Nancy Robinson Flannery discusses the legacy of achievements and papers left by a nineteenth-century Netherlands migrant family The progenitor of the Australian Delprats, Guillaume Daniel 1856–1937, was the son of a general and the grandson of a chaplain at the court of William I of the Netherlands. Born in Delft, and educated at The Hague and Amsterdam, Guillaume (Willem) began his working life in Scotland, later moving to the south of Spain as an engineer and metallurgist. He also travelled widely as an observer and consultant, continually furthering his knowledge of metals and mining. Eventually, Delprat came to the notice of the board of Broken Hill Proprietary Company (BHP) which, by 1898, had courted and enticed him to Australia. A generous contract—signed in London in July 1898, just prior to Delprat’s departure for Australia—included saloon passage for his wife, five of his seven children, and their governess. GDD—as his descendants remember him—travelled in RMS Himalaya. The same ship, on her next voyage south, brought his family, arriving in Adelaide in January 1899. Two daughters, left at school in Holland, rejoined the family at Broken Hill two years later. Henrietta Delprat, GDD’s wife, was also from a well-respected Netherlands family, with French and Swiss connections. She and Willem and their talented family left lasting impressions on the social and artistic life of late colonial and early federation Australia.
Delprat’s professional life is well chronicled in Vision of Steel (Cheshire, 1958) by his youngest daughter Paquita Mawson as well as in her working papers in NLA MS 1630 and the Mortlock Library of the State Library of South Australia (PRG 523). The BHP Archive, Melbourne, also holds extensive records of the Delprat era. But it is the large Delprat–Teppema Collection at the National Library (MS 7029) that reveals most about Henrietta and her seven children. Writing to her eldest daughters in Holland, for instance, Henrietta in those first months at Broken Hill spoke frequently of the trying conditions ‘up to 119° in the shade ... much worse than in Spain’. At first she felt the heat and dust as much as she disliked the frontier town, but within a few months this resilient woman grew to enjoy the life, oddly lamenting to her daughters that her ‘wardrobe’ was inadequate for the social life of Broken Hill!
Soon after his arrival in Australia, GDD was made General Manager of BHP, a demanding but powerful position that he held until 1921. From 1902 he successively bought homes in Adelaide and Melbourne to enable his family to complete their studies and pursue their wide cultural interests, but he retained the company-provided home in Proprietary Square, Broken Hill as his own base. Delprat travelled extensively as the company expanded its geographic and commodity range. His diaries (MS 1630) record the many gruelling trips he made, frequently by overnight trains, sometimes by coastal steamers. To attend board meetings in Melbourne, for instance, he had to travel overnight by rail south-west from Broken Hill to Port Pirie, inspect the company’s smelting operations there, take an overnight, six-hour steamer voyage across Spencer Gulf to Hummock Hill (later Whyalla), travel inland to Iron Knob for negotiations and inspections, before returning by night passage across the Gulf for another day’s business in Port Pirie. This was followed by a night train trip to Adelaide for a further daylight round of business there, before yet another night train to Melbourne to make comprehensive reports to the BHP Board and sometimes to attend social or cultural functions with the directors. Several days later, in the absence of any direct rail route from Melbourne to Broken Hill, the itinerary of this seemingly indefatigable general manager of a fast-growing industrial empire included a return journey similar to the outward one. Any one of these round trips would cover an area three or four times the entire size of Delprat’s native Holland. Little wonder he was one of the highest paid men in Australia at the time. In an era of industrial unrest—particularly the strikes of 1909 in Broken Hill and Port Pirie—‘Delly’, as he was known to the men, had the difficult task of keeping faith with the company’s board and shareholders on the one hand, while acting with fairness and compassion to the workers on the other. His courage and panache in the face of strikers’ hostility are caught in a painting by folk artist Sam Byrne, who in 1963 was commissioned by GDD’s great-grandson, Paul Delprat, to portray an incident reported in The Sydney Morning Herald of 9 January 1909. What the Herald took nearly 300 words to report, Delprat dismissed with a mere six words in his diary of 8 January.
Although he is remembered now in mining circles for helping to perfect a flotation technique that revolutionised the economic reclamation of ore tailings, as well as for his later visionary, pioneering work to successfully introduce the steel industry to BHP, the National Library collections about GDD reveal also a family man dedicated to providing the best opportunities for his offspring. Two daughters and both his sons became medical doctors, and another daughter was an internationally acclaimed musician. The youngest daughter, Paquita, who married Antarctic explorer and scientist Douglas Mawson, was an author and community leader with an OBE and the Netherlands Order of Orange Nassau. Two of her sisters married men who represented the Netherlands through consular postings. As the twentieth century progressed, only three of the seven Delprat children who migrated to Australia at the end of the nineteenth century and who, by virtue of their father’s naturalisation in 1904 became Australian (British) citizens, continued to live permanently in this country. Their parents, however, stayed in Melbourne until their deaths in 1937; and today there are many descendants in various parts of Australia. After his retirement in 1921, Delprat retained contact with other industrialists as well as continuing his involvement with scientific and arbitration entities. He worked, too, for chosen charities, and continued a long and active interest in sculpting. Delprat’s honours included a CBE, a Fellowship of London’s Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufacture and Commerce; and honorary membership of the American Institute of Mining and Metallurgical Engineers for ‘distinguished achievement as metallurgist, engineer and administrator in products of ferrous and non-ferrous metals’. Examples of the elaborate illustrated addresses of the era are amongst the visually appealing items in both of the Library’s manuscript collections. As the Delprats and their descendants were prolific letter-writers, with a strong sense of archiving, a rich and so far largely untapped source of correspondence and documents spanning 1816–1970 beckons researchers. With multilingualism another hallmark of the family, their letters slip unselfconsciously from one language to another; and GDD, fluent in several languages, sometimes elected to hide this from social and business contacts—often to his amusement and corporate benefit as an industrialist on the international scene! His diaries are all written in English, a self-imposed daily discipline to keep the language of his adopted country flowing freely in his active mind.
While much of the accumulated wealth of Delprat family correspondence is held in public repositories, there are other large series still in family hands, both within Australia and in Holland. Email and faxes are now added to the earlier land, sea and airmail exchanges, raising the question of how permanent these later forms of family communication will be. Of the two family and business collections held by the National Library, MS1630 was donated by Paquita, Lady Mawson in 1968; and the larger group, MS7029, by Tania Teppema of Uruguay in 1984, with additions in 2002. Tania is the daughter of the late Carmen Delprat, a concert violinist and teacher in Australia and Europe. Although Carmen abandoned her professional career in 1918 when she married Petrus Ephrem Teppema (Dutch Vice-Consul in Melbourne), she later performed for early Sydney radio stations in a voluntary capacity. The Delprat–Teppema collection traces three generations of the family, documenting their lives in the Netherlands, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Argentina, and Uruguay. Tania, the only child of Carmen and Peter Teppema, was born in Sydney in 1925, and lived in Dutch embassies in South America and Europe before returning to Australia in 1947, when her father became Dutch Minister to Australia. In Canberra, Tania was employed as a researcher for Pauline Fanning at the National Library. ‘It was fun and interesting. Pauline was such a nice person to work with’, she wrote in a recent email. In 1949 Tania was married to Robert Hemblys-Scales, who served the British War Office in both MI5 and MI6. Subsequent diplomatic appointments took the Hemblys-Scales to the Middle East, South East Asia, Europe and South America, where Tania stayed after separating from Robert and reverting to her maiden name.
Following the death of her parents, Tania Teppema chose the National Library of Australia as the repository for her family’s significant collection. By that time, it had been packed, unpacked, added to, and repacked in many parts of the world. Amongst the papers, scrapbooks, photographs and realia are the rare and dazzlingly colourful sash and medals of the Order of the Rising Sun, conferred on Tania’s father by the Emperor of Japan on 10 April 1953. But of all these treasures of a family’s achievements, passions and travels, the progenitor of the Australian Delprats—Guillaume Daniel—shines as an example of the skill, diligence and culture of our late nineteenth-century immigrants. As R.G. Menzies wrote in his introduction to Paquita, Lady Mawson’s biography of her father, Vision of Steel (Melbourne; Cheshire, 1958),
NANCY ROBINSON FLANNERY is an Adelaide author and editor. Her last book was This Everlasting Silence: The Love Letters of Paquita Delprat and Douglas Mawson. |
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