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An Object Lesson to Fair Visitors title
World Fair, Chicago 1893: View from the Observation Platform of the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building

World Fair, Chicago 1893: View from the Observation Platform of the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building. From left to right, Agriculture Building, Palace of Mechanic Arts, Columbia Fountain
Photograph from the Collection of the Avery Library, Columbia University

 

Roslyn Russell connects some Library treasures to a celebrated exhibition

One effect was produced by our display: The people of the United States are of a most inquisitive nature; and the large display we made, especially in our natural products, led to inquiries by visitors on almost every subject connected with the exhibits. Foreigners also, from the great nations of Europe and elsewhere, examined our representation. Australia was to most of these a terra incognita, and the name of New South Wales was, on our first appearance in Chicago, imagined to be representative of some portion of Great Britain … Before the conclusion of the Fair, New South Wales and Sydney (generally spelt ‘Sidney’ up to this time) were well known.

Thus concluded Sir Arthur Renwick, Executive Commissioner for New South Wales at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, in his report to the Governor of New South Wales, the only Australian colony to accept the invitation to participate in this international event.

The Exposition celebrated the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s sighting of the Americas. It was the largest of all the international expositions of the nineteenth century, and the most grandiose. The ‘White City’ formed by the Exposition’s architecture initiated the City Beautiful movement in urban planning, and the event itself testified to the fact that the United States had become the world’s leading capitalist nation on the brink of a new century.

Taking advantage of his colony’s position as the sole exhibitor from Australia, Renwick teamed the name of New South Wales with that of the continent, and set about positioning both to take a ‘very important and representative position’ at the Exposition. This was, to put it mildly, a challenging task. The Exposition covered 633 acres [256 ha], and contained 65 000 exhibits. Forty-three states and territories of the USA and 23 foreign countries had their own buildings, in addition to vast pavilions housing exhibits of agriculture, manufactures, liberal arts, fine arts, fisheries, transportation, horticulture, mines and mining, and forestry. There was also a separate Woman’s Building, and an Anthropological Building close to the pleasure grounds of the Midway.

World Fair, Chicago 1893: A view toward the southern colonnade across the Grand Plaza

World Fair, Chicago 1893: A view toward the southern colonnade across the Grand Plaza. At left, the Agriculture Building; at right, the Palace of Mechanic Arts.
Photograph from the Collection of the Avery Library, Columbia University

 

Despite the seeming impossibility of tiny New South Wales making an impression amid the splendours of neoclassical architecture built in dazzling white staff (plaster on a timber and steel framework), monumental statuary, ornamental waters, and the competing exhibits of so many nations, Renwick set about his task. Taking a subordinate position to Britain was ruled out from the start. He declined an offer of space within the British building, ‘Victoria House’, and instead erected ‘Australia House’, ‘a general representation of the old Sydney Post Office’. This ‘most useful and conspicuous centre’ served as offices for the New South Wales representatives, and a meeting place for Australian visitors to the Exposition.

Sufficient space to display the exhibits sent from Australia to Chicago had then to be found within the various specialist buildings. This proved a struggle in some instances: Renwick won some battles (more space in the Mines and Mining Building) and lost others (Australian paintings went on display in ‘Australia House’ rather than in the Fine Arts building). Nevertheless, in every place where New South Wales, standing for Australia, was represented, he and his fellow Commissioners created displays that not only promoted the country’s primary and secondary production and arts and crafts to a world audience, but also introduced visitors to the symbols of an Australian nation that would not come into being formally for another seven years.

Australia’s primary produce, for example, set the scene for a patriotic tableau in the Agricultural Building:

In the centre of all the wool and in the great corn arch I placed the Australian Coat-of-Arms with the emu and kangaroo rampant, while above each floated the New South Wales flag, with the Southern Cross well displayed.

In the Horticultural Building, a Fern Court was created as part of the New South Wales exhibit, complete with tree ferns, macrozamias and bird’s-nest ferns that ‘attracted increasing attention’. These, however, did not carry the entire burden of representing Australia:

In the undergrowth of the ferns was placed an immense number of beautiful specimens of young gum-trees, pepper-trees, and other plants, and the whole was so arranged as to give quite a natural and exquisitely beautiful appearance. Banners, with the legend, ‘New South Wales, Australia’, floated over the whole … the characteristic idea impressed on every visitor was that the scene was Australian.

Renwick was swift to note and to counter any slight to New South Wales. At the Grand Central Station for the Exposition he noticed that a frieze of clock faces, showing the time in 24 countries, included that of arch–colonial rival Melbourne as representing Australia. This was not to be borne:

I wrote at once to the authorities, pointing out that New South Wales was the only Australian Province officially represented at the Exposition, and that the Metropolis of Australia was the capital of New South Wales, and that its name was Sydney, and I requested that the necessary alteration of name and time might be affected … my request was complied with.

Another problem arose with the decorations inside the dome of the Exposition’s monumental Administration Building. At first ‘Australasia’ was listed on a series of panels denoting participating countries, but this panel, with others, was later removed, to avoid causing offence to countries whose names had not been mentioned. This diplomatic move had the opposite effect: Renwick fired off a missive to the Exposition administrators, stating New South Wales’s case unequivocally:

... pointing out that at great expense, and extraordinary toil and labour, our country had come to this distant land, and that it was only a matter of due and proper courtesy that our country’s name should be distinctly recognised amongst the nations thus publicly represented. Soon afterwards I received a letter from the proper authorities, stating that the whole matter had been reconsidered and that in a few days the name of New South Wales as a represented country at the Exposition would be placed on one of the panels, which was accordingly done to my entire satisfaction.

New South Wales Court, Fisheries Building

New South Wales Court, Fisheries Building
Reproduced from the Report of the Executive Commissioner for New South Wales
to the World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893

(Sydney: Government Printer, 1894)

 

Among Australian visitors to the Exposition—and to ‘Australia House’—was journalist A.G. Stephens, later editor of the Bulletin’s Red Page and mentor to many emerging writers. His description of Chicago and the World’s Columbian Exposition in A Queenslanders Travel Notes begins with a startling metaphor: ‘The World’s Fair is like a fair woman without discretion—it is a jewel of gold in a swine’s snout’

The ‘swine’, in this case, was the city of Chicago itself. While the World’s Exposition was ‘splendid beyond description’, said Stephens, and ‘One’s eye never wearies of gazing at beautiful vista after vista, planned with consummate art’, in the ‘real’ city, ‘Filth reigns supreme’. Not that its inhabitants would admit this for a second: Stephens related that he soon discovered that to criticise Chicago was a risky business. He was told to ‘keep your British bile to yourself’ as, he concluded, ‘the great American nation cannot bear plain home truths’.

As a journalist Stephens was entitled to a press pass to the Exposition, to save the entry cost each day. Despite the best efforts of Commissioner Renwick and his helpful clerk, the bureaucratic tangle at the Exposition’s heart meant that Stephens never achieved this: ‘they actually manage these things better in Australia’.

Stephens, as Renwick had done, realised that Americans knew little about Australia:

The average American conception of Australia is a small island on the uttermost edge of the earth, where a few hardy Englishmen eke out a precarious existence by breeding sheep and growing wool, defending their settlement with the most heroic courage from the assaults of kangaroos and cannibals.

The presence of New South Wales at the Exposition, said Stephens, would be an ‘object lesson to Fair visitors’ and, in a display of native pride, he asserted that:

The display is undoubtedly fine. In the mining and forestry sections we are easily first; in the agricultural section we are as good as any; and there is an excellent show in horticulture and the liberal arts. We fail in manufactures, as might be expected; but it is made abundantly evident that no country on earth has so much natural wealth at command as Australia. Nor lacks there proof that our sunny skies encourage artists. Many of the paintings which fill the New South Wales building are of considerable merit: the flower pieces of Mrs Rowan and others, and the photographs of scenery by the New South Wales Government Printer, are unequalled in the Fair.

But the wonders of the Fair had begun to pall for Stephens, as he succumbed to a version of the phenomenon known as ‘museum fatigue’:

To very many visitors the World’s Fair is a weariness of the flesh. It is too vast … And there are so many wonders to see that soon, the capacity of the human organism for wonder being strictly limited, one walks by things the most wonderful with an uncomprehending stare, an all-encompassing indifference.

Title page from the World’s Columbian Exposition, 1893, Official Catalogue of Exhibits. Anthropological Building, Midway Plaisance and Isolated Exhibits

Title page from the World’s Columbian Exposition, 1893, Official Catalogue of Exhibits. Anthropological Building, Midway Plaisance and Isolated Exhibits (Rev.ed., Chicago: W.B. Conkey Co., publishers to the World’s Columbian Exposition, 1893)

 

The World’s Exposition lasted for six months, then the exhibits were packed up and returned to their places of origin. The buildings of the ‘White City’ stood a little longer until, as was the fate of at least two other international exhibition buildings before them—the Crystal Palace that housed the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London, and the Sydney International Exhibition’s Garden Palace of 1879—they burned down, with the exception of the Palace of Fine Arts, which survives today as Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry.

What then remained as a lasting legacy of the Chicago World’s Exposition, as far as Australia was concerned? New South Wales garnered a clutch of prizes for a number of its exhibits. Ellis Rowan’s flower paintings, for which she won a gold medal, were singled out for individual praise in the Official Directory of the World’s Exposition: these works are now in the National Library’s Collection. Another award-winning exhibit was a collection of drawings by the Aboriginal artist, Mickey of Ulladulla. The National Library holds similar works by Mickey.

Apart from the glittering prizes gained by its exhibitors, and a recognition of Australia’s potential that may have resulted from New South Wales’s participation in the Exposition, there is another sense in which Chicago’s great event of 1893 and Australia are linked. A young lad named Walter Burley Griffin saw the transformation of a swampy wasteland to a glittering ‘White City’—one he drew upon when he came to design his ‘ideal city’ on the Limestone Plains. He specifically referred to the Chicago World’s Exposition in his report for the competition to design Canberra in 1912: it had, he said, ‘produced an impression outliving … any subsequent architectural ensemble of modern times’. Chicago’s ‘White City’ of 1893 lived on in Griffin’s plan for Canberra.

ROSLYN RUSSELLis a partner in Marsden Russell Historians, Canberra

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