Judy Cannon reviews the work of the colonial artist William Strutt who recorded many aspects of life and the landscape of Victoria in that state’s infancy Artist and author William Strutt arrived in in Australia July 1850 and was immediately struck by the clarity of the light. ‘My first impression of Australian scenery was the extraordinary clearness of the atmosphere through which everything was sharply defined in the pure and searching light,’ he wrote later, his memoirs at least as full of colour as his paintings. The National Library has a varied collection of his work depicting fauna, flora (including his delicate peppermint trees) and the Victorian countryside. From an historical viewpoint, he was commissioned to paint the portraits of those creating Victoria’s history—people like John Pascoe Fawkner, founder of Melbourne, the 1856 administrator Edward Macarthur and explorer Robert O’Hara Burke. Many of Strutt’s works can be seen in the Library’s online Pictures Catalogue. They include impressions of bushranger hold-ups, gold mining—which Strutt tried for himself—and the rather jaunty uniforms of the Melbourne police in white pants. In his manuscript ‘Off to’ Australia (MS4294), about his Antipodean years and experiences, he wrote with large splashes of colour and comic humour, but also with an eye for detail and beauty. The Library holds a complementary manuscript of ‘The Life and Work of William Strutt (1825–1915)’, a 1978 thesis by Heather Curnow (MS6359) and has numerous copies of The Australian Journal of William Strutt, A.R.A., 850–1862, edited by George Mackaness (Dubbo: Review Publications, 1979). William
Strutt was born in Essex, England, and enjoyed a student life in Paris.
After a near-breakdown and problems with his eyes, Artist Strutt decided
to visit Australia, where he married. After living for 18 months in New
Zealand the couple returned to Melbourne where they appear to have mixed
with all levels of society and where Strutt went on to become one of the
principal founders of the
In ‘Off to Australia’, he makes no bones about the fact that soon after his arrival in Victoria, ‘my funds were melting fast’, and he was saved by an advertisement in The Argus for a magazine illustrator. He also worked for the Illustrated Australian Magazine, which he described as the first illustrated periodical of the Australian colonies, but which unfortunately ‘expired’ in 1852. Some of his magazine designs fortuitously led to commissions, including a design for a new postage stamp, and an Anti-Transportation League card. His praise of his patron, John Pascoe Fawkner, founder of Melbourne, was unqualified—‘a thoroughly practical man and possessed of much of that ready wit and adaptability called in days gone by “gumption”’. He wrote that Fawkner started out life as a sawyer but ‘he was not ashamed of referring to the useful though humble trade he began life in’.
Assisted emigration was warmly welcomed by a community totally opposed to transportation (in a colonial sense). Strutt wrote a little tongue-in-cheek of the early disproportion of the sexes and added, ‘It was a happy time indeed for lonely bachelors, when an emigrant ship with a cargo of ladies entered the Heads. The distressed beings (i.e. the gentlemen) who could endure their lonely existence no longer, boarded the ships as soon as they had cast anchor, selected their brides, got married and started off into the bush. The ladies, as a rule, were (of course) nothing loth to accede to the persuasions of Eros, and though blind as bats as to any previous knowledge of each other, as far as I have heard to the contrary these hasty unions turned out fairly well’. Strutt wrote a deeply moving and vivid account of the Macedon bushfire in February 1851—of its dreadful destruction, of intense heat and stifling smoke and of the deaths of people, animals and birds. It makes daunting reading; his word pictures are powerful and dire. He was also moved to paint the event and titled the work Black Thursday. Strutt was there when the first gold discoveries in Victoria were made and wrote: ‘The sober Melbournites became dizzy, and a veritable gold fever of great virulence seized the population, resulting in the lords of creation leaving all their avocations and starting off, almost en masse; thus merchants, doctors, lawyers, military officers, artizans, labourers, all forsook their avocations and left their wives, daughters and sweethearts to carry on the prosaic home affairs as well as they could, while they picked up the golden nuggets that lay glittering in the sun whichever way you looked’.
Finally succumbing to the gold virus himself, but with little success, he described the method of rocking cradles to extract the gold: ‘This cradling by thousands of men simultaneously moving to and fro, rock, rock, rock, produced a noise like low rumbling thunder and was heard for a long distance … The whole field of operations reminded one of a huge ant hill, just disturbed, with the distressed insects hurrying about hither and thither to set things in order once more’. But his sense of the comic was almost lost on the return journey when he related the activities of an architect, ‘a selfish personage’, who would not take a turn walking like everyone else. Crossing a little creek, ‘he must needs mount on to the top of one heavily laden bullock dray and there sprawling full length onto the tarpaulin held on to its lashings with a death grip, his lanky legs and short pantaloons presenting a ludicrous and most pitiable spectacle’.
Building up a story in his humorous way, he describes how, after the water carriers had earlier decamped for the gold diggings, two legal friends borrowed the water carriers’ horse and cart to fetch some water. ‘The gentlemen of the long robe, spectacled and solemn, proceeded to the Yarra pumps and filled the big barrel. All went well till on ascending the hill in Collins Street, opposite the Mechanics Institution, one of the straps of the cart, named, I believe, the belly band, not having been properly secured, suddenly tipped up, to the dismay of the drivers! The water, of course, rushed out in a torrent and was lost. Discovering their omission the worthy citizens had to repeat their performance, having, however, rectified their previous mistake.’ On his return to Melbourne from his stay in New Zealand, ‘his friend and patron, the respected Governor’, opened the Yan Yean Reservoir which covered more than 2 square miles and was 595 feet above, and 19 miles distant from, Melbourne. Strutt wrote, ‘the supply was to be by iron pipes, and when these were being laid by the engineers, there was all sorts of doubts and fears expressed in the papers as to whether the pressure of the water would not force them out of the ground’. When Sir Edward turned the water on and everything went well, ‘there was a general feeling of relief expressed. I had the pleasure of witnessing this quiet but crowning achievement of engineering skill, in the Carlton Gardens, in the year 1856, the cost of which amounted to £820 000, and never was money better spent’. In his eighties, Strutt completed The Burial of Burke, at his Sussex home at Wadhurst, surrounded by his Australian sketches. According to The Argus, he was one of the last people to converse with Burke as he sketched him and his companions about to leave on their ill-fated expedition.
In Australia he had happened along at the birth of a state and stayed long enough to paint the opening of the first Victorian Parliament and the swearing-in of the state’s first governor, Charles Joseph LaTrobe. History in the making was all around him, but if he liked people and action, he loved nature perhaps best of all. Of the view from his Brighton home, William Strutt wrote, ‘A dip of Hobson’s Bay was seen through a thicket of trees on one side, looking blue as only the sea looks in Italy or Australia; the trees rich and mellow in tint, quite Titianesque; while on the other side, a grand stretch of virgin forest, with a charming undulating valley in the centre of which runs a bush road, whereon the bullock drays with their teams patiently tugging their heavy loads of firewood enlivened the scene; whilst the extreme distance was filled up by a noble range of mountains called the “Dandenong Range”, perpetually changing in effect and ever beautiful. Oh! How I loved this view!’ With such word scenes, he hardly needed to paint. JUDY CANNON is a freelance writer based in Brisbane |
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