John Wade traces the circumstances of the repatriation of one of the first pieces of Australian gold jewellery to enter a public collection
In 1956 distinguished British scientist Professor Sir Charles Galton Darwin KBE FRS enthusiastically accepted an invitation for himself and his wife Katherine to visit Australia and New Zealand to give the Royal Society Rutherford Lectures. Sir Charles (1887–1962) had simply followed family tradition when elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1922. His two great, great grandfathers Erasmus Darwin and Josiah Wedgwood, great grandfather Robert Waring Darwin, grandfather Charles Robert Darwin—author of The Origin of Species, who visited Australia in 1836—father Sir George Darwin, Professor of Astronomy at Cambridge, and two uncles, were all Fellows of the scientific academy. Three years later, in 1925, he married Katherine Pember, a mathematician; they had four sons and a daughter. Sir Charles was an applied mathematician who had explored atomic physics, X-rays and magneto-optics. He had been Professor of Natural Philosophy (physics) at Edinburgh, then Director of Britain’s National Physical Laboratory from 1938 until 1949. Knighted in 1942, Darwin was seconded to Washington DC to liaise with the Americans on wartime scientific cooperation, especially the Manhattan Project—the development of the atomic bomb. His latest concerns were population, eugenics and the long-term future of humankind. The Dictionary of National Biography recorded his greatest achievement as ‘a most unusual capacity for seeing the essential idea in a maze of complicated mathematics or conflicting experiments’.
Lady Darwin was delighted to accompany her husband on his lecture tour. She had heard stories of Australia from her grandmother Fanny, and was intrigued to see the country of her grandmother’s birth. She had ‘vivid and happy memories’ of their stay at the new University House at the Australian National University in May 1956. In Canberra, Sir Charles gave an ANU graduation address; Lady Darwin explained the development of Towns Women’s Guilds in England to the National Council of Women. In 1965, widowed and about to move to a new apartment, Lady Darwin approached F.W. Torrington, the National Library’s man at Australia House in London, offering an unusual object for repatriation to Australia, a gold brooch that had belonged to her grandmother. Encased in a box labelled Flavelle Bros, Sydney, she dated it to 1860, about the time her grandmother, Fanny Richardson, had sailed ‘Home’ to Britain. Queried about the suitability of the brooch—which the National Librarian, H.L. White, considered ‘more of a museum piece than anything else’—Bill Torrington explained that he had accepted it in the hope of getting more material from Lady Darwin. Four years after the gift, the brooch featured in a Canberra Times story about unusual items in the Library, on the women’s page alongside a piece about the wife of the South African Ambassador. Lady Darwin’s great grandfather, Dr William Richardson (c.1795– 1863) had arrived on the Katharine Stewart Forbes from Leith in Scotland on 17 December 1825, the same ship that brought new Governor Sir Ralph Darling to Sydney. Richardson was appointed Assistant Colonial Surgeon at Bathurst, New South Wales on 3 March 1826.
After five years in the colony, Dr Richardson married Elizabeth Reeves Worsley at Bathurst by licence on 19 July 1831. A witness to the wedding was Thomas Raine, who had married Elizabeth’s younger sister Fanny Eleanor Worsley in 1826, and who owned land at Bathurst. Elizabeth and William Richardson had three boys, William Wright, Louis Thornton and Tottenham Lee, and one girl, Fanny. While Dr Richardson was practising at Windsor (1831–37), he invited Austrian diplomat and plant collector Baron Charles von Hügel, touring the Nepean in 1834, to visit. But von Hügel ‘did not find Dr Richardson at home. His pretty young wife received me and I spent a couple of hours in her truly pleasant company. If people only knew how refreshing and attractive a natural and kindly manner is, they would save a lot of the time now spent on replacing those qualities with showy and wearisome erudition and wit, which is the aim of more or less all European education.’ Dr Richardson transferred to Goulburn, where Fanny was born in 1837. In 1841 he was posted to Port Macquarie. Appointed to the Medical Board on 15 May 1845, he served at the Sydney Infirmary, then sailed to Hobart in 1848. There he retired on a pension, returning to Scotland, almost certainly via Sydney, with daughter Fanny and probably his wife. He died aged 67 in Glasgow on 22 September 1863, a death notice in the Sydney Mail describing him as ‘formerly of Sydney’.
Two years before, at St John’s Episcopal Church, Edinburgh, on 28 August 1861 Fanny Richardson had married the barrister Edward Henry Pember (1833–1911). Their first and only surviving son Francis (1862–1954) was born in Scotland the next year. His daughter Katherine recalled ‘my grandmother [Fanny] always spoke of her girlhood as having been spent in Sydney. And she remembered the long voyage back to Britain under sail!’ Two of Fanny’s brothers were ‘sheep farmers’ in New South Wales. Fanny’s brooch is one of the few items of jewellery in the Library’s Collection. It measures 4.5 centimetres high and 6.2 centimetres across, and is notable for the strong, sculptural treatment of the spray of leaves tied with a fillet. The botanical motifs are decidedly Australian: two native woody pear pods and leaves, brake and bird’s nest fern fronds, a curling lily leaf tied at the base with a fillet, and a callistemon or banksia flower. Each metal leaf has been cast or cut, shaped and carefully engraved to simulate the form and texture of the species. There is no maker’s mark on the brooch, but it comes in an original retailer’s box with silk lining, printed with an elaborate cartouche inscribed ‘Flavelle Bros. & Compy. Watchmakers and Jewellers Sydney.’ John and Henry Flavelle had established Flavelle Bros in 1850. The Library’s brooch was one of the first pieces of Australian gold jewellery—perhaps the first—to enter a public collection and a tribute to its acquirer Bill Torrington. Gold brooches and bracelets with Australian motifs can be found today in the Powerhouse Museum, Queensland Art Gallery, National Gallery of Victoria and other public and private collections. Sands & Kenny’s Directory 1858–59 lists 63 ‘Jewellers,
Watch and Clock Makers’ in Sydney, though most were retailers and few were working jewellers. Stylistically-similar brooches also appear in boxes labelled ‘Brush and MacDonnell’. Many of these brooches may have originated in the workshop of Hogarth, Erichsen & Co., established about 1854 by the Dane Julius Hogarth (1820–1879) and the Norwegian Conrad Erichsen (c.1825–1903). They arrived in Sydney together from Hamburg in 1852 and, failing in their quest for gold, returned to the gold trade. This style of jewellery incorporating naturalistic Australian flora and fauna was probably invented by Hogarth and Erichsen. Newspaper reports of their jewellery, presentation pieces and exhibition pieces, in silver and gold, confirm their pre-eminence in creating metalwork that incorporates Australian flora and fauna during the 1850s. A brooch cased in an original box labelled ‘Hogarth, Erichsen & Co., 312 George Street’, their premises from March 1859, was bought in London by the Powerhouse Museum in 1975. But by 1860, Hogarth, Erichsen & Co. were in financial difficulty and declared bankrupt. At the time, their workshop employed several other fine craftsmen, including C.L. Qwist. Robert Muriel auctioned their stock over two days in January 1861.
Local gold work was targeted at the ‘Home’ market, visitors and departing colonists. As early as 1853, Adolphus Blau was advertising ‘DIGGING SCENES IN GOLD—Parties wishing to send home something of AUSTRALIAN WEALTH, to show the ADVANCEMENT OF ART in manufacture, which deserves admiration for the originality of the Idea and execution, will find the above in BROOCHES AND RINGS at A. BLAU AND CO.’S, 489, George-street.’ They were very likely made by ‘a party of German goldsmiths who came out to the goldfields, now employed by A. Blau & Co.’—almost certainly Hogarth and Erichsen. These baubles were not cheap. German traveller Hermann Lau commented: ‘Hogarth from Copenhagen and Erichsen from Norway, as the firm Hogarth and Erichsen, are the owners of a jewellery shop, enjoying a standing equal to that of the great European houses. Their work is tasteful, immaculate, and has an enormous market. They had the idea of creating mounted emu-egg goblets, with the figure of an emu on the lid, and which would usually fetch £50 Sterling. They make chains too, the links of which depicted various animals and birds of New Holland, produced in a pure and elegant style, though which in Europe would be difficult to sell because of their outrageous price.’ Nor did they appeal to all tastes. Actress Ellen Kean, wife of actor Charles Kean, wrote to their daughter Mary in 1864, ‘I should like to take you home some gold ornaments but the native work is so ugly, common and expensive that I shall fix on some other remembrances and save the money for other ways of furnishing my Mary. You can buy good Hunt and Roskell jewellery cheaper than you can get the horrid vulgar native work.’ Sixteen-year-old Blanche Mitchell’s 1859 diary records her brother Campbell ‘… bought Alice as a wedding present a most beautiful bracelet of Australian gold with various Australian plants fastened by a boomerang and waddy of the blacks, most chaste, costing 35 guineas. John [John Frederick Mann] bought Alice a brooch to correspond, five guineas.’ Sister Alice and her new husband Philip Dauncey were leaving for England to live after the wedding, so these were tender mementoes of Sydney and her family. Celebrities were deluged with lavish gifts. The entertainer Lola Montez received at least 16 presents of Australian gold jewellery from admiring men in 1855–56, while the Duke of Edinburgh, Australia’s first Royal visitor in 1867, was inundated with well over £1000 worth of gold gifts from Victorian colonists alone. Much of the Australian goldwork of the 1850s and 1860s was sent abroad, which is where it often comes to light. The Library’s brooch was very likely given to Fanny by one or more of her brothers from Bathurst, either when she sailed for Scotland, or as a wedding gift later, as a prominent reminder of her ties with her family and her life in Australia. Lady Darwin’s generous gesture 100 years later repatriates an object that owes its design to a new appreciation of Australian flora combined with European metalworking skills, which grew out of the influx of people who came for Australia’s first goldrush. JOHN WADE is an editor, writer, researcher and museum curator. He is President of the Australiana Society, edits its magazine Australiana, and maintains its website at www.australiana.org |
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