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NLA News - home April 2004 Volume XIV Number 7
Finding Australia—The Australian Presence in the English Historical Environment

Roslyn Russell discovered extra significance in the landscape when she embarked on a literary ‘tour’ of England last year

Statue of Charles Darwin erected by the Shropshire Horticultural Society in 1897 outside his former school, now Shrewsbury Library. Photograph by Roslyn Russell

Statue of Charles Darwin erected by the Shropshire Horticultural Society in 1897 outside his former school, now Shrewsbury Library
Photograph by Roslyn Russell

In August and September 2003 I joined a tour exploring the literary landscapes of England. We travelled south, then north, then back again, on a pilgrimage to such ‘sacred sites’ as Chaucer’s Canterbury, Trollope’s Salisbury, Jane Austen’s Chawton and Winchester, D.H. Lawrence’s Eastwood, the Brontes’ Haworth, Wordsworth’s Lake District, Shakespeare’s Stratford, and Dickens’, Keats’ and Dr Johnson’s London. Australia, as it always does when you are half a world away, seemed almost to have dropped off the map.

However, as we moved around the country, references to Australia inscribed in the historic environment of England appeared from time to time. Very soon our tour also acquired another purpose for me—to ‘find Australia in England’, as well as in the lives and works of the literary figures around which the tour was constructed.

It didn’t take long for these references to Australia to appear. Walking down Canterbury’s High Street on the tour’s first day, I noticed the façade of the Beaney Institute. This was founded by James Beaney, a Melbourne doctor who left money when he died in 1891 to establish the Beaney Institute for the Education of the Working Man, a public library and museum. He also left money to Canterbury Cathedral to erect a handsome monument to commemorate him in the town where he was born in 1828.

A few days later, a memorial tablet caught my eye while I was wandering around the parish church of St Mary the Virgin in Rye on the Sussex coast. The tablet was in memory of Charles Mackenzie, son of Thos. Davis and Isabella Lamb, who was ‘killed by the accidental discharge of a revolver in the far-off bush beyond Kimberley, Western Australia’ in July 1884, at the age of 26. Minutes later, my room-mate discovered a stained-glass window dedicated to Nathaniel Dawes, the first Bishop of Rockhampton, who had died in 1910. I was hooked: from then on every place we visited was examined for possible traces of our homeland. Others on the tour who knew of my preoccupation began to alert me to the presence of Australian references. These I transcribed or photographed. Back home in Canberra, I sought more information about them in the National Library’s collections. Some were too obscure to have generated collection material, but others repaid my efforts.

I discovered that Bishop Dawes, whose stained-glass window in Rye parish church features symbols of missionary endeavour, was the founder, in 1897, of the Bush Brotherhood, ‘a name that was to live for generations and add a new dimension to the Australian outback’, in the words of well-known author Ivan Southall. His history of this Anglican outreach to remote parts of Australia, Parson on the Track: Bush Brothers in the Australian Outback (1962), is part of the National Library’s collection.

Stained-glass window in the church of St Mary the Virgin, Rye, Sussex, commemorating Nathaniel Dawes, first Bishop of Rockhampton, Queensland. Photograph by Roslyn Russell

Stained-glass window in the church of
St Mary the Virgin, Rye, Sussex,
commemorating Nathaniel Dawes, first
Bishop of Rockhampton, Queensland
Photograph by Roslyn Russell

Higher Anglican clergy with Australian connections are represented also by a memorial tablet in Salisbury’s magnificent cathedral to St Clair Donaldson, who was Bishop of Salisbury from 1921 to 1935. Before taking up this position, Donaldson had been Archbishop of Brisbane from 1904 to 1921, where he gained a reputation as a ‘farsighted all-round churchman’. In her entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol. 8 1891–1939, Betty Crouchley records that he extended the Bush Brotherhood founded by Bishop Dawes, and ‘showed particular solicitude for Aboriginals’, donating £3000 from his own pocket to Yarrabah Mission. When Donaldson returned to Britain to take up the bishopric of Salisbury, he retained Australian friendships, and on his death endowed charities in Brisbane with a £4000 legacy. A biography of Donaldson, by C.T. Dimont and F. De Witt Batty, was published in 1939 and is in the National Library.

Jane Austen is, of course, the novelist for whom the Hampshire village of Chawton is famous. We literary pilgrims visited the house where she penned her novels at a small round table, then crossed the road to the church of St Nicholas where Jane’s mother and sister, both named Cassandra, lie buried. Inside the church is a memorial to another novelist who also wrote in Chawton, Caroline Glyn, whose tablet notes that she was ‘A member of the Poor Clares at the convent of St Mary Stroud, New South Wales, Australia’. Caroline Glyn died in 1981, at the age of 33, after producing seven novels and In Him Was Life, a novelistic rendering of the Gospel story. The National Library holds a copy of this 1975 work, which is illustrated by the author’s own woodcuts.

The next Australian discovery was made in the Writers’ Gallery of the Philpot Museum at Lyme Regis in Dorset, known to Jane Austen fans as the location of the Cobb, a long stone jetty. A character in Persuasion, Louisa Musgrove, insists on the handsome Captain Wentworth ‘jumping’ her down the steep steps, until she ‘fell on the pavement on the Lower Cobb, and was taken up lifeless!’ The Cobb also provided a dramatic setting for the opening scenes of a movie, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, from a novel by John Fowles, a resident of Lyme Regis, and honorary curator of the museum. The Philpot Museum, naturally, celebrates Jane Austen’s work, but also that of Henry Fielding, Beatrix Potter and Henry Handel Richardson. A display in the Writers’ Gallery is dedicated to Richardson’s time in Lyme Regis, where she holidayed with her companion Olga Roncoroni and wrote part of the The Way Home, the second volume of her epic trilogy, The Fortunes of Richard Mahony. The house in which Henry Handel Richardson stayed in Lyme Regis in 1918, Westfield, was the original for Buddlecombe in The Way Home. The Library’s Pictures Collection holds photographs of the house and of Henry Handel Richardson and Olga Roncoroni.

Henry Handel Richardson in the garden of Westfield, Lyme Regis

Another site strongly associated with the life and work of Jane Austen is Bath. The town was also the location of the last residence of Admiral (and formerly Governor) Arthur Phillip, who lived at 19 Bennett Street, died there on 31 August 1814, and was buried at Bathampton. There is a memorial in Bath Abbey to Phillip, erected by the Commonwealth of Australia in 1937, some months before the nation celebrated the sesquicentenary of the foundation of British rule. Phillip’s reputation at that time was to the fore in the historical consciousness of Australians. He was cast posthumously as the ‘star’ of the sesquicentenary: posters, booklets, medallions and stamps all honoured him as the hero of the commemoration. The memorial in the abbey states that ‘To his indomitable courage, prophetic vision, forbearance, faith, inspiration and wisdom was due the success of the first settlement of Australia at Sydney 26 January 1788’. The National Library, in addition to many works on Phillip, also holds the program for the dedication of the memorial in Bath Abbey, as well as a wide range of material relating to the 1938 sesquicentenary celebrations.

Below: Westfield, Lyme Regis, the model forBuddlecombe in Henry Handel Richardson’s The Way Home
Pictures Collection

Above:
Henry Handel Richardson in the garden of Westfield, Lyme Regis
Pictures Collection

Westfield, Lyme Regis, the model forBuddlecombe in Henry Handel Richardson’s The Way Home

A nineteenth-century visitor to Australia, whose work changed the way people think about the world, and whose name is now that of our northernmost capital city, is commemorated by a statue outside his former school in Shrewsbury. Charles Darwin came to Australia on the Beagle in 1836, but did not entirely approve of the society that he found here as his diary entry for 14 March 1836 shows:

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.

The National Library holds microfilm copies of the diary and correspondence of Charles Darwin written during the voyage of the Beagle between 1831 and 1836 (mfm G 10315–10316). A specific focus on Darwin’s time in Australia can be found in F.W. Nicholas and J.M. Nicholas, Charles Darwin in Australia (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1989). It is clear from this work that, dismissive as Darwin was of this country, he did find material in Australia that helped him to develop the ideas about evolution with which his name will forever be associated.

The literary tour over, I had several days in London. I could not leave without making another small pilgrimage, to Soho Square—the site of the former home of Sir Joseph Banks, the ‘father of Australia’. There I found a tablet bearing the inscription:

Sir Joseph Banks 1743–1820 President of the Royal Society
Robert Brown 1773–1858 and David Don 1800–1841, botanists, lived in a house on this site
The Linnean Society met here 1821–1857

This modest testimony, with no reference to Banks’ key role in the British settlement of Australia, is affixed to the walls of a building that bears the name Twentieth Century House, and is the headquarters of the Twentieth Century Fox Film Company, owned by Rupert Murdoch.

Apart from this last, deliberate visit to a place associated forever with the foundation of European Australia, all my other sightings of Australia in England were fortuitous, and dependent on the itinerary of the literary tour. For those interested in following up more Australian references in Britain, the National Library’s collection includes Ged and Gillian Martin’s 1989 survey of Australian sites there, Waltzing Britannia: A Guide to Britain for Australians.

ROSLYN RUSSELL is a partner in Marsden Russell Historians. She went to England on a tour organised by Australians Studying Abroad, ‘Exploring the Literary Landscapes of England’.

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