unnamed progeny of spring; Attendant nymphs her dulcet mandates hear, And nurse in fostering arms the tender year, Plant the young bulb, inhume the living seed, Prop the weak stem, the erring tendril lead; Or fan in glass-built fanes the stranger flowers With milder gales, and steep with warmer showers Delighted Thames through tropic umbrage glides, And flowers Antarctic, bending oe‟r his tides; Drinks the new tints, the sweets unknown inhales, And calls the sons of science to his vales. In one bright point admiring nature eyes The fruits and foliage of discordant skies, Twines the gay floret with the fragrant bough, And bends the wreath round George‟s royal brow. –Sometimes retiring, from the public weal One tranquil hour the royal partners steal; Through glades exotic pass with step sublime, Or mark the growths of Britain‟s happier clime; With beauty blossom‟d, and with virtue blazed, Mark the fair scions, that themselves have raised; Sweet blooms the rose the towering oak expands, The grace and guard of Britain‟s golden lands.”1
This panegyric to the glories of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, penned by Charles Darwin‟s grandfather Erasmus Darwin, is both descriptive of an existing state and prophetic as to its perpetuation. Darwin‟s heroic couplets, reminiscent of the poetry of Alexander Pope,2 and characterised by a „proclivity for hyperbole, overuse of adjectives, and alliteration‟,3 contain references that testify to the role of the botanic garden as the most fundamentally imperialist museum institution of them all. These include the scientific classification of plants according to a European system; the transfer and acclimatisation of plants to and from the mother country and the colonies; the practice of economic botany whereby plants
1 Erasmus Darwin, The Botanic Garden: A Poem in Two Parts Containing The Economy of Vegetation and The Loves of the Plants with Philosophical Notes, first published 1791, this edition Jones & Company, London, 1824, p. 67, Canto IV. 2 Margaret Drabble (ed.), „Darwin, Erasmus‟, in The Oxford Companion to English Literature, Fifth Edition, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1985, p. 255. 3 Alan Bewell, „Erasmus Darwin‟s Cosmopolitan Nature‟, ELH 76 (2009) pp. 19–48, Johns Hopkins University Press, p. 19. 149 that could provide useful commercial crops were studied, propagated and distributed; and use of the botanical wonders of the colonised world to adorn the royal domain. Darwin‟s use of the term, „Imperial Kew‟, in the second line of this passage, reinforces the argument that the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew have for centuries been regarded as both a symbol of, and a working repository for, the British imperial system.
This passage is part of a much larger poem, „The Botanic Garden‟, which, with many digressions and elaborations, celebrates the Linnaean system of taxonomic classification of the plant and animal world. The poem is in two parts: „The Economy of Vegetation‟, to which this passage belongs; and „Loves of the Plants‟, in which the unambiguously sexual nature of Linnaean classification is revealed. Published in 1791, for a time The Botanic Garden was „the most popular and the most controversial nature poem of the 1790s‟, 4 although within a few years it was subjected to scathing criticism. A highly effective parody, „Loves of the Triangles‟, was published at the height of anti-Jacobin feeling in 1794. It associated Darwin‟s epic poem with the excesses of revolutionary France, including anti-religious views on evolution that prefigured the immense impact of his own grandson Charles‟ theory: „It was also, unfortunately, very funny.‟5
The Royal Society of London, for Improving of Natural Knowledge, the body that initiated some of the most profound developments in Britain‟s history, notably in imperial expansion and the concomitant explosion in scientific knowledge, had been founded in 1660, over a century before Erasmus Darwin so fulsomely hymned the glories of „Imperial Kew‟.6 Its members pioneered developments in astronomy and navigation, as well as those in botany, that would culminate on
4 Bewell, „Erasmus Darwin‟s Cosmopolitan Nature‟, p. 19. 5 Jenny Uglow, The Lunar Men: The Friends Who Made the Future, 1730–1810, Faber and Faber, London, 2002, p. 485. 6 Michelle Hetherington, Exploration and Endeavour: The Royal Society of London and the South Seas, National Museum of Australia Press, Canberra, 2010; catalogue for an exhibition at the National Museum of Australia from 15 September 2010 to 5 February 2011, commemorating the 350th anniversary of the foundation of the Royal Society, and its key role in the exploration of the Pacific. 150 the one hand in the accession of the Australasian colonies to the British Crown, and on the other to the establishment of a network of British botanic gardens that spanned the globe, with Kew at its centre. The prevailing sensibility of the English Enlightenment, for which the improving qualities of the study of nature was a key concept, gave intellectual assent to the exploitation of the earth‟s resources for the benefit of mankind, and of the British Empire in particular, as Darwin‟s poem had described. Roy Porter, in Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World, has written that
Nature was a resource, „principally designed‟, asserted the Cambridge divine and Newtonian popularizer, Richard Bentley, „for the being and service and contemplation of man‟. „We can, if need be, ransack the whole globe,‟ maintained his fellow physic- theologian the Revd William Derham, „penetrate into the bowels of the earth, descend to the bottom of the deep, travel to the farthest regions of this world, to acquire wealth, to increase our knowledge, or even only to please our eye or fancy.‟7
This belief, coupled with an equally strong conviction of what John Gascoigne has called „the possibilities of progress, as embodied in the practice of improvement‟,8 underpinned the epistemology that shaped the actions of those who went – or were sent out by others – to colonise the hitherto „unimproved‟ regions of the world, and to secure their bounty for the benefit of the home country. One of the agents of that improvement was the botanic garden.
To understand the role of botanic gardens in both the British imperial system and the wider „empire of science‟ that formed such a significant part of the Enlightenment project in eighteenth-century Europe, it is necessary to go back briefly to the seventeenth century, when the foundations of modern scientific institutions were laid. Botanic gardens in Britain – as did their counterparts in Europe9 – originated in physic gardens where apprentice apothecaries learned to
7 Roy Porter, Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World, Penguin Books, London, 2000, p. 299. 8 John Gascoigne, The Enlightenment and the Origins of European Australia, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 2002, p. 3. 9 For example, the Amsterdam Botanical Garden was established by the city council in 1682 as a „medical materials resource‟, according to Lisa Jardine, Ingenious Pursuits: Building the Scientific Revolution, Abacus, London, 2000, p. 246. 151 cultivate herbs and plants to create their medications, with the first being the University Physic Garden in Oxford in 1621. The celebrated Chelsea Physic Garden of the Society of Apothecaries was initiated in 1673.10 In addition, the desire for curiosities – both animal and vegetable – stimulated and fed by voyages of discovery and commercial enterprise sponsored by the countries of Europe, also stocked the cabinets of curiosities, menageries and, most significantly for this discussion, the gardens of the wealthy in Europe with a wide range of exotic species. A commercial trade in exotic plants stimulated the creation of purpose-built glasshouses or „stoves‟ in which tropical fruit such as pineapples could be cultivated. Visiting the gardens of the wealthy to see the wonders there displayed became, in Lisa Jardine‟s words, „a recreational activity in its own right with those with the means to move around Europe‟11 in the seventeenth century. The first botanic garden in England to be opened to the general public, and funded by citizen subscriptions so that they could simultaneously learn about the world of plants and enjoy pleasant recreation, was established in Liverpool in 1802.12
Botanic gardens are not simply parks: they have a serious purpose that is well recognised – to accumulate botanical and horticultural knowledge; and to disseminate it to the wider community, often for economic advantage. The expansion of colonisation in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries brought to the botanic gardens of Europe countless numbers of specimens of newly discovered plant species. One task of a botanic garden is to preserve these plants in a herbarium, along with other representative dried and preserved specimens: „a botanic garden was meant to be a museum of living and dried specimens from the plant kingdom‟, as Donal McCracken has noted in his work
10 Ann Datta, John Gould in Australia: Letters and Drawings, The Miegunyah Press, Melbourne University Press, Carlton South, Victoria, 1997, p. 44. 11 Jardine, Ingenious Pursuits, pp. 252–3. 12 Datta, John Gould in Australia, p. 44; Richard Drayton, Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain and the ‘Improvement’ of the World, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2000, p. 134. 152 on botanic gardens in the British Empire.13 Plants in botanic gardens are organised along scientific lines, and arranged in beds according to families. Where possible, related plant families are close to each other, demonstrating possible lines of evolution. In cooler places, tropical plants are put into glasshouses and displayed in elegant conservatories. A botanic garden‟s fundamental scientific purpose was – and remains – to conserve and display living and dried plant specimens.14
As important – if not more important – a function of botanic gardens was their role in economic botany, the identification of commercially useful plants, and their propagation and dissemination to agricultural, aboricultural and horticultural interests in both a home country and its colonies. Botanic gardens in the nineteenth century provided information about plants: for horticulturists and agriculturists who were seeking new plants and crops for commercial exploitation; for new medicinal and pharmaceutical applications; and for the further enhancement of knowledge of the natural world.
Located in a colony far from a European homeland, trees, shrubs and flowers transplanted to a new environment and established in a botanic garden brought comforting reminders of home to nostalgic colonists. Exotic trees and shrubs brought from other parts of the Empire also added variety to a colonial landscape that was often regarded by colonists as dull and unvarying by comparison with that of their native lands in the northern hemisphere. Botanic gardens everywhere, as Theresa Wyborn has commented, provided „a place to revere nature whilst simultaneously studying and subduing it, a place to acquire useful knowledge in a rational, ordered recreational setting‟.15
13 Donal P. McCracken, Gardens of Empire: Botanical Institutions of the Victorian British Empire, Leicester University Press, London, 1997, pp. viii–ix. 14 Ibid., pp. viii–ix 15 Theresa Wyborn, „In Pursuit of Useful Knowledge: The Nineteenth-Century Concept of the Botanic Garden‟, Victorian Historical Journal, Vol. 67, No. 1, April 1996, p. 17. 153
Botanic gardens, with their multiple meanings and values for different social groups and interests, were the earliest – and often the most popular – museum institutions in the Australasian colonies for all these reasons.
Linnaeus, botany and empire
The intellectual basis on which activity in botanic gardens rests is the classification of plants, one with great appeal for „the orderly mind of the Enlightenment‟ which, as Gascoigne has observed, „naturally meshed with the new systems of classification, of which the best known was that of Linnaeus‟.16 This conjunction made it an integral part of the „progressive‟ outlook of the Enlightenment, as it „embodied careful reasoning and rationality‟.17
The man the English-speaking world knows as Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778) was known in his native Sweden as Carl von Linné. He has also been called Princeps botanicorum, the Prince of Botanists, and „The Pliny of the North‟.18 Possibly most appropriate, given his profession as a Lutheran pastor, and as one who „for the first time provided a method for the consistent application of names to animals and plants‟,19 he has been dubbed „The Second Adam‟.20 Patricia Fara has described how, as in the Garden of Eden, where „Adam had named the animals placed there by God‟, at Uppsala Linnaeus „re-designed the University‟s botanical garden to make it an image of God‟s creation, a miniature paradise on earth‟, believing that all the plants in the world had originally grown in the Garden of Eden and, „although species had diversified to suit different environments, they
16 Gascoigne, Enlightenment and the Origins of European Australia, p. 3. 17 Wyborn, „In Pursuit of Useful Knowledge‟, p. 19. 18 Gunnar Broberg, Carl Linnaeus, Swedish Institute, Stockholm, 2006, p. 7. Andrea Wulf, The Brother Gardeners: Botany, Empire and the Birth of an Obsession, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2009, p. 48, writes that at least one of these titles, „the prince of botany‟, was self-ascribed, and that „Such self-promotion was a constant feature of Linnaeus‟s personality‟, and that he was „conceited and arrogant‟. 19 Datta, John Gould in Australia, p. 43. 20 Broberg, Carl Linnaeus, p. 7. In his native Sweden Linnaeus is „known above all for his travel books‟. The accounts of his journeys are written in „a very bracing Swedish ... Even today they are a favoured travelling companion of the Swedish reading public‟. Ibid., p. 27. 154 remained fundamentally the same‟.21 It thus followed that a system of botanical classification could be applied across the plant productions of the globe.
Botanical classification systems were not new: many of them had evolved from considerations such as the medical use and edibility of plants, rather than from observation of the plants themselves. Two systems were in common use in European countries. One was devised by naturalist John Ray and set out in two works, Methodus Plantarum Nova (1682) and Historia Plantarum (1686–1704). It used the comparison of a range of plant characteristics such as fruit, seeds, flower shapes and habitat as the basis for a complex system of classification. Ray‟s signal contribution was his designation of the species as the basis for taxonomy: „Though botanists had grouped different plants together before, Ray was the first to envisage nature‟s hierarchy, defining the species as the smallest unit.‟22 The second commonly used system was devised by French botanist Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, who focused on the corolla, or flower head, analysing the shape and formation of its petals as the basis for determining individual characteristics.23
Linnaeus, described by Andrea Wulf as „an obsessive classifier‟ who was unable to understand anything that was not ordered systematically,24 based his system on elements of those of both Ray and Tournefort; he used the species as the basic taxonomic unit, and one characteristic to identify classes. In Linnaeus‟s case though, that characteristic was the reproductive organs of a plant, a factor that allowed him to describe the reproductive parts using analogies from human
21 Patricia Fara, Sex, Botany and Empire: The Story of Carl Linnaeus and Joseph Banks, Icon Books, Cambridge, UK, 2003, pp. 29–30. The account of Adam‟s naming of the animals in the Garden of Eden is from the book of Genesis, Chapter 2, verses 19–20: „Out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to Adam to see what he would call them. And whatever Adam called each living creature, that was its name. So Adam gave names to all cattle, to the birds of the air, and to every beast of the field.‟ The Holy Bible Containing the Old and New Testaments, first published 1611, The New King James Version, Thomas Nelson Publishers, Nashville, USA, 1983, p. 3. 22 Wulf, Brother Gardeners, pp. 52–3. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid., p. 51. 155 relationships.25 Gunnar Broberg has written of the possible inspirations for Linnaeus‟s choice of this descriptive method:
One could go to great lengths in interpreting Linnaeus‟s fascination with the ubiquitous procreative games of Nature, from which not even the innocent flowers were excluded. In addition to perhaps the first explanation that springs to mind, that Linnaeus was a kind of Peeping Tom of natural history, one can also identify a religious motif, that of Nature, in obedience to its Creator‟s call, being fruitful and multiplying. This, to Linnaeus, is its prime task, and it is in this way that life is sustained in all its diversity. His delight in the resemblance of plants to man also harks back to ideas concerning the simple plan of Nature. Further inspiration may have come from alchemy, which excelled in a kind of scientific nuptial metaphor very similar to Linnaeus‟.26
Linnaeus‟s system of plant classification according to sexual characteristics has now been supplanted as the basis for systematic botany, most recently by new techniques such as molecular phylogenetics that allow botanists to trace the genetic relationships of plants, rather than base their classification on external appearance.27 Nevertheless, „at the time it represented a method of definition and classification far surpassing anything previously known‟.28
Linnaeus‟s other classificatory innovation was binomial nomenclature, in which a plant or animal had two names, the first for its genus, and the second the species, for example Banksia serrata, in which Banksia is the genus and serrata the species name. His classificatory system according to sexual characteristics was set out in Systema Naturae, the first edition of which was published in 1735. From 1753, with the publication of Systema Plantarum and the tenth edition of Systema Naturae (published in 1758), plants and animals were given the dual names described above, now „standard practice in natural science‟.
Historians of science and empire agree with the proposition that Linnaeus‟s classificatory system brought simplicity to the massive task of taxonomic ordering
25 Ibid., p. 53. 26 Broberg, Carl Linnaeus, p. 18. 27 George Seddon, The Old Country: Australian Landscapes, Plants and People, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 2005, p. xvii; Wulf, Brother Gardeners, p. 55. 28 Broberg, Carl Linnaeus, p. 43. 156 of the enormous haul of plant specimens that flooded into Europe in the eighteenth century. While British botanists were reluctant at first to accept Linnaeus‟s system, it gained ready acceptance in the American colonies for its „unfussy‟ quality that did not rely, as did Ray and Tournefort‟s systems, on extensive reference works.29 Once Linnaeus‟s system had gained ground in Britain through the influence of an „apostle‟ of Linnaeus and fellow Swede, Daniel Solander, and his work with the collections of the British Museum,30 its simplicity was embraced by amateur botanists such as Banks, who, as Beth Fowkes Tobin has written, was attracted „by the fact that the Linnaean system limited botanical study to the identification and naming of plants and ignored more complicated (and more scientific) analyses of botany and physiology‟.31
Implicit in the Linnaean system was, firstly, a belief in the natural and God-given superiority of white Europeans; and, secondly, the obligation to propagate civilisation as well as plants in imperial possessions. Patricia Fara‟s view is that for Linnaeus, a strict Lutheran and a keen student of the Bible, and for many of his contemporaries, „imperial rule was a responsibility imposed by God‟.32 For environmental historian George Seddon, European classificatory systems reinforce another fundamental structuring principle, „the insistence on hierarchy: family, genus, species‟:33 Seddon continues:
This has the great benefit that it shows relationships and, to a degree, indicates evolutionary history, but the hierarchical structure is older than evolutionary theory. It also reflects the strongly hierarchical structure of European society, the Great Chain of Being, where everything and everyone has a place, the chain ascending from the lowest
29 Wulf, Brother Gardeners, p. 62. 30 See Chapter 6, „British Museum‟, pp. 63–71, in Edward Duyker, Nature’s Argonaut: Daniel Solander 1733–1782, The Miegunyah Press, Melbourne University Press, Carlton South, Vic, 1998. 31 Beth Fowkes Tobin, Picturing Imperial Power: Colonial Subjects in Eighteenth-Century British Painting, Duke University Press, Durham and London, 1999, p. 184. Banks in fact departed from his allegiance to Linnaeus later in his career, favouring the „natural system‟ of the French botanist Jussieu over the Linnaean system, according to Richard Drayton, Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain and the ‘Improvement’ of the World, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2000, p. 96. 32 Fara, Sex, Botany and Empire, p. 29. 33 Seddon. Old Country, p. 37. 157 through our common species and ever upwards through the feudal ranks, the angels, the archangels to the Supreme Being. All societies are hierarchical in some measure, with distinctions based on lineage, wealth, age and gender in varying combination, but European societies, including today‟s Western democracies, are significantly more hierarchical than most tribal societies …34
Mary Louise Pratt has described the „transformative, appropriative dimensions‟ of the Linnaean system:
One by one the planet‟s life forms were to be drawn out of the tangled threads of their life surroundings and rewoven into European-based patterns of global unity and order … Natural history extracted specimens not only from their organic or ecological relations with each other, but also from their places in other people‟s economies, histories, social and symbolic system.35
The imposition of a European system of classification and nomenclature, as applied to specimens garnered by scientific expeditions such as the Cook voyages, and to those collected by agents sent out to the colonies by Banks and his successors at Kew Gardens, thus „colonised‟ the plant life of newly acquired territories in much the same way as their indigenous peoples were incorporated in the governmental structures of the empire. Once a botanic garden was established in a colonial possession, European civilisation and its intellectual structures were as firmly embedded in the local environment as the plants that formed the garden.
Banks and the ‘botanical imperium’
The conjunction of imperial expansion and Linnaean nomenclature occurred most strikingly when a genus of Australian plants was named „Banksia‟ after Sir Joseph Banks, the „father of Australia‟. Banksias are a uniquely Australian genus of the Proteaceae family. The naming of this genus after Banks, according to
34 Ibid. 35 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, Routledge, London, 1992, p. 31. 158
George Seddon, is well deserved, as the name „Banksia‟ celebrates „that of the most generous patron of the natural sciences that Australia has seen‟.36
The first four „classic‟ Banksia species to be described, by the son of Carl Linnaeus, came from Botany Bay, as part of the enormous natural history haul from the Endeavour voyage.37 Their Linnaean classification and naming after the British botanist and explorer who collected them, as Patricia Fara has remarked, „made them part of European science but suppressed their local identity‟.38 [See Illustration 11: Banksia ericifolia]
The honour of having a genus named after him as a result of his collecting efforts on Cook‟s first voyage was far from the only outcome of this life-changing event for the wealthy young aristocrat. As has been seen in previous chapters, Banks became a force in British science and imperial enterprise. Ray Desmond, historian of Kew Gardens, has claimed that „The three years Banks spent on the Endeavour profoundly influenced his future perception of exploration, scientific voyages, transoceanic transfer of plants, and even imperial expansion.‟39 The voyage had a lasting effect on British botany and on the future direction of this science across the widening Empire.
Joseph Banks, described by Desmond as „the arbiter of Kew‟s destiny for almost half a century‟,40 began his association with what was then the Royal Garden in the immediate aftermath of the Endeavour voyage, riding the wave of its fame
36 Seddon, Old Country, p. 128. Australian children‟s author May Gibbs, the creator of Snugglepot and Cuddlepie, published in 1918, cast the dried cones of banksias in the role of the evil Banksia Men, and can be said to have stigmatised this innocent plant. Seddon argues, however, that this view is „misleading‟, as „her achievement was to imprint the banksia indelibly on the Australian imagination‟, and helped „generations of Australians towards an imaginative possession of their own environment‟ (ps. 133, 150). 37 Ibid., ps 133, 137. The „classic‟ Banksia species are Banksia serrata, Banksia integrifolia, Banksia ericifolia and Banksia spinulosa (p. 137). Seddon remarks that Linnaeus fils used the name „Banksia‟ to describe the land mass usually termed „Terra Australis‟ in a letter to a British colleague in 1771; and „We could all be singing „Advance, oh Banksia Fair‟ if Linnaeus had prevailed‟ (p. 133). 38 Fara, Sex, Botany and Empire, p. 73. 39 Desmond, Kew, p. 88. 40 Ibid., p. 85. 159 that owed much to the „unprecedented‟ quantity of natural history specimens that came into England from the Pacific when the epic journey ended in July 1771.41 The following month, on 10 August 1771, Banks was presented to King George III at Kew, and the visit was repeated many times, culminating in an invitation from the King to Banks in 1772 „to help reorganize the botanic garden‟.42 The two men had in common an interest in agriculture, and the Lincolnshire landowner who was unceasingly concerned with the improvements to be made in regard to flocks and crops found a ready ally in the sovereign who was nicknamed „Farmer George‟.43 As Desmond has noted, „By 1773 Banks had created an unofficial role for himself at Kew: he modestly described himself to the Spanish ambassador as operating “a kind of superintendence over his Royal Botanic Gardens”‟.44
Banks was determined to create a botanic garden to equal those of imperial rivals such as France, Austria and Germany. He also embraced one of the most effective practices developed by one of those rivals, France, in which the Jardin des Plantes in Paris was the hub of a network of linked gardens established in French colonies such as Mauritius. As Richard Grove has written in Green Imperialism, „Banks and his collaborators wished to imitate a system in which plants gathered from species-rich or little-known parts of India, South-East Asia, the Pacific and Latin America could be transferred both to gardens in Europe and, equally important, to the gardens on the islands of the Indian and Atlantic oceans and the Caribbean‟.45 Banks assiduously encouraged the collection of plant specimens by sailors on voyages of discovery, by colonists in Britain‟s
41 William T. Stearn, „The Imperial Sciences of Exploration‟, in Tony Ballantyne (ed.), Science, Empire and the European Exploration of the Pacific, Ashgate, Aldershot, UK, 2004, p. 116, enumerates the Endeavour botanical collection: „In addition to the herbarium specimens, estimated in 1772 as some 3000, there were 995 drawings of plants made by Parkinson … Plants new to science comprised about 110 new genera and 1300 new species, all provisionally classified, described and named.‟; Desmond, Kew, p. 88 42 Drayton, Nature’s Government, p. 94. 43 Desmond, Kew, p. 90; Drayton, Nature’s Government, pp. 97–106 describes the centrality of agricultural improvement to Banks‟s world view and its geopolitical implications: „This rural ideal of “Improvement” shaped his thinking about Britain‟s overseas dominions. He saw colonial expansion as enclosure on a grand scale … (p. 98). 44 Desmond, Kew, pp. 89–90. 45 Richard H. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens, and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860, Cambridge University Press, New York, 1995, p. 339. 160 possessions, and by specially commissioned collectors sent out from Kew to ransack the exotic regions of the world for new plant species. The next step was the creation of new botanic gardens in the colonies, or the encouragement of existing institutions by the appointment of competent botanists, to achieve his „vision of botanical gardens participating in the commercial life of the nation‟.46 The result was a „transformation of Kew into a centre for the global transfer of plants through its collectors and links with colonial botanic gardens.‟47 As Grove has noted:
Between 1770 and 1820 the personnel involved in the botanical network built up around the gardens and centred on Sir Joseph Banks involved about 130 collectors and superintendents of gardens. By 1790 about 15 men were involved in running the network of British botanical gardens in the tropics …48
Nevertheless, the establishment of colonial botanic gardens across the British Empire was by no means attributable to Banks alone: a number of local considerations also operated to foster their creation and development. Groves has written that „it would be a mistake to think either that it [the creation of the botanical network] was a highly organised phenomenon or that it was a development engineered entirely by Sir Joseph Banks‟.49 The stories of the establishment of botanic gardens in the Australasian colonies, for example, owe as much to the enthusiasm of local men of science, the economic drive behind botanical collecting, or the desire of colonists for access to attractive recreational spaces, as to centralised control from Kew at this period.50
46 Desmond, Kew, p. 91. 47 Ibid. 48 Grove, Green Imperialism, p. 339. 49 Ibid. 50 For example, Jim Endersby‟s article, „A Garden Enclosed: Botanical Barter in Sydney, 1818- 39‟, British Journal for the History of Science, Vol. 33, No. 3, September 2000, argues that: „The creators of Sydney's botanic garden were a varied group of people with diverse agendas and interests, only some of whom saw themselves as men of science. While several were trying to advance botany, others were more concerned with self-advancement or financial gain. Yet they collaborated, almost unintentionally, to found Australia's first scientific institution. Exchanges of plants were crucial to forming and maintaining the relationships between these different figures.‟ Endersby‟s article also challenges „the notion that British colonial botanic gardens were established as part of a botanical empire, with Kew Gardens at its centre‟. 161
Banks died on 19 June 1820, and the Gardens at Kew were left to the care of the head gardener, William Townsend Aiton, who was officially appointed Director- General of His Majesty‟s Gardens in 1827.51 Banks‟s successor as a botanist at the helm at Kew was Sir William Jackson Hooker, who was appointed Director of the Gardens in 1841.52 He had been patronised by Banks „who in 1820 wangled him the newly created position of Professor of Botany at Glasgow University‟,53 as Iain McCalman has written. Hooker‟s main role at Glasgow reinforced the link between botany and empire, as his task was to prepare student doctors for work in the colonies by training them to use local plants instead of imported manufactured drugs. His son, Joseph Dalton Hooker, had from age seven attended his father‟s lectures, and helped him with his herbarium, 54 an invaluable start to a career that saw him succeed his father as Director at Kew in November 1865, following Sir William Hooker‟s death in August that year.55 The younger Hooker had also been an active collector in the field, travelling to Van Diemen‟s Land in 1840 and exploring and botanising there.56 Joseph Dalton Hooker‟s son- in-law, Sir William Thiselton-Dyer, succeeded his father-in-law as Director in 1885, and retired in December 1905.57 These men oversaw the conduct of Kew itself, its worldwide network of collectors, and the botanic gardens established in Britain‟s colonial possessions, throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth.
The two Hookers had to wrestle with demands for more attractive recreational spaces to be made available to the public in Kew Gardens, as Desmond has described:
51 Desmond, Kew, pp. 364–5. 52 Ibid., p. 366. 53 Iain McCalman, Darwin’s Armada, Viking, Camberwell, Vic, 2009, p. 93. 54 Ibid., pp. 93–6. 55 Desmond, Kew, p. 370. 56 McCalman, Darwin’s Armada, pp. 125–131, 135–6. Joseph Hooker came to Hobart in August 1840 on the Erebus, on Captain James Clark Ross‟s Antarctic expedition to find the south magnetic pole. 57 Desmond, Kew, pp. 373, 375. 162
Sir William Hooker, ordered by one of his First Commissioners to plant an excessive number of flower-beds, feared that Kew‟s role as a botanic garden would be subordinated to its attractions as a public park. Mr Gladstone had to intervene in Sir Joseph Hooker‟s bitter confrontation with A. S. Ayrton who did his best to diminish Kew‟s status as a scientific institution. Official policy had to reconcile the needs of recreation and research, of aesthetic considerations and scientific display.58
In the early European settlement of Australia botanic gardens doubled as food gardens, but the permanent allocation of prime land59 for botanic gardens combining facilities for the pursuit of both science and recreation had occurred in most of the Australasian colonies by the second half of the nineteenth century. The dates of establishment of Australasian colonial botanic gardens are: Sydney 1816; Hobart 1818; Wellington 1844; Melbourne 1846; Adelaide and Brisbane 1855; Christchurch 1863; and Dunedin 1868.60
Once established, Australia and New Zealand‟s botanic gardens became part of the „botanical imperium‟ operating from Kew Gardens. Ray Desmond claims that all four Directors of Kew61 whose terms of office fall within the scope of this thesis „viewed the Gardens they controlled as an instrument of imperial endeavour, as a legitimate means of developing the natural resources of the Empire‟.62 Donal
58 Desmond, Kew, p. xvi. For detailed coverage of this issue as it arose at Kew Gardens see Desmond, Kew, Chapter 14, „Botanic Garden or Public Park?, and Chapter 15, „The Ayrton Controversy‟; and Drayton, Nature’s Government, Chapter 6, „The Professionals and the Empire: The Hookers at Kew, 1841–73. 59 This was not always achieved without a struggle with powerful private interests. Tim Bonyhady, in The Colonial Earth devotes a chapter to Governor Bligh‟s attempts to remove the houses of private settlers from Sydney Domain, now the site of the Royal Botanic Gardens, and sees this as one of the causes of the infamous Rum Rebellion. Bligh‟s adherence to the principle that a certain amount of prime land should be set aside for public use was one factor precipitating his downfall at the hands of the military settler oligarchy in Sydney in 1808. „No person should have two houses‟, Chapter 2 in Tim Bonyhady, The Colonial Earth, The Miegunyah Press, Melbourne University Press, Carlton South, Vic, 2000, pp. 41–65. 60 Histories of Australasian botanic gardens include Lionel Gilbert, Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney: A History 1816–1985, Sydney, 1986; Deborah Morris, Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne, Allen and Unwin, Crows Nest, NSW, 2001; Pauline Payne, „Picturesque Scientific Gardening‟ – Developing Adelaide Botanic Garden 1865–1891, in Elizabeth Kwan (ed.), William Shakespeare’s Adelaide, 1860–1992, Association of Professional Historians, Adelaide, 1992; R. T. M. Pescott, The Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne: A History from 1845 to 1970, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1982; Winsome Shepherd, and Walter Cook, The Botanic Garden Wellington: a New Zealand History 1840–1987, Millwood Press, Wellington, 1988. 61 Though Banks was an „unofficial director‟, he is appropriately included in this description, along with Sir William Hooker, Joseph Hooker and Sir William Thiselton-Dyer. 62 Desmond, Kew, pp. xiv–xv. 163
McCracken, in his survey of British Empire botanic gardens in the Victorian era, summed up the effects of this focused activity emanating from Kew:
By 1901 gardening was more than just a pastime. It was an adjunct to imperialism, and the 100 or so colonial gardens in existence were as much a part of British imperialism as the fleets of the Royal Navy or the soldiers of the Queen.63
The Director of Kew often appointed the directors of the colonial botanic gardens, supervised the dispatch of plants from Kew to the colonies, received living and dried specimens from collectors abroad, and maintained a vast correspondence, not only with colonial botanic garden directors, but with scientifically-minded administrators such as Sir George Grey (the subject of later chapters of this thesis).
Joseph Dalton Hooker sent out to the Australasian colonies a set of „Suggestions for the information of colonial governments about to appoint superintendents of botanic gardens, and for the guidance of the superintendents themselves‟. The first of these suggestions, which also included admonitions regarding cataloguing and reporting, and the establishment of herbaria and plant museums, reinforced the obligation laid upon all administrators of colonial botanic institutions to widen the botanic network even further:
These duties include not merely the keep and cultivation of the plants, but correspondence with other gardens in the Colony and elsewhere, and activity in procuring by means of travellers, visitors, ship‟s officers, &c all plants that it may be desirable to introduce, whether for use or ornament, and botanical information generally.64
As the botanic gardens established in the Australian colonies grew in stature in the second half of the nineteenth century, they became a „valuable link‟ for Kew Gardens in its worldwide network of scientific enterprise. As Carol Henty has
63 McCracken, Gardens of Empire, p. x. 64 Fig. 43, „Kew‟s Guidelines, 1883‟, with Hector‟s comments in the margin, in Winsome Shepherd and Walter Cook, The Botanic Garden Wellington: a New Zealand History 1840-1987, Millwood Press, Wellington, 1988. James Hector, Director of the Wellington Botanic Garden, has annotated Hooker‟s suggestions in the copy reproduced in this reference, writing „done‟ in the margin beside each one. 164 written, „The work of Ferdinand Mueller of the Melbourne Botanic Gardens, Richard Schomburgk of the Adelaide Botanic Garden, Charles Moore from the Sydney Botanic Gardens, and Walter Hill from the Brisbane Botanic Gardens helped make Kew supreme amongst the botanic gardens of the world‟.65
Kew held the upper hand over Australia in matters of systematic botany, and continues to do so to this day, to a certain extent. [See Appendix I: Flora Australiensis] As environmental historian George Seddon has quipped, „If an Australian botanist wishes to check the identity of a specimen that may or may not be “new to science” he most probably has to Kew up‟.66 Nevertheless, in spite of the high degree of contact and the significant level of jurisdiction exercised over botanic gardens in the Australasian colonies by successive Directors of Kew Gardens in the course of the nineteenth century, signs emerged quite early on that slavish following of Kew‟s preferred models by a colonial botanic garden or its Director would not always be automatic.67
This work must now address botanic gardens in the Australian colonies, and some of the issues that surfaced there in relation to the priorities they exhibited – were they to be primarily scientific institutions, or would they also cater to the recreational and educational needs of the citizens of the colonies? How closely would they adhere to the model presented by Kew Gardens? And how would they ultimately compare with that parent model and with the expectations of overseas visitors of botanic gardens generally?68
65 Carol Henty, For the People’s Pleasure: Australia’s Botanic Gardens, Greenhouse, Richmond, 1988, p. 4. 66 Seddon, Old Country, p. 37. 67 For example, Melbourne Botanic Gardens Director Ferdinand Mueller, after exposure to the richness and diversity of the Australian flora, developed a „natural system‟ of plant classification which „met with resistance‟ from Joseph Hooker and George Bentham at Kew, but was received more positively in Australia, where „those who followed his version of the natural system helped him to establish a more independent local tradition in science‟. Sara Maroske, „Ferdinand Mueller and the Shape of Nature: Nineteenth-Century Systems of Plant Classification‟, Historical Records of Australian Science, 2006, 17, 147–168. 68 This issue is explored more fully in the next chapter. 165
Melbourne Botanic Gardens – recreation or science?
Conditions in some Australian colonies complicated the picture of monolithic imperial goals determining colonial decision-making in the establishment and conduct of botanic gardens. It is useful in this context to consider the case of Melbourne Botanic Gardens, where local imperatives determined the direction of a colonial botanic garden and decided the fate of a director whose scientific goals did not match the desires of his fellow citizens for an attractive, albeit instructive, recreational space.
The conjunction of a colonial superintendent with interests in botany and urban planning with a citizenry eager to create for itself a place for recreation that would also cater to its desire to see the plants of „home‟ replicated in a garden, saw the establishment of Melbourne Botanic Gardens on 16 March 1846, only just over a decade from the establishment of the village on the banks of the Yarra River in 1835. Deborah Morris has described the motivation of Melbourne‟s pioneers to create a botanic garden to
provide a background to all the social rituals and celebrations, pomp and splendor of European civilization. They also wanted a public garden where they could cultivate indigenous and exotic plants. The free settlers had been financially successful and they wanted their environment to reflect this success.69
Historian of the Melbourne Botanic Gardens, and its former Director, R. T. M. Pescott, has remarked that
It is to the credit of these people that as early as 1841, only six years after the foundation of Melbourne and perhaps even as early as 1836 … moves had been made to fulfil these requests. It must be a unique event that a completely new community in a previously horticulturally unknown land and one occupied by a nomadic stone age
69 Deborah Morris, Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne, Allen and Unwin, Crows Nest, NSW, 2001, p. 14. 166 civilization should, within twelve months of settling in that country, press for the establishment of a botanic gardens.70
The Melbourne Town Council petitioned Governor Sir George Gipps towards the end of 1844 for the reservation of land for recreational purposes, invoking not only the health benefits of parks for the recreation of citizens after work; but also their socially improving qualities. Melbourne at that time was still a raw frontier settlement, but its leading citizens had aspirations to gentility, and advanced an argument that would appeal to a man charged with the task of maintaining law and order and social decorum in the colony‟s dependent territories – a park would preserve the social order: experience in the Mother Country proves that where such public places of resort are in the vicinity of large towns, the effect produced on the minds of all classes is of the most gratifying character; in such places of public resort the kindliest feelings of human nature are cherished, there the employer sees his faithful servant discharging the higher duties of a Burgess, as a Husband, and as a Father‟.71
Less than a year later, „persistent agitation‟ produced a petition to the Governor of New South Wales, signed by close to 400 citizens, to ask for the determination of a site and the commencement of a botanic garden. The petition was successful, and a site selection committee was formed, chaired by Superintendent Charles La Trobe, an amateur botanist himself, who „believed strongly in the idea of a botanic garden‟ and, in addition, had the capacity to choose an appropriate site from both the scientific and urban planning perspectives.72 La Trobe‟s choice of a site on the south side of the Yarra River half a mile to the east of the township was supported by the committee.73
The site for the Gardens was reserved in February 1846. The final approval had to come from Governor Gipps in Sydney. Gipps wrote to La Trobe on 16 March
70 R. T. M. Pescott, The Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne: A History from 1845 to 1970, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1982, pp. 2–3. 71 Quoted in ibid., p. 6. 72 Morris, Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne, pp. 7–10, 16. 73 Pescott, Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne, pp. 10–11. 167
1846, pointing out that the Sydney Gardens had become effectively a recreational area, but one with a drawback – the Gardens were too far from the main settlement, and he expressed a concern that the site chosen for Melbourne could suffer from a similar problem:
His Excellency remarks that the Botanic Garden in Sydney is such only in name; it is in reality a public promenade or place of recreation for the Citizens of Sydney; and he long ago (he believes) expressed an opinion that such was what was really wanted in Melbourne. The site of the Sydney Garden is now found to be somewhat too far from the town for public convenience – whether or not a Garden on the south side of the Yarra may be too far from Melbourne for the general convenience of the inhabitants he is unable to say.74
Despite this seeming lack of enthusiasm by the Governor, La Trobe interpreted Gipps‟s approval of the site as the last note of official recognition, and the Melbourne Botanic Gardens date from this event.75
Gipps‟s attitude complicates the picture of botanic gardens in the Australasian colonies as simply outposts of Kew Gardens, with imperial interests the driving force behind their establishment. Gipps was an imperial administrator who, as this interpretation has it, ought to have had the economic motive of plant transfer and acclimatisation, and the dispatch of useful and interesting flora to the Kew herbarium as priorities in the creation and maintenance of a colonial botanic garden. Contrary to this view, Gipps placed the desires of the local population above imperial interests in botanic gardens. As the story of the Melbourne Botanic Gardens unfolds, the imperialist interpretation, at least in this particular instance, becomes even harder to sustain, as the recreational interests of colonists emerged ever more clearly as a rationale for the existence of the Gardens. In succeeding decades the struggle between the requirements of science and the demand for beauty in botanic gardens would erupt into conflict in Melbourne, as it did at Kew Gardens as well.
74 Correspondence from Governor Gipps to Superintendent La Trobe, 16 March 1846, Department of Crown Lands and Survey, Melbourne. Quoted in Pescott, Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne, p. 15. 75 Ibid., p. 15. 168
The development of the Gardens began with the appointment of Scottish botanist and landscape gardener John Arthur as Superintendent in March 1846, with the first plantings of trees in winter of that year. Sadly, Arthur died in January 1849, possibly from cholera contracted by drinking Yarra River water, but not before he had laid out the first lagoon walk, and established lawns and enclosures for planting.76 Governor La Trobe replaced Arthur as Superintendent with John Dallachy, again a Scot, who had a background in gardening and landscaping, but whose true passion was plant collecting. His title was soon changed to Curator, and he was responsible for increasing the number of plant species in the Gardens to 6000 as a result of his assiduous collecting activities.77
Dallachy‟s tenure as Curator also intersected with the involvement of a young German immigrant scientist, Ferdinand Mueller, in the affairs of the Gardens. Born in Rostock, Germany, in June 1825, Mueller had trained as a pharmacist, but his interest in botany led him to complete a doctoral thesis at the University of Kiel on the flora of south west Schleswig. A tragic family history of tuberculosis led the young botanist to emigrate to South Australia with two surviving sisters in 1847. Once in Australia, Mueller threw himself enthusiastically into collecting and studying the local flora, and quickly became an expert on the medical and commercial applications of Australian plants, as well as their botanical characteristics. Mueller would become, in Sara Maroske‟s words, „Australia‟s greatest nineteenth-century scientist, with an international botanical reputation‟.78
Less than two years after arriving in Australia Mueller began to send specimens from the Adelaide region to the Melbourne Botanic Gardens. He relocated to Melbourne in 1852 and his interest in Australian botany encouraged Lieutenant-
76 Morris, Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne, pp. 26–9. 77 Ibid., p. 29. 78 Sara Maroske, „Ferdinand Mueller (1825–1896)‟, Royal Botanic Gardens, viewed 24 November 2001, http://www.rbg.vic.gov.au/edserv/sara.html; Deirdre Morris, „Mueller, Sir Ferdinand Jakob Heinrich von [Baron von Mueller] (1825–1896), Australian Dictionary of Biography Online Edition, viewed 13 November 2010, http:adbonline.anu.edu.au/biogs/A050353b.htm 169
Governor Charles La Trobe to appoint him Government Botanist in 1853. Dallachy could then devote more of his time to field collecting. Mueller‟s involvement with the Gardens meant that they became steadily more scientific, and he was the prime mover in a proposal to establish a system garden to display plants according to the biological relationships between them, which Dallachy duly carried out. As Pescott has remarked, „Gradually Dallachy‟s influence in the administration of the Gardens lessened, and in 1857 Mueller was appointed director of the Gardens‟.79
By the late 1850s Mueller had established a public reputation for his enthusiasm for the Australian flora, and even found his way into fiction in the character of Dr Mulhaus, a natural scientist in Henry Kingsley‟s 1859 novel, The Recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn, through whom the author „could impart, wide-eyed, the joy and wonder of new discoveries‟.80 Kingsley depicted Dr Mulhaus‟ raptures over the blossoming of a new Grevillea species:
And there is Dr Mulhaus kneeling in spectacles before his new Grevillea Victoria, the first bud of which is bursting into life … Sam went to the Doctor, who was intent on his flower. “Look here, my boy; here is something new: the handsomest of the Grevilleas, as I live. It has opened since I was here.” “Ah!” said Sam, “this is the one that came from the Quartz Ranges, last year, is it not? It has not flowered with you before.” “If Linnæus wept and prayed over the first piece of English furze which he saw,” said the Doctor, “what everlasting smelling-bottle hysterics he would have gone into in this country! I don‟t sympathise with his tears much, though, myself; though a new flower is the source of the greatest pleasure to me.”81
While the fictional version of Mueller rhapsodised over an Australian native flower, the real Melbourne Botanic Gardens Director was dismissive of demands that he introduce more colourful exotic shrubs and blooms into the Gardens for
79 Pescott, Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne, p. 25; Morris, Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne, pp. 28–30. 80 Stanton Mellick, Patrick Morgan, and Paul Eggert (eds), Henry Kingsley, The Recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn, first published 1859, The Academy Editions of Australian Literature, University of Queensland Press, 1996, p. 597. 81 Ibid., pp. 302–03. See also the explanatory notes to this passage on p. 631. 170 the enjoyment of the citizens of Melbourne. Enthusiasm in Melbourne for Mueller‟s scientific status, after a few years, began to change to dismay for, as Weston Bate has commented, „Mueller‟s philosophy replaced the idea of figures in a landscape with that of plants in a system‟.82 Pescott, acknowledging this, has concluded that in Melbourne
It is no wonder that, some twenty years after the Gardens were first established, when Baron Ferdinand von Mueller confronted the public with a Gardens where the juxtaposition of plants was based on scientific requirements and the visual effect and recreational considerations were secondary, they found it difficult to accept.83
The story summed up here in a sentence is one of the most poignant – even tragic – in Australia‟s scientific history. Mueller‟s fellow countryman and botanic gardens director in Adelaide, Richard Schomburgk, had asserted that a botanic garden was „not a mere colonial show got up for the purpose of attracting the colonists or stranger who may honor South Australia with a visit‟, but was „really an educational institution, by means of whose operation instruction may be spread over the colony, as to the constitution, habits, and mode of culture of introduced plants‟.84 Despite this belief, as his biographer Pauline Payne has written, Schomburgk had the „ability to give attention to the different roles of a botanic garden – a balanced approach which was to be his trademark and an important reason for his success as director‟.85 „Providing a balance between the “picturesque” and the “scientific” was the key to success in colonial Adelaide‟, 86 Payne writes. She titled her biography of Richard Schomburgk The Diplomatic Gardener, and cites his careful timing in the establishment of a „class ground‟ or „system garden … where plants would be laid out according to their botanical classification‟ as a key example of his sensitive approach to public needs as well
82 Weston Bate, „Perceptions of Melbourne‟s „Pride and Glory‟‟, Victorian Historical Journal, Vol. 67. No. 1, April 1996, p. 8. 83 Pescott, Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne, p. 2. 84 Quoted in Pauline Payne, „Picturesque Scientific Gardening‟ – Developing Adelaide Botanic Garden 1865–1891, in Elizabeth Kwan (ed.), William Shakespeare’s Adelaide, 1860–1992, Association of Professional Historians, Adelaide, 1992 pp. 126–7. 85 Ibid., p. 128. 86 Ibid., p. 127. 171 as scientific imperatives.87 While Mueller had given priority in Melbourne Botanic Gardens to the systematic arrangement of plants above the creation of attractive landscaping, Schomburgk „delayed the construction of the Class Ground while other projects went ahead and when he did begin, paid considerable attention to the design‟.88 The beauty of Adelaide Botanic Garden „was a source of great pride to the people of Adelaide in the latter part of the nineteenth century‟, as it „demonstrated that the wilderness could be tamed and civilization brought to the Antipodes‟,89 a feature of a successful botanic garden that was often remarked upon by colonists and visitors alike, as will be seen in the next chapter.
Unlike Schomburgk, Mueller was unable to negotiate the complex accommodations required to satisfy both scientific goals and demands by the public for attractive recreational spaces in botanic gardens. After a decade of Mueller‟s scientific emphasis prevailing in the Melbourne Botanic Gardens, people began to complain that the Gardens were not aesthetically or recreationally appealing. In the opinion of many, there were too many stands of thickly planted trees and not enough attractive flowers and shrubs. They were not meeting the expectations of the increasingly wealthy citizens of Melbourne, who had quite different views of what botanic gardens should contain. Mueller‟s biographer, Edward Kynaston, has described the perceived deficiencies of the Gardens:
Celebrated, comprehensive and world famous the Gardens might be, but there was not a single piece of ornamental statuary, and only one fountain, throughout its length and breadth. Where were the massed banks of flowers, the palladian walks, the manicured lawns? Dr Mueller was always planting trees everywhere, and cultivating them to send out all over the colony. There were already over twenty miles of walks lined with trees in the Gardens alone. The rich and influential shook their heads and rolled their eyes. Trees!90
87 Pauline Payne, The Diplomatic Gardener: Richard Schomburgk, Explorer and Botanic Garden Director, Jeffcott Press, Adelaide, SA, 2007, p. 98. 88 Ibid. See also p. 159. 89 Payne, „Picturesque Scientific Gardening‟, p. 126. 90 Edward Kynaston, A Man on Edge: A Life of Baron Sir Ferdinand von Mueller, Allen Lane, Penguin Books Australia, Ringwood, Vic, 1981, p. 270. 172
Stephen Jeffries claims that Mueller „believed that the primary purpose of a botanic garden must be scientific and instructive‟ and as long as those goals were met „there was no case for him to answer‟. Jeffries has argued that Mueller‟s adherence to this belief meant that he was unprepared „to meet criticism levelled against him that was based on aesthetic grounds‟. From his perspective, a garden arranged according to scientific principles had its „own beauty‟.91 The horticultural community, in the vanguard of Mueller‟s detractors, instead favoured „British style‟ garden design: „lots of lawns, plenty of trees for shade and masses of attractive flowers‟.92 The result was, Jeffries believes, that over the five-year long struggle between Mueller and his powerful critics, there existed „a situation of mutual misunderstanding, of each party talking at but past each other‟.93
Other commentators are not so prepared to attribute the conflict over Mueller‟s management of the Melbourne Botanic Gardens to such an essentially benign cause as „misunderstanding‟. Helen Cohn and Sara Maroske have identified the problem as deriving from Mueller‟s violation of the goals of the founders of the Gardens: „In his determined pursuit of scientific objects Mueller had betrayed the presumed intentions of the founders of the Gardens to create an ornamental garden.‟94 To Mueller‟s perceived shortcomings as a landscape gardener was added a potent brew of other grievances: the resentment of horticulturists at his free plant distribution; his fondness for honours and decorations; and even his foreign origins and German accent. The fact that Mueller, to shore up his
91 Stephen Jeffries, „Alexander von Humboldt and Ferdinand von Mueller‟s Argument for the Scientific Botanic Garden‟, Historical Records of Australian Science, 11(3), June 1997, p. 305. Jeffries‟ article locates Mueller‟s botanical science within the German study of plant geography articulated by Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), to which Mueller was eager to contribute. As Jeffries notes, „If he considered the example of the garden in Kew with its traditions of patronage and support as a primary example, at the same time his project for the scientific botanic garden was also modelled upon some very significant contemporary German examples‟ (p. 302). 92 Morris, Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne, p. 51. 93 Jeffries, „Scientific Botanic Garden‟, p. 306. 94 Helen Cohn and Sara Maroske, „Relief From Duties of Minor Importance: The Removal of Baron von Mueller from the Directorship of the Melbourne Botanic Garden‟, Victorian Historical Journal, Vol. 67, No. 1, April 1996, p. 112. 173 position, lobbied his friends and political allies unceasingly to advocate on his behalf was also held against him.95
A Board of Enquiry convened in December 1870 to investigate ways to achieve the „best possible condition‟ for the Melbourne Botanic Gardens reported a year later, and delivered its verdict on Mueller‟s custodianship. The report was scathing about Mueller‟s management of the Gardens, and declared that
Such a Garden should have more than a scientific object – it should be a place where the whole colony could study horticulture, arboriculture, floriculture and landscape gardening in their most perfect forms – it should especially be a model of careful and thorough cultivation, of well planned scientific effect, and of art skillfully applied to the embellishment of nature.96
The Board‟s principal recommendation was the separation of the botanical from the horticultural functions of the Gardens, with a „man of large experience and of cultivated and refined taste – possessed of scientific knowledge to enable him to deal with the many rare foreign specimens that have been gathered together and at the same time a practical landscape and flower gardener‟ to be appointed as curator. A person of sufficient competence could be obtained from the United Kingdom. Mueller‟s plant distribution program was also to be suspended to appease the horticulturists.97 The Argus newspaper, a spearhead of the campaign against Mueller‟s management of the Gardens, was exultant at the report‟s confirmation of the opinion it had been circulating for several years:
… we believe that the bulk of the public will approve of the terms of the report. In effect, it merely gives form and substance to that vague sense of dissatisfaction with our Botanical-gardens – which has been so long rankling in the minds of the community. Year after year we have seen a great expenditure in the baron‟s department without any commensurate results. Nature has done a great deal for the grounds, whether as
95 For full accounts of Mueller‟s five-year struggle to retain control of the Melbourne Botanic Gardens see Cohn and Maroske, „Relief from Duties of Minor Importance, pp. 103–127. Kynaston‟s A Man on Edge, Chapters 19–22 presents a more partisan account of Mueller‟s tribulations at the hands of Melbourne‟s „Small, Mean, Mediocre Men‟ (the title of Chapter 19). 96 The Report of the Board of Enquiry, submitted on 14 December 1871, is reproduced in R. T. M. Pescott, W. R. Guilfoyle: The Master of Landscaping, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1974, pp. 65–7. 97 Cohn and Maroske, „Relief from Duties of Minor Importance, pp. 111–112. 174 regards their situation, their undulating contour, or their proximity to water; but art, or rather, no art, has done its worst to disfigure nature. In the hands of a competent man, with an eye for the picturesque and a taste for the beautiful, these gardens might have been rendered superior even to the Fitzroy, and the Treasury Gardens … In two or three years some of our quick growing shrubs and trees assume notable proportions, and a wilderness is capable of being transformed into a blooming garden, bright with colour and heavy with fragrance.98
The Argus wished Mueller well in his pursuit of science, „and the gardens better‟.99 The Argus and Mueller‟s other detractors would, however, have to wait. Two years later the Board of Enquiry‟s recommendation to remove Mueller from the Gardens was finally enacted. The end, when it came, was swift: a letter of removal from Clement Hodgkinson, Assistant Commissioner of Crown Lands and Survey, informed Mueller that he was being relieved of „duties of minor importance, at present devolving on you, and leaving you free to devote most of your attention to the prosecution of labours in the field of science‟. The management of the Gardens and the Government House Domain would be aggregated under „a competent curator‟, effectively abolishing Mueller‟s position in the Gardens, while retaining him as Government Botanist. The letter also gave Mueller less than a month to vacate his house in the Gardens.100
The choice of a replacement fell, not upon a British curator, as the 1871 report of the Board of Enquiry had recommended, but upon a local man and the son of a nurseryman, William Guilfoyle. He had been a protégé of Mueller‟s, who had utilised him as a collector, fostered his botanical education and writing, and had even named an orchid, Epiphogium guilfoylei, after him.101 Guilfoyle‟s appointment in 1873, at the hand of J. J. Casey, Commissioner of Crown Lands in the Victorian government, and a relative of Guilfoyle, was viewed by Mueller‟s
98 Argus, 4 January 1872. 99 Ibid. 100 Clement Hodgkinson to Frederick von Mueller, quoted in Cohn and Maroske, „Relief from Duties of Minor Importance‟, p. 103. 101 Pescott, W. R. Guilfoyle, pp. 50–1; Paul Fox, Clearings: Six Colonial Gardeners and Their Landscapes, The Miegunyah Press, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Vic, 2004, pp. 112– 114, 120–22. 175 defenders as an „act of nepotism‟.102 Whatever the ethics of the appointment, though, its results were regarded by most as a great success.
Guilfoyle transformed the Melbourne Botanic Gardens. Influenced by the example of Charles Moore‟s picturesque planting in Sydney Botanic Gardens, by his own travels to tropical islands in the Pacific and his experience of working in the Tweed River area in his father‟s nursery there, he created a botanic gardens environment that more than met the needs of Melbourne‟s citizens for an attractive recreational space that would also provide the correct level of botanical instruction. Guilfoyle‟s experiences had taught him „something that had escaped von Mueller: how plants might be gardened into a poetic landscape‟.103 Weston Bate has written that „Guilfoyle reclaimed the gardens for people‟ by creating lawns that provided open spaces with attractive vistas, picnic spots and concert venues, by breaking up the dense plantings of large trees.104 He also introduced tropical and sub-tropical plants, particularly the Moreton Bay fig, and created a Fern Gully that became „a tourist‟s delight‟.105 Winding pathways meandered through plants chosen for their blend of colours, and past ornamental lakes. George Seddon has claimed that „Guilfoyle created a dream world from the resources of a unique sensibility‟.106 The scientific nature of a botanic garden was not forgotten. Guilfoyle created some gardens devoted to specific plant orders, or to the flora of particular continents or countries, and all plants were labelled.107 As Paul Fox has commented, „Guilfoyle had integrated the botanic and the scenic, the taxonomic and the poetic‟.108 Guilfoyle himself stated, several years into the transformation process that
102 Pescott, W. R. Guilfoyle, p. 69; Kynaston, A Man on Edge, p. 312. 103 Fox, Clearings, p. 128. 104 Bate, „Perceptions of „Melbourne‟s Pride and Glory‟, p. 10. 105 Ibid.; Fox, Clearings, pp. 128–131. 106 George Seddon, „A Captive Jungle, or Rainforest in South Yarra‟, Landscape Australia 3/1984, p. 14, viewed 29 December 2010 at http://www.aila.org.au/LApapers/papers/seddon/captive- jungle/one.htm 107 Bate, Perceptions of „Melbourne‟s Pride and Glory‟, p. 10; 108 Fox, Clearings, p. 139. 176
No necessity exists for allowing botanical correctness and landscape effect to clash in the development of the Melbourne Botanic Gardens. To combine the two has been my design from the beginning …109
While Guilfoyle‟s work in the Melbourne Botanic Gardens thus garnered plaudits, his predecessor could never be reconciled to his dismissal as Director, and for many years harboured hopes that he would be reinstated in the position.110 His correspondents were left in no doubt of his bitterness, or of his opinion of what his successor had done in the Gardens. Mueller complained in 1878 to Kew Gardens Director William Thiselton-Dyer that he „could not set my foot into my own garden since 5 years with any self-respect‟; and that the new regime under William Guilfoyle had converted „a scientific garden into a Cremorne‟.111 He admitted to Christchurch‟s Canterbury Museum Director Julius von Haast in 1881 that his „unfortunate expulsion from the Botanic Garden‟ had caused him to „still now burn in anger every day‟.112 A year later he commented waspishly to Joseph Hooker that „The Curator of the bot. Garden of Melbourne … seems to have a morbid vanity to pass as a scientific man‟.113 Helen Cohn and Sara Maroske relate a story that is almost heartbreaking in its poignancy, and reveals that the loss of his position as Director of the Gardens was for Mueller „a lasting source of pain‟. A colleague who had the misfortune to mention the Gardens to Mueller was shocked by „the anguished picture my foolishness had conjured up‟. Mueller „sank back in his chair, sobbing as if his heart would break‟.114
109 Quoted in Pescott, W. R. Guilfoyle, p. 93. 110 Kynaston, A Man on Edge, sums up Mueller‟s attitude: he „believed that his dismissal only meant that he had lost a battle. It was years before he was able to accept the fact that he had lost the war‟ (p. 313). Cohn and Maroske, „Relief from Duties of Minor Importance‟, state that „even after his removal [he] continued to believe for years that he would be restored to the position‟ (p. 123). 111 Ferdinand von Mueller to Sir William Thiselton-Dyer, 12 May 1878, in Home, R. W., Lucas, A. M., Maroske, Sara, Sinkora, D. M., and Voigt, J. H., Regardfully Yours: Selected Correspondence of Ferdinand von Mueller, Vol. III, 1876–1896, Peter Lang, Bern, 2006, p. 122. 112 Ferdinand von Mueller to Julius von Haast, 28 July 1881, in ibid., p. 222. 113 Ferdinand von Mueller to Joseph Hooker, in ibid., p. 278. 114 Cohn and Maroske, „Relief From Duties of Minor Importance‟, p. 123. 177
It was perhaps just as well that Mueller was „Too proud to venture ever again into the Garden that had been taken from him‟,115 as Pescott admitted that, „when Mueller died in 1896 there was no remaining visible expression of his earlier labours in the Gardens‟.116 Instead, as an artist visitor commented in 1903, the Gardens after Guilfoyle‟s transformations had taken hold were „something like a Paradise‟, whose equal he had not seen anywhere else, „no, not in Europe itself‟.117
Guilfoyle, with only a few exceptions, used landscaping to create the effects that were so admired by visitors. Botanic gardens in both Europe and in colonial possessions also incorporated a number of built and decorative features to enhance the landscape, divert the eye and improve the mind. It is to these embellishments, and the significance of their role within the context of a botanic garden, that this thesis must now turn.
Botanic gardens’ architecture and empire
The intellectual subjugation of the plant world to imperial collection, classification and nomenclature was not the only way in which botanic gardens – the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew in particular, operating within the framework of British imperialism – signified the dominant position of a colonising nation. Architectural features within Kew Gardens‟ landscape also acted to reinforce the message of imperial power, according to Nandina Bhattacharya who, in an essay dealing largely with the eighteenth-century British theatre, includes the architectural elements within the Royal Botanic Gardens as an example of „many attempts in eighteenth-century Britain to revive the historical alterity of other cultures to suit English Enlightenment needs for improvement, consolidation, and
115 Home, R. W., Lucas, A. M., Maroske, Sara, Sinkora, D. M., and Voigt, J. H., Regardfully Yours: Selected Correspondence of Ferdinand von Mueller, Vol. III, 1876–1896, Peter Lang, Bern, 2006, p. 8. 116 Pescott, Guilfoyle, p. 99. 117 E. S. Fysh, „M. Rudinoff in the Botanic Gardens, Garden Gazette, May–June 1903, p. 240, quoted in Fox, Clearings, p. 142. 178 modernization‟. Bhattacharya expands her argument by reference to architect William Chambers‟ description of Kew Gardens‟ monuments and architectural features, Plans, Elevations, Sections, and Perspective Views of the Gardens … at Kew in Surrey, claiming that „The architecture of Kew Gardens exemplifies … imperialist expropriation‟. She cites the borrowing of architectural features from Britain‟s former (and future) enemies, Spain and France, and from the wider Mediterranean world to the Orient, located within the Gardens as both monuments to past victories and as a demonstration of „the range of British ambitions abroad‟. The cultural landscape of Kew also owes much to the architecture inspired by the classical world; the erection of classical temples and ruins to ornament the Royal Botanic Gardens, Bhattacharya claims, displays „further symptoms of the project of aestheticizing foreign antiquity‟. 118 She continues:
Since the appropriated, reconstituted “treasure” never loses its association with the plunder of other cultures, the gesture of transplanting cultural treasures is always an act of power. Greek and Roman ruins could simultaneously signal England as the new Rome, and the impermanence of empire, uniting anxiety and triumph.119
This argument is likely to appeal to those who identify multiple imperialist sub- texts in the cultural productions of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain. There is a case to be made that the sheer plethora of such architectural features within the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew validates the view of these structures as triumphant gestures of imperial power. [See Illustration 12: Classical temple at Kew Gardens.] Nevertheless, it must be remembered that the Royal Botanic Gardens was by no means the only location in Britain (or, indeed, on the Continent or in North America) where architectural features that referenced the glories of classical Greece and imperial Rome were (and are) to be found. The fashion of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries for romantic picturesque landscaping demanded a temple or a ruin set on an elevation or
118 Nandina Bhattacharya, „Family Jewels: George Colman‟s Inkle and Yarico and Connoisseurship‟, Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 34, No. 2, 2001, pp. 213–14. 119 Ibid., p. 14. 179 reflected in a lake as part of the prevailing landscape aesthetic. Mark Girouard has described the „circuit‟ made by guests to eighteenth-century country houses, where „A basically circular layout was enlivened by different happenings all the way round the circuit, in the form of temples, obelisks, seats, pagodas, rotundas and so on‟.120 The celebrated country house garden at Stourhead in Wiltshire had an artificial lake – as many botanic gardens in England and the colonies did also – and featured „a temple of Flora, a Chinese bridge, a grotto … a rustic cottage, a pantheon, a temple of the Sun and a Palladian bridge‟.121 Many of these features were replicated in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century country house gardens across Britain, including Bowood in Wiltshire and Studley Royal in North Yorkshire, both of which have Doric temples overlooking lakes; while Biddulph Grange in Staffordshire features a Chinese garden with a pagoda.122
Bhattacharya‟s argument thus has cogency if it is applied to the style that characterised the domestic cultural landscapes of the ruling class of an imperialist nation. Nevertheless, identifying Kew Gardens as a specific encoding of imperial power through its architectural features ignores the widespread occurrence of this style in British upper class domestic landscapes. Many of the great country houses of Britain were thus also implicated in the imperial project as exemplified in classically-inspired landscape features, along with the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew.123 Public parks also were established across Britain in the nineteenth century in response to unplanned urban growth throughout the industrialising country, and the growing perception that „the need for some provision of open space was socially and politically pressing‟. The creators of
120 Mark Girouard, Life in the English Country House: A Social and Architectural History, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England, 1980, p. 210. 121 Ibid. 122 Peter and Jennie Brimacombe, Gardens on a Grand Scale, HMSO Books, London, 1996, ps. 8, 15, 28–9. 123 They were also directly implicated in imperial expansion and power, as many of Britain‟s great country houses and their surrounding picturesque landscapes dotted with statues and classical follies were built on the proceeds of wealth created by slave labour in the British Caribbean. Jane Austen‟s „Mansfield Park‟ had many equivalents across Britain, including Harewood House, whose garden was designed by Lancelot „Capability‟ Brown in the 1770s (Brimacombe, Gardens on a Grand Scale, p. 7). 180 these parks turned to classical and other exotic forms of ornamentation as part of their mission to „afford a vision of nature ennobled by art‟, and to „instruct and delight‟.124
Colonial botanic gardens were as likely to reference the classical mode of architecture and ornament as were their British counterparts. The impetus for this practice, though, did not necessarily spring from British antecedents. Richard Schomburgk‟s European training at Sanssouci, the Prussian Royal Gardens at Potsdam created under the enlightened rule of Frederick the Great (1712– 1786),125 rather than any desire to emulate Kew‟s ornamental features, led him to adopt the use of statuary in Adelaide Botanic Garden, not only to beautify the Garden but also to cultivate „the public taste for the fine arts‟.126 [See Illustration 13: Classical statuary at Sanssouci Palace, Potsdam, Germany.]
Pauline Payne has commented on another motivation for introducing statuary to a colonial botanic garden: „The use of statues helped to create the atmosphere of a mature garden while trees and bushes were growing.‟127 At Schomburgk‟s behest, the citizens of Adelaide contributed to a fund in 1867 for two new statues, one of which, „The Amazon‟, is still to be seen in the Garden.128
The practice of adorning botanic gardens with classically-inspired ornamental features continued well past the colonial period in Australasia. The Royal Botanic Gardens Sydney, for example, appropriated an architectural feature from ancient Athens when a copy of the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates, created in 1870 by sculptor Walter McGill for New South Wales Premier Sir James Martin‟s Macleay Street home, was installed close to the ornamental lake and within sight of
124 Hilary A. Taylor, „Urban Public Parks, 1840–1900: Design and Meaning‟, Garden History, Vol. 23, No 2, Winter 1995, pp. 202, 208, 211. 125 Petra Wesch, Sanssouci: The Summer Residence of Frederick the Great, Prestel, Munich, 2003, p. 3. 126 Payne, „Picturesque Scientific Gardening‟, p, 129. 127 Payne, Diplomatic Gardener, p. 93. 128 Payne, „Picturesque Scientific Gardening‟, p, 129. 181
Sydney Harbour in 1943, nearly half a century after Australia had become a nation.129
Many other features that owe their origins to the fashion for classical ornament and picturesque landscaping can be found in Australasian botanic gardens. These include the „Venus Fountain‟, allegorical statues of the „Four Seasons‟ imported from Italy in 1879, and copies of „The Boxers‟ by the neo-Classical sculptor Canova, all in Sydney Botanic Gardens.130 The presence of such works reinforces the argument that botanic gardens in the antipodes were (and are) as much heirs to the Europe-wide classical tradition as were the art galleries, museums and libraries in the Australasian colonies whose designers had also opted to build them in this style.131 [See Illustration 14: Venus fountain and lake, Sydney Botanic Gardens, early 1900s.]
The translation of classical forms to an antipodean setting could lead to hybridity in the design of architectural features to adorn botanic gardens‟ landscapes. William Guilfoyle‟s version of the classical Temple of the Winds – a tribute to Charles La Trobe as the man who selected the Melbourne Botanic Gardens‟ site – in a prominent position in the Gardens, has ten columns instead of the
129 Edwin Wilson, The Wishing Tree: A Guide to Memorial Trees, Statues and Fountains in the Royal Botanic Gardens, Domain and Centennial Park, Sydney, Kangaroo Press and Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney, 1992, pp. 88–91. Wilson has noted that „Statues in the gardens have been in and out of vogue‟ at various times since their heyday in the nineteenth century. A „morality purge‟ in 1915 saw a removal and then destruction of „a nude Venus, a nude Apollo, and other undraped statues‟; while others were removed in the 1970s because they had deteriorated „and because they did not fit in with the ideas of landscaping at that time‟. In more recent times a number of statues have been conserved and returned to the Gardens as, wrote Wilson, „Given their historical associations it seems most appropriate that these Gardens retain some statuary, while eschewing clutter and not becoming a museum of the nineteenth century‟, ibid., p. 13. A work with significant literary and classical associations, „The Satyr‟, by Australian sculptor Frank „Guy‟ Lynch, created in 1924, was not installed in the Sydney Gardens until 1977. The model for this work was the artist‟s brother, Joe Lynch, whose death by drowning in Sydney Harbour inspired one of Kenneth Slessor‟s most celebrated poems, „Five Bells‟, ibid., p. 102.
130 Antonio Canova (1757–1822) was an Italian neoclassical sculptor who worked in marble. His most famous work is „The Three Graces‟.
131 Wilson, Wishing Tree, pp. 102–3. These include the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the State Library of New South Wales, and the State Library of Victoria building (which formerly housed the National Gallery of Victoria and the Museum). 182 traditional eight or twelve.132 Guilfoyle used his favourite New South Wales staghorn fern decorative motif for the top of the columns in place of the traditional acanthus leaf device, thus „creating an indigenous architectural form – Australian Classic‟.133 As Deborah Morris comments, „it typified Guilfoyle‟s approach to design: it may look traditional, but there is always a unique twist‟.134
Beth Fowkes Tobin has identified another structure commonly found in botanic gardens – the tropical house, effectively a large glasshouse – as an architectural feature with a strong imperial meaning deriving directly from the gathering of the world‟s plant life into the repository created by Banks at Kew. In Tobin‟s view, the Palm House at Kew dislocates plants „from their ecological and cultural contexts‟ in „the nineteenth-century realization of a Banksian dream‟:135 [See Illustration 15: Plants from Australasia in the Palm House, Kew Gardens.]
Even though it recreates the hot and humid air of the tropics, it is an idealized tropics, not a re-creation of an ecosystem specific to Jamaica or Tahiti, for instance. In this undifferentiated tropical setting, bananas from Tahiti grow side by side with bananas from the Caribbean, and ginger from Jamaica grows next to ginger from Brazil. No attempt has been made to replicate a specific place‟s tropical ecosystem … The Palm House represents the triumph of Britain‟s power to collect, analyze, and manage the world‟s resources for Britain‟s benefit.136
Hilary Taylor posits a more practical role than Tobin for the nineteenth-century palm or tropical glasshouse, one that is located within the perceived educational role of botanic gardens: „With plants carefully cultivated, and informatively displayed, these palmhouses firmly asserted the role of the public park as an arena for presenting an accumulated collection of facts about the material character of the natural world and providing opportunities for all to study and learn.‟137 Glasshouses, after all, are simply a container for plants gathered from all over the world for cultivation in a different environment. It is the concentration
132 Pescott, W. T. Guilfoyle, p. 98. 133 Ibid; Wilson, Wishing Tree, p. 90. 134 Morris, Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne, p. 79. 135 Tobin, Picturing Imperial Power, p. 187. 136 Ibid. 137 Taylor, „Urban Public Parks‟, p. 208. 183 of plants and the steamy atmosphere within glasshouses that make entering them a dramatic experience, especially in colder climates. Hardier exotic species planted outside in the botanic garden are no less dislocated from their environmental contexts than the fragile tropical plants encased in an often aesthetically imposing structure.
Colonial botanic gardens emulated the example of Kew Gardens and other British locations, with palm houses and tropical flower conservatories of their own where exotic plants could flourish, protected either from icy winter cold or a searingly hot dry climate. The pride of Adelaide Botanic Gardens, for instance, was Richard Schomburgk‟s giant waterlily, Victoria regia (now called Victoria amazonica) in its Victoria House, in which this plant from South America, with its enormous flat leaves, has been cultivated successfully since 1868.138 Adelaide Botanic Garden also boasts a Palm House, designed and manufactured in Bremen, Germany, in 1875 and reputed to be „the finest Victorian glasshouse remaining in Australia and … the only remaining example in the world of German cast iron/wrought iron conservatory architecture of its period‟.139
Finally, though, whatever architectural features and landscaping styles were imposed on portions of land transformed into botanic gardens in the Australasian colonies, the most significant change was not the result of how many statues or temples were installed, how many climate-controlled structures were erected, whether plants were organised in straight lines or planted in harmonious curves, or whether these were massed trees or attractive flowering shrubs. The
138 Payne, „Picturesque Scientific Gardening‟, p. 130. Richard Schomburgk and his brother, explorer and botanist Robert Schomburgk, had seen the Victoria regia growing in British Guiana, and Robert‟s descriptions and specimens had led to its scientific classification (ibid.). Rosamund Dalziell, in „„Botanical Autobiography and Vegetable Wonders‟: Richard Schomburgk‟s Botanical Reminiscences of British Guiana‟, in Russell McDougall (ed.), To the Islands: Australia and the Caribbean, Australian Cultural History, Australia Research Institute, Curtin University of Technology, University of Queensland Press, 2002, pp. 70–78, describes the cultivation history of the Victoria regia waterlily, and Richard Schomburgk‟s response when he saw it in flower in British Guiana – where one of its sharp spines pierced his hand. Despite the continuing celebration of the giant waterlily in Adelaide, the first Victoria regia to be cultivated in Australia was grown by Mueller in Melbourne Botanic Gardens. 139 Payne, „Picturesque Scientific Gardening‟, p. 132. 184 introduction of exotic plant species – classified, named and labelled according to the Linnaean system – into these spaces was the major factor in radically and irretrievably refashioning portions of the colonial earth as botanic gardens. These became places in the towns and cities of the Australasian colonies to which nineteenth-century colonists and travellers alike responded as familiar and comforting, and resorted to in search of the self-improvement that the study of nature was thought to confer. As Katie Holmes has written, in relation to colonial gardens generally, there was a „gradual shift from a sense of loss and mourning for the home left behind, to one of memory and transformation‟.140 She continues: „The success of colonisation depended on this ability to create first a sense of individual and then collective futures. Hope was a crucial ingredient.‟141
For the original inhabitants of these colonised spaces, the inexorable spread of exotic plants across the landscape,142 their own displacement from country to make way for grazing herds, buildings and the cultivation of economically useful crops, and the occlusion of the Indigenous names for plants by those assigned using Linnaean taxonomic classification, were potent negative consequences of the „improvement‟ that was fundamental to Britain‟s imperial project. Holmes has reflected that „For Indigenous people, European gardens were part of a “hope- destroying” enterprise‟.143
140 Katie Holmes, „„Planting Hopes with Potatoes‟: Gardens, Memory and Place Making‟, in Marilyn Lake, (ed.), Memory, Monuments and Museums: The Past in the Present, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Vic, 2006, p. 173. Although Holmes‟ chapter pertains most strongly to domestic gardens and gardening, the same conclusions can be applied to gardening on a wider scale in the Australasian colonies, including in botanic gardens. 141 Ibid. 142 Alfred W. Crosby, in Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 1986, pp. 162–4, claims that British settlers in Australia had brought over 200 plant species to the country by March 1803, including unintentional introductions such as a number of invasive weed species. By the late twentieth century there were around 800 naturalised plant species in Australia, the majority originating in Europe. 143 Holmes, „Planting Hopes with Potatoes‟, p. 173. 185
The passion for natural history
Henry Kingsley‟s novel, The Recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn, depicts a group of people on a sightseeing expedition to Cape Chatham in Victoria in the mid- nineteenth century. Natural history topics dominate their conversation; the authority on all things geological, ornithological and botanical is the Mueller-like Dr Mulhaus:
They came soon on to the heath; a dark, dreary expanse, dull to look upon after so long a journey upon the bright green grass. It stretched away to right and left interminably, only broken here and there with islands of dull-coloured trees; as melancholy a piece of country as one could conceive: yet far more thickly peopled with animal as well as vegetable life, than the rich pastoral downs farther inland … The painted quail, and the brush quail (the largest of Australian game birds I believe), whirred away from beneath their horses‟ feet; and the ground parrot, green with mottlings of gold and black, rose like a partridge from the heather, and flew low. Here, too, the Doctor flushed a “White‟s thrush,” close to an outlying belt of forest, and got into a great state of excitement about it. “The only known bird,” he said, “which is found in Europe, America, and Australia alike.” Then he pointed out the emu wren, a tiny little brown fellow, with long hairy tail- feathers, flitting from bush to bush; and then, leaving ornithology, called their attention to the wonderful variety of low vegetation that they were riding through; Hakeas, Acacias, Grevilleas, and what not. In spring this brown heath would have been a brilliant mass of flowers; but now, nothing was to be seen save a few tall crimson spikes of Epacris, and here and there a bunch of lemon-coloured Correas. Altogether, he kept them so well amused, that they were astonished to come so quickly upon the station, placed in a snug cove of the forest …144
Kingsley‟s fictional depiction of Mueller, and the scope of his natural history enthusiasms, shows „Dr Mulhaus‟ as a natural educator, inducting younger people into the knowledge that he has accumulated. Although this passage relates to an expedition across country, and Mulhaus is not communicating his knowledge in the context of a botanic garden, the educational role of people such as Mulhaus/Mueller is a persistent theme in Kingsley‟s treatment of this character throughout the novel. It is also interesting to note, in the light of Mueller‟s problems in the Melbourne Botanic Gardens described earlier in this chapter, that „Dr Mulhaus‟ talks earlier of passing „from a productive pasture land into a
144 Mellick, Morgan and Eggert (eds) Kingsley, Recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn, p. 407. See also Explanatory Notes for this passage in ibid., pp. 643–4. 186 useless flower-garden‟.145 While what he is describing is native vegetation, Mueller‟s passion for promoting the economic value of plant life and his disdain for „a useless flower garden‟ have been captured effectively in Kingsley‟s characterisation of the botanist.
The botanic gardens conducted by Mueller and his fellow directors in other colonies were regarded by most informed citizens as educational spaces as much as collections of plants arranged attractively in public gardens (although Mueller‟s experiences in Melbourne would suggest that such an understanding was not universal in the Australian colonies). Botanic gardens helped to satisfy the passion for natural history that prevailed throughout most of the nineteenth century and from around 1820 onwards had assumed the status of a „national obsession in Britain, and by extension in her colonies‟.146 They were thus venues for the „rational amusement‟ deemed to be so necessary in the nineteenth century, if only to fill the time that hung heavily on the hands of those whose social status precluded working for a living, particularly genteel women. Lynn Barber has described the requirements of rational amusement in The Heyday of Natural History:
To qualify as rational amusement – as distinct from vulgar or „mere‟ amusement, like going to the theatre or reading novels – an activity had to contain some element of useful instruction or moral uplift; preferably both. Natural history fitted the bill perfectly. It was scientific, and there was nothing more useful than science, as everyone knew. It was morally uplifting, because it enabled one to find „sermons in stones, and good in everything‟. It was healthy, since it involved going out of doors … It also tied in very conveniently with the contemporary mania for forming collections.147
The self-improvement to be gained by studying nature was also a key to social advancement. Members of the working class who aspired to middle-class status were encouraged to emulate the recreational habits of middle-class people by following their example. A prime place in which to observe „their social superiors
145 Ibid. 146 Lynn Barber, The Heyday of Natural History 1820–1870, Jonathan Cape, London, 1980, pp. 13–14. 147 Ibid., p. 16. 187 in public and imitate their behaviour‟, as Theresa Wyborn has noted, was a botanic garden, „in which the community could come together in a shared, regulated public space‟, one that „aimed to attract a discerning audience, an audience that wished to further advance itself by the acquisition of useful, scientific knowledge‟.148 [See Illustration 16: Enjoying „rational amusement‟, Sydney Botanic Gardens.] There is no doubt that Australian colonists availed themselves of the opportunity to improve themselves with rational amusement and also simply to stroll in a pleasant place: Donal McCracken claims that „The most popular of all colonial botanic gardens were those in the Australian colonies‟.149
This enthusiasm for the study of natural history, the prevailing belief in its moral and social efficacy, and the correspondingly high level of knowledge of the subject in the nineteenth century, meant that those travellers – male and female alike – who commented on the botanic gardens of the Australasian colonies very often delivered their opinions from a highly informed perspective. In addition, many of them expected to enlarge their own knowledge of natural history in the course of their visits (even though some writers, for example Anthony Trollope, whose responses are examined in the next chapter, resented the implication that they ought to emerge from a visit to a botanic garden having learned something). The extent to which antipodean botanic gardens met these expectations of a satisfying experience of rational recreation, and provided evidence of both environmental and social „improvement‟, informed many travelling writers‟ assessments of the success or otherwise of the botanic gardens they visited in the Australasian colonies.
148 Wyborn, „In Pursuit of Useful Knowledge‟, p. 23. 149 McCracken, Gardens of Empire, p. 168. 188
Chapter Seven: Experiencing Australasia’s botanic gardens
The previous chapter dealt with the British Empire-wide network of botanic gardens originated by Sir Joseph Banks, and maintained by successive Directors of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew; and the imposition of the Linnaean system of taxonomic classification across the British Empire. It also outlined the establishment of botanic gardens in the Australasian colonies, and their role as part of the empire-wide network of botanic gardens centred on Kew, with its program of plant transfer between the colonies and the mother country, and between the colonies themselves. Issues that focused debate on botanic gardens in both the mother country and its colonies, particularly those relating to the conflict between the interests of science and recreation in these public spaces, were also addressed, with Melbourne Botanic Gardens as the key exemplar.
Underlying all activity in botanic gardens, though, was the assumption that the botanical riches of the world existed to be exploited by European powers; and that these colonising powers had the right – indeed a duty – to shape and transform colonial environments to a pattern that conformed to their own cultural landscapes, and to the urban forms of their towns and cities.1 This duty could also be seen as an obligation imposed by religious belief, as described in Reading the Garden: The Settlement of Australia:
The belief that the cultivation of the soil was a God-given directive was common in Britain in the nineteenth and for much of the twentieth century: gardening brought one closer to God, and was good for the moral fibre of the individual and
1 For a discussion of the philosophical and historical origins of this assumption see Jessica Maynard, ‗Intersections: The British Settlers‘ View of the Environment and the Subsequent Environmental Impact in Australia and New Zealand in the Nineteenth Century‘, AHA/Waikato University Award for Excellence in Social and Cultural History: 2009, viewed 6 December 2010 at http://www.theaha.org.au/awards/aha_waikato/maynard.htm 189 the colony or nation … Gardening was implicitly and explicitly a white endeavour: under white settlement the wild land of the Aborigines would become a garden.2
Travelling writers who came to the Australasian colonies did not challenge any of these assumptions. They were instead interested in how effective the colonies had been in replicating the botanic garden model of their home country in the alien environments in which they had settled. At least one writer, Anthony Trollope, took sides in the science versus recreation debate in 1870s Melbourne that resulted in Ferdinand von Mueller‘s dismissal from the Melbourne Botanic Gardens, described in the preceding chapter. Comments by travelling writers on botanic gardens in the colonies also frequently made comparisons between them that reveal some interesting contradictions.
Praiseworthy public gardens
Only twenty years separated the establishment of the Sydney Botanic Gardens from Charles Darwin‘s visit to Sydney during the voyage of the Beagle in 1836, but they had developed sufficiently for him to comment that ‗There is one advantage which the town enjoys in the number of pleasant walks in the Botanic Gardens & Government domain; there are no fine trees, but the walks wind about the Shrubberies & are to me infinitely more pleasing than the formal Alamedas of S. America‘.3 Natural history artist Elizabeth Gould, who was in Sydney three years after Charles Darwin had visited in the Beagle, appreciated the exotic plants growing in the Gardens, but also paid tribute to the native flora she had seen and drawn while she was in Australia with her husband, ornithologist John Gould:
2 Katie Holmes, Susan K. Martin and Kylie Mirmohamadi, Reading the Garden: The Settlement of Australia, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Vic, 2008, p. 17. 3 Charles Darwin, Beagle Diary, quoted in F. W. Nicholas and J. M. Nicholas, Charles Darwin in Australia, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 2002, p. 22. An Alameda is a southern American term for a public walk or promenade lined with trees. 190
The government gardens are very attractive to a stranger just arrived from our high northern latitude not accustomed to see the shrubs and plants of warm climates growing in the open air. A great many Cape of Good Hope shrubs are introduced, which are very beautiful but not more so than the wild native plants of the colony.4
Elizabeth Gould‘s comment in regard to the beauty of Australian native plants was an unusual one. The tendency of most British visitors to the Australasian colonies, from her time to the end of the nineteenth century and beyond, was to remark on how well many English flowers and plants had acclimatised in Australian soil, creating a ‗burgeoning excess, an ideal English garden beyond what was possible in England‘.5
In January 1885 British historian James Anthony Froude arrived in Adelaide, his first landfall on a journey to Australia and New Zealand. He and his party knew no one there; the Governor was away; it was, of course, hot in the midday sun. They sought shelter in Adelaide‘s Botanic Gardens, the first of several of these ‗open-air museums‘ that Froude encountered in his travels in the Australian colonies. Recalling this episode back in England, as he penned his travel account, Oceana, or, England and Her Colonies, he gave his opinion of all he had seen of Australia‘s botanic gardens:
Whether it be the genius of the country, or some development of the sense of beauty from the general easiness of life, or the readiness of soil and climate to respond to exertion, certain it is that the public gardens in Australian towns are the loveliest in the world, and that no cost is spared in securing the services of the most eminent horticulturists.6
Froude was far from being a keen museum visitor, as has been mentioned in Chapter Five. He did not experience the same weariness in a botanic garden: he found wandering in such places both refreshing and
4 Elizabeth Gould to Mrs Coxen, 13 September 1839, in Alec H. Chisholm, The Story of Elizabeth Gould, Hawthorn Press, Melbourne, 1944, p. 74. 5 Holmes, Martin and Mirmohamadi, Reading the Garden, p. 29. 6 J.A. Froude, Oceana, or, England and Her Colonies, Longmans, Green and Co., London, 1886, p. 75. 191 instructive. Many of his fellow nineteenth-century British travellers to Australia felt the same way.
Travellers from overseas often remarked with approval on the obvious desire of the founders of the Australasian colonies to ensure that facilities for the public in the way of open space and gardens did not give way to private alienation of these prime sites. Anthony Trollope remarked that Britain‘s southern colonies had, in this regard, learned from the mistakes of Old World societies in not providing urban land for recreation and the dissemination of scientific knowledge:
The people of Australia personally are laudably addicted to public gardens, as they are to other public institutions with which they are enabled to inaugurate the foundation of their towns, by the experience taught to them by our deficiencies. Parks for the people were not among the requirements of humanity when our cities were first built; and the grounds necessary for such purposes had become so valuable when the necessity was recognised, that it has only been with great difficulty, and occasionally by the munificence of individuals, that we have been able to create these artificial lungs for our artisans. In many of our large towns we have not created them at all. The Australian cities have had the advantage of our deficiencies. The land has been public property, and space for recreation has been taken without the payment of any cost price. In this way a taste for gardens, and, indeed, to some extent, a knowledge of flowers and shrubs, has been generated, and a humanizing influence in that direction has been produced. There are, in all the large towns, either in the very centre of them, or adjacent to them, gardens rather than parks, which are used and apparently never abused.7
James Edge Partington, in his travel memoir, Random Rot, also employed the same physiological metaphor as Trollope when describing the amenities of Wendouree Lake and the Botanic Gardens in Ballarat, Victoria. The Botanic Gardens were established in the late 1850s, and ‗considered the most elaborate in Victoria‘, featuring a ‗fernery, glasshouse, conservatory, aviary and a pavilion housing statues‘, according to garden historian Francine Gilfedder.8 Partington admired the
7 P. D. Edwards and R. B. Joyce (eds), Anthony Trollope, Australia, University of Queensland Press, 1965, first published as Australia and New Zealand, 1873, pp. 231–2. 8 Francine Gilfedder, ‗The Provincial Botanic Gardens in Victoria and their Relationship with the Royal Botanic Gardens, Melbourne, Victorian Historical Journal, Vol. 67, No. 1, 192 transformation of what he described as a ‗swamp‘ into an aesthetically pleasing space with features that imparted a sense of familiarity to a young Englishman abroad:
It forms a grand lung to the city, as upon it there are numbers of private yachts and several small steamers, which ply between the near shore and the Botanical Gardens on the other side. To these we went. They are very prettily laid out, and in them there is one avenue a mile in length. I noticed numbers of our English flowers growing in great profusion.9
This facility became a popular place of resort for Partington and his friends while he was in Ballarat. His descriptions locate it within the sight-seeing and recreational itinerary of the affluent citizens of this provincial Victorian town that was still reaping the rewards of the gold rushes thirty years before:
This afternoon Dr. P------took me for a drive around Soldiers‘ Hill, where the troops were encamped at the time of the ―Eureka Stockade,‖ and from there on round Lake Wendouree and through the Botanical Gardens. At one part it was exactly like Regent‘s Park. The lake looked lovely with all its yachts, three of which were having a most exciting race. The Botanical Garden side is all embanked and planted with willows, the light green of which contrasts beautifully with the darker colour of the other trees.10
Froude also commended the city fathers of Ballarat for providing the oasis of the gardens and Wendouree Lake for the recreation of the town‘s citizens, from the bounty delivered by the gold rushes. As in Adelaide, the discovery of the gardens meant a welcome respite from the heat, and Froude‘s words convey just how grateful he was to encounter them:
We had been passed through Purgatory in the morning that we might enjoy Paradise afterwards–literally Paradise–for Paradise means Park, and here was a
April 1996, p. 148. Gilfedder‘s article views the development of provincial botanic gardens in mid-nineteenth century Victoria as a result of ‗the distinct foresight of the government of the day‘, when ‗parks, gardens and botanic gardens were established almost exclusively in urban centres‘ (p. 144). 9 James Edge Partington, Random Rot: a Journal of Three Years’ Wanderings About the World, privately printed at Guardian Office, Altrincham, UK, 1883, p. 85. 10 Ibid. 193 park worth the name. I have already expressed my admiration of the Australian gardens, but this at Ballarat excelled them all. It was as if the town council had decided to show what gold and science could do with such a soil and climate. The roses which bloom ill on the hotter lowlands were here, owing to the height above the sea, abundant and beautiful as in Veitch‘s nurseries at midsummer. Besides roses, every flower was there which was either fair to look upon or precious for its fragrance. There were glass houses to protect the delicate plants in the winter; but oranges and camellias, which we know only in conservatories, grow without fear in the open air, and survive the worst cold which Ballarat experiences. A broad gravel walk led up the middle of the grounds, with lateral paths all daintily kept. Dark shadowy labyrinths conducted us into cool grottoes overhung with tree-ferns, where young lovers could whisper undisturbed, and those who were not lovers could read novels. Such variety, such splendour of colour, such sweetness, such grace in the distribution of the treasures collected there, I had never found combined before, and never shall again.11
Froude paid one final tribute to the Ballarat Botanic Gardens, recording that ‗The head gardener … presented us each with a bouquet of exotics, the like of which could hardly be put together at Kew‘12 – high praise indeed for the diversity of the plants that had been established within this colonial botanic garden. Some of this diversity can be attributed to Ferdinand von Mueller‘s program of distributing plant material from the Melbourne Botanic Garden to urban botanic gardens in the provinces. Over a busy decade from 1858 to 1867 for Mueller and the Melbourne Gardens, Ballarat was one of the provincial botanic gardens to have received this bounty, its reception of plants from Melbourne commencing in 1859.13
Indian traveller Nundo Lall Doss also reflected the success of the program of plant transfer between the British Empire‘s colonies, and the process of acclimatisation of exotic plants in botanic gardens, when he remarked of Sydney that
In the vegetable world I met with many specimens of trees and plants with which we are so familiar in our own country. Among fruit trees there were the date
11 Froude, Oceana, pp. 112–113. 12 Ibid., p. 114. 13 Gilfedder, ‗Provincial Botanic Gardens in Victoria‘, p. 150. 194 palm, the loquat, and the plantain. They seemed to flourish well. I saw two gigantic specimens of the first in the Botanical Gardens.14
American traveller Mark Twain endorsed Trollope‘s view, quoted earlier, of the benefits Australians enjoyed as a result, early in their colonial history, of the reservation by government of plentiful space for public works, including botanic gardens:
One is sure to be struck by the liberal way in which Australasia spends money upon public works such as legislative buildings, town halls, hospitals, asylums, parks, and botanical gardens. I should say that where minor towns in America spend a hundred dollars on the town hall and on public parks and gardens, the like towns in Australasia spend a thousand… The botanical garden of Sydney covers thirty-eight acres, beautifully laid out and rich with the spoil of all the lands and all the climes of the world. The garden is on high ground in the middle of the town, overlooking the great harbor, and it adjoins the spacious grounds of Government House …15
It would not have escaped acute readers of Twain‘s travel account, Following the Equator, that the land occupied by the botanic gardens in the centre of Sydney, adjacent to a highly desirable harbour view, was prime real estate that in other contexts could – and would – have been turned to private gain. Both Trollope and Twain clearly appreciated the foresight of the founders of the various Australian cities whose botanic gardens were among their chief attractions.
British journalist George Augustus Sala agreed with his American counterpart as to the magnificence of Australia‘s ‗splendid public buildings in which the ‗great Australian cities abound‘: ‗The post office is usually a palace; the gaol commanding, and Government house lofty if not aesthetic‘. By contrast, though, ‗the private dwellings are with rare
14 Nundo Lall Doss, Reminiscences, English and Australasian: Being an Account of a Visit to England, Australia, New-Zeland [sic], Tasmania, Ceylon, &c, Herald Press, Calcutta, 1893, p. 192.
15 Mark Twain, Following the Equator, Dover Publications, New York, 1989, first published by American Publishing Company, Hartford, Connecticut, 1897, p. 137. 195 exceptions paltry in construction and ugly in aspect‘.16 Sala nevertheless held a contrary view to that of Trollope and Twain in their admiration for reserved public space for recreation in Australia. He unleashed a tirade of condemnation of those whom he saw as the real beneficiaries of this antipodean public munificence:
By the ―domains‖ or ―reserves‖, the open spaces set apart in all Australian cities and most rural townships for the recreative use in perpetuity of the community, I do not set much store. The streets are, as a rule, so prodigiously broad that the necessity for what we call an urban ―lung‖ is not so urgently felt, in a sanitary sense, as is the case in the Old World, and in the larger Antipodean towns the ―domain‖ is often rather of a nuisance than otherwise. It is the happy hunting- ground of those mischievous vermin, the larrikins; it is not unfrequently [sic] the scene of gross profligacy, and at night its sward provides eleemosynary sleeping quarters for houseless ―bummers‖ and loafers, for ―remittance men‖ whose remittances have not yet arrived – for that floating contingent, in fine, of wastrels, black sheep, and ne‘er-do-wells whom their relatives and friends at home, in sheer despair of knowing what to do with them, have shipped off to the colonies …17
Travellers such as Trollope, Froude, Partington, Doss and Twain may not have encountered the negative side of public gardens as the haunts of society‘s outcasts, as they usually mixed with the more socially respectable colonial citizens, who would have been at pains to conceal them from their distinguished visitors, or at the very least not draw attention to them. They certainly did not agree with Sala that broad streets would constitute sufficient public space in colonial towns and cities, and applauded the town planning initiatives that had ensured that this amenity was preserved for their citizens.
16 George Augustus Sala, Tinsley’s Magazine, August 1886, 97–104, in Robert Dingley (ed.), Land of the Golden Fleece: George Augustus Sala in Australia and New Zealand in 1885, Mulini Press, Canberra, 1995, p. 189. 17 Daily Telegraph, 12 April 1886, in ibid, p. 220. McCracken, Gardens of Empire, notes that ‗Australian botanic gardens were particularly pestered by drunks and vagrants‘ (p. 168). 196
Science versus beauty
Travellers to the Australian colonies, particularly those from Britain, understood that their readers wanted to hear about the state of British culture in those colonies. How did colonial cultural institutions fare by comparison with the parent models? Travel accounts thus act partly as assessments of how institutions such as botanic gardens were performing their perceived functions in societies at the periphery of the Empire.
Journalist Frank Fowler, in Southern Lights and Shadows, published in 1859, spoke approvingly of the ‗young, but particularly well laid out‘ Melbourne Botanic Gardens.18 Alice Frere, travelling in Australia in the late 1860s, was impressed by the scientific standing of the Director of the Melbourne Botanic Gardens, Ferdinand von Mueller, and his ‗orders from every crowned head in Europe‘. The Melbourne Gardens, Frere believed, ‗promise to be among the finest in the world … The climate of Australia is particularly favourable to horticulture, and no trouble is spared in making the gardens perfect.‘19
The Gardener’s Chronicle published by the Veitch Royal Exotic Nursery, Chelsea, had been less flattering about the Melbourne Gardens in 1866, only a couple of years before Frere‘s visit:
The Melbourne Botanic Gardens … [are] … under the direction of Dr Mueller, the celebrated botanist, so well known in Europe in connection with the flora of Australia. The Melbourne Botanic Gardens, like almost everything else [in Melbourne] are in a state of formation; no portion of them can be said to be
18 Frank Fowler, Southern Lights and Shadows, Being Notes of Three Years’ Experience of Social, Literary and Political Life in Australia, Sampson, Low, Son and Co., London, 1859, p. 101. 19 Alice M. Frere, The Antipodes and Round the World; or Travels in Australia, New Zealand, Ceylon, China, Japan, and California (2 vols), Vol. I, Hatchards, London, 1870, pp. 18–19. 197 finished or in order. From this cause they do not present an attractive appearance, and contrast but poorly with those of Sydney.20
This comment, resented by Mueller,21 was nevertheless a warning shot that presaged the open conflict that broke out a couple of years later in regard to his management of the Melbourne Botanic Gardens, and would be echoed in the comments of at least one travelling writer early in the next decade.
A conundrum that exercised the minds of travellers and colonists alike – as it did the controlling bodies of botanic gardens both in Britain and the colonies, as has been seen in Chapter Six – was the balance that should be maintained between scientific values and the provision of recreational space in botanic gardens. Travellers differed as much as colonists as to whether educational value and scientific standing should predominate over the provision of pleasant public gardens. Most applauded attempts at botanical education, expressed in scientific labelling and plant beds laid out according to plant families, but it was generally agreed that it was important to balance this goal with the provision of recreational amenities.
Anthony Trollope was in Melbourne in 1872 as controversy raged over the style of Ferdinand von Mueller‘s directorship and the appearance and future development of the Melbourne Botanic Gardens. Trollope made his views on this issue crystal clear: Mueller had, in this British visitor‘s opinion,
… sacrificed beauty to science, and the charm of flowers to the production of scarce shrubs, till the higher authorities have interfered. When I was at Melbourne there had arisen a question whether there should be some second
20 Gardener’s Chronicle, 7 April 1866, p. 316, quoted in R. W. Home, A. M. Lucas, Sara Maroske, D. M. Sinkora, and J. H. Voigt, Regardfully Yours: Selected Correspondence of Ferdinand von Mueller, vol. II, 1860–1875, Peter Lang, Bern, 2002, fn 6, p. 541. 21 Mueller, in a letter to George Bentham at Kew on 22 April 1870, complained that this comment by Veitch ‗did – perhaps unwittingly … great injustice and damage to my establishment‘ (ibid.). 198 and, alas, rival head-gardener, so that the people of Melbourne might get some gratification for their money. The quarrel was running high when I was there. I can only hope that the flowers may carry the day against the shrubs‘.22
Trollope was a man of his time: as George Seddon has noted, ‗The Victorians craved colour in their gardens‘.23 He thus scorned the scientific approach taken by Mueller in the Melbourne Botanic Gardens, and spurned it in favour of what he had experienced in Sydney‘s Botanic Gardens:
Those at Melbourne in Victoria are the most pretentious, and, in a scientific point of view, no doubt the most valuable. I am told that in the rarity and multiplicity of the plants collected there, they are hardly surpassed by any in Europe. But for loveliness, and that beauty which can be appreciated by the ignorant as well as by the learned, the Sydney Gardens are unrivalled by any that I have seen. The nature of the land, with its green slopes down to its bright little sea bay, has done much for them, and art and taste combined has made them perfect.24
The visiting British writer acknowledged Mueller‘s international standing as a botanist, and reported that he had been told that ‗the gardens and the gardener, the botany and the baron, rank very highly in the estimation of those who have devoted themselves to the study of trees,‘ and ‗Melbourne should consider herself to be rich to have such a man‘.25 Trollope nevertheless claimed that the German scientist had ‗made these gardens a perfect paradise of science for those who are given to botany rather than beauty‘. They were ‗not charming, and the lessons which they teach are out of the reach of ninety-nine in every hundred‘.26
22 Trollope, Australia, pp. 380–1. 23 George Seddon, ‗A Captive Jungle, or Rainforest in South Yarra‘, first published in Landscape Australia 3/1984, archived in LA Papers, http://www.aila.org.au/LApapers/seddon/captive-jungle/one.htm noted that flowering shrubs such as azaleas were introduced into the great eighteenth-century British gardens such as Stourhead in the course of the nineteenth century. Their designers – Capability Brown, William Kent and Humphrey Repton – had used the native trees of the British Isles to achieve their desired gradations of tone and colour, and ‗Flowers were kept to the kitchen garden‘ (p. 8). 24 Ibid., p. 232. 25 Ibid., p. 380. 26 Ibid. 199
By comparison with the botanic gardens in Sydney and Adelaide, Trollope thought that Melbourne‘s Gardens took everything too seriously, as is evident in his comment that the goal of the Gardens appeared to him to be to be a largely didactic one. He summed up his view of all the botanic gardens he had seen in the Australian colonies, with a damning concluding sentence that underlined his disapproval of those at Melbourne:
The gardens of Adelaide cannot rival those of Sydney, – which, as far as my experience goes, are unrivalled in beauty anywhere. Nothing that London possesses, nothing that Paris has, nothing that New York has, comes near to them in loveliness. But, as regards Australian cities, those of Adelaide are next to the gardens of Sydney. In Melbourne the gardens are more scientific, but the world at large cares little for science. In Sydney, the public gardens charm as poetry charms. At Adelaide, they please like a well-told tale. The gardens at Melbourne are as a long sermon from a great divine, whose theology is unanswerable, but his language tedious.27
From Trollope‘s perspective, the Melbourne Botanic Gardens made no concession to pleasure, and betrayed a killjoy attitude on the part of their Director. This, for Trollope – whose dislike of, for example, the Evangelical style of religion, with its emphasis on avoiding pleasurable pastimes, was well known and has been described in Chapter Four – demonstrated dismaying symptoms of the ‗excessive seriousness‘ that characterised the Evangelicals, and ‗was a favourite theme of their opponents‘.28 For Trollope thus to compare Mueller‘s Melbourne Botanic Gardens to a ‗sermon‘, and to call them ‗tedious‘ would, for those familiar with his prejudices as conveyed through his published works, be a signal to his alert readers that the visiting novelist was stating his condemnation of the Melbourne Botanic Gardens in an unmistakable and highly characteristic manner. Trollope‘s Australia and New Zealand was published in 1873, the same year as Mueller was finally replaced as Director of the Melbourne Botanic Gardens. As Chapter Six has shown, the decision to oust Mueller
27 Trollope, Australia, p. 643–4. 28 Ian Barclay, The Call to Seriousness: The Evangelical Impact on the Victorians, Jonathan Cape, London, 1976, p. 26. 200 had already been made well before Trollope‘s book arrived in Australia. Nevertheless, those Melburnians who had agitated for more pleasant recreational space in the Gardens would have been gratified to read Trollope‘s criticism of Mueller‘s administration as an external validation of their views. Historian of Australian science Ann Mozley Moyal has summed up their attitude to the Mueller‘s Melbourne Botanic Gardens: ‗His ―stiff garden of science‖ … made little appeal to Melbourne‘s citizenry‘.29
Trollope‘s view of the Melbourne Botanic Gardens was not typical of his response to the other botanic gardens he visited in the Australian colonies. Although he claimed not to like public gardens, ‗because I am called on to listen to the names of shrubs conveyed in three Latin words, and am supposed to interest myself in the locality from which they have been brought‘,30 he was entranced by Sydney Botanic Gardens, referring to them again five years‘ later in his travel book on South Africa. Describing the Cape Town Botanic Gardens, Trollope again recalled the glories of Sydney‘s version: ‗As a public pleasure ground the Capetown [sic] gardens are not remarkable. As I walked up and down this somewhat dreary length I thought of the glory and the beauty and the perfect grace of the gardens at Sydney.‘31
Trollope gave the reason why the Cape Town Botanic Gardens, which ‗were valuable in a scientific point of view, but were, as regards beauty and arrangement, somewhat deficient‘, appeared to be a failure by comparison with those in Sydney. He noted that ‗funds were lacking‘: ‗There is a Government grant and there are subscriptions, but the
29 Ann Mozley Moyal, Scientists in Nineteenth-Century Australia: A Documentary History, Cassell Australia, Stanmore, NSW, 1976, p. 174. 30 Trollope, Australia, p. 230. 31 Anthony Trollope, South Africa: a reprint of the 1878 edition with an introduction and notes by J. H. Davidson, A. Balkema, Cape Town, 1973, p. 82. 201
Government is stingy, — and what good Government ever was not stingy? — and the subscriptions are slender‘. 32
Trollope wrote that the Sydney Botanic Gardens ‗beat all the public gardens I ever saw‘.33 His affection for them extended to featuring the Gardens in his fictional works based on his experience of the Australian colonies;34 they are the only metropolitan setting that Trollope employs in his one novel set entirely in Australia, Harry Heathcote of Gangoil.35 In Trollope‘s novel, a scene involving British-born squatter Harry Heathcote36 is located in the ‗Botanical Gardens‘ at a key moment in the plot. Harry is courting a Sydney girl, Mary Daly, and is able to pop the question once his future sister-in-law, Kate Daly, deliberately ‗went away and left us in the Botanical Gardens‘.37 It is clear from the fact that Mary and Kate are said to come from Sydney that the Sydney Botanic Gardens was the place that the novelist was picturing when writing this scene. Trollope again used Sydney Botanic Gardens as a setting in his 1879 novel whose action is located partly in Australia, John Caldigate.
The Sydney Botanic Gardens evidently represented for the novelist an appropriate site for the depiction of emotional engagement, with both
32 Ibid. 33 Trollope, Australia, p. 229. 34 J. H. Davidson, in his review of Edwards and Joyce (eds), Trollope, Australia, mentions that the editors were ‗silent‘ on the ‗immediate relationship between Australia and the more famous works of fiction‘, citing The Way We Live Now as owing some of its inspiration to Trollope‘s ‗description of the proposed South Australian trans-continental railway.‘ Davidson continued: ‗One would have liked to have a considered opinion as to whether Trollope‘s exposure to the brash but vigorous settler society arising in the Antipodes helped to crystallise the sustained attack the novel makes on what seemed to its author to be a profoundly sick one.‘ J. H. Davidson, review of Australia. By Anthony Trollope. Edited by P. D. Edwards and R. B. Joyce, 1968, in Historical Studies, Vol. 13, No. 52, April 1969, pp. 559–61. 35 Introduction by P. D. Edwards to Anthony Trollope, Harry Heathcote of Gangoil. The novel was first published in Australia in the Age, 15 November 1873 to 3 January 1874. This World‘s Classics edition first published Oxford University Press, 1992, p. xiii. 36 Harry Heathcote is modelled on Trollope‘s own younger son, Frederic, who had bought a property in central New South Wales where the novelist and his wife Rose stayed while touring Australia in the early 1870s. 37 Ibid., pp. 6, 120. 202 positive and negative consequences for his characters in each novel. In the case of Harry Heathcote and his future wife, the Gardens are a place where romantic ties are sealed, allowing the novel to progress to the next stage, the hero‘s married life with Mary at his property, ‗Gangoil‘, on the Mary River in Queensland. John Caldigate, on the other hand, is lured into the Gardens for a conversation with Mrs Euphemia Smith, a shipboard companion on the journey to Australia with whom he had an affair. What transpires in the Sydney Botanic Gardens between Caldigate and Mrs Smith sets in train the events that see him charged with bigamy after he returns to England. For Caldigate the Gardens are a personal Garden of Eden, and his temptation there leads him to fall into transgression of society‘s mores. (For a summary of the section of the novel associated with the Sydney Botanic Gardens, see Appendix II, John Caldigate and Sydney Botanic Gardens.)
A change of direction for Melbourne Botanic Gardens
As has been described in the preceding chapter, Mueller‘s place as Director of the Melbourne Botanic Gardens was taken by William Guilfoyle, whose extensive landscaping and tree transfer and removal substantially shaped the Gardens as they now appear. Plant labelling, informing visitors of a plant‘s botanical and vernacular names and its habitat, continued under Guilfoyle‘s directorship but he replaced Mueller‘s white labels with more unobtrusive versions.38 Visitors to the Gardens continued to have ‗a social and aesthetic experience, and for most visitors learning about the natural world occurred informally and incidentally as they enjoyed their leisure‘.39
38 Kathleen M. Fennessy, A People Learning: Colonial Victorians and Their Public Museums 1860–1880, Australian Scholarly Publishing, North Melbourne, Vic, 2007, pp. 179–80 39 Ibid., p. 181. 203
Richard Twopeny, in Town Life in Australia (1883), published in London just over a decade after Guilfoyle had taken over from Mueller as Director of Melbourne Botanic Gardens, commented that the Gardens were ‗well worth a visit‘. But to his eyes they retained no semblance of their former didacticism and had thus lost their scientific significance: ‗They have no great scientific pretensions, as their name would imply, but are merely pleasure-grounds, decked with all the variety of flowers which this land of Cockaigne produces in abundance‘.40 Trollope (and Victorians in both senses of the word) were more likely to have approved of this transformation of the place that the celebrated novelist had condemned so roundly for its tedious seriousness. Colourful flowers had asserted their ascendancy over dull-looking but botanically instructive clumps of thickly planted trees, and opportunities for pleasant strolls occurred where Mueller‘s scientific rigour had struck a ponderous note.
Nevertheless, Twopeny‘s dismissal of Guilfoyle‘s Melbourne Botanic Gardens as ‗merely pleasure-grounds‘ did their Director a disservice, in the view of other commentators who visited the Gardens as his new landscaping was taking shape. Froude, visiting in 1885, appreciated both the landscape and scientific values of the Gardens:
The gardens themselves extend for a mile with a large sheet of winding water in the middle of them. As at Adelaide no expense has been spared: and I think I observed more attention to scientific arrangement in the grouping of the trees. Broad lawns, kept carefully watered, open out at intervals with flower-beds blazing with splendour. The lake has islands in it, approached over pretty bridges, and it will be one day beautiful when the water is filtered. Here was all which heart of visitor could desire: avenues to stroll in which a vertical sun could not penetrate; with the glory of colour which nature lavishes on leaf and petal to look at.41
Emily Katharine Bates agreed with Froude‘s verdict on the Melbourne Botanic Gardens. A keen if not hypercritical observer, she was able to
40 R. E. N.Twopeny, Town Life in Australia, first published London 1883; facsimile edition, Sydney University Press, 1973, p. 11. 41 Froude, Oceana, p. 88. 204 separate the Gardens from their setting and appreciate the landscape that Guilfoyle had created: ‗the Botanical Gardens are even more beautiful here than in Sydney, although the latter can boast the finer situation of the two, thanks to the immortal harbour.‘42
Horticultural writer James Veitch, of the Royal Exotic Nursery, Chelsea, also commended the scientific emphasis that he considered was still visible in the Melbourne Botanic Gardens after Guilfoyle‘s comprehensive reorganisation. He claimed after a visit in 1896 that
It is unquestionably the best labelled garden I ever entered … In addition to the botanical name, the name of its author, the popular name, the habitat, Order, and in some instances the economic or medicinal value of the plant are legibly inscribed.43
Despite the obvious emphasis given to botanical education, landscape values had been given their full weight in the Gardens, Veitch commented: ‗Rich grassy undulating slopes, interminable winding walks and bold sweeping beds in pure English style complete as fine a general landscape effect as is to be met with anywhere‘.44 Catherine Bond, visiting Melbourne with her husband in the same year, agreed with Veitch‘s commendation of Guilfoyle‘s combination of landscaping and scientific classification:
We are very fond of walking in the Melbourne Botanical Gardens; they are well laid out, and so pretty, and the hours pass quickly by admiring the palms, ferns, and beautiful and curious plants, and one learns so much too, as everything is named and classified.45
For writers such as Veitch and Bond there had been no sacrifice of scientific values as the price to be paid for a charming recreational environment in the Melbourne Botanic Gardens. Their readers back in
42 E. Katharine Bates, Kaleidoscope: Shifting Scenes from East to West, London, Ward and Downey, 1889, p. 52. 43 James Herbert Veitch, A Traveller’s Notes, or, Notes of a tour through India, Malaysia, Japan, Corea, the Australian colonies and New Zealand during the years 1891–1893, James Veitch and Sons, Royal Exotic Nursery, Chelsea, 1896, pp.186–7. 44 Ibid. 45 Catherine Bond, Goldfields and Chrysanthemums: Notes of Travel in Australia and Japan, Simpkin, Marshall and Co, London, 1898, p. 67. 205
Britain were reassured that the Gardens, under Guilfoyle‘s direction, were providing the mix of features that identified them as a place of both informal scientific learning and recreation.46
Botanic gardens and social order
While botanic gardens were characterised by ordered planting, their human visitors were expected to demonstrate orderly conduct as well. Indeed, botanic gardens themselves were designed to act on their visitors to moderate their behaviour, and to impart civilised and refined values and attitudes, as well as communicating messages about nature as part of God‘s creation, stimulating aesthetic sensibilities and even inspiring patriotism.47 As Holmes, Martin and Mirmohamadi have written in Reading the Garden, ‗public gardens were viewed as commonly held spaces, where ideal citizens and ideal values might be produced, shaped and regulated‘. They were ‗demonstrations of control over nature and proper order, and this was expected to impress itself on visitors, sometimes literally‘.48
Policing behavior in botanic gardens was not always easy, especially when they attracted large numbers of visitors. Melbourne Botanic Gardens attracted 300,000 visitors in 1860, according to Mueller and, while most visitors observed the proprieties, a minority did not. He reported thefts of flowers and plants, killing of birds with slingshots by Melbourne Grammar School Boys, wandering livestock, prostitutes and their clients using the Gardens for assignations, and men bathing naked in the river in full view
46 At least one twenty-first century environmental historian nevertheless has acknowledged that ‗neither the greatness and originality of Guilfoyle‘s achievement nor its costs have been adequately recognised in Australia … Melbourne has one of the world‘s great landscape gardens, but it is not among the great botanic gardens. The herbarium and scientific functions of the Gardens are carried out well, but they have become divorced from the pleasure garden, which has only a limited educational and scientific function.‘ Seddon, ‗A Captive Jungle‘, p. 14. 47 Holmes, Martin and Mirmohamadi, Reading the Garden, pp. 18, 58–9. 48 Ibid., pp. 59, 71. 206 of passing ladies.49 His successor, William Guilfoyle, employed ‗watchmen‘ to police his regulations against visitors smoking, littering, thieving flowers and letting their dogs and children run out of control. At this time, as Kathleen Fennessy has noted, ‗Visitors were yet to form a consistently refined and responsible public.‘50
While most botanic gardens, following Kew‘s lead, set up a standard set regulations for appropriate behaviour in botanic gardens, Charles Moore, the Director of Sydney Botanic Gardens, posted an augmented set of rules in December 1885 that prohibited bad language in addition to a range of other restrictions.51 Some of Moore‘s rules were clearly what could have been expected of people habituated to the codes of public propriety of the Victorian era; others were central to the maintenance of this public space and the protection of its special purpose; others were a little draconian. At least one of the regulations, that dealing with dress, could exclude the very poor from the Gardens:
No person in a state of intoxication, or of reputed bad character, or who is not cleanly and decently dressed, shall enter or remain within these gardens: and no person shall behave in an improper or offensive manner, or use bad language, or commit any act of indecency therein.52
This may not have been of great concern to the directors of botanic gardens, who were eager to maintain the distinction between ‗respectable‘ members of the public, who were welcome in botanic gardens, and the ‗undesirable‘, who were not.53 The other regulations combined predictable
49 Homes et. al. (eds), Regardfully Yours, Vol. II, pp. 9–10. 50 Fennessy, A People Learning, p. 173. 51 Moore‘s new regulations followed a celebrated case where the behaviour of an overly affectionate couple, the Dunlops, had caused them to be ejected from the Gardens. Although Mr Dunlop sued Moore, and obtained a judgement against him in the Water Police Court, the Colonial Secretary, Alexander Stuart, reversed the finding on appeal. Lionel Gilbert, Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney: A History 1816–1985, Sydney, 1986, p. 108. 52 Quoted in ibid. 53 Holmes, Martin and Mirmohamadi, Reading the Garden, p. 63. J. H. Maiden (1859– 1925), Director of the Sydney Botanic Gardens from 1896 to 1924, described visitors to 207 prohibitions such as injunctions against marking furniture or setting fires with other restrictions that verged on the onerous, and would have been likely to have discouraged some people from visiting the Gardens at all.54
Melbourne Botanic Gardens‘ regulations, particularly the ban on smoking, almost frustrated James Froude‘s enjoyment of his time there. He was bothered by ‗flies, of all sizes and hues, who were in millions‘, but found that the Gardens‘ staff connived with visitors to nullify some of these restrictions:
A cigar would be a remedy but for the stern ‗No smoking allowed in these precincts.‘ The gardeners happily are more humane than their masters, and do not see the forbidden thing when it is not flourished in their faces. With the help of tobacco I contrived to protect myself, and thus guarded I had the most charming place to walk in all the time of my stay, and a great many curious things to observe.55
Despite minor and inconsequential infringements such as Froude‘s,56 the stringent regulations had their effect on the behavior of the majority of visitors by the closing years of the nineteenth century. Catherine Bond was impressed by those she saw in Sydney‘s Botanic Gardens in the late 1890s:
After lunch we walk in the Botanical Gardens. They are beautifully situated, and the palms are most lovely and grew so freely there. The view of the harbour is very fine, and the hundreds of people lying on the grass and walking about seem the Botanic Gardens and the Domain in the bluntest of terms: ‗You will find that the Botanic Garden visitors are clean people, and those in the park which surrounds the Botanic Gardens are dirty people‘. Quoted in ibid., p. 64. 54 Moore‘s other regulations may be summarised as follows: Children under 12 must be accompanied by an adult; no races or games; no stones to be thrown; no fires; no garbage to be left; no smoking; no carrying flowers into the garden; no marking ornaments or furniture; standing or lying on furniture forbidden; lying on grass near walks forbidden; no meetings of above 20 people to be held permission required. McCracken, Gardens of Empire, p. 170–1, mentions that Hobart added even more bans, on whistling and musical instruments, as well as sitting on seats ‗in an improper manner‘. 55 Froude, Oceana, p. 88. 56 Froude was by no means alone in his flouting of this particular regulation. Holmes, Martin and Mirmohamadi, in Reading the Garden, p. 64, cite the case of the ‗Vagabond‘, John Stanley James, in 1876, who also broke the no smoking rule in Sydney Botanic Gardens, seeing that the ‗edict‘ was ‗infringed by many, and I am one‘. 208 thoroughly happy and enjoy themselves so quietly. They might teach our English crowds some lessons in manner and deportment.57
A testimony to the exemplary behaviour of visitors to the Sydney Botanic Gardens such as Bond has offered here would have been most gratifying to the director of a colonial botanic garden – and to citizens of the Australian colonies generally – as it emphatically repudiates any suggestion of uncouthness and colonial impropriety. This recognition by travelling writers that Australian colonists could and did exhibit ‗proper‘ manners while enjoying nature in botanic gardens testified as strongly to the success of the civilising mission as did the taxonomically organised plant life of the botanic garden itself. [See Illustration 17: Social order on display, Sydney Botanic Gardens]
‘Transforming’ the native environment
The verdicts of travellers to the Australian colonies were generally feared – at least in the colonies – by those who felt that any implication of colonial inferiority could damage the reputation of their cultural institutions in the eyes of those reading their accounts in Britain. Travellers‘ accounts that praised the transformation of the natural environment of the colonies were particularly welcome. For their part, nineteenth-century travellers were very interested in the extent to which the Australian colonies had created environments which echoed those of their homelands and, through advantages of climate, exceeded them in beauty. Frank Fowler, who lived in Australia for several years in the late 1850s, paid Sydney Botanic Gardens a considerable tribute, invoking the names of European painters of contrasting landscape styles to compare the landscape of Sydney‘s Domain, home of the Botanic Gardens, with an analogous public park in London:
They are situated in a large natural park called the ―Domain,‖ which, for a certain rugged beauty, is unequalled by any similar place we have in England. It is to
57 Bond, Goldfields and Chrysanthemums, pp. 75–6. 209
Kensington Gardens, what Salvator Rosa is to Watteau.58 The Gardens run down, by gentle declivities, to the Harbour, and are stocked with the rarest trees and flowers.59
In the 1860s Alice Frere claimed that the site of Melbourne Botanic Gardens had only thirty years before been a ‗wilderness‘.60 For many of her nineteenth-century readers, Frere‘s use of the word ‗wilderness‘ would have evoked a different emotional response to that experienced by most twenty-first century readers, for whom the word most commonly suggests a vision of unspoiled nature that stands in need of preservation, as the name and mission of a current environmental organisation such as The Wilderness Society suggests.61
American scholar Roderick Nash, in Wilderness and the American Mind, has commented that ‗over time the general attitude towards wilderness has altered radically‘, and that the word ‗is so heavily freighted with meaning of a personal, symbolic and changing kind as to resist easy definition‘.62 Nash‘s book traces the evolution and diversity of meanings of ‗wilderness‘, from its etymological origins as ‗a place of wild beasts‘ and,
58 Salvator Rosa (1616–1673) was an Italian painter of the Baroque period, and an early exponent of the depiction of the ‗romantic‘ or ‗sublime‘ landscape full of dramatic effects. Simon Schama has claimed that Rosa ‗had become the object of a cult among the collecting aristocracy of Whig England‘, although ‗What his greatest admirers had actually invented for themselves was a ―Salvator effect‖ rather than anything resembling the truth about the artist‘. He did, however, ‗celebrate the brutal, rocky wildernesses that French classicists like Claude Lorrain preferred to keep on a misty horizon. He seemed, almost perversely, to delight in exactly the scenery that convention rejected as savage‘. Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory, HarperCollins Publishers, London, 1995, pp. 453–4, 456. Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684–1721) was a leading artist of the Rococo style, whose work depicts comedy actors or fashionable people in gentle park-like landscape settings. H. W. Janson and Anthony F. Janson, History of Art, sixth edition, Harry N. Abrams Inc., New York, 2001, p. 594. 59 Fowler, Southern Lights and Shadows, p. 99. 60 Frere, Antipodes and Round the World, p. 18. 61 The Wilderness Society (TWS) is a national, community-based, environmental advocacy organisation whose purpose is to protect, promote and restore wilderness and natural processes across Australia for the survival and ongoing evolution of life on Earth. ‗Who is The Wilderness Society?‘ viewed 11 December 2010 at http://www.wilderness.org.au/about-us/who-is-tws-article. 62 Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1967, p. 1. 210 by extension for a human being, ‗an alien environment where the civilization that normally orders and controls his life is absent‘. Wilderness, according to this understanding, can be ‗Any place in which a person feels stripped of guidance, lost, and perplexed‘.63 Wilderness was also ‗a potent symbol applied either to the moral chaos of the unregenerate or to the godly man‘s conception of life on earth‘; ‗wilderness as fact and symbol permeated the Judeo-Christian tradition‘, according to Nash.64 Those Europeans responsible for colonising newly acquired lands had an instinctive understanding of wilderness ‗as something alien to man – an insecure and uncomfortable environment against which civilization had waged an unceasing struggle‘.65 Taming wilderness in newly acquired outposts of empire was, in its turn, regarded in many quarters as one of the positive effects of colonisation. In the Australian context, ‗cultivating the soil ―became the moral ground of expropriation‖, reflecting a higher stage of civilisation than the Aboriginal people whose land had been taken‘.66
It is thus likely, given the context, that the word ‗wilderness‘ – as used by Frere and other travelling writers visiting the Australasian colonies – carried the meaning of a barren, unproductive and even possibly a pagan space populated by undesirable elements, and inimical to the values of civilisation. These comments by Fowler and Frere were echoed by many other travellers, who were also impressed by the rapidity with which the native landscape of the colonies had been refashioned into environments that recalled those of the home country – or at least could be located within a European landscape tradition, whether it be actual or artistic.
63 Ibid., pp. 2–3. 64 Ibid., ps. 3, 8. For example, John Bunyan‘s classic Christian allegory, Pilgrim’s Progress, begins with the words, ‗As I walked through the wilderness of this world …‘ John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress From This World to That Which is to Come, first published 1678, this edition printed by W. Oliver, London, 1776, p. 1. 65 Ibid., p. 8. 66 Holmes, Martin and Mirmohamadi, Reading the Garden, p. 19. 211
Mark Twain, for instance, envied Australians the diversity of exotic plant life represented in their botanic gardens, and also remarked upon the transformative aspects of European-style cultivation on the native environment:
The successor of the sheet-iron hamlet of the mangrove marshes has that other Australian speciality, the Botanical Gardens. We cannot have these paradises. The least we could do would be to cover a vast acreage under glass and apply steam heat … What will grow under glass with us will flourish rampantly out of doors in Australia. When the white man came the continent was nearly as poor, in variety of vegetation, as the desert of Sahara; now it has everything that grows upon the earth. In fact, not Australia only, but all Australasia has levied tribute upon the flora of the rest of the world; and wherever one goes the results appear, in gardens public and private, in the woodsy walls of the highways, and even the forests. If you see a curious or beautiful tree or bush or flower, and ask about it, the people, answering, usually name a foreign country as the place of its origin. India, Africa, Japan, China, England, America, Java, Sumatra, New Guinea, Polynesia and so on.67
Twain‘s final statement would appear to suggest a high level of botanical knowledge in the colonial population. It is more likely that such information was conveyed by plant labelling, but Twain‘s hyperbole suggests otherwise, to colourful effect.
Twain was usually a percipient and critical observer of the practices of colonialism, but he was also a man of his times, and shared the view of many other writers that the native flora of Australia was devoid of beauty, and that the botanic gardens created in the colonies compensated for this lack of aesthetic appeal by adorning the landscape with beautiful exotic plants; a considerable irony when one recalls that the flora of ‗Botany Bay‘ had so captivated Sir Joseph Banks in April 1770.
When Australia‘s botanic gardens fell short of a perceived ideal condition, travellers certainly noticed and said so. Botanical artist Marianne North‘s comments on the Brisbane Botanic Gardens were at best lukewarm,
67 Twain, Following the Equator, p. 184. 212 although it should be noted that the vagaries of Brisbane‘s weather played a significant part in her dissatisfaction with them:
The weather was too untropical for much out-of-door sketching, and the gardens were dried up and unattractive. Hot sun, cold wind, and dust. The famous araucaria trees in the Botanical Gardens were brown and dusty, and not larger than the one in the temperate house at Kew. The ferns and palms looked bare and cold. There were few flowers, though the Government House garden alone was rich with sweet home flowers—roses, carnations, heliotropes, etc., a few tecomas and tacsonias in addition showing that the present cold was rare. Dracaenas, strelitzias, and Norfolk Island pines also give a different look to the gardens, as well as wattle trees, yellow, with thousands of fairy balls and leaves mimicking the eucalyptus, though the young seedlings begin with the ordinary acacia leaves. There were some grand blue nymphaeas blooming on the water, but shrivelled and deformed by the unusual cold; certainly the climate of subtropical Queensland was rather different from what I had expected.68
Donal McCracken notes that this response was not typical of North‘s ‗usual praise of imperial botanic gardens‘.69 North was even less flattering about all the botanic gardens she visited in Australia when writing to Sir Joseph Hooker at Kew Gardens, who had set out a program of Australian plants for her to illustrate: ‗I fear you will think me very idle for not painting more of the things on your list, but the Gardens do not tempt me – they are all so stiff and young.‘70
James Veitch, reporting on Brisbane Botanic Gardens a decade later, tried to be as understanding as possible about the efforts of its Curator, Philip McMahon, to maintain his botanic garden on the English model. He noted that ‗Labour is naturally, as throughout the Colony, the greatest difficulty to
68 North was even more unsparing in her condemnation of Brisbane itself: it was, she wrote, ‗a most unattractive place—a sort of overgrown village, with wide empty streets full of driving dust and sand, surrounded by wretched suburbs of wooden huts scattered over steep bare hills‘. North was in Brisbane in August 1880, in the Australian winter. While Queensland is more temperate than the southerly states at that time of the year, it can experience biting cold winds quite frequently. Marianne North, Recollections of a Happy Life, Macmillan, London, 1892, pp. 109–110. 69 McCracken, Gardens of Empire, p. 36. McCracken also notes that Brisbane Botanic Gardens were ‗regularly flooded‘, and were ‗something of a poor cousin‘ to Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide Botanic Gardens (p. 37). 70 Marianne North, quoted in Brenda E. Moon, Biographical Note – Marianne North 1830– 90, in Vision of Eden: The Life and Work of Marianne North, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, in collaboration with Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 1980, p. 238. 213 cope with‘, as wages were high, with ordinary labourers earning £2 per week and skilled workers even more: ‗As Mr McMahon‘s vote for the garden only amounts to £52 per acre, he has not much to spare.‘71 The Gardens were, Veitch wrote, ‗largely patronized by the public‘, with ‗a fair- sized cricket field and a lawn tennis court‘. Despite its success with visitors, Veitch could not be positive about the Brisbane Botanic Gardens any longer, and commented, ‗All is under grass, except the beds and asphalt paths, cheaply kept clean, but scarcely in accordance with our British idea of a garden.‘72 After a few commonplace remarks about blossoming trees in ‗perfect condition‘, a duck pond, and a ‗neat terrace‘ with a fountain and tank of nymphaeas, Veitch registered his disapproval of the use of a native Australian tree as a major defining feature of the garden:
From this entrance running the whole length of the garden is a row of Araucaria Bidwillii from forty to sixty feet high. As here seen, little can be said in praise of this tree for ornamental purposes; its branches, ten to fifteen feet long, are almost invariably leafless except from twelve to twenty-four inches at the end. The immense cones, of several pounds‘ weight, are clustered at the top, hidden from view and difficult to obtain without the assistance of a storm.73
Bamboo, in Veitch‘s opinion, grew best here, and he wrote lyrically that ‗large clumps of Bambusa arundinacea, with thickly interlaced tough stems, forty to fifty feet high, cracking and bending in every breeze, shade, near the centre of the grounds, one of its prettiest spots – a large open-air fernery‘.74 [See Illustration 18: Bamboo Avenue, Brisbane Botanic Gardens.]
Veitch‘s point of view was that of a horticulturist with an eye to the commercial exploitation of the flora of the Australian colonies. From his
71 Veitch, A Traveller’s Tale…, p. 159. The Brisbane Botanic Gardens comprised forty acres adjacent to Government House and the Brisbane River. 72 Ibid. 73 Ibid., pp. 159–60. 74 Ibid., p. 160. 214 perspective, many of the native plants did not appeal as garden plants that would lend themselves to propagation and sale in an English market, let alone be considered as suitable to ornament botanic gardens:
The native trees do not, as here represented, strike me as particularly ornamental, though in the bush, from all accounts, some must be very fine. In the gardens, however, some trees are not particularly interesting.75
James Edge Partington condemned the Melbourne Botanic Gardens in the early 1880s as ‗a disgrace to the colony‘, by contrast with Hobart, where the Gardens were ‗kept in beautiful order‘.76 Clearly Partington felt justified in chiding Melbourne for the condition of its Botanic Gardens, which were still within the first decade of Guilfoyle‘s remodelling. Overseas visitors such as Partington had high expectations of what botanic gardens should be, especially when comparisons could be made with superior versions in other colonies.
Other travelling writers were more tolerant of the difficulties experienced by colonial botanic gardens directors in their attempts to establish exotic trees in the Australian environment. James Anthony Froude sought for reasons why trees in Melbourne Botanic Gardens had not yet achieved the desired effects. He believed that more time was necessary before the English trees planted by Guilfoyle in the Melbourne Botanic Gardens would grow into true scions of their parent stock:
They are trying hard to introduce English trees, and succeed tolerably with some. The elms and planes thrive best; of oaks they have fifty varieties, I think, and none of them do really well. They grow vigorously for a year or two, then lose their leading shoot, which dies away, and they throw out branches horizontally. I
75 Ibid. Lack of appreciation of the aesthetic values of Australia‘s native flora was not confined to English and American visitors such as Veitch and Twain – it was not until 1970 that a botanic garden devoted entirely to Australian native plant species, the Australian National Botanic Gardens, was established in Canberra. Since then a number of other botanic gardens featuring Australian native flora have been established, including Mount Annan Botanic Garden in western Sydney, and Jervis Bay Botanic Garden on the south coast of NSW. 76 Partington, Random Rot, p. 154. 215 noticed, however, that they bore the largest acorns which I had ever seen. They are perhaps acclimatising themselves, and out of these acorns may come true monarchs of the forest, grander than our own.77
Froude also noted a pond in the Adelaide Botanic Gardens with which the Director, Dr Richard Schomburgk, had ‗done all which his art could accomplish with water lilies, pink, and blue, swans black and white, and particoloured ducks and geese; the banks were fringed with weeping willows growing to the dimensions of vast forest trees; but the water itself was liquid mud, so dirty that the pure blue of the sky turned brown when reflected on it‘. Dams, he decided, were needed to provide reliable water to the gardens to sustain the water features and landscape effects after which Schomburgk was striving. Froude concluded, somewhat patronisingly, ‗All in good time: even Australians cannot do everything at once.‘ 78 [See Illustration 19: James Shaw, Adelaide Botanic Gardens]
James Veitch visited Adelaide Botanic Gardens several years after Froude‘s journey through the Australian colonies. By this time Richard Schomburgk had retired as Director, and had been replaced two years before Veitch‘s visit by another German-born botanist, Maurice Holtze, who had been in charge of the Palmerston Botanic Gardens (Darwin) for eighteen years, and with his son Nicholas was a pioneer of tropical agriculture in the Northern Territory.79 Clearly things had been allowed to get out of hand in the latter years of Schomburgk‘s term as Director in Adelaide. Veitch remarked that, since Holtze had taken over, ‗important alterations have taken place, and that which bore the reputation of being an overgrown wilderness is once more assuming the proportions and aspect of an interesting and tasteful garden‘.80
77 Froude, Oceana, p. 88. 78 Ibid., p. 76. 79 Darrell N. Kraehenbuehl, ‗Holtze, Maurice William (1840–1923), Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol. 9, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Vic, 1983, pp. 353–4. 80 Veitch, A Traveller’s Tale ..., p. 173. 216
Emily Katharine Bates commented tartly on the varying standards of care in evidence in the Sydney Botanic Gardens in 1888:
The Botanical Gardens which run down to the water, and occupy a considerable line along the harbour, are most extensive and beautiful, but not very well kept as a whole. It was amusing to notice how much more care was bestowed upon those parts of the grounds which surrounded Government House, built at the top of the gardens, overlooking the harbour.81
Bates, however, made a concession to the effects of climate when she admitted that ‗Spring is scarcely the best time to see tropical gardens. Many of the shrubs and plants are dried up by the early heat, while others, more prudent, have not attempted to bud.‘82
An Australian native son whose name has become synonymous with the evolution of a characteristic Australian literary voice – Henry Lawson – registered his preference for a botanic garden across the Tasman over Sydney Botanic Gardens in his essay, ‗New Zealand from an Australian point of view‘, asserting that ‗The Botanical Gardens, Wellington, are a relief after the painfully artificial gardens of Sydney.‘83 Marianne North was also more positive about Wellington‘s Botanic Gardens than she had been about their equivalents in Australia, noting that ‗Dr H[ector] gave me a delightful walk in the Botanical Garden‘, and that she ‗saw one tree-fern forty feet high there‘.84 Donal McCracken claims that Wellington Botanic Gardens was the ‗only botanic garden in Victorian New Zealand worthy of the name‘. Although its director, James Hector struggled to deal with gorse infestation and cuts to the government grant to the Gardens,
81 E. Katharine Bates, Kaleidoscope: Shifting Scenes from East to West, London, Ward and Downey, 1889, p. 37. 82 Ibid. 83 Henry Lawson, ‗New Zealand from an Australian Point of View‘, [date] in L. Cronin (ed.), A Camp-Fire Yarn: Henry Lawson Complete Works, 1885–1900, Lansdowne Press, Sydney, 1984, p. 345. 84 North, Marianne, Recollections of a Happy Life: Being the Autobiography of Marianne North, edited by her sister, Mrs John Addington Symonds, Vol II, Macmillan, London, 1892, p. 189.
217
‗Despite many hardships, he had created, at least in parts, an interesting gardens with some noted features‘.85
Despite some criticisms, many of them reflecting the difficulties of reproducing English-style botanic gardens in a very different climate, none of the travelling writers claimed that the establishment of these gardens had failed absolutely. Some gardens may have been preferred to others – indeed, as has been noted, writers differed from one another in their views of particular colonial botanic gardens – but the efforts of their creators, while not always praised effusively, were generally appreciated by visitors from overseas.
By the time of Federation in 1901, transformations of portions of the native landscape to botanic gardens were complete in most of the colonies. But harping on the natural beauty of a garden‘s setting a persistent theme of travellers‘ accounts, particularly of those in Sydney made it all seem too easy, in the view of J. H. Maiden, Director of the much-admired Sydney Botanic Gardens from 1896 to 1924. He believed that the praise lavished on the Gardens‘ ‗natural‘ setting gave insufficient credit to the aesthetic sensibilities and physical effort that had shaped this garden, and indeed all colonial botanic gardens. Maiden concluded his 1903 Guide to the Botanic Gardens, Sydney with a reminder that this much admired terrain was not the natural environment of the place, but the outcome of much hard work and generous public provision:
Contemplation of the beauty and floral treasures of the Sydney Botanic Gardens sometimes causes unthinking visitors to attribute the beauty of the scene almost wholly to the natural advantages of the situation, for, with its diversified surface and charming marine views, it may fitly be termed an earthly paradise. But visitors must never lose sight of the fact that the greater portion of what is now the Botanic Gardens was originally a barren, rocky, sandy place, such as may be seen in the scores of gulfs and gullies in other parts of Port Jackson today. It is the hand of man that has converted this barren waste into smiling gardens, and
85 McCracken, Gardens of Empire, p. 39. 218 has produced marvellous landscape effects. The surface has been so altered that the original contour of the ground in most parts of its area can now only be guessed at. Blasting has taken place here, filling up there, renewal of soil here, deflection of a water-course there, and so on … The present state of the Gardens is owing to the skill of my predecessors, who have always been supplied with reasonably sufficient funds by a succession of enlightened Governments.86
Erasmus Darwin, whose poem, ‗The Botanic Garden‘, is quoted at the beginning of Chapter Six, penned another verse in 1789, in which he projected a vision of modernist progress for the very place where the Sydney Botanic Gardens now stand – Sydney Cove. Darwin prophesied, again in rhyming couplets, Sydney‘s destiny as a flourishing child of empire, in Visit of Hope to Sydney-Cove, Near Botany Bay‘:
Where Sydney Cove her lucid bosom swells, And with wide arms the indignant storm repels; High on a rock amid the troubled air Hope stood sublime, and waved her golden hair; Calm‘d with her rosy smile the tossing deep, And with sweet accents charm‘d the winds to sleep; To each wild plain she stretched her snowy hand, High-waving wood, and sea-encircled strand. ―Hear me,‖ she cried, ―ye rising realms! record Time‘s opening scenes, and Truth‘s prophetic word.– There shall broad streets their stately walls extend, The circus widen, and the crescent bend; There, ray‘d from cities o‘er the cultured land, Shall bright canals, and solid roads expand.– There, the proud arch, colossus-like, bestride Yon glittering streams, and bound the chafing tide; Embellish‘d villas crown the landscape-scene. Farms wave with gold, and orchards blush between.– There shall tall spires, and dome-capt towers ascend, And piers and quays their massy structures blend; While with each breeze approaching vessels glide, And northern treasures dance on every tide!‖– Then ceased the nymph–tumultuous echoes roar, And Joy‘s loud voice was heard from shore to shore– Her graceful steps descending press‘d the plain, And Peace, and Art, and Labour, join‘d her train.87
86 J. H. Maiden, A Guide to the Botanic Gardens, Sydney, NSW Government Printer, Sydney, 1903, pp. 8–9. 87 Erasmus Darwin, The Botanic Garden: A Poem in Two Parts Containing The Economy of Vegetation and The Loves of the Plants with Philosophical Notes, first published 1789, this edition Jones & Company, London, 1824. The poem has a note at the end giving the 219
[See Illustration 20: Wedgwood medallion]
Maiden‘s more prosaic description of Sydney Cove, while delivered at the beginning of a new century, belongs squarely in the late nineteenth century, and was produced by the pen of a scientist of that period, not a polymath ‗Lunar man‘.88 Like Darwin‘s poem though, it nonetheless celebrates, if in less visionary, more pragmatic terms, the ‗improvement‘ so beloved of the historical periods to which he, Darwin, and the travelling writers who visited Australia belonged. It would take another century‘s understanding of the social and natural environment of Australia to acknowledge the price that had been paid in human and ecological terms to achieve this vision. (See Appendix III, Recognising the Indigenous Presence in the Royal Botanic Gardens Sydney.)
context for its creation: ‗Mr. Wedgwood, having been favoured by Sir Joseph Banks with a specimen of clay from Sydney Cove, has made a few medallions of it, representing Hope encouraging Art and Labour, under the influence of Peace, to pursue the employments necessary for rendering an infant colony secure and happy. The above verses were written by the author of The Botanic Garden, to accompany these medallions.‘ At least eleven of the medallions survive, and five examples are held in the collection of the State Library of New South Wales. 88 Jenny Uglow, The Lunar Men: The Friends Who Made the Future, Faber and Faber, London, 2002, provides extensive coverage of the scientific and literary activities of Erasmus Darwin. See also Jenny Uglow, ‗Sexing the Plants‘, Guardian, 21 September 2002, viewed 11 January 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/sep/21/featuresreviews.guardianreview30/print 220
Chapter Eight: James Anthony Froude and Sir George Grey
A visit to Kawau Island
One day during the closing decade of the nineteenth century a man sat in the Natural History Museum in South Kensington, London, watching the stream of visitors passing through the galleries. A group of boys clustered around an animal specimen, close to where the man sat watching the interaction between the museum‘s visitors and the silent spoils of natural history collecting. Wanting to know more about what they were looking at, the boys approached the man to ask if he knew the animal‘s name.
Its name was immediately forthcoming, the answer prompting another question: ‗Who killed it?‘ This placed the man in a mild quandary. Should he risk telling the truth, that he had indeed been the one who shot the animal in the interests of science and education, of course – and have his audience suspect him of being a fraud or a boaster, and lose confidence in the information he had already given them? He chose the truth and, gratifyingly, was believed. Of course the whole tale of how the animal had been collected in southern lands far distant from the fog and cold of England had then to be told.1 The group of well-brought-up British
1 While Governor at the Cape of Good Hope, Grey, as he had done in New Zealand in his first Governorship there, made trips from Cape Town into the interior to meet tribal chieftains, and ‗also took the opportunity to collect specimens of rocks, fossils, animals and plants. Plants and animals were collected along the way and preserved. Large game animals shot by Grey were dispatched straight back to a taxidermist in Cape Town.‘ R.I.C. Spearman, ‗The Rt. Hon. Sir George Grey, K.C.B. (1812–1898) Colonial Administrator, Naturalist, Botanist and Horticulturist, The Linnean, Vol 18, No. 3, July 2000, pp. 22–30. Grey also collected specimens in Australia and New Zealand, and one of these could have been the subject of this discussion. For example, John Gould, in Volume II of The Mammals of Australia, published in London between 1845 and 1863, describes Grey procuring two specimens, male and female, of the Short-Eared Rock Wallaby (Petrogale brachyotis) ‗on the north-west coast of Australia, near Hanover Bay, on the 29th of December, 1837‘. Gould also mentioned that these specimens were now ‗in the British Museum, and are at present unique‘. 221
lads then ‗raised their hats and caps with a hearty and convinced ―Thank you, sir‖.‘2
A decade or more earlier, in the 1880s, the same man, advancing in years, all but retired from public life but less frail and more active, was still living in one of those southern lands – New Zealand – more precisely, on an island off the coast of the North Island, Kawau Island, about forty kilometres from Auckland. He was Sir George Grey.
The name of Sir George Grey figures prominently in the colonial histories of Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. As a young officer in the 1830s he had explored in Western Australia, and was appointed governor of South Australia in 1841. He took over the governorship of New Zealand in 1845, where he served for ten years, then assumed the same position at Cape Colony (South Africa) from 1854 to 1861, returning to New Zealand as governor that year until 1868, when the Colonial Office decided to put an end to his independent style of governance. Grey then embarked on a political career and was premier of New Zealand from 1877 to 1879. He stayed in parliament for fifteen years longer, but was essentially marginalised from the centre of power.
Grey‘s last foray into political culture was as a New Zealand delegate to the National Australasian Convention in Sydney in 1891, where he was the only one to espouse radical measures such as one-man-one-vote, and
2 James Milne, The Romance of a Pro-Consul: Being the Personal Life and Memoirs of the Right Hon. Sir George Grey, K.C.B., London, 1911, pp. 42–4. The Sir George Grey Inward Correspondence Typescripts held in the Auckland Public Library Special Collections contain a letter from James Milne, the Daily Chronicle journalist who acted as Grey‘s amanuensis and penned the above book, setting out Milne‘s suggestion to pay a visit to the Natural History Museum. ‗I have been thinking that I should like to come tomorrow afternoon and have a look at some of your animals in the South Kensington Museum‘ (GL: M36, 10 April 1896) It is tempting to think that this visit may have resulted in the anecdote related above. 222
an elected governor-general.3 One of the other delegates to the National Australasian Convention, Alfred Deakin, later reported wryly that the extreme radicalism of Grey‘s stand owed something to a desire to aggravate the colonial statesman who was hosting the event, Sir Henry Parkes:
One was inclined to suspect that these views were pressed further by Sir George because he evidently felt from the first that they would be repugnant to the majority of his colleagues and especially to Sir Henry Parkes, to whom in strength of will and force of egotism, he was no whit inferior. Had fortune placed them in the same political sphere theirs would indeed have been a battle of the giants and though the same willfulness and incapacity to keep a party or ministry together would have hamstrung Sir George Grey, he would have proved an adversary superior in craft and in power of thrust to any of those with whom Parkes had been confronted … Each had been so long the ‗grand old man‘ of his own colony, that it was almost with a feeling of affront on each side at an attempted usurpation by an interloper, that they met and from the first moment plainly bristling with hostility to each other.4
Sir Charles Dilke, who had travelled in New Zealand in 1866–7 during Grey‘s second governorship and had written of his experiences there in
3 J.A. La Nauze, The Making of the Australian Constitution, Melbourne University Press, 1972, pp. 40–1. La Nauze‘s magisterial work on the Australian constitutional conventions summed up Grey‘s position at the conference and what lay behind the stance he adopted: ‗old Sir George Grey, a figure in the world if long since a cross to be borne in New Zealand, thought that they should have nothing to do with a federation which could draw them into great difficulties a line of talk he was to modify when he found himself an admired figure among Australians‘, ibid., p. 21; C. M. H. Clark, A History of Australia, Volume 5, The People Make Laws 1888–1915, Melbourne University Press, 1981, pp. 58, 74, 80. 4 Alfred Deakin, The Federal Story: The Inner History of the Federal Cause, Robertson & Mullens, 1944, pp. 33–4. Deakin‘s posthumously published account of the federal conventions continues with a telling anecdote that nicely delineates the essential egotism of the two men. He describes Parkes‘ ‗besetting foible‘ of dropping the names of the ‗notables of the day‘, such as the historian Lecky and the Poet Laureate, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, ‗of whom he devoutly preserved all mementoes, of whom he frequently spoke and with whom he corresponded whenever possible‘. Grey, aware of Parkes‘ susceptibility in this regard, set out to discomfort him in a speech to the Convention: ‗If Sir George Grey had set himself but the one purpose of inflicting the utmost exacerbation upon all the tenderest vanities of his great rival, he could not have better constructed that elaborate address in which he contrived to delicately remind his hearers of his own chief achievements and of some of his distinguished friendships commencing with the Marquess of Salisbury and another unnamed peer, and leading up to Her Majesty and the Prince Consort … What Sir Henry‘s feelings were could only be guessed, for he by no means wore his heart upon his sleeve, but even he could not refrain from whispering to Deakin, ―Don‘t you think this speech is rather too much about Sir George Grey and his illustrious friends?‖ No doubt it was, but it was also the height of irony that it should be Sir Henry Parkes who should complain of it.‘ ibid, p. 34. 223
Greater Britain (1869), thirty years later endorsed the view of Grey as a patrician turned democrat in his 1899 book, The British Empire:
Sir George Grey, after being the famous Captain Grey of Australian exploration, and the still more famous Governor of the Cape and of New Zealand, retired from the Colonial Office service, and became Prime Minister of the island colony in which he had previously represented the mother country. His teaching aroused the New Zealand democracy …5
New Zealand‘s pre-eminent twentieth-century historian, Sir Keith Sinclair, nevertheless said of Grey that ‗Democratic by conviction, he was authoritarian by temperament‘.6 He had more natural affinity with working people than with those who sought to exploit both land and labour, and was also notable amongst his countrymen for the respect he showed to indigenous people. Grey‘s contemporary and subordinate, and resident magistrate in the Waikato in the early 1860s, John Eldon Gorst, contrasted Grey with the majority of New Zealand‘s town dwellers of the time in his attitude to Maori: ‗Nothing can exceed the kindness and respect with which men like Sir George Grey and the Bishop of New Zealand behave to natives; they treat them as ―gentlemen‖‘.7 Grey‘s desire to understand and work with Maori people led him to learn their language: the response of some of them was to claim him as their ‗white father‘. (A more extensive analysis of Grey‘s period in New Zealand, and in particular the contested views of his relationship to Maori, is provided in Chapter Nine.)
During the period with which this chapter is concerned – early 1885 Grey was settled on Kawau Island,8 where he had spent twenty years
5 Charles Dilke, The British Empire, Chatto and Windus, London, 1899, p. 86. 6 Sir Keith Sinclair, A History of New Zealand, revised edition, Penguin, Auckland, 2000, p. 89. Grey‘s most recent biographer, Edmund Bohan, uses similar words to describe his subject: ‗a democrat and rebel who was also an autocrat‘. (Edmund Bohan, To Be a Hero: Sir George Grey, 1812–1898, HarperCollins, 1998, p.14.) 7 John Eldon Gorst, The Maori King, edited by K.O. Arvidson, Reed Book, Auckland, 2001 (first published Macmillan & Co., London, 1864, p. 31. 8 Grey had bought Kawau Island in November 1862. With alterations designed by leading architect Frederick Thatcher, the former copper mine manager‘s house, with twenty rooms added to the original ten, became a magnificent mansion of kauri-lined rooms. 224
building up what an admiring journalist (and distant relative) described as an ‗earthly paradise‘.9 He had already planned to ensure his posthumous reputation as an imperial statesman and local hero – to some at least – by becoming a cultural benefactor. He would bestow on Auckland and its citizens the treasures of his extensive collection of bibliographic and artistic works, and artefacts of the Indigenous people he had governed at the Cape and in New Zealand.
This was not a new role for Grey: he had already given the British Museum over a hundred Maori objects in 1854, including gifts presented to him, gathered during his first governorship of New Zealand.10 Before donating them to the Museum, Grey had checked the propriety of his action with the Colonial Office. Told that these gifts were legally his to dispose of as he wished, he passed them into the Museum‘s keeping. The objects donated by Grey included ‗named pieces of great mana and historical importance‘,11 similar in type and quality to those he would later bestow on the citizens of Auckland. [See Illustration 22: Mere pounamu in the Enlightenment Gallery, British Museum.]
The word mana, which appears throughout this chapter in relation both to people and objects, has been defined by Ngahuia Te Awekotuku:
‗Kawau Island‘, Auckland City Libraries website, http://www.akcity.govt.nz/library/spec/kawau.html 9 J. Grattan Grey, His Island Home, Wellington, 1879, p.6. James Grattan Grey (1847– 1931) worked as a journalist in Australia and New Zealand, and as a Hansard reporter in New Zealand, rising to the position of chief reporter, but was dismissed from this post at the time of the Boer War, occasioning much political controversy. (G. H. Scholefield, A Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, Vol. I, Department of Internal Affairs, Wellington, New Zealand, 1940, p. 331.) 10 Grey‘s collection was one of the earliest ‗ethnographic‘ collections taken into the British Museum. His offer of Maori material was accepted for the Museum by the Keeper of Antiquities and Trustee Augustus Wollaston Franks. Appointed to the British Museum in 1851, Franks‘s ‗influence on the Museum over the next forty-five years was greater than that of any member of staff before or since‘, according to the British Museum‘s historian, former Director Sir David Wilson (David M. Wilson, The British Museum: A History, The British Museum Press, London, 2002, ps.119, 159). 11 D.C. Starzecka (ed.), Maori Art and Culture, British Museum Press, London, 1996, p. 152. 225
Mana, like tapu, is a pan-Pacific concept. It has layers and levels of meaning: primarily, it is about power and empowerment, about authority and the right to authorise. Charisma, personal force, social status, princely charm, leadership inherited or achieved are all forms of mana; it is a subjective human quality, measured by various means … Just as they are rich with the tapu of their former owners or makers, objects taonga or treasures may also carry their mana.‘12
New Zealand historian James Belich described mana as ‗a kind of spiritual capital, often translated as prestige or authority, inherited, acquired and lost by both individuals and groups‘.13
Grey had also collected natural history and ethnographic specimens in Australia in the course of two journeys of exploration in 1837 and 1838, and during his magistracy in Western Australia and governorship of South Australia. Another collection, bibliographic and artistic as well as ethnographic, had been given to the South African people of Cape Colony when he left his gubernatorial position there. Anthony Trollope, who visited the public library in Cape Town during his 1877 visit to South Africa, added lustre to Grey‘s name as a donor of material culture to a colony that he had previously served as governor:
Under the same roof with the Museum is the public library which is of its nature very peculiar and valuable. It would be invidious to say that there are volumes there so rare that one begrudges them to a distant Colony which might be served as well by ordinary editions as by scarce and perhaps unreadable specimens. But such is the feeling which comes up first in the mind of a lover of books when he takes out and handles some of the treasures of Sir George Grey‘s gift. For it has to be told that a considerable portion of the Capetown library, — or rather a small separate library itself numbering about 5,000 volumes, — was given to the Colony by that eccentric but most popular and munificent Governor. But why a MS. of Livy, or of Dante, should not be as serviceable at Capetown as in some gentleman‘s country house in England it would be hard to say; and the Shakespeare folio of 1623 of which the library possesses a copy … is no doubt as often looked at, and as much petted and loved and cherished in the capital of South Africa, as it is when in the possession of an English Duke. There is also a wonderful collection in these shelves of the native literature of Africa and New Zealand. Perhaps libraries of greater value have been left by individuals to their country or to special institutions, but I
12 Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, ‗Maori: People and Culture‘, in ibid., p. 27. 13 James Belich, Making Peoples: A History of the New Zealanders from Polynesian Settlement to the End of the Nineteenth Century, Allen Lane, Penguin Press, Auckland, NZ, 1996, p.18. 226
do not remember another instance of a man giving away such a treasure in his lifetime and leaving it where in all human probability he could never see it again.14
The collection with which this chapter is primarily concerned though is the one Grey offered in 1882 to the citizens of Auckland for the Auckland Institute and Free Public Library, which opened in 1887. The collection has since been dispersed across three institutions in Auckland. The works of art went to the Auckland Art Gallery, where the fifty-three paintings he presented became ‗the nucleus of the Gallery‘s collection.‘15 The bibliographic collection has now become a significant part of the Auckland Public Library Special Collections.16 The Maori artefacts were transferred on loan from the Auckland Art Gallery to the Auckland War Memorial Museum in 1915.17 The nature and in turn the fame of this collection – and its creator – was spread throughout the English-speaking world by an account of Grey‘s life on Kawau by the most celebrated visitor to Grey‘s island home, British historian James Anthony Froude.
Froude‘s 1886 book, Oceana, or, England and Her Colonies, presented the owner of Kawau Island, Sir George Grey, now an elderly man whose involvement in public life was diminishing, to the British and colonial (and
14 Anthony Trollope, South Africa; a reprint of the 1878 edition with an introduction and notes by J. H. Davidson, A. Balkema, Cape Town, 1973, p. 81. A full account of Grey‘s benefaction to the Cape Town Library is to be found in Chapter 10, ‗Cape Town‘s Munificent Gift‘, in Donald Jackson Kerr, Amassing Treasures for All Times: Sir George Grey, Colonial Bookman and Collector, Oak Knoll Press and Otago University Press, Delaware, USA and Dunedin, New Zealand, 2006, pp. 153–68. 15 Director and Curators Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, The Guide, Auckland Art Gallery, 2001, p. 7. The Auckland Art Gallery‘s website also acknowledges Sir George Grey as the ‗founding donor for Auckland‘s public library and its art gallery‘. His donation of paintings included ‗works by Caspar Netscher, Henry Fuseli, William Blake and David Wilkie‘, http://www.aucklandartgallery.govt.nz/aboutus/history/collections.asp?show=Grey 16 Kerr, Amassing Treasures for All Times, Chapter 13, ‗Private Library to Public Collection‘ gives an account of the transfer of Grey‘s library from Kawau Island to Auckland Free Public Library, pp. 205–17. The library and art gallery shared the same building until a new library building was constructed in the 1970s. Information supplied by Dr Roger Blackley. 17 Wendy J. Harsant, ‗The Maori Artefacts in the Sir George Grey Collection held on deposit in the Auckland Institute and Museum, Auckland‘. Unpublished report prepared for Auckland City Art Gallery, 1988, held in Department of Archaeology, Auckland War Memorial Museum. Information on the ownership status of the Maori artefacts supplied by Dr Roger Blackley. 227
later the United States) reading public as a benevolent patriarch ruling over a semi-feudal domain. Froude‘s account of Grey in Oceana occupies the largest space given to an individual residing in the Australasian colonies in that book. Froude devoted a full chapter to his visit to Kawau, and part of a preceding chapter to his meeting with Sir George Grey in Auckland‘s Northern Club, where he reprised his subject‘s career and spoke of his standing as an imperial administrator.
Froude‘s account of the bibliographic, artistic and ethnological treasures in Grey‘s collection, and the breadth of ancient and contemporary reading material Sir George Grey could command on his island outpost, further enhanced his host‘s reputation as a collector, bibliophile and connoisseur, as well as an imperial statesman. Souvenirs of his career as New Zealand‘s governor were also on display, and descriptions of these were enlisted by Froude to enhance Grey‘s reputation as a benefactor of indigenous people. A travel account such as Froude‘s thus acted to validate the reputation of an imperial administrator and, by implication, the ‗civilising mission‘ he represented and whose interests it was his often- expressed duty to serve.
The background to the travel account, its future as a widely published work, and that of the collection described therein, are central to an interrogation of this text. The nature of the friendship between Grey and Froude, and their possible expectations of what the publication of Oceana would do for Grey‘s reputation, raises the question of whether Froude was, either deliberately or unwittingly, propagandising on Grey‘s behalf. Positioning Grey within a typology of collecting and collectors, in Chapter Nine, locates him within the Victorian era‘s cultural and museological contexts. An examination of Grey‘s role as a benefactor, and comparison with other benefactors, helps to shed light on his motives and intentions. And, most crucially for the purpose of this work, one short passage in
228
Froude‘s account of his visit to Kawau, with an almost throwaway line at the end describing Grey as the ‗father of the Maori race‘, raises a number of questions about the real meaning or meanings of objects, and the significance with which they are invested by their owner (and later donor), and their eventual viewers when they appear in museum collections and displays.
Froude in New Zealand, March 1885
Leaving Sydney for New Zealand on 26 February 1885 on an American steamer, the City of Sydney, by 2 March Froude was passing in sight of the shore of the North Island, and pondered on lost possibilities. In his youth he and his friend Arthur Clough had planned to emigrate to New Zealand and become farmers, but their lives had taken altogether different directions and only Froude was here now, ‗flitting by like a ghost‘.18 It would not be the last time in his reflections on New Zealand that he entertained the thought of living amongst its islands.
He and his two companions – his son Ashley and Lord Elphinstone19 – landed in Auckland on 3 March and, having decided that their remaining time was insufficient to see both islands, determined to make a round trip out of Auckland and back, taking in Cambridge and Oxford – the travellers later found these places to be a far cry from their namesakes in the mother country20 – Rotorua and Ohinemutu, Tikitapu, the Blue Lake,
18 James Anthony Froude, Oceana, or, England and Her Colonies, Longmans, Green & Co., London, 1886, p. 208. 19 See Martyn Downer, The Queen’s Knight, Corgi Books, London, 2008, for an account of the life of Howard, Lord Elphinstone, soldier and VC winner, member of Queen Victoria‘s court and ‗governor‘ to her son Arthur, Duke of Connaught. Elphinstone was also an accomplished artist, and his sketches of scenes in New Zealand and Australia were included in Oceana.
20 Froude, Oceana, pp. 228–9. 229
Rotomahana and the Pink and White Terraces.21 But before setting out on this journey Froude established a base in Auckland at the Northern Club, at the high point of one of city‘s hills, ‗a staring, unbeautiful building, but internally of ascertained excellence‘.22 The Northern Club was (and is) one of the institutions created for the benefit of the ruling classes in the Australasian colonies, although Froude referred to them as ‗that colonial institution so peculiarly precious to travellers, who are thus spared the nuisances of hotels‘.23 [Illustration 23: The ivy-clad façade of the Northern Club in Auckland, New Zealand, 2002.]
Froude‘s initial encounter in New Zealand with Sir George Grey they had met in England some years before was in the Northern Club. There he renewed his acquaintance with the man whose career he described as ‗a romance‘.24 Froude, in common with many of his fellow Victorians, thirsted after heroes, and nowhere is this heroising tendency more apparent than in his account of Sir George Grey his administrative and political career, his intellectual attainments and what would now be called his ‗lifestyle‘. The British people of the nineteenth century were notable for revering two things: ‗great men and public heroes‘, as one of Charles Darwin‘s biographers described it;25 and the lives of the governing classes of the medieval period, romanticised as the ‗age of chivalry‘. The latter reached its apogee in aspects of the pre-Raphaelite movement in art and literature.
The age of chivalry subliminally informed the tone of Froude‘s account of his encounter with Grey in New Zealand, from his first mention of their
21 Waldo Hilary Dunn, James Anthony Froude: A Biography, Vol. 2, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1963, p. 529. 22 Froude, Oceana, p. 310. Ivy has mellowed the ‗staring‘ outlines of the Northern Club, and its interior is still (as seen in 2002) redolent of ‗excellence‘. It is also still an exclusive club for the leading citizens of Auckland. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid., p. 215. 25 Janet Browne, Charles Darwin, Voyaging: A Biography Part I, Princeton University Press, New York, 1995, p. xi. 230
meeting in the Northern Club to his valedictory statement about Grey near the end of his chapters on New Zealand in Oceana. If ever there was a ‗verray parfit gentil knight‘26 (to quote Geoffrey Chaucer, one of the sources for the medievalising fashion of the Victorian era), in Froude‘s mind, it was Sir George Grey. The rhetorical tone Froude adopted when writing of Grey would have been fully endorsed by many of his readers, unless they were among those who had their own personal reasons for challenging what he said. Heroes, especially imperial heroes, were in vogue. This would not change until Lytton Strachey, with the publication of Eminent Victorians in the final year of a war that had seen the physical obliteration of the old European order in the mud and blood of mass warfare in the trenches of the Western Front, set off the progressive demolition, throughout the twentieth century, of the reputations of the ‗great and the good‘ of history and of contemporary public life. Strachey‘s controversial work revealed their all-too-human flaws and behaviour, and undermined the tendency to revere those formerly considered as paragons.27
26 Geoffrey Chaucer, in the Prologue to The Canterbury Tales, describes the qualities of the Knight: ‗A Knight there was, and that a worthy man, That fro the tyme that he first bigan To ryden ou, he loved chivalrye, Trouthe and honour, fredom and curteisye …
And though that he were worthy, he was wys, And of his port as meke as is a mayde. He never yet no vileinye ne sayde In al his lyf, un-to no manner wight. He was a verray parfit gentil knight.‘ (The Prologue, The Canterbury Tales, ls 43–6, 68–72, in Walter M. Skeat (ed.), The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, Oxford University Press, London, first published 1912, reprinted ser. (latest date 1962), pp. 419–20.) 27 The Oxford Companion to English Literature (ed. Drabble, 1985, fifth edition 1992), describes Strachey‘s Eminent Victorians (1918) as ‗a landmark in the history of biography‘, p. 942. In the mid-twentieth century an American historian writing of Strachey‘s impact on the historiography of the Victorian era sounded more than a note of regret that the latter‘s view had apparently prevailed: ‗No modern writer has shaped current attitudes towards Victorian England so much as Lytton Strachey. This fact makes many historians writhe, for they take a dim view of Strachey and his Eminent Victorians … Patriotic English historians, in particular, have never been able to forgive him. They cannot forget that he published his attacks on the Victorians in the last year of World War 231
Froude‘s meeting with Grey in the Northern Club brought him up to date with Grey‘s career, of which he clearly had been aware previously, and of which he had formed his own opinions. Otherwise, it would seem to beggar belief that Froude would be so naïve as to accept straight from the subject‘s lips such statements as are made in Oceana regarding Grey‘s achievements. Yet this would seem to have been the case. Grey, as Alfred Deakin had related, was not above indulging in more than a little self-praise as he dwelled on the glories of his past career.28 And in Froude he had found a more than sympathetic listener.
Describing Grey‘s first governorships, in South Australia and at Cape Colony, Froude declared that he ‗rose from one situation to another, always respected, always liked by those under him‘.29 At the Cape he was, said Froude, ‗the only person who ever held that trying position who won the hearts of all classes there English, Dutch, and coloured equally‘.30 The Colonial Office, obtusely, did not value this paragon sufficiently. It recalled Grey from the Cape, then allowed him to return, ‗but his power for good was gone, and all that he could do was to leave a memorial of himself which would deserve the lasting gratitude of the South African people‘ his library of rare books, manuscripts and ‗old editions‘ (the
I. At a time when the future of England looked so bleak, there was Strachey attacking the English past … For all their efforts, anti-Stracheyite historians have failed notoriously, for Eminent Victorians gives every sign of enduring for a long time … Strachey will march on as the chief shaper of twentieth-century views of the Victorians.‘ (Herman Asubel, The Late Victorians: A Short History, D. Van Nostrand Company, New York, 1955, pp. 90–1.) There are, however, signs that Strachey‘s long ascendancy in defining the public consciousness of the heroes of Victorian Britain may be coming to an end. The Preface to A.N. Wilson‘s recent book, The Victorians, indicates an incipient pendulum-swing: ‗If there has been a single shift in balance since Strachey wrote his mischievous debunking of Eminent Victorians over eighty years ago, however, it is the reversal of roles in the judicial bench. Strachey and his generation self-consciously judged and condemned the Victorians. We, while noting many things amiss about Victorian society, more often sense them judging us.‘ (A.N. Wilson, The Victorians, Hutchinson, London, 2002, p. 4.) 28 Deakin, The Federal Story, p. 34. 29 Froude, Oceana, p. 215. 30 Ibid., pp. 215–6. 232
collection described above by Trollope). Sir George already had learned the public relations value of benefaction, and it was a hand he would play again in Auckland. Meanwhile, in Cape Colony, a tangible expression of the colonists‘ gratitude existed to testify to his generosity: ‗Sir George‘s statue stands in the gardens under the window, and if the Cape colonists were given to idolatry they would worship at that spot‘, Froude asserted.31
Froude wrote even more effusively, if that were possible, of Grey‘s two terms as Governor of New Zealand. Chapter Nine analyses the claims he made for Sir George in this passage:
He was Governor of New Zealand during the last and worst Maori war, and more than any other person succeeded in bringing it to an amicable end. The Maori had long interested him. As early as 185232 he had collected and published a volume of Maori songs and ballads. He spoke and wrote their language, and, without a tinge of weak sentimentalism, appreciated their many noble qualities. In the war itself he showed energy and firmness. When it was over he saved the remnant of the defeated race from extermination, or from the serfdom and beggary into which they must have fallen if their lands had been taken from them. They were left with their independence, and the fine and extensive territory which they now occupy. The natives call him their ‗white father‘. Among the colonists he stands by the poor man against the rich, by the labourer when he has a question with the capitalist, and consequently he is as much loved by the great body of the people in New Zealand as he was loved at the Cape.‘33
Froude then, after scolding the Colonial Office for not taking advantage of Sir George‘s skills as a conciliator in South Africa in the troubles brewing between the British and the Boers that would ultimately lead to bloody conflict at the end of Victoria‘s reign,34 launched into an account of his subject‘s current living arrangements on Kawau Island.
31 Ibid., p. 216. 32 Sir George Grey, Ko Nga Moteatea, Me Nga Hakirara O Nga Maori (Poems, Traditions and Chaunts of the Maories [sic]), R. Stokes, Wellington, NZ, 1853. Froude‘s dating was thus out by a year. 33 Froude, Oceana, p. 216. 34 Ibid., pp. 216–7. 233
If Froude had set out to describe a paradigm of Britain‘s civilising mission, his description of Sir George Grey‘s island home could not have bettered. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, wrote Froude, Kawau was ‗a nest of native pirates, who robbed and plundered, harried the coast, carried their prisoners into the forest there, and dined upon them.‘ Defeated by the coastal Maori tribes, who combined to get rid of these pests, they were succeeded by freebooters from the shadier fringes of British capitalism, a copper-mining company whose chief addition to the natural environment of the island was a muddle of ‗shafts, and broken sheds, and fallen chimneys, and beams and scaffold-poles‘. When this speculative venture failed – the mineshafts flooded – Sir George was attracted by the island‘s ‗capabilities‘. Having purchased the island, wrote Froude, he erected a ‗handsome house‘, and set about creating an environment of almost pre-lapsarian harmony with nature. There Grey created a human environment of an equally Edenic quality, where the forms of feudal life in their best and noblest expression held sway, in combination with the latest in nineteenth-century intellectual life:
He planted every tree that he knew of in any part of the world which had a chance of growing there. He laid out a garden, where, among orange-groves and figs and pears, the choicest hothouse flowers blossom carelessly, having been once introduced. Into the interior of his little kingdom he brought elk, red deer, fallow deer, roe, wild hog, and wallaby.35 He has wild turkeys there and wild
35 The wallabies in particular found the Kawau environment very congenial. Their numbers increased rapidly and they began to compete with the island‘s sheep for pasture. Wallaby drives to cull their numbers were held from time to time in the 1880s. (Nora Creina Wilson, Memories of Mansion House Kawau Island New Zealand, Richards Publishing, Auckland, 1980, p. 99.) One of Grey‘s many correspondents, Constance Feka Gordon Cumming, regretted this necessity: ‗I did so thoroughly enjoy our happy time in the Northern Isle and in delightful Kawau. How often I think of it all in this dull grey land and wish my eyes could be gladdened with a sight of the scarlet Pohutakawa and the blue sea-bays and of the darling little wallabies I often think regretfully of the lovely skins of those that have to be shot, and wish that I had confided to you how much I should have liked to carry off one or two Perhaps next time you are coming to England you might bring me one or two they would be unique treasures to me.‘ (Constance Feka Gordon Cumming to Sir George Grey, 16 February 1883, Sir George Grey Inward Correspondence Typescripts, Auckland Public Library Special Collections.) In March 2002 a plan was announced to rid Kawau Island of its Australian wallabies introduced by Sir George Grey, including two species currently listed as endangered in 234
peacocks anything and everything. He engaged men whom he knew and could depend on to manage his farms and woods, his sheep and cattle, his own grounds and gardens. He settled them, with their families, in substantial houses; and in democratic New Zealand he established a patriarchal monarchy, held together by the singular personal attachment which he is able to command. Having given away his first precious book collection, he has gathered a second, perhaps even more curious than the first. He has specimens of the earliest printed volumes, English or German, volumes of old engravings, original MSS., some oriental, some belonging to our own Commonwealth period of the highest historical value, &c. There he lives amidst his intellectual treasures, in the midst of dependants who look on him more as a father than a master; his house always open to men of science, to the superior colonists, to strangers who have a better purpose than curiosity in seeking his acquaintance.36
Grey invited Froude and his two travelling companions to stay with him on Kawau: they needed ‗no pressing‘ to accept.37 Indeed, Froude had anticipated that it would be ‗the most interesting feature in my whole expedition‘.38
However, before visiting Grey at Kawau, Froude and his companions journeyed to the thermal region and Ohinemutu for the tourist experience of bubbling mud pools, geysers and Maori culture. He was dismayed at what had happened to the Maori people of the district since white settlement and the ending of the fierce Land Wars that occurred in the North Island of New Zealand from the 1840s to the 1870s:
They own the district as a village community. The Government rents it of them. They live on their income, like ladies and gentlemen, and having no work to do, or not caring to do any, they prefer to enjoy themselves. They dig out baths, bring streams from cold springs to temper the hot, and pass half their time lounging in the tepid water … The Maori … relieved of all care for their subsistence, loaf about in idleness, living on their cray fish, and their pigs, and their share of the renta sad, shameful, and miserable spectacle: the noblest of all the savage races with whom we have over time been brought into contactwho, in spite of our rifles and cannon, fought long and stubborn wars with us, and more than
Australia. Some will be sent to zoos in Australia and overseas, but the remainder will be poisoned. (‗NZ plan to poison wallabies‘, Canberra Times, 27 March 2002.) 36 Froude, Oceana, p. 218. 37 Ibid., p. 219. 38 J. A. Froude to Sir George Grey, 8 March 1885, Ohinemutu, New Zealand, Sir George Grey Inward Correspondence Typescripts, Auckland Public Library Special Collections. 235
once saw the backs of English troops retiring from an open battlefieldovercome by a worse enemy than sword and bullet, and corrupted into sloth and ruin.39
Froude also visited and marvelled at the fabled Pink and White Terraces of layered silica deposits, and experienced a bath in pool of mineral-laden water. On 10 June 1886, fifteen months after Froude‘s visit, an earthquake destroyed these wonders of nature in a disaster that also resulted in the deaths of 101 people.40 Froude was relieved that the female guides, Kate and Marileha, withdrew to allow a male attendant to do the honours with the towels,41 though that no such modesty had afflicted his fellow countryman and previous traveller to the antipodes, Anthony Trollope, when he visited Ohinemutu fifteen years earlier.42
Sir George Grey and his island
After the expedition to the terraces the Froude party made its way to Kawau, where the small steamer on which they travelled, the Rose Casey,43 docked at the jetty that Sir George Grey had built in front of the Mansion House ten years before. Grey and some friends were waiting for Froude at the jetty. One of them was William Steadman Aldis, a talented mathematician. Aldis had been unable to obtain a post at Oxford or Cambridge because he held Nonconformist religious beliefs at a time when members of these universities were obliged to subscribe to the doctrines of the Church of England. Conversation with Grey, and with Aldis and his equally intellectual wife, was a bonus to the stimulation
39 Froude, Oceana, pp. 232–3. 40 Dunn, James Anthony Froude, p. 529. 41 Froude, Oceana, p. 250. 42 Accompanied by Captain Gilbert Mair, Trollope bathed in a hot spring with ‗three Maori damsels‘, who gave him ‗encouraging pats‘ as he entered the water, then one of them lent him her ‗capacious back‘ to lean against, all of which led the celebrated novelist to comment that ‗I think I did wise in leaving Mrs Trollope in Auckland‘. Gilbert Mair, Reminiscences, quoted in A. H. Reed (ed.), With Anthony Trollope in New Zealand, ii, pp. 561, 471–3. Quoted in N. John Hall, Trollope, a Biography, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1991, p. 373. 43 Dunn, James Anthony Froude, p. 530. 236
provided by Grey‘s matchless library and other treasures during Froude‘s week-long stay on Kawau.
In his introduction to Grey in a preceding chapter of Oceana, Froude had already briefly described his host‘s mode of living on Kawau. Now, reaching the part of his narrative where he had landed on Kawau at last, he treated his readers to a ‗walk-through‘ of Sir George‘s estates, and in particular Mansion House, where on entering he and his fellow guests had ‗passed into an atmosphere of intellect, culture, science, and the mellow experience of statesmanship‘.44
Froude began his account of the physical environment with the house itself, ‗large and well proportioned, with a high-pitched roof, a projecting front towards the sea, and a long verandah‘. Maintaining the feudal theme that he had adopted earlier in regard to Sir George and his employees, he related that the party was met by ‗Two or three superior-looking men, Sir George‘s lieges‘, who relieved them of their baggage and allowed them to view unhindered Grey‘s dominions, where ‗Everything we saw was his own creation, conceived by himself, and executed under his eye by his own feudatories‘. Froude noted that, like another imperial hero, Charles Gordon of Khartoum, Sir George took his patriarchal responsibilities seriously, reading ‗daily prayers to his household‘ from a huge Bible.45 [Illustration 24: Mansion House, Kawau Island, New Zealand, from a sketch by Lord Elphinstone, in J. A. Froude, Oceana, or, England and Her Colonies, 1886.]
Having positioned Grey firmly within the tradition of noblesse oblige later in his account of Kawau he mentioned the ‗substantial cottages‘ Sir George provided for his ‗hands‘46 Froude subtly moved the emphasis to
44 Froude, Oceana, p. 263. 45 Ibid., pp. 263–4. 46 Ibid., p. 265. 237
another aspect of his host‘s character, that of the connoisseur and informed observer of the contemporary scene:
Some good oil pictures hung on the walls, excellent old engravings, with Maori axes, Caffre shields and assegais, all prettily arranged. Book-cases and cabinets with locked doors contained the more precious curiosities. On the table lay Quarterlies, Edinburgh Reviews, magazines, weekliesthe floating literature of London, only a month or two behindhand. Every important movement in domestic, foreign, or colonial politics could be studied as exhaustively at Kawau as in the reading room at the Athenaeum.47
From this intellectual sanctum the party moved to the garden, ‗a study for a botanist‘: ‗fruit trees, flowering trees, forest trees all growing together, with rare plants and shrubs collected miscellaneously, or forwarded by correspondents‘.48 That evening Grey displayed for his guests the range of material that his thirst for collecting had accumulated on Kawau, including some artefacts Maori clubs that are the subject of further analysis in Chapter Nine:
Literary treasures were produced chieflyI suppose in compliment to me, for he had all sorts. There were old illuminated missals; an old French MS. of the fourteenth century, which had belonged once to Philippe le Bel49 and afterwards to Sully; old Saints‘ lives; a black-letter Latin Life of the Swedish St. Bridget, of whom I had never heard, but who, if the stories told of her were true, must have been as strange a lady as her Irish namesake. Besides these was a precious MS. of the four Gospels which had come from Mount Athos; important English historical MSS., never printed, of the time of the Commonwealth; modern translations of the Bible, &c. All these he had himself collected, and he had agents all about the world looking out for him.50
47 Ibid., p. 264. 48 Ibid. 49 ‗A groundless claim, on the authority of J. A. W. Bennett, Landfall, X, 1956, p.151‘, cited in E. H. McCormick, The Fascinating Folly: Dr Hocken and his Fellow Collectors, University of Otago Press, Dunedin, 1961, fn 1, p.11. 50 One source has claimed that this story about agents collecting around the world was not true: ‘Nor is there any substance in the notion of a string of emissaries searching the world for ‗treasures‘ a notion traceable to Froude and probably fostered by Grey‘s reputation as a sort of Renaissance Prince untimely born into the nineteenth century.‘ (McCormick, The Fascinating Folly, p.14.) This may depend on one‘s definition of ‗agent‘. Grey‘s correspondence contains letters from agents such as antiquarian bookseller Bernard Quaritch; and a small study of the relationship between Grey and an Adelaide bookseller, James Calder, focuses on purchases made from another, highly eccentric, bookseller, William Legrand, who supplied Grey with Aboriginal artefacts as well as 238
While I was examining these, E and my son were occupied over a cabinet of Maori weaponsnot ordinary knives or lances, but axes of jade,51 as rare as they were precious. They had been heirlooms in the families of great chiefs; and had each killed no one could say how many warriors in battle. They were never parted with in life, and had been bequeathed by their various owners to Sir George, as the father of the Maori race.52
But Froude did not spend all his time on Kawau closeted with books and treasures or deep in conversation with Grey or Aldis. He explored the island and encountered (and Lord Elphinstone sketched) the grove of intertwined pohutakawa trees where Maori had held feasts of human flesh. [Illustration 25: A Maori Banquet Hall, from a sketch by Lord Elphinstone, in J. A. Froude, Oceana, or, England and Her Colonies, 1886.] Froude‘s imagination augmented his description of the physical characteristics of this place, evoking its sinister numinousness, and offering an implied contrast between the pre- and post-European settlement eras in New Zealand, and the ordered, civilised ambience of Grey‘s Mansion House not far away:
We turned from the path into the forest, forcing our way with difficulty through the thicket. Suddenly we came on a spot where three-quarters of an acre, or an acre, stood bare of any kind of undergrowth, but arched over by the interwoven branches of four or five gigantic Pohutakawa trees, whose trunks stood as the columns of a natural hall or temple. The ground was dusty and hard, without trace of vegetation. The roots twisted and coiled over it like a nest of knotted pythons, while other pythons, the Rata parasites, wreathed themselves round the vast stems, twined up among the boughs, and disappeared among the leaves. It was like the horrid shade of some Druid‘s grove, and the history of it was as ghastly as its appearance. Here, at the beginning of this century, the Maori pirates of the island had held their festivals. To this place they had brought their prisoners; here they had slain them and hung their carcasses on these branches to be cut and sliced for spit or cauldron. Here, when their own turn came, they had made their last bloody stand against the axes of the invaders, and had been killed and devoured in turn. I could fancy that I saw the smoking fires, the
books. In this case Calder was the intermediary between Grey and Legrand, so acted as an ‗agent‘. (James Erskine Calder, Bibliopole and Bibliophile, Adelaide, 1985) Froude‘s statement, taken by McCormick to relate merely to medieval manuscripts, with no evidence that Grey bought in France, Italy or the Netherlands (p.14) can thus be regarded as hyperbolic rather than actually false. 51 Froude‘s use of the word ‗axes‘ is an incorrect understanding of the nature of these objects. They are mere pounamu, chiefly thrusting weapons better described as ‗clubs‘. 52 Froude, Oceana, p. 265. 239
hideous preparations, the dusky groups of savage warriors. I could hear the shrieks of the victims echoing through the hollows of the forest.53
It is in this passage that Froude most vividly evokes the ‗otherness‘ of the Maori, in contrast to his lamenting their present ‗degraded‘ condition. In the passage on Maori people at Ohinemutu quoted earlier, they are constructed almost as figures of derision, lying in sloth in their heated pools and living on government rent for the thermal regions, but nevertheless recognisable as a particular social type within European parameters. On Kawau, the memory of their past practices, described so graphically by Froude, provides an example of what Susan Pearce, following Edward Said in his pioneering work, Orientalism (1978), has called ‗the need to make cultural distinction between ―them‖ and ―us‖‘. While, says Pearce, this tendency ‗is common to all humans, in the European tradition it takes on a particular tone, and is, indeed, fundamental to the system, one of the structuring dichotomies which make the system what it is‘.54 The passage describing the ‗pirates‘ glade‘ forms a natural pair with Froude‘s description of the Maori treasures in Grey‘s collection. Of all his commentaries on Maori people in Oceana, these passages engage most strongly with the conventional mode of structuring the ‗other‘ that is apparent in many nineteenth-century travel accounts.55
While on Kawau, Froude and his party also took part in a shark hunt, though, he admitted, ‗the carnage was sickening‘. He concluded his
53 Ibid., pp. 274–5. 54 Susan M. Pearce, On Collecting: An Investigation into Collecting in the European Tradition, Routledge, London, 1995, paperback edition 1999, p.309. 55 Said‘s words on the structuring of the idea of the ‗Orient‘ can be just as fitly extended to other ‗exotic cultures‘ such as those indigenous to Britain‘s newer colonies in the Antipodes: ‗Under the general heading of knowledge of the Orient and within the umbrella of Western hegemony over the Orient during the period from the end of the eighteenth century, there emerged a complex Orient suitable for study in the academy, for display in the museum, for reconstruction in the colonial office, for theoretical illustration in anthropological, biological, linguistic, racial, and historical theses about mankind and the universe, for instances of economic and sociological theories of development, revolution, cultural personality, national or religious character‘. Edward Said, Orientalism: Western Concepts of the Orient, Penguin Books, London, 1978, p. 8. 240
account of his visit to Kawau with a valedictory statement that nevertheless sounded a melancholy note:
The week which we had passed at Kawau was one of the most interesting which I remember in my life, and our host certainly was one of the most remarkable men. It is sad to think that in all human likelihood I shall never see Sir George Grey again. When he dies, the Maori and the poor whites in New Zealand will have lost their truest friend, and England will have lost a public servant, among the best she ever had, whose worth she failed to understand.56
Grey in fact outlived Froude by nearly four years, and had left Kawau and New Zealand, and was living in England, at the time Froude died in October 1894. Grey expressed his sorrow on hearing of Froude‘s fatal illness, and reflected to his biographer James Milne on Froude‘s visit to Kawau in 1885: ‗He heard that his friend, James Anthony Froude, who had been lying ill in Devonshire, was steadily losing strength. ―I have made inquiries about him, poor fellow,‖ he murmured, ―but now I must telegraph for the latest particulars. He and I are old companions, and I have a liking and admiration for him. When he visited me at my island of Kawau, off the New Zealand coast, we had a capital while together‖‘.57 Froude was right about one thing: there is no evidence in the correspondence between him and Grey that they actually met again in person.
Oceana, Froude and Grey
After Froude had departed from Sir George‘s Grey‘s domain on Kawau Island, nearly ten years were to pass before either man was required to mourn the other‘s passing. In the meantime, Froude returned to England and wrote Oceana, or, England and Her Colonies, published in London in January 1886, ‗a handsome volume of 396 pages‘.58 Later editions
56 Froude, Oceana, pp. 280–1. 57 Milne, Romance of a Pro-Consul, p. 26. 58 Dunn, James Anthony Froude, p. 538. 241
followed, including one published in New York. The book sold some 75,000 copies, putting it in the best seller category.59 Froude‘s biographer, Waldo Hilary Dunn, claimed that ‗it became known throughout the English- speaking world‘.60 Froude‘s account of Grey thus reached a vast audience across the British Empire and in America.
Froude could have anticipated that anything he said about Grey in Oceana would find a wide audience, and be quoted extensively. His own experience would have told him this much; the experience of other British literary figures also indicated that their words would be taken up and quoted. Anthony Trollope‘s words about Grey, after his 1872 visit, almost acted as a curtain-raiser (albeit fifteen years earlier) to Froude‘s more extensive coverage. Trollope wrote:
When at Auckland I had the pleasure of meeting Sir George Grey, whose name had been so intimately connected with the fortunes of New Zealand, whether in peace or war. He is now residing at the Island of Kawau, some miles from the Harbour, and is there turning a wilderness into a garden … … as to Sir George Grey, I may fairly say, without expressing any opinion of my own, as to his conduct as governor, that he certainly managed to endear himself in a wonderful way to a population with whom it was his duty to be fighting. There can be no doubt of Sir George Grey‘s popularity among the Maoris.61
One of Grey‘s correspondents, George Colburn from Glasgow, bracketed Trollope‘s words with Froude‘s account of Grey and Kawau, and demonstrated that their words had established the former governor as a hero of empire, at least in his eyes:
Especially have I been delighted with what Trollope in his book on Australia and New Zealand and Froude in his ―Oceana‖ have told of your statesmanship, your
59 Geoffrey Serle, The Rush to Be Rich: A History of the Colony of Victoria, 1883–1889, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Vic, 1971, p. 218. 60 Dunn, James Anthony Froude, p. 539. 61 Extract from With Anthony Trollope in New Zealand, 1872, A. H. and A. W. Reed, New Zealand, 1969, quoted in Nora Creina Wilson, Memories of Mansion House Kawau Island New Zealand, Richards Publishing, Auckland, New Zealand, 1980, p.103. 242
humane treatment of the natives and your high morality. And I hope you will not call it flattery when I say that Great Britain has sent out to her Colonies only a few too few alas! men who have been actuated by the same conscientious principles, and have ruled in the same wise manner as you have done. Such men are the salt of the earth, and the salvation of empires. May God provide this great empire, in all its times of trial with a few such saving spirits. Since reading ―Oceana‖ I have often pictured Kawau in my mind and would like to come out and see you and the great countries of the South.62
That Froude was concerned at how Grey would react to his portrayal of him in Oceana is shown in a letter from Froude to Grey in April 1886, acknowledging the latter‘s gift of a Maori axe head (from the ‗cannibal‘s banqueting hall‘ so graphically described by Froude in the passage from Oceana quoted above), and a copy of Polynesian Mythology:
Your kind letter of the 9th of February reached me a week ago with the precious little axe head which your niece found in the forest in that strange scene.63 But it was infinitely welcome to me also as evidence of your good will to your visitor and as memorial of that delightful week which I spent at Kawau. Your book on the Maori literature will be even more welcome both for story and for the promised dedication which I regard as the greatest honour of my life. That my writings should have seemed worth something to you is very comforting to me, now at the close of my life when I generally tell myself that they are worth absolutely nothing. I did not send you Oceana, chiefly because I wished to know what you thought about it, before I asked you to let a copy of it stand in your library. Perhaps I shall hear from you about it, before long, as it will probably have reached Auckland. The reception which it has met with here has been curious. It has been out 3 months, and 35 thousand copies have been already printed and disposed of, or if not all disposed of … on the way to be so. It has caught public feeling as a sort of antidote to Gladstone. In Canada and America is has also been very favourably reviewed. From Australia I got conflicting criticisms as is very natural In New Zealand there will be a good deal of anger at least in some quarters there. You will tell me the truth.64
Despite this plea for honesty from author to subject, no response from Grey was forthcoming to assuage Froude‘s anxiety, although contact between the two men seems to have been maintained, if only informally.
62 George Colburn to Sir George Grey, 25 August 1887, Sir George Grey: Inward Correspondence Typescripts, Auckland Public Library Special Collections. 63 Froude is referring to the grove described earlier as the scene of cannibalistic feasts. 64 J. A. Froude to Sir George Grey, 23 April 1886, Sir George Grey: Inward Correspondence Typescripts, Auckland Public Library Special Collections. 243
Three years later, in a letter to Grey, Froude remarked on how ‗We were all sorry to hear that you had parted with Kawau‘65 indicating that, had he known it was on the market, he might have been tempted to buy it himself, ‗and to have ended my life as a voluntary Robinson Crusoe in a spot which you had made so charming‘. Froude added
I never heard accurately whether you were pleased or displeased with the liberties I took in describing, in Oceana, yourself, your doings, and your surroundings. I do not think that you can have been seriously angry with me …66
There is no evidence to suggest that Grey was ‗seriously‘ or even mildly ‗angry‘ with Froude for his account of his Kawau visit in Oceana. On the contrary, in his musings to his amanuensis, James Milne, Grey referred to the ‗capital while together‘ he had had with Froude when he visited Kawau.67 It is unlikely that he would have reminisced so fondly about that time if he had resented the portrayal of himself and his island home in Froude‘s account. That friendly relations still existed between these two elderly men is demonstrated by another letter from Froude welcoming Grey to England in 1894, the year of Froude‘s death, in which the latter said: ‗I am most anxious to see you again first for the singular pleasure which it will give me, and next because I want to talk to you about Aldis‘68 (the fellow-visitor to Kawau at the time of Froude‘s stay there). As suggested previously, it appears unlikely that this meeting ever took place, owing to the decline in Froude‘s health.
Was Froude in Oceana deliberately promoting Grey‘s image as the beau ideal of an imperial administrator and cultural benefactor, or was his
65 Grey had sold Mansion House and Kawau Island in 1888 to a Mr and Mrs Thompson, and went to live with his niece and nephew-in-law, Mr and Mrs Thorne George, in Parnell, Auckland. (Wilson, Memories of Mansion House, p.100). 66 J. A. Froude to Sir George Grey, 7 June 1889, Sir George Grey: Inward Correspondence Typescripts, Auckland Public Library Special Collections 67 Milne, Romance of a Proconsul, p. 26. 68 J. A. Froude to Sir George Grey, 21 April 1894, Sir George Grey: Inward Correspondence Typescripts, Auckland Public Library Special Collections. Froude died seven months later, in October 1894. 244
seemingly artless admiration just that the expression of a warm friendship founded on a deep respect for the man and his achievements? Without matching correspondence from Grey commenting on what he believed Oceana had done for his reputation, it is difficult to reach a firm conclusion as to his possible complicity in Froude‘s representation of his career, his character and his collection. Indeed, despite his somewhat puzzling silence on the subject of Oceana (both to Froude and to later investigators), Grey seemed never to have wavered in his affection for its author.69 When Froude was dying in September 1894, his son Ashley, who had accompanied his father to visit Grey on Kawau Island nearly a decade before, kept Grey in touch with his father‘s condition, telling him that, although Froude was unable to read himself, ‗he was very pleased when my sister told him of your telegram‘.70 A month later, after Froude had died, Ashley Froude wrote to Grey again:
We have just received your most kind telegram. It is hard not to feel thankful that my father‘s long and weary illness is over, but that somehow does not make his loss any easier to bear. I have received many letters from various people who all express the kindest sympathy with us, but there are few whose messages I have been more grateful for than yours.
I shall never forget the delightful week which we spent with you at Kawau. There were few people that my father had so great a regard for as for you, and he always spoke of our visit to you as one of the pleasantest times he had ever spent.71
Grey and Oceana attacked
Grey‘s reticence on the subject of his representation in Oceana could be attributed to a highly critical response to the book published in the journal, Nineteenth Century, in August 1886. Its author was Edward Wakefield,72 a
69 Milne, Romance of a Pro-Consul, p. 26. 70 Ashley Froude to Sir George Grey, 22 September 1894, GL: F55, Sir George Grey, Inward Correspondence Typescripts, Auckland Public Library Special Collections 71 Ashley Froude to Sir George Grey, 22 October 1984, ibid. 72 Edmund Bohan, ‗Edward Wakefield 1845–1924‘, Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, Vol. 2, p. 562. 245
journalist, bureaucrat, and at various times Member of New Zealand‘s House of Representatives. Wakefield‘s view of Grey‘s role in forming Froude‘s opinion of New Zealand can only be described as scathing and this from a man who had had many years‘ experience of Grey as governor and politician. No doubt Wakefield‘s blistering words received a wide circulation in New Zealand.
Froude, Wakefield claimed, had confined his study of New Zealand to three major locations and episodes: ‗He made himself comfortable at the Northern Club for two days, during which time … he ―did Auckland‖, a town of fifty thousand people and one of the most beautiful and curious in the world‘; then Froude ‗made the regular humdrum, cut-and-dried tour of the hot lakes … That took a week‘; then he went to Kawau, staying there for a week and seeing nobody except Sir George and his other visitors and servants, and a farming family with whom he stayed for a night after a fishing trip that had gone wrong.73
So, asked Wakefield, when Froude published his ‗elaborate account‘ of the New Zealanders, and presumed to ‗pass a critical judgment upon them‘, upon whom did he rely for his information? Froude had not only drawn ‗a picture of New Zealand which is equally offensive and preposterous, but he publishes statements about its inhabitants, so injurious that it was seriously considered whether some public means of refuting them should not be taken‘.74 Wakefield identified the culprit who had so poisoned the mind of Froude, a man he acknowledged as ‗the sovereign prince of literature‘, against New Zealand and New Zealanders:75
73 Edward Wakefield, ‗New Zealand and Mr. Froude‘, Nineteenth Century, August 1886, Henry S. King and Co, London, pp. 178–9. 74 Ibid. 75 Ibid., p. 172. 246
…he saw the Northern Club and Kawau, and he heard the views of Sir George Grey and his servants, a Mr. Aldis, and some man whose name he did not catch, or forgot, in the smoking-room at the club. But mainly, and for all practical purposes solely, he heard and adopted the views of Sir George Grey. Mr. Froude lost his head completely about Sir George Grey, and the things he says of him, while they make all sensible colonists chuckle with satiric glee, or burn with prosaic indignation, must even have made Sir George himself blush, if he have not lost the faculty of blushing by long disuse. Mr. Froude, on the strength of a week‘s acquaintance, pronounces Sir George Grey the greatest, ablest, noblest, wisest, most pious, and beneficent man who ever deigned to waste his God- given qualities on a wretched colony.76
Wakefield‘s next words suggest, as an answer to the question he posed in regard to Froude‘s possible complicity with Grey, that the travelling historian had (quite simply) fallen prey to Grey‘s manipulative charms charms that had long since palled for many of his fellow New Zealand colonists. Wakefield‘s words are worth quoting as a representative view of Grey held at that time by a particular class of New Zealander:
Now, Sir George Grey is a perfectly well-known personage. Mr. Froude did not discover him. When I first met Sir George Grey I was eight years old, and I have known him ever since, quite intimately enough to form as good a judgment as anybody of his public character, at all events; and of his private character I am quite sure Mr. Froude can know absolutely nothing, for he is the most inscrutable of men. He is an exceedingly polished man and is an incomparable host in his paradise of an island home, especially when he has his own reasons for wishing to make himself agreeable to a guest. His venerable bearing, the prestige of his early career, his grace and dignity of manner, his impressiveness of silence when he is silent, his golden-mouthed eloquence when he speaks, his haughty seclusion contrasted by his affability when he appears in public, have given him a great measure of personal popularity. He is acknowledged to be the most distinguished public man who ever took part in the public affairs of a colony. But to make him out to be only so very little lower than the angels, as Mr. Froude does, is sheer nonsense.77
Wakefield then catalogued Grey‘s public disasters. He was ‗a troublesome Governor, clever at taking advantage of other‘s mistakes, but always in hot water with his ministers, with the military, and with the Colonial Office‘. After Grey had been ‗summarily removed from the Government in 1867‘,
76 Ibid., p. 179. 77 Ibid., pp. 179–80. 247
he went back to England and spoiled his political chances there by alienating everyone in an attempt to gain a parliamentary seat. Returning to New Zealand, he had a fling at colonial politics, and became prime minister for two years, ruling the colony in an dictatorial manner in ‗the darkest period in the political history of New Zealand‘. Strenuous efforts had to be made to rescue the colony‘s financial position, while the ‗state of native affairs was such that a serious disturbance was only averted by the most stringent measures on the part of the native minister, Mr. Bryce, and by the most active efforts of the Commissioners, Sir William Fox and Sir Dillon Bell‘. Grey‘s party was ‗annihilated‘ at the next election. ‗His personal popularity, as a patron of literature and art, as the shadow of a great name, is undiminished; but in politics he stands alone, without a single follower‘.78
It was from this man, Wakefield claimed, that Froude had derived all his views on New Zealand including the one with the highest potential for damage to the local economy – that the colonial ministry intended to repudiate its high overseas debt. Oceana did in fact produce significant misgivings among overseas investors on this point.79 Wakefield made no comment on Froude‘s claim that Grey was ‗the father of the Maori race‘.
Before giving full weight to Wakefield‘s views particularly of Grey‘s political career it is necessary to ascertain his own political position, and what manner of man he was to, first of all, so roundly condemn Froude‘s book, and then so acerbically attack Sir George Grey‘s reputation. Wakefield, born in Launceston, Tasmania in 1845, and educated in New Zealand, France and London, had returned to Nelson in the South Island in 1863, working as a journalist and a bureaucrat. In 1874 he became the crusading editor of the Timaru Herald, and achieved success in his
78 Ibid., pp. 180–1 79 W.J. Gardner, ‗A Colonial Economy‘, in Geoffrey W. Rice (ed.), Oxford History of New Zealand, Second Edition, Oxford University Press, Auckland, 1982, p. 77. 248
campaigns for a port and waterworks for Timaru. The following year he entered the New Zealand House of Representatives on the returning officer‘s casting vote, a presage of things to come in a stormy political career. His entry in the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography sums up the public view of this able man, who nevertheless had a reputation for being too much aware of his own cleverness: ‗He was among the best parliamentary debaters of the time, admired for his wit and power of argument, feared for his sarcasm‘. His lack of political loyalty to parties, governments and constituents was well known, as was his capacity to make enemies. He was favoured by his constituents with a large dead rat when he became colonial secretary in the short-lived Atkinson government of 1884, after having promised to act in opposition to it. In 1886, the year that he penned his damaging attack on Oceana and its author, his personal life was in tatters. He was divorced in the month that his article on Oceana appeared in the Nineteenth Century within the week his wife had remarried. He abandoned politics altogether the following year, and began an attack on the Bank of New Zealand from his position as editor and part-owner of the Wellington Evening Post. Amid a welter of libel suits, the Wellington manager of the Bank of New Zealand declared that Wakefield was ‗unsteady‘, ‗unworthy‘, and ‗his private life would not bear examination‘.80 This was the man whose criticism of the way Grey had been portrayed by Froude in Oceana gained such wide currency at the time, and has to some extent shaped later assessment of the book as a whole.
The section of Wakefield‘s analysis of Grey‘s political career which indicates most strongly his attitudes towards Maori in their relationship to European settlers is that in which he refers to the ‗state of native affairs‘, and the role of John Bryce in averting ‗severe disturbance‘. This ‗disturbance‘ had arisen as a result of the government led by Grey
80 Bohan, ‗Edward Wakefield‘, p. 562. 249
attempting in 1877 to open the Waimate plain in southern Taranaki to European settlement. Local resistance, led by a Maori prophet, Te Whiti,81 prompted a commission of inquiry, which recommended the setting aside of some of the land for Maori reserves. This did not satisfy Te Whiti and his followers, who continued to disrupt settlement at Parihaka by erecting fences across the roads. Hundreds were gaoled, but Te Whiti‘s mana was rising rapidly among Maori. The Minister of Native Affairs and Defence, John Bryce, suspended habeus corpus while, as Ranginui Walker writes, ‗Scaremongering and disinformation prepared the social climate for state oppression, the course on which Bryce, under the guiding hand of the Prime Minister, Sir George Grey, had embarked‘.82
The militarily experienced Bryce did all that his political masters could have wished. In November 1881, after Grey had left government, Bryce advanced on Parihaka with 1500 Armed Constabulary and volunteer militia. Encountering no resistance from the 2200 ‗unarmed people sitting passively in a dense mass on their marae‘,83 Bryce arrested Te Whiti and his offsider Tohu Kakahi, and kept them in the South Island without trial for two years. The local Maori residents were ‗dispersed‘, the plains opened to settlers: ‗It was a demonstration of military muscle of the willingness of the Pakeha to use force to facilitate the colonisation of New Zealand‘.84 Clearly, in Wakefield‘s view, this robust response contrasted positively with the apparent ambivalence regarding Maori affairs that, in his view,
81 For a brief biography of Te Whiti see Bernard John Foster, ‗Te Whiti-O-Rongomai or Erueti Te Whiti (c.1830–1907)‘, Te Ara Encyclopedia of New Zealand, viewed on 20 January 2011 at http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/1966/te-whiti-o-rongomai-or-erueti-te-whiti/1 82 Ranginui Walker, Ka Whawhai Tonu Matou: Struggle Without End, Penguin Books, Auckland, revised edition, 2004, p. 158. 83 Ibid., p. 159. 84 M. P. K. Sorrensen, ‗Maori and Pakeha‘, Chapter 6 in Geoffrey W. Rice (ed.), Oxford History of New Zealand, Second Edition, Oxford University Press, Auckland, 1982, p. 161. The memory of Parihaka darkens Maori-Pakeha relations in Taranaki to this day. On the surface contact between the races appears friendly, but sooner or later in any extended social contact the memory of what happened at Parihaka comes between them. Personal communication 17 May 2002 with Robyn Oliver, Director, Lady Denman Heritage Complex, Huskisson, NSW, and former curator of the Taranaki Museum, New Plymouth Museum, North Island, New Zealand. 250
had characterised Grey‘s administration although, as Ranginui Walker and other historians have shown, Grey‘s hand was behind the move to settle the Waimate plain. From the Maori perspective, Bryce‘s persecution of Te Whiti had created a ‗symbol of the endless struggle of the Maori people against Pakeha subjection‘.85
Grey the benefactor
By the mid-1880s Grey‘s political career was manifestly in decline. While his nature was to be generous to his constituencies as regarded his material possessions, there is also the fact that something needed to be done to keep his name in the public‘s mind in the short and longer terms.
He turned his mind to organising the donation of his collections to the Auckland Institute and Free Public Library, an act he had set in train several years before Froude‘s visit. On 19 August 1882 he had sent a telegram to an Auckland stockbroker, James Shera, announcing that he intended to give his collection to the citizens of Auckland, including the magnificent library that he had spent the last twenty-five years building up again, after donating its predecessor to Cape Town. The collection did not only contain books, but also works of art, Maori treasures and other artefacts of the indigenous people over whom he had ruled.86
Late in life Grey told James Milne, who dutifully wrote down his words, of his motivation in making these generous gifts:
85 Walker, Struggle Without End, p. 159. Walker locates Te Whiti within the ‗creative tradition of pacifism which predated Gandhi‘s stand against British imperialism by seventy years‘ (ibid.) 86 McCormick, Fascinating Folly, pp.10–12. In the 1920s Auckland and Cape Town exchanged material from each of their Grey donations that was deemed relevant to each location. (ibid., p. 12) 251
There is no virtue … in honest duty, such as we claim from every public servant. Our lofty ideal in that regard is true British wisdom. Moreover, need a man, estimating wealth on its merits, care to be rich? What private means I inherited, I have spent largely on public ends. I mean, in particular, those libraries at Cape Town and Auckland, which I was enabled to help. Why, the bargain is all mine; I am the debtor for the opportunity.87
Grey‘s sense of civic obligation evoked a matching response from Auckland‘s City Council. Prompted to provide a suitable home for the treasures Grey was about to bestow on the city, the Council commissioned designs for a new library and art gallery building. The successful architects were a Melbourne firm, Grainger and D‘Ebro.88 The foundation stone was laid with due ceremony on 4 June 1885, and the Library was officially opened on 28 March 1887, with the Art Gallery following a year later, on 17 February 1888.89 By 1886 Grey had organised the packing and transporting of his collection the bibliographic component alone numbered between eight and nine thousand works from Kawau to Auckland, assisted by Professor William Steadman Aldis, Froude‘s fellow guest at Kawau. Grey continued to add works to the collection for the rest of his life, ‗enriching it to such an extent that the Auckland Library obtained what is, perhaps, a unique, position among municipal libraries throughout the world‘.90 Milne‘s biography of Grey contains a telling vignette, indicating how close to his subject‘s heart was ‗his‘ library in Auckland:
Sir George would ride by ‗bus, except, indeed, when in pursuit of some volume for that beloved library at Auckland. Then, nothing would satisfy his eagerness but hot foot and back with the trophy, scanning its pages in his scholar‘s joy.91
87 Milne, Romance of a Pro-Consul, p. 96. 88 The building they designed now houses the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki. 89 John Barr, The City of Auckland New Zealand 1840–1920, Whitcombe and Tombs Limited, Auckland, 1922, reprint by Capper Press Limited, Christchurch, New Zealand, 1985, pp.146–7. 90 Barr, City of Auckland, pp. 146–7; Kerr, Amassing Treasures for All Times, Chapter 15, ‗Later Purchases and Presentation Copies‘, pp. 235–50. 91 Milne, Romance of a Proconsul, p. 31. 252
Wendy Harsant‘s inventory of the Grey material in the Auckland War Memorial Museum‘s collection also notes ‗three stone hand clubs (patu onewa) have labels indicating they were acquired at Fenton‘s in London‘, as does a wooden mere (kotiate).92 Grey clearly continued to collect this material, as well as bibliographic items, for dispatch from England to Auckland to join the rest of his collections there.
These are the physical manifestations of Grey‘s generous gift. The speeches made at the ceremonies to lay the foundation stone and at the opening of the Library indicate the scope of Grey‘s vision for its future, and his fellow-citizens‘ appreciation of his gift. Grey‘s speech at the ceremony on 4 June 1885 to lay the foundation stone outlined the necessity for an institution of this kind in New Zealand, and the benefits that could be expected to accrue from his collection of world and Indigenous New Zealand literature:
… we were, by our position, a peculiar people. We were cut off from the rest of the world, and there were no closely contiguous countries from whom we could take example. To the south there were vast tracts of ice, to the north semi- barbaric lands, and to the east and west long stretches of ocean. This, too, was the only free library of any consequence in the whole colony, and while Auckland had been singularly ignored in the disbursement of Government aid to large public undertakings, she might claim the credit of her own enterprise for erecting a suitably handsome edifice in which to house the treasures of art and literature left to us by all the sages of antiquity and all the learned men of modern times … It would be to us an adequate compensation for our necessary isolation in the midst of the South Pacific. It would also acquire an especial importance from the fact of its being the largest and best collection of literature bearing upon the aboriginal inhabitants of these islands … From our shores, and from this city especially, would go forth in time to come the civilising forces which would pervade the lands and islands to the north of us, and in establishing a library which would help to equip us for that grand mission, we were marking an epoch that should be long remembered after we had passed away and been forgotten.93
92 Harsant, ‗Maori Artefacts in Sir George Grey Collection‘, pp. 21-–2. 93 General Catalogue of Grey Collection Free Public Library Auckland 1888 Reference Department, p. viii. 253
Grey‘s final sentence is a telling one, both for its missionary fervour in the cause of promoting the civilising mission, and for its hint that such an institution would be an effective vehicle of memory. The speeches and catalogue text describing the Grand Opening Ceremony on 28 March 1887 would have reassured Grey that his place in history as a gracious benefactor was secure. As well as noting that the manuscripts presented by Grey had added value because ‗these gifts were made while the owner was yet alive‘, the catalogue did not fail to mention the Maori artefacts he had also given to the Library:
The room in which these valuable books are now placed has been most handsomely fitted up. Upon reaching the landing from the main entrance, the visitors‘ eyes are attracted by the Maori carvings, gods, and weapons with which the walls are embellished. These also are a portion of Sir George Grey‘s collection. They have been arranged with considerable skill and taste, and present a striking appearance.94
It is interesting to note that the aspect of Grey‘s donated Maori collection that most impressed the catalogue‘s author was the aesthetic quality of its display. From private collection to ‗ethnographic‘ specimens, these objects were now at least two steps away from their original context and meaning. Their new role was to delight the eyes of viewers and instruct them in an alternative aesthetic, and to testify to the generosity of their donor. This was by no means overlooked at the time. The Mayor of Auckland, A. E. T. Devore, noted in his speech the inclusion of ‗a valuable collection of native carvings in wood … the like of which cannot now be procured‘.95 He paid a graceful tribute to Grey‘s generosity, one that has been echoed down the years and is reflected throughout the three institutions that now house components of the Grey collection: Auckland Public Libraries, Auckland Art Gallery and Auckland War Memorial Museum:
94 Ibid., p. x. 95 Ibid., p. xii. 254
The collection of a lifetime has been given by Sir George Grey to the people of Auckland, and his anxiety throughout has been that what he has given should be placed where most readily seen, and the most instruction imparted. Sir George, during his long and eventful life, has done many good actions, but it has always appeared to me that his gift to this Library ranks first among those actions.96
Assessment of Grey‘s overall career since that time has declined from this peak of public appreciation. Nevertheless, it would be correct to state that his gift to Auckland is still regarded as one of the more positive actions of his life in New Zealand.
96 Ibid. 255
256
Chapter Nine: Sir George Grey, collector and collection
Collectors and collecting have been the subjects of scholarly study for several decades. The activity of collecting and the personality and motivations of the collector have been analysed from a number of academic perspectives, including psychology, history, sociology, connoisseurship and cultural studies. Susan Pearce, one of the leading commentators in this field, has sketched the full dimensions of the activity of collecting as it relates to the individual collector. Her definition of collections provides clues to understanding the multi- layered meanings of collected material:
Collections are psychic ordering, of individuality, of public and private relationships, and of time and space. They live in the minds and hearts of their collectors, for whom they act as material autobiographies, chronicling the cycle of a life, from the first moment an object strikes a particular personal chord, to specialised accumulation to constructing the dimensions of life, to a final measure of immortality. For these personal inscriptions on the blue void, the content of the collection in many ways matters much less than its formal role in weaving the pattern. But collections are also made of real objects to which intrinsic meaning is accredited, and operate in the political arena …1
In an earlier work, Pearce argued for an understanding of collections as „the extended self, and the activity of collecting as a „striving for immortality‟2 (a note echoed in the quote above). Eilean Hooper- Greenhill also focuses on the capacity of collections to define the self, when she writes that „Assemblages of words and things act to produce the self; identity is shaped, and self-image is materialized through writing and through collecting‟.3
It is instructive to look at Sir George Grey as a collector in the light of Pearce‟s definition and Hooper-Greenhill‟s statement, particularly
1 Susan Pearce, On Collecting: An Investigation into Collecting in the European Tradition, Routledge, London, 1995, paperback edition 1999, p. 279. 2 Susan Pearce, Museums, Objects and Collections: A Cultural Study, Smithsonian Institution Press, USA, 1993, first published 1992, Leicester University Press, UK, 1992, p. 37. 3 Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Interpretation of Visual Culture, Routledge, London, 2000, p. 9. 256 through the former‟s metaphor of the „extended self‟. Pearce‟s final sequence in the construction of a material biography, „a final measure of immortality‟, can be identified as one of the possible motivating factors in Grey‟s collecting and donating behaviour , and his use of his collections as validation of his imperial role, particularly where the material culture of Maori people was concerned. An examination of modes of collecting is necessary so as to locate Grey‟s collecting activities within them.
What type of collector was Grey, and how do his collecting practices fit within the typologies developed by theorists of collecting? His collecting activities were eclectic, rather than highly scholarly. They encompassed bibliographic collecting, natural history collecting, art connoisseurship, palaeographic and geological collecting, and ethnography. Grey‟s eclecticism at one level thus locates him within one of the earliest collecting paradigms in the modern period his collection overall resembled a Renaissance „cabinet of curiosities‟, such as those compiled by Ole Worm and John Tradescant in the seventeenth century in Leiden and England, and „conceived as making manifest the existing harmonies of the universe, as acting as microcosms of universal nature, the assembling and contemplating of which was at once an act of discovery and definition and a mystical exercise‟.4
Francis Bacon‟s description, in „Gesta Grayorum‟, of the principles that should underpin a collection assembled by the man of refined sensibility and cultivated intellect is often quoted.5 This description in
4 Pearce, Museums, Objects and Collections, p. 95. 5 For example, Susan Pearce has quoted it in ibid., pp.95–96, and she acknowledged her debt in this regard to a further source, O. Impey and A. MacGregor (eds), The Origin of Museums, Oxford University Press, 1985, p. 1. A portion was also quoted by Tom Griffiths in Hunters and Collectors: The Antiquarian Imagination in Australia, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1996, p. 21, and in his Petherick Lecture of 1997 at the National Library of Australia, published as „Collecting Culture‟, National Library News, July 1997, p.10. 257 many respects would apply to the habitat Grey had created for himself on Kawau Island:
First, the collecting of a most perfect and general library, wherein whosoever the wit of man hath heretofore committed to books of worth … may be contributory to your wisdom. Next, a spacious, wonderful garden, wherein whatsoever plant the sun of divers climate, or the earth out of diverse moulds, either wild or by the culture of man brought forth, may be … set and cherished: this garden to be built about with rooms to stable in all rare beasts and to cage in all rare birds; with two lakes adjoining, the one of fresh water the other of salt, for like variety of fishes. And so you have in small compass a model of the universal nature made private. The third, a goodly huge cabinet wherein whatsoever the hand of man by exquisite art or engine has made rare in stuff, form, or motion; whatsoever singularity, chance, and the shuffle of things hath produced; whatsoever Nature has wrought in things that want life and may be kept; shall be sorted and included …6
Descriptions of Grey‟s collection overall bear some resemblance to those of the idiosyncratic collections that formed the basis of the great collecting institutions with which we are now so familiar, that themselves grew out of the Renaissance „cabinet of curiosities‟. Sir Hans Sloane‟s collection, the foundation of the British Museum‟s collection, was one such example. Horace Walpole, an original Trustee, complained that he spent his time, after Sloane had died and made him and the other Trustees responsible for the collection, „in the guardianship of embryos and cockleshells‟. Sloane had concentrated on natural history including, according to Walpole, „hippopotamuses, sharks with one ear, and spiders as big as geese!‟7 He had also collected to a lesser extent in other areas: Egyptian pieces, a few objects from classical antiquity, some prehistoric items, medieval rings and gems, mathematical instruments, and prints and drawings. However, apart from his core interest in natural history, Sloane‟s
6 Francis Bacon, „Gesta Grayorum: or, the History of the High and Mighty Prince, Henry, Prince of Purpoole, Arch-Duke of Stapulia and Bernardia, Duke of High and Nether Holborn, Marquis of St Giles and Tottenham, Court Palatine of Bloomsbury and Clerkenwell, Great Lord of the Cantons of Islington, Kentish Town, Paddington and Knights-bridge … Who Reigned and Died AD 1594 … London, 1688. Malone Society Reprints 1914, Oxford University Press, p. 34, line 34, p. 35, lines 1–17. This „account of the Christmas revels at Gray‟s Inn in 1594–5 did not find its way into print until nearly a century later‟ (introduction to reprinted issue, p. v). . 7 Horace Walpole to Horace Mann, 14 February 1753, quoted in David M. Wilson, The British Museum: A History, British Museum Press, London, 2002, p. 11. 258 collection, according to David Wilson, „is a miscellany illustrating English history up to the Restoration‟, including a supposed death- mask of Oliver Cromwell, Queen Elizabeth I‟s „Phoenix Jewel‟, and other sumptuous bits and pieces, including the oldest English astrolabe.8
Compare this list with the description by Grey‟s biographer Edmund Bohan of his subject‟s collection as it left Kawau Island for Auckland. As well as the massive transfer of books and manuscripts, there were „cases of rare Indian, Japanese, African, Pacific Island and South-east Asian woodcarvings, Kingite flags, moa bones set in limestone and even a piece of the cross erected by Bernal Diaz near the Cape of Good Hope‟.9 Eclectic collecting such as Sloane and Grey exhibited in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was still responding to the desire for universalism represented by the „cabinet of curiosities‟.
Grey does not fit into the typology of the obsessive collector who simply must have a particular item, nor one who strives to complete entire series of a particular object type. Rather he was an episodic, if not opportunistic collector. Grey‟s collecting style (in this case in the area of medieval manuscripts) „had little in common with the traditional connoisseur patiently building up a collection of rarities over a lifetime‟. According to one commentator, „his affinities were rather with the drinker who punctuates arid stretches of sobriety by bouts of excess or with the parsimonious housewife who seeks periodic release in a shopping spree‟.10
8 Ibid., p. 17. 9 Edmund Bohan, To Be a Hero: Sir George Grey, 1812–1898, HarperCollins, 1998 p. 310. The author‟s personal favourite among Grey‟s collected objects, now in the Auckland Art Gallery, is Napoleon‟s death mask. This object connects Grey with collectors of a slightly earlier era, the Romantic period, designated by Judith Pascoe, in The Hummingbird Cabinet: A Rare and Curious History of Romantic Collectors, Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London, 2006, as „romantic collectors‟. Pascoe sees „in the widespread fascination with Napoleonic relics a peculiar instance of the romantic preoccupation with authenticity‟ (p. 23), and refers to „the ways in which Napoleonic objects enabled self-aggrandizing fantasies‟ (p. 87). 10 E. H. McCormick, The Fascinating Folly: Dr Hocken and his Fellow Collectors, University of Otago Press, Dunedin, 1961, p.14. 259
Grey can also be regarded as a typical Victorian Age collector, with a habit formed and cultivated from his childhood. Asa Briggs, in Victorian Things, writes that „Collecting started at school and was encouraged. It usually began with shells on the beach or fossils from the moors or wild flowers from the hedgerows.‟11 Grey‟s story suggests that he may have followed a similar pattern with a twist. At the age of eight Grey had run away from his school at Guildford and returned to his family who, instead of punishing him, sent him on a holiday to Cheltenham. There he met a man who was to become a significant intellectual guide Richard Whately, later to become Archbishop of Dublin.12 Whately „enthusiastically took charge of moulding young George‟s mind and expanding his intellectual and imaginative horizons‟.13 The two went „walking in the pleasant English woods‟, with the lad learning from his mentor „the manner in which the ancient Britons lived, and how they dug for pignuts; or Whately rubbed dry sticks against each other, the primeval manner of making fire‟.14
Other childhood influences also guided the young boy‟s bibliophilic tendencies, particularly a cultivated aunt and uncle who lived in Lombard Street, London, and had a large library, which George „steadily read through … choosing any and every subject that took his fancy‟,15 especially „accounts of the travels of Captain Cook and other explorers‟.16 The result of these influences was to create „a handsome
11 Asa Briggs, Victorian Things, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, USA, 1989, p. 47. 12 Whately himself merits mention in literary histories of the Antipodes, as the author of a poem describing the natural oddities of the Antipodes, „There is a place in distant seas‟. See Les Murray (ed.), The New Oxford Book of Australian Verse, expanded edition, 1991, Oxford University Press, Melbourne. 13 Bohan, To Be a Hero, p. 17. 14 James Milne, The Romance of a Pro-Consul, Being the Personal Life and Memoirs of the Right Hon Sir George Grey, K.C.B., Chatto and Windus, London, 1899, p. 25. This edition of the book was noted as „For sale only in India and the British Colonies‟. 15 Bohan, To Be A Hero, p. 17. 16 Milne, Romance of a Pro-Consul, p. 21. 260 and charming youth with an insatiable curiosity about the world and a precocious intellectual sophistication‟.17
Grey‟s collecting was also typical of that carried out by colonial administrators, whose official tasks included an obligation to procure specimens of fauna and flora to send back to the mother country to swell the collections of museums and botanic gardens, and assist in the ongoing project of taxonomic organisation of the natural world, as has been seen in Chapter Six. Some colonial administrators indulged in this aspect of their work as much in pursuit of their private interests as in fulfillment of their administrative duties. For example, one of Grey‟s contemporaries, Everard im Thurn, a magistrate in British Guiana from the 1870s to the 1890s and later governor of Fiji, „piggybacked on British imperial networks in order to pursue his own ethnological and botanical interests‟, writes Rosamund Dalziell.18
Within that imperial context, Grey also acted as a conduit for collected material as part of an international network of like-minded intellectuals, and as part of his duty as an imperial administrator, charged with the responsibility, for example, of sending back botanical, faunal and geological specimens to Britain as part of the system of scientific exchange and transfer that has been described in Chapter Six as integral to the operation of botanic gardens. John Forrester‟s description of Sigmund Freud‟s activities as a collector also bears a considerable resemblance to those of Grey:
… Freud‟s collections were a natural history of civilization, constructed in the same spirit of self-serving public service that other nineteenth-century scientific collectors envisaged. In Britain in the mid-nineteenth century, one or two individuals would act as centralized exchanges, correspondence-network organizers, for collections of objects, such as butterflies, flowers, orchids, sea-fish. Participants would send in specimens collected locally, and would
17 Bohan, To Be A Hero, p. 17. 18 Rosamund Dalziell, „‟A Tramp with Redskins‟: A British Colonial Administrator‟s Cross-Cultural Encounters, in Rosamund Dalziell (ed.), Selves Crossing Cultures: Autobiography and Globalisation, Australian Scholarly Publishing, Melbourne, 2002, p. 136. 261 receive in return, via the central communications system, excess specimens from other collectors in other parts of the country. In order to acquire, one had to give. And the scientific fruit or product of this market was the map of the flora and fauna of the British Isles.19
If the scope described by Forrester is widened to the British Empire and beyond, it constitutes a description of how Grey functioned within the imperial network. His activity in this area is well attested by the voluminous correspondence housed in the Special Collections area of the Auckland City Library. One commentator has said that „The list of his English correspondents alone reads like a muster-roll of the great Victorians‟,20 in particular those prominent in scientific and intellectual life. They included Henry Ellis and Augustus Franks of the British Museum, naturalist John Gould, Ferdinand von Mueller and William Guilfoyle of the Melbourne Botanic Gardens, Directors of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Sir Willliam Hooker and his son Joseph Hooker, geologist Charles Lyell and palaeontologist Richard Owen, and explorer and geographer Roderick Murchison. Grey also corresponded with many people in other British colonies, including those of which he had previously been governor, for example, David Murray, Chairman of the Public Library Museum and Art Gallery of South Australia, to whom he sent a mere pounamu in 1893.21
Other correspondents advanced more exotic subjects than routine requests for shells, geological and animal specimens for the British Museum, and plants to be dispatched in Wardian cases under the superintendence of Kew Gardens to botanic gardens throughout the
19 John Forrester, „”Mille e Tre”: Freud and Collecting‟, in John Elsner and Roger Cardinal, The Cultures of Collecting, Melbourne University Press, 1994, p. 243. 20 McCormick, Fascinating Folly, p. 18. 21 The South Australian Museum currently displays this mere in its Pacific Gallery. Its catalogue description is as follows: „Club, greenstone, with plaited flax wriststrap, „Mere‟ type. New Zealand, Hamilton, Waikato district. Donated in 1893 by Sir George Grey‟. A search of the SA Museum‟s archives at the time failed to locate any further information as to the detailed provenance of the mere. Email correspondence 11 December 2002 with Barry Craig, Curator of Foreign Ethnology, South Australian Museum, and Lea Gardam, Archives Access Officer, South Australian Museum. The mere is now on display in the refurbished Pacific Cultures Gallery. Its label adds the information that „Sir George Grey, former Governor of South Australia, obtained it in about 1850 during his governorship of New Zealand‟. Viewed by author during a visit to the Pacific Cultures Gallery, South Australian Museum, 11 October 2007. 262 world. H. G. Robley, a collector of toi moko22 (decapitated tattooed Maori heads), wrote to Grey when the latter arrived in England in 1894, enclosing some notes he had written about toi moko that „I hope you will just look over, as you know the lore of the Maori better than anyone‟.23 Collecting toi moko was just one example of the nineteenth- century practice of obtaining human remains from colonised peoples for the purposes of study, a particularly striking example of cultural imperialism that is now under sustained attack throughout the museum profession, along with a concerted movement to repatriate such remains to the originating communities.24
To return to Susan Pearce‟s metaphor of the collection as the „extended self‟, and its further employment in guaranteeing immortality – at least the immortality of reputation. The ageing Grey, despite handing over his collection to Auckland, still clearly regarded it as an extension of himself, and as a vehicle for displaying the triumphs of his varied career. Froude‟s Oceana had revealed to his world-wide readership his view of the meaning of Grey‟s collection and its intrinsic links to its owner. Grey himself did the honours in the Auckland of the late 1880s and early 1890s, spending, according to Edmund Bohan, „endless hours in the library helping the librarians to catalogue and display his collection, and he proudly escorted every distinguished visitor to Auckland around both library and museum, discoursing on the histories of each exhibit and recounting relevant (and not so relevant)
22 Toi moko is the term used by Te Papa Tongarewa in its engagement with museums around the world to repatriate these ancestors/artefacts. Information supplied by Dr Roger Blackley. 23 H. G. Robley to Sir George Grey, 16 April 1894, GL – 1085-6, Sir George Grey Inward Correspondence Typescripts, Auckland Public Library Special Collections. One of Robley‟s letters to Grey came with a sketch of a toi moko. 24 The problems associated with repatriating toi moko to the appropriate community, and Te Papa Tongarewa National Museum of New Zealand‟s role in this process is the subject of an article by Bess Manson, in The Dominion, 10 March 2001, reprinted in Museums News, the newsletter of Museums Aotearoa, March 2001 issue, pp. 8–9. The process of repatriation continues: The Art Newspaper in its May 2007 issue carries an item relating to the return by Chicago‟s Field Museum of 13 Maori skulls and a tattooed human head to Te Papa Tongarewa. Collected in September 2007 by a Maori delegation, the remains „will be taken to the national marae (meeting ground) at Te Papa Tongarewa and held there until the tribal identities of the individuals can be established‟. The Art Newspaper, No. 180, May 2007, p. 22. 263 tales of his youthful adventures‟.25 In the vignette that began the preceding chapter, Grey is seen replicating his behaviour in Auckland in the Natural History Museum in London, where the specimens with which he was surrounded constituted a „material autobiography‟ that he was able to interpret by using his own anecdotes. People who had read Froude‟s account of Grey and his collection in Oceana could see the Maori treasures in the Auckland Free Public Library and interpret them as the material expression of Grey‟s status as „the father of the Maori race‟.
Grey and the Maori
Key features of Froude‟s account of Grey and his reputation are his claims relating to Grey‟s influence over Maori and his benevolent and „fatherly‟ relationship with them, best illustrated in the following quotation from Oceana, where the British historian gave a brief summary of his subject‟s career. These extracts from that passage relate to one particular view of Grey held by Froude and his other admirers. It is the task of this section to trace the movement from this adulatory and positive assessment to the current historiographical position on Grey and his relations with Maori, which ranges from ambiguity to outright condemnation. Froude wrote of Grey:
He was Governor of New Zealand during the last and worst Maori war, and more than any other person succeeded in bringing it to an amicable end …In the war itself he showed energy and firmness. When it was over he saved the remnant of the defeated race from extermination, or from the serfdom and beggary into which they must have fallen if their lands had been taken from them. They were left with their independence, and the fine and extensive territory which they now occupy. The natives call him their „white father‟.26
Grey‟s popularity with Maori, despite the fact that he was governor during much of the period marked by the New Zealand Land Wars of the 1840s to 1870s, and set his seal on the government‟s confiscation
25 Bohan, To Be a Hero, p. 311. 26 Froude, Oceana, p. 216. 264 of Maori land afterwards described by historian Sir Keith Sinclair as „the worst injustice ever perpetrated by a New Zealand Government‟27 was attested to most famously in the tribute sent by Maori people to London at the time of his death to mark his memorial in St Paul‟s Cathedral: „Horei [sic] Kerei, Aue! Ka nui matou aroha ki a koe (George Grey, alas! Great was our love for thee.)‟28 His statue in Auckland‟s Albert Park shows him leaning against a Maori carving, and inscriptions in Maori, along with those in English, adorn the plinth.
The nature and persistence of the „myth‟ of George Grey, „the father of the Maori race‟, requires some analysis, as it provides the context into which Froude‟s account in Oceana can be inserted. There is no doubt that Grey himself encouraged it in the first instance. We cannot know whether Froude was reporting Grey‟s own words when he called him the Maori „white father‟, but an examination of texts heavily influenced by Grey himself fits this pattern. For example, the words of Grey‟s young admirer, the Daily Chronicle journalist James Milne, in Romance of a Pro-Consul were virtually dictated to him by Grey in the 1890s. The contemporary exception was Sir John Gorst‟s book, The Maori King, which is realistic about the limitations to Grey‟s power as a colonial governor and the extent of his effective prestige with Maori.
Gorst believed that the expectation of those who welcomed Grey back to New Zealand in 1861, thinking that his arrival „would be hailed by the natives with delight, that they would rush into his arms, tell him their grievances, and follow his advice with confidence‟ was doomed to disappointment, as „this supposed feeling of personal confidence did not exist‟.29 According to Gorst,
27 Sir Keith Sinclair, A History of New Zealand, revised edition, Penguin, Auckland, 2000, p. 148. 28 J Rutherford, Sir George Grey, K.C.B., 1812–1898: A Study in Colonial Government, Cassell, London, 1961, p. 653. 29 John Eldon Gorst, The Maori King, edited with introduction by K.O. Arvidson, Reed Books, Auckland, 2001, p. 75, first published Macmillan and Co, London, 1864. 265
Sir George Grey, during his former administration, had succeeded in attaching the greatest chiefs to himself, not so much by presents and pensions … but by exercising his extraordinary power of persuasion in personal intercourse. On the mass of the people he never made much impression. But at that time, the influence of the old chiefs, though decaying, had not altogether vanished … But the day for a policy of this kind had gone by when Sir George Grey returned to New Zealand. Most of the old chiefs were dead, and the rest had become followers and not leaders of the public will. The Maories had contracted a passionate desire for nationality which overwhelmed the personal predilections of their chiefs, so that Sir George Grey found his old friends either unwilling to sacrifice their patriotism to personal friendship, or powerless to persuade their tribes to follow them.30
Nevertheless, despite Gorst‟s view of the local situation, in which he was involved himself, mythmaking around the person of Grey proceeded apace. The first attempt at a biography of Grey was made during his lifetime by a friend and parliamentary supporter, William Lee Rees, and his daughter, and published in 1892, six years before its subject‟s death. Their account of his first governorship, as it related to Maori people, is couched in rhetoric that bears a remarkable stylistic similarity to Froude‟s words on Grey in Oceana. It shows their subject as firm but fair, and overwhelmingly benevolent in his intentions and actions. Leigh Dale has said of the Reeses‟ account that „they so transparently aim to speak for their subject‟, making their book a „crucial‟ source „for understanding the ways in which Grey wanted historians, and the reading public, to see him as having acted‟.31 The Reeses‟ view of Grey is that
… he relied less upon military force to subdue the Maoris than upon the civilising influences of wise and considerate legislation. When war was necessary, Sir George Grey did not shrink from the most severe and decisive action. This was clearly shown by his vigorous conduct of the struggle which was being waged when he arrived in the colony. But when recourse to arms could be avoided wisely and justly, nothing would induce the Governor to consent to bloodshed. His warm interest in the welfare of the Maoris, and his benevolent plans for their happiness had their due effect. Savage warriors, who had until then shown themselves rebellious and implacable, became as
30 Ibid. 31 Leigh Dale, „George Grey in Ireland: Narrative and Network‟, in David Lambert and Alan Lester (eds), Colonial Lives Across the British Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2006, p. 154. See also Leigh Dale, „George Grey in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa‟, in Peter Hulme and Russell McDougall (eds), Writing, Travel and Empire: In the Margins of Anthropology, I. B. Tauris and Company, London, 2007. 266 little children in their simple reverence and loving obedience to their “father”, “Kawana Kerei” [Governor Grey].32
The Reeses‟ account of Grey‟s second governorship showed him dealing with the problems that had been created while he had been away from New Zealand, and his differences of opinion with General Duncan Cameron as to how to deal with the war against the followers of the Maori King in the Waikato and Taranaki. They chose to illustrate their assertion of Grey‟s continuing prestige mana with Maori by an anecdote about how Grey dealt with an outbreak of inter-tribal warfare after the larger conflict of Pakeha versus Maori had effectively ended in 1866. The Governor arrived to find that battle had been joined, and that one man had already been shot through the neck. The ensuing account was almost certainly related by Grey to his friend and biographer. It bears all the hallmarks of his generally heroised representation of his role as governor:
The person of the Governor was at once recognised. In a moment all was silent. Sir George Grey, still sitting on his panting horse, commanded both parties to come out and range themselves on either side of him without their arms. His word was law. In a few minutes several hundreds of fighting men stood drawn up in two bodies, only separated by the Governor and his orderly. In a severe tone Sir George Grey reminded the chiefs on both sides that as the Queen‟s representative he had forbidden all fighting, whether for land or in revenge for any injury or insult. He bade both sides depart at once for their ordinary homes, and he would himself decide their disputes. A few of the chiefs and common men were to stay to look after the dead and wounded, the rest were to depart. To the Maoris the voice of “Te Kawana” was as the voice of God. To hear was to obey. Without remonstrance the defenders left the pah, the besiegers left their pits and whares. Shouldering arms, they marched away contentedly to their various kaingas. The wounded were looked to, the dead were buried, and the Governor, having examined into the dispute which was, as such disputes usually were, about land settled it satisfactorily to both sides. Personal intervention like this, regardless of danger or fatigue, challenged the admiration of the chivalrous Maoris, while the constant kindness and justice exercised towards them won their confidence and love.33
32 William Lee Rees and L. Rees, The Life and Times of Sir George Grey, K.C.B., Hutchinson and Co., London, c1892, p. 193. 33 Ibid., pp. 399–400. 267
Fictional representations of New Zealand at the time of the Land Wars also picture Grey as a paragon of military decisiveness, asserter of British power, and promoter of harmonious race relations. As late as 1914 novelist William Satchell, in The Greenstone Door described as „New Zealand‟s most famous historical novel‟, and its author „the most powerful early New Zealand novelist, whose novels „burn with a fiery anger against the contemptuous attitude of many nineteenth-century settlers towards the Maoris‟34 perpetuated the characterisation of Grey as the saviour of New Zealand, and the idol of the Maori.35
Satchell‟s account of Grey‟s actions relates to the latter‟s first governorship, when in 1846 the newly arrived Governor Grey defeated the Maori leader Hone Heke in the Northern War centred on the settlement of Korarareka (now Russell) in the Bay of Islands. Hone Heke, influenced by American traders who had led him to see the Union Jack as a symbol of oppression and had given him a Stars and Stripes flag to flaunt on his war canoe,36 had cut down the flagstaff at Kororareka four times from 1844 onwards, and had sacked the settlement:
34 Endpaper note to William Satchell, The Greenstone Door, first published 1914, this edition Golden Press, Auckland, 1973. For a more restrained view of Satchell‟s reputation see Kendrick Smithyman, „Satchell, William Arthur – Biography‟, from the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, Te Ara – the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, updated 1-Sep-10, viewed 20 January 2011 at URL: http://www.TeAra.govt.nz/en/biographies/3s4/1. Smithyman describes The Greenstone Door as the „most popular‟ of Satchell‟s novels, in which „His gallery of Maori men and women, his principal strength here, has a range rarely attempted, but the metaphor of the greenstone door is handled maladroitly‟. Nevertheless, Smithyman writes, the novel influenced younger New Zealand writers, in particular short story writer Frank Sargeson, and overall, Satchell‟s „three successful novels represent the most significant achievement in New Zealand fiction before the First World War‟. 35 Phillip John Wilson, William Satchell, Twayne‟s Publishers, New York, 1968, Preface. Wilson says of the portrayal of Grey in the novel that „One reader who did enjoy it was Colonel H. Stratton Bates, former official Interpreter to Sir George Grey and General Cameron during the Taranaki and Waikato wars, who was “able to recognise the excellence of your sketch of the Maori customs and modes of expression” and considered the portrait of Grey in the book to be “lifelike”‟ (ibid., p. 48). 36 Rutherford, Sir George Grey, p. 78. 268
When Sir George then Captain Grey arrived in the Colony, Hone Heke was at the height of his triumph. He had defeated the soldiers of the Queen, sacked the capital of the Colony, and was considering fresh and more ambitious schemes of conquest. The native mind, even that of our strongest adherents, was disturbed. The white man, then, was not invincible in war. It was still, perhaps, possible by force of arms to thrust him back into his original position of pakeha-maori. To such ideas, as well as to the fears of the settlers, the energetic action of the new Governor gave instant denial. Prompt and stern measures against Hone Heke, followed by immediate leniency on their success, retrieved the position, recaptured the Maori imagination, and called forth from the settlers universal gratitude and praise. But not for long. The Maori remained constant. To him this was a great man, strong in battle, merciful in victory, wise in knowledge; a protector, a father, a true representative of the White Queen that sublime, far-off goddess, whom their eyes were never to see.37
Nevertheless, the historiography of New Zealand generally traces a steeply descending trajectory in its assessment of Grey‟s reputation in general, and in relation to Maori matters as well. Leigh Dale notes that „Grey‟s reputation – and debates about – span the English-speaking world‟, much of it „concerned with challenging the mythology of Grey as a governor who “knew the Maori”, a reputation based on Grey‟s studies of the language, and his patronage of widely circulated publications of Maori literatures‟.38
Grey was a master creator of a desired image. On taking up his position as governor of New Zealand in 1845, he moved swiftly to establish himself as a decisive leader even to the extent of claiming as a signal victory an attack on the heavily-fortified pa of the Maori leader Kawiti at Ruapekapeka (the „Bat‟s Nest‟), from which the defenders had mostly already left.39 His masters at the Colonial Office, distant from the scene of action, were none the wiser and his reputation as a competent colonial administrator was further augmented.
37 Satchell, Greenstone Door, pp. 202–3. 38 Dale, „George Grey in Ireland‟, p. 147. 39 James Belich, The New Zealand Wars and the Victorian Interpretation of Racial Conflict, Penguin Books, Auckland, 1988 edition, p. 333. 269
Among his contemporaries Grey had both admirers and detractors, as is often the case with charismatic characters. His detractors were never reluctant to speak out, and even his funeral obsequies hint at an ambiguous reputation. A eulogy of Sir George Grey from the New Zealand Times in September 1898 claimed that „Never was a man more keenly criticised than he was‟, and quoted fellow politician William Gisborne as saying:
[I]t is only just to say generally that, however much outward influences, acting on inward features of character, may have shut out Sir George Grey from some of the highest public positions of a statesman, it is impossible to deny with truth that he has well earned an imperishable memorial in the great good which he has, in the course of a long public life and in different parts of the world, conferred on his fellow creatures, and in the future work, which he will leave, in human probability, to others, of giving full effect to some of his ideas (in advance of the present age) for securing the greatest good of the greatest number.‟40
This „greatest number‟,41 it is to be presumed, included the Maori people, in the view of Grey‟s parliamentary colleague. Despite the words of contemporary rivals and detractors, Grey‟s talent for self- promotion, coupled with genuine achievements in fostering good race relations, led to the adoption of a sobriquet that was often assigned to his first governorship of New Zealand between 1846 and 1853 – „good Governor Grey‟. This was also generally applied to his second governorship between 1861 and 1867, until over fifty years after his death.
During the 1950s historians began to ask questions about Grey‟s character, decisions and attitudes, particularly during his second governorship. Sir Keith Sinclair grappled with the problem of defining Grey‟s historical reputation, in a work that was first published in the late 1950s and had its latest revision in 2000, his highly regarded History of
40 New Zealand Times, 21 September 1898. 41 A. N. Wilson, The Victorians, Hutchinson, London, 2002, has an extended discussion throughout his book of the penetration and acceptance in the Victorian era of the ideology of utilitarianism, pioneered by political philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832). This held that the greatest good of the greatest number should be the goal of public policy. 270
New Zealand. Sinclair‟s verdict on Grey‟s character and career as it affected New Zealand signals a tendency to acknowledge the extent of Grey‟s inner conflicts:
Grey was such a strange mixture of man and superman that his career has had a never-failing fascination for posterity. He had only a nodding acquaintance with truth and in his dispatches home the facts he mentioned, carefully selected and artfully presented, usually managed to convey what impression he wished … Grey did not, however, so much lie as fail to tell the truth; and despite a further reputation for enjoying his pleasures, he was no Falstaff. The genial Governor was a lonely, secretive man who, as he grew older, found it more and more impossible to get on with his equals or superiors and who, as a party politician, later in the century, compensated for the absence of wife and friend by seeking, through his skill as a popular orator, the approval of the masses. He was a man of the widest interests in the humanities and natural science, and of considerable intellectual force; an efficient if despotic leader; a ruthless foe who would stoop to petty victories; and altogether what his arch-enemy, William Fox, called him: „the great dictator, the great pro-consul, the great Maori-tamer‟.42
James Rutherford, the first biographer of Grey to abandon a hagiographic approach to his subject, whose comprehensive work was published in 1961, provides a thoughtful analysis of the Grey of the second governorship. His book presents a picture of a man of immense talent, dedication and personal worth betrayed by his lack of „the higher and rarer form of moral courage, the courage to admit himself in error and to change his course‟.43 When Grey returned to New Zealand in 1861, Rutherford writes, he was an embittered and disappointed man lacking in self-confidence after the abrupt termination of his South African governorship by the Colonial Office. He found that he was, as governor, no longer the sole source of power, but had to share it with the elected representatives of the white settlers. The rise of the Maori King movement directly threatened his authority and that of the British Crown. To get his own way always a powerful imperative for Grey he resorted to duplicity, which only made people suspect him. This
42 Sinclair, History of New Zealand, pp. 82–3. 43 Rutherford, Sir George Grey, p. 656. Leigh Dale is blunter about Rutherford‟s assessment of Grey‟s reputation, stating that Rutherford „describes Grey as perhaps the greatest liar the British Empire ever spawned‟. Leigh Dale, „George Grey in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa‟, in Peter Hulme and Russell McDougall (eds), Writing, Travel and Empire: In the Margins of Anthropology, I. B. Tauris and Company, London, 2007, p. 19. 271 suspicion undermined his influence with Maori. Although his old Maori friends such as Tamati Waka Nene44 still supported him, others were less prepared to trust Grey with fateful results, which Rutherford has summarised with admirable economy:
…his professions of benevolence no longer carried conviction with the Maoris, their rejection of his peace terms compelled him against his real wishes to resort to war, and he found himself committed to a policy of coercion and confiscation which he did not fully approve but which he could not control. His convictions were at war with themselves, his inner conflicts of conscience put an intolerable strain on his overwrought nerves, his judgment became confused, his temper uncontrolled, and he allowed himself to become embroiled in arguments and recriminations which reduced policy to confusion and ended in his dismissal.45
Other historians have taken a far less charitable position on Grey as regards his personality and his legacy. B. J. Dalton in his 1967 book, War and Politics in New Zealand 1855–1870, delivers a strongly worded condemnation of this period of Grey‟s career:
There can be little need to enlarge on the qualities Grey revealed throughout his second governorship of New Zealand the dread of responsibility, the vacillation and inconsistency, the ruthless egotism to which he would sacrifice anything and everybody, his contempt for truth, his ingenuity and lack of scruple in controversy. Of his boasted influence over the Maori, insight into their character and tender regard for their well-being, little trace survives. What had become of the Grey who won so great a reputation by his first governorship? Clearly his character may have degenerated in the interim. His dishonesty and lack of scruple, his almost obsessional preoccupation with his public standing, and his genius for self-advertisement are certainly qualities likely to grow with years of power and applause. The young army captain of 1846 with a name to make had become a great public figure with a reputation to lose. It is, however, significant that the skilfully disingenuous use of documents so frequent in his second governorship was a source of bitter complaint during the first as well; and there is no doubt that his account of the Maori as he left them in 1853 is as fictitious as the „state of tranquillity and returning prosperity‟ he bequeathed to his successor in 1867. The legendary first governorship may yet prove to be as far from the truth as the usual account of the second. At all events the record of his second governorship is clear: confusion, debt, destruction and despair were its legacy.46
44 Rutherford says of Tamati Waka Nene that he and several other Maori chiefs formed for Grey „a miniature Maori court in attendance on vice-royalty‟. In 1848 Grey selected Waka Nene and Te Puni as his „esquires on the occasion of his investiture into his knighthood‟. Rutherford, pp. 209–10. 45 Ibid., p. 657. 46 B. J. Dalton, War and Politics in New Zealand 1855–1870, Sydney University Press, 1967, p. 259. 272
By the 1990s Grey‟s reputation had thus suffered a severe challenge, not least in regard to his relationship to Maori people. Some historians of the 1990s and early 2000s, such as James Belich, have little to say of Grey that is positive. Belich, in The New Zealand Wars (1996) has said that it is „difficult to avoid‟ the conclusion that Grey „planned the Waikato War well in advance‟. Nevertheless, Belich has given Grey the benefit of the doubt to a certain extent, without minimising the catastrophic effect of his actions on the very people he claimed to be trying to help:
Grey had some real empathy with the Maoris, and he deplored vulgar racial prejudice directed against them. But he also believed them to be „a semi- barbarous race, puffed up with the pride of an imagined equality‟. Like many of his contemporaries, he considered that the Maoris‟ only chance of advancement, even of survival, lay in submission to substantive British sovereignty, and amalgamation with the settlers. During his first governorship, he felt that this was indeed happening, slowly but surely. During his second, the King Movement presented a solid obstacle which had to be removed. No doubt Grey would have preferred to remove it by peaceful means, but it is very hard to believe that he considered this realistic after about the middle of 1862. Grey‟s „peace policy‟ might better be described as his indirect preparation for war.47
Historical debate over Grey‟s role in New Zealand‟s history has even affected occasions when he was to be honoured posthumously. The Governor-General of New Zealand, Sir Michael Hardie Boys, unveiled a statue of Grey at Greytown in the Wairarapa valley, north of Wellington, in September 1998.48 Instead of eulogising the colonial statesman whose name was incorporated in that of the town, the Governor-General instead struck an apologetic note in his speech. Nevertheless he defended Grey‟s right to be remembered in this particular New Zealand community:
47 Belich, New Zealand Wars, pp. 121–2. 48 This statue has now disappeared from Greytown, possibly as part of an iconoclastic movement directed at monuments dedicated to colonial-era politicians who were implicated in cross-cultural conflicts. Information supplied by Dr Roger Blackley. 273
It used to be forty, fifty and more years ago that Grey was regarded quite uncritically. The Pakeha New Zealand picture was that he was something of a colonial-era hero, which, of course, is how some of his contemporaries saw him. Then, tardily, we began to take a more genuine interest in our country‟s history, evidence for that being our increased willingness to see noteworthy figures in our past in more than the one dimension, perhaps going too far in the other, the highly critical direction.
So by unveiling a statue of the man whose name this town bears, and who had much to do with its establishment, we are not committing ourselves to applauding everything that he might have done, or that he did not do. Instead, we simply acknowledge that he was immensely influential in the life of this country, in setting its course, and that the outcome of many of his actions is still becoming apparent … May this likeness of him indeed encourage, as intended, not Sir George Grey‟s glorification, but an on-going commitment to understand the history of this community in which he played such a prominent early part.49
The most recent biography of Grey, by Edmund Bohan (1998), is titled To Be a Hero, indicating the broadly sympathetic view of Grey presented by its author. Leigh Dale states that „almost every single commentator, with the notable exception of his most recent biographer Edmund Bohan‟, can be described as a „Grey sceptic‟, but that „public criticisms of Grey that were made in his own lifetime have more often filtered into the scholarly than the popular record‟.50
Grey as ‘father’ of the Maori
Despite the negativity that now surrounds Grey‟s reputation, it is clear that he was – and still is – regarded as a colonial administrator who had greater affinity with the Maori people over whom he ruled than most of his contemporaries. One of the key reasons for this view is his reputation as one who took the trouble to learn to deal with Maori people on their own terms. It is also equally clear that at least some Maori people were deeply impressed by this, and demonstrated their appreciation in tangible terms, including the presentation of valuable
49 „The Right Honourable Sir Michael Hardie Boys GNZM, GCMG, Governor-General of New Zealand at the unveiling of the statue of Sir George Grey, Greytown, 19 September 1998, http://www.gov-gen.govt.nz/speeches/hardie_boys/1998-09-19.html 50 Dale, „George Grey in Ireland‟, p. 151. 274 treasures. James Rutherford said of Grey‟s relationship with Maori people that:
No Governor ever acquired such a mana among the Maoris. He met them fearlessly in their tribal assemblies, where his courtesy and dignity and his firm decisions made a deep impression.51
Anne Salmond has made a detailed study of rituals of encounter among Maori, and makes the point that, as Europeans began to deal with Maori people on a consistent basis, „they learned that challenges, sham fights, and war dances as well as oratory and other verbal arts were an expected part of ceremonial occasions … it was only Europeans who had frequent cause to parlay with the chiefs and elders who ever mastered them‟.52 Governor George Grey was one of these Europeans.
The fact that Grey taught himself Maori, and collected and translated Maori myths and legends – published as Polynesian Mythology in 1854 – is seen as one of the central reasons for his apparent popularity among Maori people, although he admitted that he did this for a strictly utilitarian purpose. While travelling about the country during his first governorship, he discovered that his Maori interpreters were often incapable of conveying to him the nuances of utterances by Maori interlocutors. If an interpreter were not present, the governor would leave disappointed supplicants, some of whom had come several hundred miles to see him, with their messages undelivered. Dealing with Maori chiefs was particularly difficult, owing to the crucial place held by oratory in Maori culture, and the necessity for effective communication with them on their terms, in ceremonial ritual exchanges of a highly formalised nature. Salmond says of the primacy of oratory in Maori society that
51 Rutherford, Sir George Grey, p. 209. 52 Anne Salmond, „Rituals of Encounter Among the Maori: Sociolinguistic Study of a Scene‟, Richard Bauman and Joel Sherzer (eds), Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking, Cambridge University Press, New York, 1989, p. 192. 275
Oratory in particular has reached the status of a verbal art among the Maori. The skilled orator is a master of genealogy, ancient chants, local history, and proverbs. Not only is he erudite, but a consummate actor as well. His movements are dramatic and timed to give the greatest possible effect to the statement he is making. The finest orators are well known throughout the country … Oratory is the way for a man to win fame in Maori circles.53
Grey set out his reason for learning about Maori cosmology and legends in the preface to Polynesian Mythology: to participate fully in these vital exchanges in ways that other colonial governors had been unable to do. Grey made it clear that solving the communication problem was his „duty‟, and that furthering the cause of imperial governance was the motive for his eight years of assiduous effort in collecting and translating the material:54
I found that these chiefs, either in their speeches to me or in their letters, frequently quoted, in explanation of their views and intentions, fragments of ancient poems or proverbs, or made allusions which rested on an ancient system of mythology; and, although it was clear that the most important parts of their communications were embodied in these figurative forms, the interpreters were quite at fault, they could then rarely (if ever) translate the poems or explain the allusions, and there was no publication in existence which threw any light upon these subjects, or which gave the meaning of the great mass of the words which the natives upon such occasions made use of; so that I was compelled to content myself with a short general statement of what some other native believed that the writer of the letter intended to convey, as his meaning by the fragment of the poem he had quoted or by the allusions he had made. I should add that even the great majority of the young Christian Maoris were quite as much at fault on these subjects as were the European interpreters. Clearly, however, I could not, as Governor of the country, permit so close a veil to remain drawn between myself and the aged and influential chiefs whom it was my duty to attach to British interests and the British race, whose regard and confidence, as also that of their tribes, it was my desire to secure, and with whom it was necessary that I should hold the most unrestricted intercourse. Only one thing could under such circumstances be done, and that was to acquaint myself with the ancient language of the country, to
53 Ibid., pp. 199–200. 54 Despite his silence on the subject, Grey did not undertake this work alone. He was assisted by Te Rangikaheke, who lived in quarters attached to Grey‟s residence. The entry by Steven Oliver on Te Rangikaheke in People of Many Peaks: the Maori Biographies from the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, Bridget Williams Books, Wellington, 1991 says that he and Grey „worked together in a warm and close collaboration‟ and gives details of the volume of work that Te Rangikaheke carried out for Grey, who „did not acknowledge his debt, and introduced alterations, combinations and omissions‟ (p. 253). 276 collect its traditional poems and legends, to induce their priests to impart to me their mythology, and to study their proverbs.55
Serving an imperial goal was Grey‟s driving motivation. Indeed, he made it clear that his interest in the spiritual life of Maori did not spring from any intrinsic respect for their belief system when he stated that „their traditions are puerile‟ and that „the religious faith of the races who trust in them is absurd‟. Nevertheless, said Grey, these beliefs had no less credibility than many others that had preceded Christianity, and Maori had shown themselves capable of adapting to this particular introduced creed with great success. He had no doubts about Christianity‟s superiority over Maori belief systems. Grey‟s interest in the spirituality of Maori was utilitarian and also antiquarian he was a collector, after all, of intangible as well as tangible heritage. [See Appendix IV for the full text of the Preface to Polynesian Mythology.]
Maori commentators have read Grey‟s Preface to Polynesian Mythology, and identified an imperial purpose behind him learning the language of the Maori people and gathering their legends. Ngapine Allen expresses the most negative view of this activity when she claims that „We can better understand the significance of Maori myth when we recall that Sir George Grey … attempted to record all Maori myths and superstitions a bank of information that could potentially be used to cripple the infrastructure of Maori society‟.56
Grey also recognised the important role of oratory and the correct observance of ritual in the accession and retention of mana. As Rutherford has said, Grey‟s own mana was enormously increased by his ability to deal with Maori in these ritual exchanges. In the time of his first governorship it seems to have paid large dividends, at least among some of the chiefs. By the time Grey left New Zealand in 1854, several
55 Preface to Sir George Grey, Polynesian Mythology and Traditional History of the Maori as Told by Their Priests and Chiefs, first published 1854, pp. v–xii, 56 Ngapine Allen, „Maori Vision and the Imperialist Gaze‟, in Tim Barringer and Tom Flynn, Colonialism and the Object: Empire, Material Culture and the Museum, London, Routledge, 1998, p. 145. 277 deputations of Maori chiefs had come to him with formal addresses of regret at his departure. On 22 December 1853, for example, a deputation of twenty Waikato chiefs waited on Grey and delivered an address replete with sentiments of the most complimentary kind, and expressing their desire that their „Father‟ might return to them:
How great is the pain of our hearts in consequence of our Governor going to a distant land. The grief of the heart commences with the rising of the sun since we heard the tidings of his proposed visit to England. We are therefore endeavouring to ascertain the reason why this Taniwha57 a Governor, Sir George Grey, should tear himself from us. We thought, indeed, that you would have remained in this land as a father for us. On your arrival in this island the rain was beating, and the wind blowing fiercely, and then you lifted up your voice to calm the raging elements… Go, O Father, to England, and may the Divine Being preserve you while you are voyaging on the great sea. When you go into the presence of Queen Victoria, and inquiries are made by her [respecting us natives], say, that we are blessed with peace owing to the good governors she has sent us. If you are requested to return hither, O Father, then come back to us, your children whom you have left in a state of uneasiness.58
These highly flattering effusions were published by Charles Oliver B. Davis, „translator and interpreter to the general government‟, in 1855. When Grey returned in 1861, addresses of welcome to him were also published. While the expressions of affection were as effusive as ever, many of them made reference to the imminent conflict that would convulse the country during Grey‟s second governorship. The tone of the address of the Ngati Ruaka tribe of Whanganui on 29 August 1861 is characteristic:
Salutations to you, our loving father in the grace of our Lord. Friend, we rejoice at your coming here among us as an overlooker and mediator between these two races, the Maori and the Pakeha. We are very glad because of your coming as Governor for this island, to unite us in one under the protecting shade of our Queen, that we may adhere together as one people. This is our thought respecting you, that you should put an end to the errors in this island …59
57 The term „Taniwha‟ means a god and is used only for powerful chiefs. This is thus an extremely complimentary reference to be applied to Grey. Charles Oliver B. Davis, Maori Mementoes: Being a Series of Addresses, Presented by the Native People to Sir George Grey …, Williamson and Wilson, Auckland, 1855, fn (a), p. 17. 58 Ibid., pp. 17–18. 59 Native Addresses of Welcome to Sir George Grey, Auckland, 1861, p. 5. 278
While the affection in which Grey was held by these Maori chiefs is evident in their addresses to him, there are also a number of references to his predecessor, Governor Gore-Browne, as „father‟, and to his „kindness‟ to the Maori.60 Grey was greatly loved by some Maori, but was by no means the only European administrator to have been referred to as „father‟, or to be addressed in eulogistic terms. Charles Dilke, described as „one of the most observant travellers to come here [Australia and New Zealand] in the nineteenth century‟,61 was in New Zealand during Grey‟s second term as governor. Dilke, at the time in his early twenties, travelled extensively through America, New Zealand and Australia. Back home in Britain he wrote Greater Britain: A Record of Travel in English-Speaking Countries During 1866 and 1867 (1868), a work that went into six editions over three years, and eight editions over all.62 Dilke recorded a speech addressed to Isaac Featherston by the Maori leader Hunia Te Hakeke63 to demonstrate the nature of Maori oratory, replete with extravagant statements and protestations of loyalty. Dilke‟s account leaves the reader in no doubt that these utterances were rhetorical, not to be taken literally:
„Hail guests! You have just now seen the settlement of a great dispute the greatest of modern time.64 „This was a weighty trouble a grave difficulty. „Many Pakehas have tried to settle it in vain. For Petatone was it reserved to end it. I have said that great is our gratitude to Petatone.65
60 Ibid.,p .6, Ngai Tahu Tribe, 28 September 1861. 61 Foreword to Geoffrey Blainey (ed.), Charles Dilke, Greater Britain: Charles Dilke Visits her New Lands, 1866 and 1867, Methuen Haynes, North Ryde, NSW, 1985. 62 Entry on Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke (1843–1911) in William H. Wilde, Joy Hooton, and Barry Andrews, The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature, Second Edition, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1994, p. 233. Also entry by Sally O‟Neill in Douglas Pike (ed.), Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol. 4, 1851–1890, D–J, pp. 74–5. 63 Hunia Te Hakeke, chief of the Ngati Apa, Blainey (ed.), Dilke, Greater Britain, p. 56. 64 Three tribal groups were at odds over who had the right to sell a large block of land at Manawatu. 65 Maori rendering of the surname of Isaac Featherston, „an Edinburgh-trained doctor who became one of the most magnetic leaders New Zealand has known. A man of public spirit he was four times elected Superintendent of Wellington Province.‟ (Blainey (ed.), Dilke, Greater Britain, fn p. 55) The township of Featherston in the Wairarapa Valley north of Wellington was named after him. 279
„If Petatone hath need of me in the future, I shall be there. If he climbs the lofty tree, I will climb it with him. If he scales high cliffs, I will scale them too. If Petatone needed help, he shall have it; and where he leads, there will I follow. „Such are the words of Hunia.‟66
There are no published addresses that mark the close of Grey‟s second governorship. Nevertheless, his death in 1898 prompted the message from Maori quoted earlier: „Hori Kerei, Aue! Ka nui matou aroha ki a koe (George Grey, alas! Great was our love for thee.)‟67
Grey’s Maori collection
As Chapter Eight has shown, Froude enthused over the varied nature of Grey‟s collections in his account of his stay on Kawau Island, detailing the bibliographic treasures, the works of art, and objects that had come from the people over whom Grey had ruled. He concluded with the few sentences that form the focus of this chapter, describing the Maori taonga that had come into Sir George‟s possession:
… a cabinet of Maori weapons – not ordinary knives or lances, but axes of jade, as rare as they were precious. They had been heirlooms in the families of great chiefs; and had each killed no one could say how many warriors in battle. They were never parted with in life, and had been bequeathed by their various owners to Sir George, as the father of the Maori race.68
What Froude was describing are mere pounamu (nephrite jade greenstone clubs). Mere pounamu are the most prestigious of all Maori artefacts, and short striking weapons (patu) generally were precious heirlooms and battlefield trophies: „Being intimately associated with the god of war and the shedding of blood, they were highly tapu and were concealed when not in use; possession of such treasures was a weighty responsibility‟.69
66 Blainey (ed.), Dilke, Greater Britain, pp. 67–8. 67 Rutherford, Sir George Grey, p. 653. 68 Froude, Oceana, p. 265. 69 Ngahuia Te Awakotuku, „Maori: People and Culture‟, in D.C. Starzecka (ed.), Maori Art and Culture, British Museum Press, London, 1998, p. 38. 280
Ranginui Walker has noted that „taonga (artefacts) have their own mana (power) and mauri (life force) derived from the tohunga (expert) who fashioned them, the illustrious ancestors who used them, and the people who held them as tribal emblems‟.70 An account of Maori culture, The Old-Time Maori, written by a Maori woman, Makereti (also known as Margaret Thom, Maggie Papakura and Mrs Staples-Brown) in Oxford in 1930, also described the significance of these greenstone weapons for her people. Her words amplify their crucial position, only hinted at by Froude in the passage quoted above, within the complex symbolic structures that underpinned chiefly prestige in Maori, rangatiratanga:
The mere were very highly prized by our old people, and many of them were of great historical interest and were handed down from generation to generation as heirlooms … … When a tangata rangatira [chiefly person] was captured and was about to be slain, he often passed his own patu pounamu to his captor, asking that he might be killed with it. If his captor was also a tangata rangatira, the request would be granted, for a chief of high rank would do this. The Maori warrior did not mind dying, and loved to die in battle, especially if he was killed with a greenstone mere, a rangatira weapon.71
Portraits of eminent Maori by nineteenth- and early twentieth century artist Gottfried Lindaeur show the subjects holding such weapons in much the same way as a European king or queen might hold an orb and sceptre. For example, Lindauer‟s 1878 portrait of female chief Pare Watene, now in Auckland Art Gallery, shows her holding a mere as confirmation of her status as a chief.72 These weapons frequently had names that suggested the great mana that they embodied.
How many of the seven mere pounamu included in the Grey collection in Auckland were, as Froude wrote, „bequeathed by their various owners to Sir George, as the father of the Maori race‟?73 What were the
70 Ranginui Walker quoted in Amiria J. M. Henare, Museums, Anthropology and Imperial Exchange, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2005, p. 273. 71 Makereti, The Old-Time Maori, New Women‟s Press, Auckland, 1986, ps 323, 325. 72 Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, The Guide, Auckland Art Gallery, New Zealand, 2001, p. 59. 73 Froude, Oceana, p. 265. 281 circumstances by which these mere came into Grey‟s ownership? The comprehensive investigation of the Grey collection conducted by Wendy Harsant in 1988 outlined what was known of the provenance of all the mere pounamu, although one of them was more like a toki (a blade for a ceremonial axe). The others, according to Harsant
… are all superb examples of mere pounamu, the most prized and esteemed personal weapon (indeed, taonga) of all. Most appear to have been given to Grey as marks of friendship and esteem, or on state occasions. This greatly enhances their historic value.74
Harsant‟s survey revealed that, while several of the mere did come into Grey‟s possession in the way that Froude described, others were part of more indirect or complex scenarios. For example, „Te Whanaupani‟ belonged to a Maori servant of Grey‟s called Hone Ropiha (John Hobbs), and was bequeathed by him to Grey. Hone Ropiha had been Grey‟s orderly during the Northern War of 1845-6, and afterwards had been rewarded in 1853 with a land grant on the foreshore at Orakei. This had generated considerable criticism of Grey in the settler community for giving a Maori individual costly waterfront land, and ignoring „worthy citizens‟. This charge of partiality on the part of the governor in no way fazed Grey. An 1862 portrait by the English painter William Ewart, of Hone Ropiha, musket in hand, with the controversial Orakei foreshore in the background, hung in his drawing room at Kawau Island, and was included in the founding collection of the Auckland Art Gallery.75
Other mere in the collection fit Froude‟s description of heirlooms of great mana captured or used in battle, and passed on to Sir George as the most puissant character in New Zealand, and for reasons of „friendship and esteem‟, as Harsant has stated. „Kataore‟ had been captured during Te Rauparaha‟s raid on Akaroa in the 1820s, and named after the death of a chief called Kataore. It was given to Grey by
74 Harsant, „Maori Artefacts in Sir George Grey Collection‟, p. 20. 75 Ibid., p. 227, G1 13924; Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, The Guide, Auckland Art Gallery, New Zealand, 2001, p. 49. 282
Rewai Te Ahu of Ngati Awa.76 „Tuhawaiki‟ or „Paewhenua‟ belonged to Tuhawaiki of southern New Zealand, and was left by him to Grey77 or so said the catalogue of the collection when it came from Kawau to the Auckland Public Library in 1887. Since Tuhawaiki drowned in 1843, over a year before Grey‟s arrival in New Zealand, this attribution is patently incorrect. It is more likely, says Harsant, that the mere was given to Grey by the southern New Zealand parliamentarian, H. K. Taiaroa, whose father was a contemporary of Tuhawaiki‟s and may have possessed the mere after its owner‟s death.78
Other mere have even vaguer provenances or none at all. „Parewhenua‟, stated to be of unknown provenance, was given to Grey on 17 April 1851 at Mechanics‟ Bay „during the Maori attack on Auckland‟.79 Another mere, with no name, was given to Grey in 1863 by persons unrecorded, and had been accidentally burnt during the Waikato War in 1862.80
The mere pounamu were the only specific Maori artefacts singled out for mention by Froude in Oceana. Nevertheless, although the mere were probably considered by Grey and others to be among the most significant Maori treasures he owned, there were many other artefacts in his collection, of excellent provenance and mana, whose ownership also conferred great prestige. For example, Grey was given a highly significant Ngati Toa treasure, a precious greenstone ear-ring called „Kaitangata‟ („eater of men‟), by Te Rangihaeata, who was a nephew of Grey‟s old adversary, Te Rauparaha.81 The ceremonial gifting (tuku exchange) of this treasure was described in an account of Grey‟s life published in 1909. After Te Rangihaeata‟s wife had had the earring removed from her ear, it was given to the chief, who „then proceeded
76 Harsant, „Maori Artefacts in Sir George Grey Collection‟, p. 228. G2 13925. 77 Ibid., p. 231.G5 13928. 78 Ibid., p. 21. 79 Ibid., p. 230, G4 – 13927. 80 Ibid., p. 232, G6 13929. 81 Henare, Museums, Anthropology and Imperial Exchange, p. 147. 283 after the ancient Maori custom of „Hongi‟ to press the green stone to his nose, and pass it over his face in token of farewell, having finally parted with the precious heir-loom of the tribe as the most expressive mode of conveying to the Governor the assurance of his regard and esteem‟.82 Amiria Henare interprets this ceremonial gesture as Te Rangihaeata „mingling his hau or breath of life with that of the taonga through the ritual of hongi‟. The acts of Te Rangihaeata and his wife bound the lineages of the chief and the governor together and kept „alive the relationship of reciprocity established in the Treaty of Waitangi‟.83
Collecting in practice
There is an account dating from the time of Grey‟s first governorship of New Zealand that displays the complex situation that surrounded both the office of governor and the circumstances in which he collected Maori material, including artefacts and stories for his work on Polynesian mythology.84
In the summer of 1849–1850 Grey undertook an expedition to Taranaki with some of his officers, travelling overland by way of Rotorua, Taupo, and the west coast. On this journey Grey displayed considerable hardihood, placing personal comfort well below the achievement of his task of recording Maori culture. When heavy rain soaked all the bedding and provisions, „The Governor bore all our mishaps very stoically, appearing to care very little what became of that which had been provided for the inner man, but amused himself all day in his tent
82 J. Collier, Sir George Grey: Governor, High Commissioner and Premier, An Historical Biography, 1909, quoted in ibid. 83 Ibid., pp. 147–8. Henare notes that this earring forms part of the collection given by Grey to the British Museum, with the accession number of 1855.5–14.1. 84 G. S. Cooper, Journey to Taranaki – Journal of an Expedition Overland by Way of Rotorua, Taupo, and the West Coast Undertaken in the Summer of 1849–50 by His Excellency the Governor-in-Chief of New Zealand, Auckland, 1851. Cooper was Assistant Private Secretary to Grey and the group was accompanied by the Maori chief Te Heuheu. The book is bilingual, with English and Maori text on facing pages. 284 surrounded by natives, learning their songs, proverbs, ceremonies, &c, &c, in collecting which he takes great interest …‟.85
Nevertheless, cultural confusion and a possible loss of prestige by the Governor occurred when Grey‟s party encountered Maori people in the swamps near Manawaru (Mangapouri) on 15 December 1849:
Whilst we were in the midst of the swamps, the natives at the settlement having heard that the Governor was approaching, came out to meet us, bringing presents of small kits86 of wild cherries which we found very refreshing, the day being warm. They scrutinised the party, and at length asked, as they saw us coming up one by one, what had become of the Governor, as they could see neither cocked hat, feathers, sword, nor silver lace on any of the party; and when His Excellency was pointed out to them they seemed quite astonished and almost disappointed at beholding a man in a common shooting jacket, a Jim Crow hat, trowsers rather the worse for wear, and a pair of moustaches. “Is this the Governor?” they all exclaimed, “why we thought he certainly would have come to visit us attired in his full gubernatorial costume.”87
Two days later, on 17 December at Matamata pa, the Ngati Haua people indicated the esteem in which they held their treasures by withholding from the eyes (and the hands) of Grey‟s expedition their most cherished object: „the tomahawk of Te Waharoa, with which the bodies of their enemies used to be dissected preparatory to their being cooked, and which had been used to cut off the heads of their own chiefs after death for the purpose of preserving them.‟88
The narrator then recounted a situation that reveals the complexity of the relationship of Maori to their treasures, to each other, and to outsiders who were interested parties. Te Waharoa‟s tomahawk had been shown to Grey the previous day. One of the young men had on that occasion given it to him, but with misgivings: „it was very sacred in his eyes, having been used to decapitate his own father for the purpose of his head being dried, and he therefore almost feared its
85 Ibid., p. 36. 86 A „kit‟ is a kete, or woven bag. 87 Ibid., pp. 58–9. 88 Ibid., p. 80. 285 being taken away, as that might have the effect of destroying the tapu‟. Grey had declined to accept a gift so surrounded by ambiguity, probably sensing that the young man was struggling with his desire to honour an important guest, and his responsibility to keep this sacred heirloom safe and in the appropriate hands.
Grey‟s refusal to accept the treasure was not the end of the matter. Other Maori apparently considered that the group should complete the promised gift of the tomahawk. One of them „secretly gave the tomahawk to Symonds [Lieutenant Symonds, Staff Officer of Pensioners] in the evening, who hid it‟. Even now things were not resolved to all the Ngati Haua people‟s satisfaction. Secrecy was once more resorted to, possibly to save face. The tomahawk was retrieved from the place where Symonds had concealed it, „and we heard nothing more of it afterwards‟.89 Grey and his party were sufficiently sensitive to Maori cultural practice not to make an issue of its removal, and a situation in which cross-cultural conflict might have ensued was averted.
This episode of apparent contestation, action and reaction in relation to significant artefacts contrasts with another reported later on in the expedition. A brisk trade in artefacts some of them of precious material such as greenstone could result from a meeting of Maori and Europeans. There appears to have been no hindrance either to the selling or purchase of these items when on 2 January 1850 at Taupo, „The scene had something the resemblance of a fair, the natives bringing us for sale curiosities of all descriptions, taiahas, green-stone ornaments, ornamented kits, &c, &c, of which we purchased several‟.90
These two vignettes from the same expedition thus indicate two processes by which Maori artefacts could have been collected by Grey. Cherished objects could be presented to him by Maori to show honour
89 Ibid. 90 Ibid., p. 266. 286 to him; or trinkets of lower intrinsic value to the vendors could be marketed in a fairground atmosphere and purchased there by all who were interested. Despite Froude‟s claim that all the mere in Grey‟s collection were in the first category, the fact that their provenances are unclear in several instances would indicate that at least some of them may have been purchased in circumstances similar to those that prevailed in the „fairground‟ at Taupo.
Meanings of Grey’s collection
As Susan Pearce has said, „collections are also made of real objects to which intrinsic meaning is accredited, and operate in the political arena‟.91 The passage on the Maori treasures included in Froude‟s account of Grey‟s collection on Kawau Island raises some tantalising questions. To what extent did the Maori who gave these artefacts to Grey if indeed they did give them intend to confer the status of „the father of the Maori race‟ upon him? What was the true nature of Maori gifting, as understood by Maori? How does it relate to their attitude to their treasures?
Grey‟s departure from New Zealand in 1854, as described earlier, was marked by formal addresses of regret that he was leaving. As each chief delivered his salutation to the departing Governor, he presented him with a treasured heirloom, in most cases a piece of body ornament, such as an ear-drop (earring) or a heitiki.92 These were all named treasures of great value to the donor, and as such were a powerful expression of the esteem in which Grey was held by Maori at that time. None of the presents named included greenstone mere. As has been discussed, Grey was referred to as „father‟ at that time, and when he returned to New Zealand in 1861. However, other colonial governors (such as Gore-Browne) and administrators were also
91 Pearce, On Collecting, p. 279. 92 These items were among the Maori material presented by Grey to the British Museum. 287 referred to as „father‟ as well. Froude‟s words imply an exclusivity that did not exist. The gift of a Maori treasure was one thing; so were flattering words. It is difficult, if not impossible, to establish an intrinsic connection between these two forms of Maori courtesy and political power on the European model. The presentation of Maori treasures in a number of different situations seems to have involved a diverse range of motives on the part of the donors, and an equally diverse range of recipients.93
Other Europeans in nineteenth-century New Zealand, for example magistrate F. E. Maning, „the Pakeha Maori‟,94 were also given Maori treasures. What did they understand this act to mean? Maning was given the mere of the rangatira of the village of which he was „the pakeha‟. In the early days of European settlement of New Zealand Maori villages and their chiefs deemed it a great honour to secure a Pakeha (European) to live among them, as a fruitful source of exchange, and a means of interpreting the strange new culture whose impact upon traditional Maori society was growing steadily. Before the incident of the presentation of the mere, Maning was summoned to the old chief‟s deathbed, and saluted on his way there with the words „Here comes the pakeha! his pakeha! make way for the pakeha! kill those dogs that are barking at the pakeha!‟ and so on. He found the dying man formally arrayed with spear, tomahawk and musket by his side and his mere hanging over him. The chief told his people to „Listen to the words of my pakeha; he will unfold the designs of his tribe‟, then said „I give my mere to my pakeha‟. Several days after the old chief had died Maning received the deputation „to deliver up my old friend‟s mere. It was a weapon of great mana and was delivered with some little ceremony.‟ The intention of Maning‟s rangatira in this case was to make sure that his tribe had access to information from a source he saw as more powerful than any within the tribe itself. The rangatira believed, as did his people, „that the Europeans designed sooner or
93 Oliver, Maori Mementoes, p. 15. 94 The „Pakeha Maori‟ is Maning‟s fictional alter ego. 288 later to exterminate them and take the country‟. Maning said he had been „cross-questioned‟ by him „about a thousand times; and the only way I could find to ease his mind was to tell him that if I ever heard any such proposal I would let him know, protesting at the same time that no such intention existed.‟95 By presenting his mere to Maning the chief had, in effect, passed to him the responsibility for the safety of the tribe.
Gratitude for past favours also led to the presentation of Maori treasures. Captain Gilbert Mair had won the right to be considered a rangatira himself in the eyes of the Ngati Whakaue people, when he fought alongside them against the rebel chief Te Kooti, helping them to save Ohinemutu from destruction in 1870. Along with his rangatira status were bestowed gifts of many treasures, helping Mair to develop a large private collection that he later sold to the Auckland Museum in 1891. Mair was clearly regarded by the Ngati Whakaue as a Pakeha Maori like Maning; when he died in 1923 he was buried near the rest of the tribe next to their marae.96
One incident illustrates the fact that at least some Maori believed that mere were only passed on to a second person conditionally, and could be recovered if the situation changed and that person had not honoured the implied trust that came with the gift. On 22 February 1872 Wiremu Kingi Te Rangitake, the former antagonist of the British forces at Taranaki, walked into New Plymouth. It was the tenth anniversary of the declaration of martial law in Taranaki. In a gesture seen by some historians as one of submission to British authority, Te Rangitake walked into the town to meet Native Minister Donald McLean. He wanted peace and friendship with the white men, but had only one request. He was eager to secure the return of „Otokauri‟, a greenstone mere that had come down from his ancestors, and had been presented at some time to either Sir George Grey or to a
95 F. E. Maning, Old New Zealand: A Tale of the Good Old Times and a History of the War in the North Told by an Old Chief of the Ngapuhi Tribe, first published 1887, this edition Golden Press, Auckland, 1973, pp. 219–227. 96 Paul Tapsell, Pukaki: A Comet Returns, Reed Books, Auckland, 2000, p. 80. 289 missionary, Octavius Hadfield.97 There is no indication that the mere was ever returned to Te Rangitake (it does not figure among those presented by Grey to Auckland, and it may have been given elsewhere, or indeed to Hadfield). But this small incident is a telling one when considering the meaning of the gift of a mere, or any other Maori treasure. Its restitution could be requested if the implicit bargain that came with the gift was not honoured.
Wendy Harsant mentions „state occasions‟ as possible times when Grey may have been given mere.98 Certainly other mere figured in presentations to honour imperial dignitaries, sometimes to the height of the British throne. In 1901 the future King George V and Queen Mary (at that time the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall and York) visited New Zealand as part of the royal tour for the Duke to open the first parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia in May. By mid-June the royal couple had reached New Zealand, and had gone to the Rotorua racecourse where 4000 Maori had gathered to meet them. The visitors were garbed in cloaks and huia feathers placed in their hair, and each tribe danced before them in turn. Then came the gifts, duly recorded in his diary by the future monarch:
As each dance was finished the tribe presented us with beautiful presents, which were piled up in a heap in front of us, they consisted of greenstone Meres, whalebone Meres, whalebone paddles, carved sticks, feather cloaks innumerable, mats & other cloaks, also reed kilts.99
This lavish outpouring of Maori artefacts to honour the royal guests, though, provoked a debate over the propriety of exporting Maori treasures. Conal McCarthy has described observers at the event as „astonished‟ that such objects should be given away. A year later James Carroll, the Native Minister in the Seddon Government, announced legislation to preserve Maori works of art, the Maori
97 Ann Parsonson, „Te Rangitake, Wiremu Kingi‟, in People of Many Peaks, p. 266. 98 Harsant, „Maori Artefacts in Sir George Grey Collection‟, p. 20. 99 D. C. Starzecka, „The Maori Collections in the British Museum‟, in Starzecka (ed) Maori Art and Culture, p. 157. Extract from Diary of King George V, quoted by the gracious permission of Her Majesty the Queen (Royal Archives). 290
Antiquities Act, which passed into law in 1902 with substantial support from Pakeha New Zealanders as well as Maori.100
Treasures could also be used by Maori to initiate negotiations with a warring party. Wiremu Tamihana, the „kingmaker‟ at the time of the Land Wars, sent his chiefly greenstone mere to General Duncan Cameron as a token of good faith and to open peace negotiations instead of formally surrendering after the battle of Rangiriri in November 1863. The disdainful treatment which this gesture received has lived long in Maori resentment of Pakeha insensitivity to their cultural mores. The failure to negotiate with Tamihana one of the most admirable characters in New Zealand history is seen as a major failure by Grey, who did not take this opportunity to reach a negotiated settlement in the murderous and divisive Land Wars.101 Charles Dilke, who decades later in his book, The British Empire (1899), lauded Grey‟s „democratic‟ nature, nevertheless felt keenly the insults that Tamihana had endured at the hands of officials acting under the Governor‟s ultimate command:
… the record of our dealings with the Queen‟s native subjects in New Zealand has been almost free from stain, but if we have not committed crimes, we have certainly not failed to blunder: our treatment of William Thompson [Wiremu Tamihana] was at the best a grave mistake. If ever there lived a patriot, he was one, and through him we might have ruled in peace the Maori race. Instead of receiving the simplest courtesy … he underwent fresh insults each time that he entered an English town, or met a white magistrate or subaltern, and he died, while I was in the colonies – according to Pakeha physicians, of liver-complaint; according to the Maories, of a broken heart.102
100 Conal McCarthy, „Before „Te Maori‟: A Revolution Deconstructed‟, Simon J. Knell, Suzanne MacLeod and Sheila Watson, Museum Revolutions: How Museums Change and are Changed, Routledge, London and New York, 2007, pp. 123–4. 101 „Te Waharoa, Wiremu Tamihana Tarapipipipi, ?1866, entry by Evelyn Stokes in People of Many Peaks, pp. 290–5; L. S. Rickard, Tamihana the Kingmaker; A. H. and A. W. Reed, Wellington, 1963, pp. 154–5. Evelyn Stokes‟s entry in People of Many Peaks quotes missionary Richard Taylor as saying of Wiremu Tamihana (William Thompson) at his death in 1866 that „There is something very sad in the death of this patriotic chief; a man of clear, straightforward views; sad that a man, who possessed such an influence for good, should thus have been ignored by the Government, when, by his aid, had he been admitted to our councils, a permanent good feeling might have been established between the two races.‟(p. 295) 102 Dilke, Greater Britain, Vol. I, Macmillan, London, 1869, pp. 395–6. 291
Numerous other colonial administrators were also presented with mere and other treasures, which then found their way into museums by donation or sale. Some of these treasures meant far more to Maori people than simply presenting a gift to a respected official might imply. Meanings did not only inhere in the person to whom the gift was given but, most significantly, in the treasures themselves. To make a seamless connection between the presentation of mere to Sir George Grey and his status as „the father of the Maori race‟, as Froude did in the passage on Grey‟s Maori treasures in Oceana, is to ignore whole layers of customary meanings and traditional behaviour. These meanings were sloughed off, and others took their place as these objects were donated to museums. Here their presence conferred prestige on the (generally European) donor; the original meanings of Maori treasures were submerged, making them casualties of the colonial situation.
Grey in twenty-first century Auckland
If Grey‟s aim in bestowing his extensive collections upon Auckland was to achieve posthumous recognition and even fame beyond his lifetime, it would seem to have succeeded. The Auckland of the twenty-first century bears abundant evidence of his life and works. His statue adorns the highest point of Auckland‟s Albert Park, located in the central business district and across the road from the University of Auckland. Grey stands in frock-coated heroic pose, one hand extended over Auckland, the other holding a scroll either a reference to his literary interests and donated collection, or his charter to rule as Governor, or to both. Behind him is a large representation of a Maori sculpture, and a Maori inscription on the plinth complements those in English.103 Mark Stocker has examined the historical background to the commissioning of the memorial statue, executed by sculptor Francis
103 Personal visits by the author to Grey‟s statue in Albert Park, Auckland, November 1999 and 2001.
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John Williamson between 1900 and 1904, its installation at the intersection of Grey‟s Avenue and Queen Street, Auckland, and its subsequent relocation to its current home in Albert Park in 1922. It was first defaced by university students as a prank in 1952, and far more seriously damaged on 6 February 1987, Waitangi Day, when it was decapitated and the head held to ransom by a Maori activist group, in protest at perceived violations of the Treaty of Waitangi. The head, regarded by some as slightly over-sized, was replaced by sculptor Roderick Burgess. Later the statue was subjected to other acts of vandalism, including amputation of the hands (it was missing a hand on at least one of the occasions the author visited it). The carving on the „Maori post‟ on which Grey is depicted as leaning has also been subjected to extensive critiquing. Stocker sums up the fate of Sir George Grey‟s statue:
Dismissed by art historians for its stiffness and staidness, denounced by radical Maori for its connotations of murder, land theft and white supremacy and ignored by a largely uninformed public, the George Grey statue has been harshly treated by history.104
Street and place names also carry Grey‟s memory: Grey‟s Avenue in Auckland is named after the former Governor and Premier. Further afield is Greymouth in the South Island, and Greytown in the Wairarapa in the North Island. His former home, Mansion House on Kawau Island, is now an historic site that can be visited by fast catamaran.
The collection Grey bestowed upon the city now forms a substantial part of those of three collecting and exhibiting institutions: the Auckland City Library, the Auckland War Memorial Museum and the Auckland Art Gallery. Each institution publicly and prominently acknowledges Grey‟s contribution the Art Gallery displays a sign naming Grey, along with
104 Mark Stocker, „‟Director of the Canoe‟: The Auckland Statue of Sir George Grey, in David R. Marshall (ed.), Europe and Australia: Melbourne Art Journal 11–12, 2009, pp. 50–63. See also http://www.publicartaroundtheworld.com/Sir_George_Grey_Statue.html
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James Tannock Mackelvie, as a founding benefactor. The Auckland City Library, whose Special Collections area houses the extensive Grey Correspondence and book collection, displays one remaining packing case used to transport his books to Auckland from Kawau Island. The Auckland War Memorial Museum, in its „City‟ exhibit on Auckland, has a showcase devoted to Grey, containing his sculpted head from the former Shortland Street Post Office, his phrenological chart, top hat, phonograph recording (and photo of the recording taking place), medals awarded to him, a Maori mere pounamu and a Maori carving, and a photo of his Maori collection displayed in the drawing room of Mansion House on Kawau Island. Grey has become a museum exhibit himself, along with the many Maori treasures he donated to the museum. A comparison of the text of the showcase display, opened in 2000–2001, with that on Grey‟s statue in Albert Park, erected just under a hundred years earlier, demonstrates the shift in perceptions of Grey that have occurred over a century. The statue‟s plinth carries this encomium:
Soldier, statesman, lover of his fellow men whose wisdom, eloquence and strong personality gave to the people of this colony a large measure of the liberties they now possess.105
The showcase text, which provides probably the best conclusion possible to the examination of Grey and Froude‟s tributary statements, reads:
George Grey, „the great proconsul‟, was one of the outstanding figures of the 19th century British Empire. As Governor of New Zealand (1845–53 and 1861–8), Superintendent of Auckland (1875–6), Premier of New Zealand (1877–9), and famous private citizen lurking in the wings in his retreat on Kawau Island, he spent more time in and around Auckland than anywhere else. An autocratic democrat, friend and deadly enemy of the Maori, philanthropist and imperialist, Grey remains an enigmatic colossus in the history of Auckland, New Zealand and the British Empire.106
105 Transcribed on visits to Grey statue in Albert Park, Auckland, November 1999 and 2001. 106 Showcase text transcribed by author during visit to Auckland War Memorial Museum, November 2001. 294
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Conclusion
Many accounts by travelling writers who visited Australia and New Zealand in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century have been analysed in this thesis for their capacity to demonstrate the success of the civilising mission of British imperialism as represented by colonial museums and collections. This analysis has followed two major trajectories that intersect at various points, particularly in relation to individuals such as Sir Joseph Banks and Sir George Grey.
The first involves discussions of a museum object and a museum collection – each linked to an account by a travelling writer – that investigates them as what Nicholas Thomas has called ‘entangled objects’.1 These objects – an Aboriginal shield and a collection of Maori mere pounamu – were collected in the course of cross-cultural encounters that were often characterised by mutual misunderstandings. These misunderstandings have been perpetuated in accounts narrated by representatives of the colonising power, and reinforced when the objects entered museum displays, where they were interpreted according to the epistemologies of the dominant culture.
The objects, and the accounts of their collection, also shed lustre on the reputation of the collector or donor, rather than on the creators and former owners of the objects and the cultures from which they arose. Sir Joseph Banks’s account of the collection of an Aboriginal shield from the beach at Botany Bay in April 1770, discussed in Chapter One, and James Anthony Froude’s account of Sir George Grey’s collection of Maori mere pounamu, discussed in Chapters Eight and Nine, served to enhance the reputation of these individuals: one, as an explorer of a new land that would later be incorporated within the British Empire;
1 Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1991.
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and the other as a benevolent imperial administrator who had won the hearts and minds of a subjugated population. Evidence from historical, anthropological and museological sources demonstrates that the accounts written by Banks and Froude have occluded the complexities of the cross-cultural situations in which these objects were collected, instead imposing narratives that have acted to validate imperial goals. These narratives have begun to be questioned over the past few decades, but aspects of the previous interpretation remain.
The second trajectory involves an examination of the Enlightenment ideal of ‘improvement’, as it was applied to the natural environments of new possessions of the British Empire in Australia and New Zealand from 1788 onwards. Commencing with a discussion of Sir Joseph Banks’s role in the development of the British Museum, and later his position as unofficial Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, the thesis has moved to the establishment of museum institutions in the Australasian colonies –both natural science museums and botanic gardens containing living collections, with an active role in propagating and exchanging plants for the benefit of the wider Empire.
As colonial societies grew and became increasingly wealthy, other museum institutions such as art galleries were established for the improvement of their citizens, whose leisure hours could thus be filled with ‘rational amusement’, strolling in botanic gardens and studying the classification of plants in fine weather, and developing an aesthetic sense by studying works of art in galleries. A number of travelling writers also came into colonial museums, with their own views of what museums should be, and also with their particular views of empire. Their accounts show that they had high expectations of their visits to colonial museums and art galleries, and their verdicts – some generous, some harsh – have provided perspectives on how successful or otherwise colonial societies had been in establishing and maintaining these imperial institutions. A discussion of colonial museums by travelling writers often led into an assessment of the cultural quality of the entire colonial society. This could be flattering, but could
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also be dismissive of the capacity of these imperial offshoots ever to attain the sophistication and intellectual depth of the parent culture. Only a few writers – notably Mark Twain – pondered the fate of the Indigenous people of Australasia as reflected in monuments and objects in museums. His savagely ironic account of Aboriginal knives made from discarded glass bottles, and his description of Maori carving reveals an appreciation of Indigenous skill that is not paralleled in most other accounts. Natural wonders such as the moa skeletons in Canterbury Museum generally evoked more enthusiastic responses from travelling writers, much as dinosaur skeletons still attract attention and comment from museum audiences today.
Many visiting writers commended the reservation of public space in colonial towns and cities for botanic gardens, recognising that governing bodies in the colonies were attempting to create superior urban amenities for their citizens to those that existed in older townscapes. There were, however, questions that were asked about botanic gardens by colonists and visiting writers alike. Were they to be scientific, mostly concerned with demonstrating classificatory systems and the geographic origins and economic uses of plants, or were they to be attractively landscaped spaces where people could stroll along shady walks adorned with exotic flowers that recalled the gardens of their northern hemisphere homelands? The thesis has shown that scientific goals – and their imperial outcomes such as economic botany – were not the only motivations for increasingly independent colonists to create institutions such as botanic gardens. In some cities, Melbourne in particular, the desire of citizens for attractive recreational spaces could subvert scientific goals. This outcome complicates any monolithic interpretation of botanic gardens as institutions that existed principally to fulfill an imperial mission.
The verdicts of travelling writers on particular botanic gardens have shed light on conflicting perceptions of the role of botanic gardens as a whole. One writer, Anthony Trollope, expressed his views of Australian botanic gardens in a number
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of ways, praising those in Adelaide and Sydney, condemning the scientific Melbourne Botanic Gardens under the directorship of Ferdinand von Mueller with his comparison to the tedium of a sermon, and even utilising his favourite, the Sydney Botanic Gardens, in his novels with Australian settings. Other writers criticised some botanic gardens for not being scientific enough.
All writers who commented on colonial botanic gardens praised them as examples of ‘improvement’, commending the transformation of the natural environment – frequently described, in the parlance of the times, as ‘wilderness’ – into ordered spaces for recreation and education. Some writers, however, demonstrated less tolerance than others, either of the relative immaturity of gardens that had only been established for several decades, or of the condition of their plants. While some writers conceded that botanic gardens’ directors struggled with the vagaries of the antipodean climate, others were less generous in their judgments.
Of the two trajectories outlined here, it is the first, in which single travel accounts have an object and a collection as their subjects, that demonstrates most explicitly the connections between travel writers, museums and empire, and the validation of colonisation and empire through their interpretations. It is clear from any discussion that acknowledges Indigenous perspectives, such as the one provided in Chapter Nine, that the accounts by Banks and Froude provide only partial and one-sided explanations of the events and circumstances that led to these objects becoming incorporated in museum collections. A fuller understanding that incorporates these perspectives is necessary before the misunderstandings of the past can be said to be truly laid to rest.
The second trajectory, broadly described as the effect of Enlightenment-based ‘improvement’ as manifested in the museum institutions visited by travelling writers in the nineteenth century, is less amenable to such a determination. The views of travelling writers were complicated by their attitudes to empire, to museums and botanic gardens, and by their personal responses to colonial
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society. While most of them agreed that ‘improvement’ had taken place, their verdicts vary significantly as to how pervasive this had been, particularly in the wider social context.
Reading the accounts of travelling writers as de facto qualitative visitor surveys of colonial museums is instructive and illuminating, and does allow some judgments to be made as to the relative success of these institutions. In the view of most writers, colonial museums had made a good start, but some considered that there was some way to go before many of these instruments of empire could be ranked as equal with their counterparts in the home country.
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Appendix I
Flora Australiensis and botanical liaison with Kew
Kew‟s domination of the study of the flora of the British Empire could at times create difficult situations between Kew and the botanic gardens in the Australian colonies in particular. Mueller, fearing a return to the northern hemisphere would see him fall victim to the family fate of contracting tuberculosis, had refused to travel to Kew to compile the Flora Australiensis. The original specimen from which the identification of a species is made – known as the type specimen – is the primary taxonomic reference for a plant, and must be preserved in a herbarium so that botanists can refer to it to confirm the identification of a species. For Mueller to carry out this work it was imperative that he consult the type specimens of the Australian flora held in the Herbarium at Kew. He discovered, to his great chagrin, that George Bentham had been appointed as author of this definitive work on the Australian flora that Mueller had made his life‟s study, with Mueller in the role of assistant, sending information from the Australian colonies to Kew.
Mueller‟s refusal meant that he was denied the honour of describing the flora of his adopted homeland.1 His bitterness at this circumstance rankled for years, provoking bitter complaints to botanical colleagues and influential administrators such as Sir William Thiselton-Dyer, Director of Kew Gardens, to whom he wrote in May 1878, accusing Kew of „depriving me of the authorship of the Australian flora‟:
Bentham‟s work is everywhere quoted as his sole and own; I have myself done so, simply the diagnoses are written by him; but the real main work, in travels, prior publications & accumulating and examining the vast material the main work of my best years of life done by me since 1847 uninterrupted is far greater than Benthams. Now, why was that not left for me? Would it not have been far more just to leave me that work,
1 J. M. Powell, „Melbourne and Kew: Botanic Gardens Controversies in the 1870‟s‟, three-part series, Landscape Australia, 1979; Edward Kynaston, A Man on Edge: A Life of Baron Sir Ferdinand von Mueller, Allen Lane, Ringwood, 1981, pp. 152–4. 300
when Kew was teaming [sic] with unexamined treasures from tropical Africa & other parts of the Globe. Or why did the venerable Bentham not concentrate his great talent on the “genera”, which by this time would then have been ready.2
The Australian Government has maintained a Botanical Liaison Officer at Kew Gardens since 1937, a situation that exists because of the collection of specimens of the Australian flora initiated by Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander in 1770, and continued by collectors sent out to British colonies around the world by Banks and subsequent Directors of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. A scheme for appointing Botanical Liaison Officers from British colonies to Kew had been pioneered by Sir Joseph Hooker in 1882, and representatives from India and the African colonies had worked there successfully on research into their respective flora into the early decades of the twentieth century. In the course of negotiations with the Commonwealth of Australia over the Botanical Liaison Officer‟s appointment during the early 1930s, the Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, Sir Arthur Hill, set out the background to and rationale for the scheme, for which he was a great enthusiast:
Much good work in the field of Systematic Botany has been carried out in Australia by Australian botanists and a great deal by visiting foreign botanists from Germany, Denmark, Sweden and America. The Australian-trained botanists, however, owing to their comparative isolation from home, are not fully equipped for their task. Moreover at Kew and the British Museum we have the bulk of the type specimens of the Australian plants on which the Flora of Australia has been written.
I venture to think it is of the utmost importance to establish a closer co-operation with Kew and that a liaison officer should be appointed – a young Australian Botanist – who could be sent to work at Kew on the Australian Flora for a period of, say, two years … At the end of the period of home service, such a liaison officer would return to Australia with a wider outlook and would be able to build up the study of Systematic Botany in Australia on broad and sound lines.3
2 Ferdinand von Mueller to William Thiselton-Dyer, 12 May 1878, RBG Kew, Kew correspondence, Australia, Mueller, 1871–81, ff. 211–14, in R. W. Home, A. M. Lucas, Sara Maroske, D. M. Sinkora, and J. H. Voigt, Regardfully Yours: Selected Correspondence of Ferdinand von Mueller, Vol. III, 1876–1896, Peter Lang, Bern, 2006, p. 122.
3 „Appointment of Liaison Officer Royal Botanical Gardens Kew England‟, 1935–1936, Series A9778, Control Symbol B30/1/153 Part I, National Archives of Australia. 301
Encouraged by Sir David Rivett, head of the Commonwealth Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (forerunner to the CSIRO), the first Botanical Liaison Officer, C. A. Gardner, Government Botanist of Western Australia, was appointed to the position in late 1936. He has been followed ever since by a succession of other botanists from Australia appointed to Kew to continue this work. Kew‟s control over the flora of at least one of Britain‟s former colonial possessions has thus far outlasted the British Empire, in which botany and its economic applications played such a significant role.
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Appendix II
John Caldigate and Sydney Botanic Gardens
The eponymous hero of Trollope’s novel, John Caldigate, while on board ship on his way from Cambridgeshire to the goldfields of New South Wales, encounters an attractive and ladylike but seemingly indigent fellow passenger, ‘Mrs Smith’, and forms a romantic attachment to her, against the advice of other passengers and his own better judgement. Hoping to return to England and marry a beautiful young neighbour, Hester Bolton, Caldigate nonetheless is seduced into a vague promise of marriage to Mrs Smith during their last night on board ship. He returns to Sydney from the diggings at ‘Ahalala’, having achieved some success there, and discovers that Mrs Smith has transformed into ‘Mademoiselle Cettini’, pictured in placards prominently displayed on hoardings as ‘a wonderful female, without much clothes, which was supposed to represent some tragic figure in a tableau. There was the woman whom he was to make his wife.’1
Although Caldigate is ‘disgusted’ at this idea, and for a time delays contacting his former lover, he finally visits her at her lodgings ‘overlooking the public park’ in Sydney, where she flings herself into his arms. When he tries to probe the background to her transformation into what was clearly the nineteenth-century equivalent of a burlesque dancer, Mademoiselle Cettini deflects him by inviting him to ‘Come and take a walk in the gardens?’ Trollope gives the Sydney Botanic Gardens some credit, along with Mademoiselle Cettini’s practised wiles, for what ensued: ‘He did go, and did tell her about the gold, and before he had been with her an hour, sitting about on the benches of that loveliest of all places, the public
1 Anthony Trollope, John Caldigate, first published 1879, this edition The Zodiac Press, London, 1972, p. 92; Richard Mullen, Anthony Trollope: A Victorian in His World, Duckworth, London, 1990, p. 542. 303
gardens at Sydney, he was almost happy with her.’2 After that tryst in the Sydney Botanic Gardens Caldigate entered into what we would now describe as a de facto marital relationship with Mrs Smith/Mademoiselle Cettini that would later to see him charged with bigamy after his return to England and his marriage to Hester Bolton.
2 Trollope, John Caldigate, p. 93. 304
Appendix III
Recognising the Indigenous presence in the Royal Botanic Gardens Sydney
The Royal Botanic Gardens and Domain Trust has recently used remarkably similar words to those employed by J. H. Maiden in 1903 to describe the transformation of the natural environment of Sydney Cove and its surroundings to create the Sydney Botanic Gardens. Maiden had described how ‘the greater portion of what is now the Botanic Gardens was originally a barren, rocky, sandy place, such as may be seen in the scores of gulfs and gullies in other parts of Port Jackson today’. He had taken great pride in the fact that it was ‘the hand of man that has converted this barren waste into smiling gardens, and has produced marvellous landscape effects’.1 Maiden’s account of the place, however, contained no reference to its original people, unlike his latter-day counterparts in the management of the Gardens. In the introduction on its website to the Indigenous garden, Cadi Jam Ora: First Encounters, the Trust confronts the seeming absence of an Aboriginal past in the area now occupied by the Gardens:
To the casual visitor the landscape of the Royal Botanic Gardens appears controlled, groomed, contrived, and distinctly European in origin. There is little visible evidence that this was once a wild landscape, or that dramatic remodelling and transformations occurred here to create this high-Gardenesque setting. Nor is there any evidence that another culture once thrived here until its displacement by British colonists in 1788.2
The Trust, in a spirit of active reconciliation with Indigenous people, addressed this deficiency with the creation of Cadi Jam Ora, the first stage of which opened
1 J. H. Maiden, A Guide to the Botanic Gardens, Sydney, NSW Government Printer, Sydney, 1903, pp. 8–9. 2 Botanic Gardens Trust, ‘The Cadi Jam Ora: First Encounters Garden Display’, viewed 21 February 2010, http://www.rbgsyd.nsw.gov.au/welcome_to_bgt/royal_botanic_gardens/garden_features/Indigeno us 305
in time for the Sydney Olympic Games in 2000.3 The interpretive sign that introduces this special place within the Gardens explains that ‘Cadi’ was the country of the Cadigal people of the coastal area of Sydney; ‘Cadi Jam Ora’ means ‘I am in Cadi land’. The arrival of the First Fleet in January 1788 ‘was to change the Cadigal’s life forever’. Two-thirds of the Cadigal had died of smallpox before the year was out, ‘while those that remained were driven inland, far away from their ancestral land, or stayed and were forced to interact with a foreign culture’. The sign’s message concludes with a statement in bold type that reasserts the Cadigal presence in the land now occupied by the Royal Botanic Gardens: ‘The traditional owners of the land may no longer be living here, but its importance to Aboriginal people today is as powerful as ever.’4
The Cadi Jam Ora: First Encounters garden within the Royal Botanic Gardens Sydney features panel displays that snake through the garden. They tell the story of Indigenous contact with the Europeans from the time the latter arrived here in January 1788, up to the first decade of the twenty-first century; and the movement towards active reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. [See Illustration 21: Beginning of the Cadi Jam Ora: First Encounters garden within the Royal Botanic Gardens Sydney.]
Plants that grew naturally in this location in 1788 and acted as food sources for the Cadigal people who lived here are located in close proximity to plants that were brought here on the First Fleet for food crops for the convict settlement, and
3 ‘The objectives of Cadi Jam Ora are: To create an experience of what happened here, on this very spot, at the time of European settlement/invasion; to convey Aboriginal people’s prior use and significance of this site and their understanding of plants; to represent the differing environmental perspectives of Aboriginal and European cultures; to work closely with the local Aboriginal community to foster Reconciliation and show that Sydney has a continuing Aboriginal culture.’ RBGS First Encounters Brief and Design Documentation, AMBS, quoted in Janelle Hatherly, ‘Myths About Visitors to Botanic Gardens’, paper delivered to the Evaluation and Visitor Research Special Interest Group of Museums Australia, 2002, viewed 26 March 2010, archive.amol.org.au/evrsig/pdf/MA2002hatherley.pdf 4 ‘Who are the Cadigal?’ interpretive sign for Cadi Jam Ora garden in Royal Botanic Gardens Sydney, sighted and photographed on 9 March 2010. 306
the differing use of plant species and attitudes to the environment of both groups are interpreted in signage among the plants.5
Cadi Jam Ora functions as a powerful symbolic place for the Indigenous people of the Sydney region, and is often used by them as a meeting place, and even for weddings in the Indigenous community. It was created by a process of extensive consultation with Indigenous people, and with the assistance of an Aboriginal Education Officer, John Lennis, who continues to develop the garden display and works on public programs to interpret the Indigenous presence in the Royal Botanic Gardens Sydney and beyond. According to Janelle Hatherly, the Gardens’ Community Education Manager, ‘Despite its Eurocentricity and highly contrived landscape RBGS has meaning for the Indigenous community and they feel a sense of ownership towards it’.6 The creation of this special space within the Royal Botanic Gardens Sydney in effect hands back to the Indigenous people of Sydney the place where their ancestors first witnessed the event that would change the fate of their people forever. It is a site of memory, but also a site of reconciliation within a botanic garden, 220 years afterwards.
5 Melinda Hinkson, ‘Exploring ‘Aboriginal’ Sites in Sydney: A Shifting Politics of Place?’, Aboriginal History, Australian National University, Canberra, 2002, p. 67. 6 Hatherly, ‘Myths About Visitors to Botanic Gardens’. 307
Appendix IV
Preface to Sir George Grey, Polynesian Mythology and Traditional History of the Maori as Furnished by Their Priests and Chiefs, first published 1854, John Murray, London, 1855.
Towards the close of the year 1845 I was suddenly and unexpectedly required by the British Government to administer the affairs of New Zealand, and shortly afterwards received the appointment of Governor-in-chief of those Islands.
When I arrived in them, I found Her Majesty’s native subjects engaged in hostilities with the Queen’s troops, against whom they had up to that time contended with considerable success; so much discontent also prevailed generally amongst the native population, that where disturbances had not yet taken place, there was too much reason to apprehend they would soon break out, as they shortly afterwards did, in several parts of the Islands.
I soon perceived that I could neither successfully govern, nor hope to conciliate, a numerous and turbulent people, with whose language, manners, customs, religion, and modes of thought I was quite unacquainted. In order to redress their grievances, and apply remedies which would neither wound their feelings nor militate against their prejudices, it was necessary that I should be able thoroughly to understand their complaints; and to win their confidence and regard it was also requisite that I should be able at all times and in all places patiently to listen to the tales of their wrongs and sufferings, and, even if I could not assist them, to give them a kind reply, couched in such terms as should leave no doubt on their minds that I clearly understood and felt for them, and was really well disposed towards them.
Although furnished with some very able interpreters, who gave me assistance of the most friendly nature, I soon found that even with their aid I could still only very imperfectly perform my duties. I could not at all times and in all places have an interpreter by my side; and thence often when waylaid by some suitor, who 308
had perhaps travelled two or three hundred miles to lay before me the tale of his or her grievances, I was compelled to pass on without listening, and to witness with pain an expression of sorrow and keenly disappointed hope cloud over features which the moment before were bright with gladness, that the opportunity so anxiously looked for had been at length secured.
Again, I found that any tale of sorrow or suffering, passing through the medium of an interpreter, fell much more coldly on my ear than what it would have done had the person interested addressed the tale direct to myself; and in like manner an answer delivered through the intervention of a third person appeared to leave a very different impression upon the suitor from what it would have had coming direct from the lips of the Governor of the country. Moreover, this mode of communication through a third person was so cumbrous and slow that, in order to compensate for the loss of time thus occasioned, it became necessary for the interpreters to compress the substance of the representations made to me, as also of my own replies, into the fewest words possible; and, as this had in each instance to be done hurriedly and at the moment, there was reason to fear that much that was material to enable me fully to understand the question brought before me, or the suitor to comprehend my reply, might be unintentionally omitted. Lastly, I had on several occasions reasons to believe that a native hesitated to state facts or to express feelings and wishes to an interpreter, which he would most gladly have done to the Governor, could he have addressed him direct.
These reasons, and others of equal force, made me feel it to be my duty to make myself acquainted, with the least possible delay, with the language of the Maoris, as also with their manners, customs, and prejudices. But I soon found that this was a far more difficult matter than I had at first supposed. The language of the Maoris is a very difficult one to understand thoroughly: there was then no dictionary of it published (unless a vocabulary can be so called); there were no books published in the language which would enable me to study its
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construction; it varied altogether in form from any of the ancient or modern languages which I knew; and my thoughts and time were so occupied with the cares of the government of a country then pressed upon by many difficulties; and with a formidable rebellion raging in it, that I could find but very few hours to devote to the acquisition of an unwritten and difficult language. I, however, did my best, and cheerfully devoted all my spare moments to a task, the accomplishment of which was necessary to enable me to perform properly every duty to my country and to the people I was appointed to govern.
Soon, however, a new and quite unexpected difficulty presented itself. On the side of the rebel party were engaged, either openly or covertly, some of the oldest, least civilized, and most influential chiefs in the Islands. With them I had, either personally or by written communications, to discuss questions which involved peace or war, and on which the whole future of the Islands and of the native race depended, so that it was in the highest degree essential that I should fully and entirely comprehend their thoughts and intentions, and that they should not in any way misunderstand the nature of the engagements into which I entered with them.
To my surprise, however, I found that these chiefs, either in their speeches to me or in their letters, frequently quoted, in explanation of their views and intentions, fragments of ancient poems or proverbs, or made allusions which rested on an ancient system of mythology; and, although it was clear that the most important parts of their communications were embodied in these figurative forms, the interpreters were quite at fault, they could then rarely (if ever) translate the poems or explain the allusions, and there was no publication in existence which threw any light upon these subjects, or which gave the meaning of the great mass of the words which the natives upon such occasions made use of; so that I was compelled to content myself with a short general statement of what some other native believed that the writer of the letter intended to convey.as his meaning by the fragment of the poem he had quoted or by the allusions he had
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made. I should add that even the great majority of the young Christian Maoris were quite as much at fault on these subjects as were the European interpreters.
Clearly, however, I could not, as Governor of the country, permit so close a veil to remain drawn between myself and the aged and influential chiefs whom it was my duty to attach to British interests and the British race, whose regard and confidence, as also that of their tribes, it was my desire to secure, and with whom it was necessary that I should hold the most unrestricted intercourse. Only one thing could under such circumstances be done, and that was to acquaint myself with the ancient language of the country, to collect its traditional poems and legends, to induce their priests to impart to me their mythology, and to study their proverbs. For more than eight years I devoted a great part of my available time to these pursuits. Indeed, I worked at this duty in my spare moments in every part of the country I traversed and during my many voyages from portion to portion of the Islands. I was also always accompanied by natives, and still at every possible interval pursued my inquiries into these subjects. Once, when I had with great pains amassed a large mass of materials to aid me in my studies, the Government House was destroyed by fire, and with it were burnt the materials I had so collected, and thus I was left to commence again my difficult and wearying task.
The ultimate result, however, was, that I acquired a great amount of information on these subjects, and collected a large mass of materials, which was, however, from the manner in which they were acquired, in a very scattered statefor different portions of the same poem or legend were often collected from different natives, in very distant parts of the country; long intervals of time, also, frequently elapsed after I had obtained one part of a poem or legend, before I could find a native accurately acquainted with another portion of it; consequently the fragments thus obtained were scattered through different notebooks, and, before they could be given to the public, required to be carefully arranged and rewritten, and, what was still more difficult (whether viewed in reference to the real difficulty
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of fairly translating the ancient language in which they were composed, or my many public duties), it was necessary that they should be translated.
Having, however, with much toil acquired information which I found so useful to myself, I felt unwilling that the result of my labours should be lost to those whose duty it may be hereafter to deal with the Maoris; and I therefore undertook a new task, which I have often, very often, been sorely tempted to abandon; but the same sense of duty which made me originally enter upon the study of the native language has enabled me to persevere up to the present period, when I have already published one volume in the native language, containing a very extensive collection of the ancient traditional poems, religious chants, and songs, of the Maori race, and I now present to the European reader a translation of the principal portions of their ancient mythology and of some of their most interesting legends.
Another reason that has made me anxious to impart to the public the most material portions of the information I have thus attained is that, probably, to no other person than myself would many of their ancient rhythmical prayers and traditions have been imparted by their priests; and it is less likely that anyone could now acquire them, as I regret to say that most of their old chiefs and even some of the middle-aged ones who aided me in my researches, have already passed to the tomb.
With regard to the style of the translation a few words are required; I fear in point of care and language it will not satisfy the critical reader; but I can truly say that I have had no leisure carefully to revise it; the translation is also faithful, and it is almost impossible closely and faithfully to translate a very difficult language without almost insensibly falling somewhat into the idiom and form of construction of that language; which, perhaps, from its unusualness may prove unpleasant to the European ear and mind, and this must be essentially the case in a work like the present, no considerable continuous portion of the original whereof was derived from one person, but which is compiled from the written or
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orally delivered narratives of many, each differing from the others in style, and some even materially from the rest in dialect.
I have said that the translation is close and faithful: it is so to the full extent of my powers and from the little time I have had at my disposal. I have done no more than to add in some places such few explanatory words as were necessary to enable a person unacquainted with the productions, customs, or religion of the country, to understand what the narrator meant. For the first time, I believe, a European reader will find it in his power to place himself in the position of one who listens to a heathen and savage high-priest, explaining to him, in his own words and in his own energetic manner, the traditions in which he earnestly believes, and unfolding the religious opinions upon which the faith and hopes of his race rest.
That their traditions are puerile is true; that the religious faith of the races who trust in them is absurd is a melancholy fact; but all my experience leads me to believe that the Saxon, Celtic, and Scandinavian systems of mythology, could we have become intimately acquainted with them, would be found in no respects to surpass that one which the European reader may now thoroughly understand. I believe that the ignorance which has prevailed regarding the mythological systems of barbarous or semi-barbarous races has too generally led to their being considered far grander and more reasonable than they really were.
But the puerility of these traditions and barbarous mythological systems by no means diminishes their importance as regards their influence upon the human race. Those contained in the present volume have, with slight modifications, prevailed perhaps considerably more than two thousand years throughout the great mass of the islands of the Pacific Ocean; and, indeed, the religious system of ancient Mexico was, probably, to some extent connected with them. They have been believed in and obeyed by many millions of the human race; and it is still more melancholy to reflect that they were based upon a system of human sacrifices to the gods; so that, if we allow them to have existed for two thousand
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years, and that, in accordance with the rites which are based upon them, at least two thousand human victims were annually sacrificed throughout the whole extent of the numerous islands in which they prevailed (both of which suppositions are probably much within the truth), then at least four millions of human beings have been offered in sacrifice to false gods; and to this number we should have to add a frightful list of children murdered under the system of infanticide, which the same traditions encouraged, as also a very large number of persons, destroyed for having been believed guilt of the crime of sorcery or witchcraft.
It must further be borne in mind that the native races who believed in these traditions or superstitions are in no way deficient in intellect, and in no respect incapable of receiving the truths of Christianity; on the contrary, they readily embrace its doctrines and submit to its rules; in our schools they stand a fair comparison with Europeans, and when instructed in Christian truths, blush at their own former ignorance and superstitions, and look back with shame and loathing upon their previous state of wickedness and credulity; and yet for a great part of their lives have they, and for thousands of years before they were born have their forefathers, implicitly submitted themselves to those very superstitions, and followed those cruel and barbarous rites.
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Primary Sources
Manuscripts and Archival Holdings
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Articles and Book Reviews
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Blackwood‟s Edinburgh Magazine, „Lady Travellers‟, July 1896.
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Davison, Graeme, „Exhibitions‟, Australian Cultural History, No. 2 1982/3 Institutions & Culture in Australia, Australian Academy of the Humanities and the History of Ideas Unit, ANU, Canberra, pp. 5–21.
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McCubbin, Maryanne, „International Exhibitions‟, review of Proudfoot, Peter, Maguire, Roslyn and Freestone, Robert (eds), Colonial City Global City: Sydney‟s International Exhibition 1879, Crossing Press, Sydney, 2000, in Museum National, Vol 10, No 1, August 2001.
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No author cited, „McLeay, Alexander (1767–1848)‟, Australian Dictionary of Biography – Online Edition, viewed 31 March 2010, http://adbonline.anu.edu.au/biogs/A020156b.htm
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MacLeod, Roy, review of John M. Mackenzie, Museums and Empire: Natural History, Human Cultures and Colonial Identities, 2009, reCollections: A Journal of Museums and Collections, viewed 20 May 2010 http://recollections.nma.gov.au/issues/vol_5_no_1/book_reviews/museums_and_empire
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Catalogues and exhibition guides
Brunton, Paul, „One Hundred Objects for 100 Days‟, in One Hundred: Celebrating the Mitchell Library Centenary 1910–2010, 2010 Centenary Guide, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, 2010.
[Grey, Sir George], General catalogue of Grey Collection Free Public Library Auckland 1888 Reference Department.
Hemsley, William Botting, The Gallery of Marianne North‟s Paintings of Plants and Their Homes, Royal Gardens, Kew, Descriptive Catalogue, Third Edition, Kew Gardens, London, 1883.
Hetherington, Michelle, Exploration and Endeavour: The Royal Society of London and the South Seas, National Museum of Australia Press, Canberra, 2010.
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Sweet, Jonathan, „The Gold Pyramid‟, in Stannage, T. (ed.), Gold and Civilisation, Art Exhibitions Australia/National Museum of Australia, Melbourne, 2001, pp. 90–91.
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Newspaper and magazine articles
„Alexander Macleay: Colonial Secretary of New South Wales‟, Macleay River Historical Society Journal, May 2009, pp. 1–8.
Argus, 4 January 1872 (editorial on report of Board of Enquiry into Melbourne Botanic Gardens).
Greenslade, Andy „Tayenebe: Tasmanian Aboriginal Women‟s Fibre Work Exchange – In Workshops, Exhibition and Collection‟, Friends of the National Museum of Australia Magazine, June 2010.
[Grey, Sir George – Obituary], New Zealand Times, 21 September 1898.
Griffiths, Tom, „Collecting Culture‟, National Library News, July 1997.
Marchant, Sylvia, „The Crystal Palace and the Great Exhibition of 1851‟, National Library News, April 2002.
Museums News, the newsletter of Museums Aotearoa, March 2001, on repatriation of moko mokai.
[no author cited], „NZ Plan to Poison Wallabies‟, Canberra Times, 27 March 2002.
Pryor, Sally, „Meet the Green Believers‟, Panorama, Canberra Times, 4 September 2010, pp. 6–9.
Russell, Roslyn, „Eliezer Montefiore: From Barbados to Sydney‟, National Library of Australia News, December 2008.
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Electronic resources
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Sir George Grey Statue Controversy, http://www.publicartaroundtheworld.com/Sir_George_Grey_Statue.html
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