The Man Behind the Prize: A Life of J.F. Archibald

By Paul J Greguric

Every year thousands of Sydneysiders visit the Art Gallery of NSW to view the entrants in the Archibald Prize for Portraiture.

Across Australia thousands more go to see the travelling exhibition. Sydney's fountain in Hyde Park is named after him.

He was the founding editor of one of our nation's most iconic n

• Language: English
• Publisher: Shawline Publishing Group
• Release date: Apr 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781922444639

Paul J Greguric

Paul Greguric grew-up in Adelaide. He studied at the Education Faculty of Sydney University. After graduating, he taught English in NSW high schools for over two decades. He has published both fiction and non-fiction in numerous journals, newspapers, and magazines. He currently lives in Sydney suburb of Waterloo.

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THE MAN BEHIND THE PRIZE

A LIFE OF J.F. ARCHIBALD

PAUL J GREGURIC

The Man Behind the Prize Copyright © 2021 by Paul J Greguric.

All Rights Reserved.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.

This is a work of nonfiction. The events and conversations in this book have been set down to the best of the author’s ability, although some names and details may have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals. Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

Printed in Australia

First Printing: April 2021

Shawline Publishing Group Pty Ltd

www.shawlinepublishing.com.au

Paperback ISBN- 9781922444622

Ebook ISBN-9781922444639

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The Special Collections staff at the NSW State Library. John at State Archives. Peter, Joy, and Suzette of the Society of St Vincent de Paul. Sinead of Mission Australia and Pagan of Flourish Australia. Stephen Taylor. Da Capo Courtyard Café, and my dear mother.

‘Doubtless the Old Chief chats tonight

With writers and artist who passed from sight.’

Henry Lawson,

Archibald’s Monument

To Robert Walmsley 1941-1993

1

EDUCATION ON THE GOLD FIELDS

Within the eight-storey grand Edwardian stonework of the Hunter Street office of Perpetual Trustee a stenographer typed the last will and testament of a dying man. It was Thursday, October 10, 1918. The testator, sixty-two-years-old, bequeathed his immense fortune into fifty portions. The beneficiaries were to be his late brother’s widow, two nephews, a niece, his half-sister, butler, housekeeper, daughter of a friend, the Australian Journalists’ Association, Sydney Hospital cancer research, and one portion was to be set aside to buy tobacco for inmates of Warrnambool Benevolent Asylum.

Two sizable sums remained. Several thousand pounds were to be provided for the construction of a gorgeous bronze fountain. The will specified it was to be lit by electric lights. This was something marvellous, as electricity was still in its infancy. The classical themed, French designed, fountain was to grace Sydney’s Hyde Park. An equally ample share was to fund an annual art prize. It was to be entrusted to the Art Gallery of NSW who were to decide on the best portrait, painted in the previous year by an Australasian artist, of an individual in Arts, Sciences, Letters or Politics. The dying man dictated his name as Jules Francois Archibald. The stenographer corrected this to John Feltham Archibald.

Sixty-seven years earlier a twenty-nine-year-old from County Wexford, Ireland, James William Esmond, had tried his luck without success at gold prospecting in California. On board ship to Australia, he had a conversation with a geologist who suggested there might be gold in the hinterlands of the vast continent. On the first of July 1851 Esmond reported he had found a nugget of gold at Creswick’s Creek, some eighteen kilometres north of Ballarat. By historical coincidence, on the same day one hundred kilometres away in Melbourne, the colony of Victoria was declared to be separate and independent. Its governor was to be Charles Joseph La Trobe. The new colony was to have its own parliament, postage stamps and police force. The latter would be integral to the story of J. F. Archibald.

The Victorian gold rush had begun and was to continue for another half decade. The Australian El Dorado was reported with enthusiasm in overseas newspapers. The Welsh guidebook to Australian colonies was titled GwaldYr Aur, the land of gold. A Chinese carpenter in Melbourne, Ah Mouy, wrote a letter to his brother in Canton and mentioned the find. The news spread across the provinces and thousands of Chinese began to immigrate to Victoria. The influx of prospectors created tent cities. Population centres shifted as new fields were opened. Gold could be searched for via one of three methods. Alluvial deposits were in the sands of riverbeds. A solitary seeker could wade in the shallows and pan for the gold flecks, using something akin to a large tin milk dish. If at least four hopeful men syndicated, a cradle could be used for surface digging. This timber frame was about two metres in length with a handle operated sifting device. One man would dig and shovel the nearby soil, another brought it by wheelbarrow to the cradle. A third man rocked the cradle, the fourth dashed buckets of water for sifting. Eager eyes would search for the glint of golden specks. More costly, adventurous and dangerous, a shaft was sunk vertically into the ground and a timber headframe held a winch and bucket. The gold was hidden in the geological matrix of soil and quartz rock. The lumps of gold, the extraordinary nuggets that permeate the history of the gold rush, were to be found in fissures of slatey rock or locked in cellular quartz. Our contemporary image of gold fields is one of hillsides and plains dotted with winches, buckets, piles of earth, shovels, pickaxes, canvas and gatherings of men wearing dungarees and hats.

The rush for gold was a double-edged sword. It was the opportunity of a lifetime for an individual as a commercial venture, but it was also an unprecedented challenge to the economy and social structure of the fledgling colony. The population, disproportionately male, was to double to over 160,000 hopefuls. La Trobe had been handed both a cornucopia and a poisoned chalice. The administration of the gold fields had immense financial and administrative dimensions. Infrastructure for supplying food, clothing, materials and equipment for the gold fields sprang up as spontaneous enterprises by entrepreneurial individuals. Over in Adelaide, in the colony of South Australia, one could order a prefabricated hut from a store in Hindley Street and have it delivered to the gold fields. Back in Melbourne, it was to be a different story. Just three months after Esmond’s announcement, La Trobe was to complain that in a matter of weeks Melbourne houses were emptied of their inhabitants. He wrote to a colleague of the suburban streets, ‘seemingly deserted.’ Overwhelmed, La Trobe made unpopular expedient decisions. One source of revenue was to be the miner’s licence. These impressive looking certificates fluctuated in price in a dialectical tension between the miners and the revenue collectors. The problem for the prospector was the licences had to be purchased whether a miner found gold or not. The cost of a licence that hovered around thirty shillings a month was about fifty dollars in today’s money and prohibitive to a prospector who, without a find, had little alternative sources of income. Policing the gold fields for miners prospecting without licences became a problem. The Melbourne police force was small and in a desperate measure, ex-convicts from Van Diemen’s Land were brought over to serve as gold field police. Their heavy-handed tactics and corruption incensed the diggers. La Trobe complained ‘the very character of the service exposes them to temptation.’ In correspondence he opined of ‘the seduction of the gold field.’ Many a man swapped police uniform for shovel to try his luck at Ballarat or Bendigo. A different approach to recruitment was required.

In addition to the miners’ vexation at police behaviour were the voices of concern in the stately homes of Melbourne. An exponential rise in crime was accompanied by a deterioration of the constabulary. In 1854, as many as a quarter of all police had stood in the dock charged with alcohol related offences committed whilst on duty. Most representative of the colony’s press, the newspaper the Argus, although a champion on the cause of improving police working conditions, ran daily reports of violent crimes and police ineptitude.

Help was sought from England. A Captain Stanley Carr led a delegation to London to approach the secretary of state for the colonies, Sir John Pakington. They asked for well-trained London police to be deployed in Victoria. They were, they said, sullied neither by the convict stain nor gold fever. Rightly so, the only dilemma: there were two meritorious constabularies administered by Whitehall, each one with vastly different characteristics to the other. Coupled with the London Metropolitan Police, forerunners of today’s bobbies, were the Irish Constabulary. Both were the initiatives of Sir Robert Peel less than thirty years earlier. The Irish Constabulary, in their rifle-green uniforms, were armed with state-of-the-art carbines. They were stationed in barracks and rode horses. Their inclination and propensity were paramilitary. On the other hand, the London Metropolitan Police were unarmed and avoided any veneer of militarism.

On paper, it would seem that the military quality of the Irish Constabulary would be the most effective. There was simmering dissent on the gold fields. The miners had begun to federate and held rowdy meetings to argue against the hated licence and the methods of its policing (as La Trobe was to discover when Ballarat’s Eureka flag was hoisted). Someone in the London delegation had the foresight to visualise the incendiary-like effect of a mounted militia from Ireland arriving in the colony. All other conflicts considered, there were thousands of expatriate Irishmen dispersed and concentrated on the gold fields. Attitudes had been moulded by their homeland encounters with English authority. Amongst these men and women were ex-convicts, the so-called emancipists, who had been transported to Australia from Ireland for seditious crimes, had served out their term, and freely roamed the colony. It would be a volatile mixture. Instead, to Whitehall’s credit, draftees were called from the demure London Metropolitan Police. The men were to sign a three-year contract at ten shillings a day. Fifty constables plus three sergeants and an inspector set sail for Victoria. Upon arrival they were dubbed by the Argus with the sobriquet—The London Fifty.

Among the London Fifty was Sergeant, First Class, Joseph Archibald. Born in Dublin on the 18 November 1823, his parents had brought him to England when he was just over a month old. He spent much of his childhood in Edinburgh. He had joined the London Met at age nineteen. His father had been a soldier in the 28th Regiment on Foot in the British Army during the Peninsular Wars. This seven-year long campaign pitted the British and their Spanish allies against Napoleon’s invading force. It was a struggle for control of Spain’s Iberian Peninsula. Military tactics of the day exploited mass formations of soldiers armed with muskets and bayonets, fierce cavalry charges and artillery that tore soldiers to pieces. Archibald senior was one of 25,000 soldiers under the command of Lord Wellington. On the mountain ridges of Bussaco they resisted five repeated attacks until the French conceded defeat. Archibald was wounded and returned to England so consequently was not in Wellington’s ranks when Napoleon was finally defeated at Waterloo in 1815.

Joseph Archibald and the London Fifty, under the command of Inspector Samuel Freeman, boarded the sailing ship Earl Grey at Plymouth early in 1853 and arrived in Melbourne after a fourteen-week voyage. Life as a policeman in the colony was a stark contrast to a municipal London beat. On the day the London Fifty were to be sworn in, they had second thoughts and refused en masse, only to relent when threatened with fines. The colonial attitude towards police in general was tarnished by the corruption and ineptitude they had already seen firsthand or read in the Argus, nor was policing perceived as real work by the prospectors. The Fifty began their patrols. Problems immediately arose. The men were disconsolate that they were allocated barracks, not houses. Barrack life entailed twenty men sleeping under one roof. Beds had to be shared between day and night shifts. One of the London Fifty wrote to the Argus to complain there was no fuel for heating, no hot water and no breakfast or dinner served.

Joseph Archibald was assigned gold escort duty. This potentially dangerous task was described by La Trobe in correspondence as ‘a very heavy service.’ It was extremely dangerous. The troopers escorting the gold on its way to the Melbourne Mint were armed and rode horses. It was the heyday of the bushrangers that was not to fade until Captain Thunderbolt was shot dead in 1870.

Archibald’s residence in Warrnambool and his escort duty meant he ranged as far as Creswick. His marriage to Charlotte Jane Madden took place at St Francis church in Melbourne. Charlotte was an English Catholic from Cambridge England, a heritage that Archibald would cloud in misconception for all his adult life. We do not know much of these early years except that the young couple settled in Warrnambool. By then the town was one of the gateways to the gold fields. In 1836, the first European to explore the region was Thomas Mitchell, who was a public servant unlike his contemporaneous maverick explorers who searched for inland oceans or just disappeared. Unfortunately, his Enlightenment Era sensibility made him oblivious to, or unwilling to see, the extent of pre-colonial Aboriginal Australian aquaculture and agriculture surrounding his search for future white farmlands. Mitchell eschewed the use of horses as too expensive for the public purse. Instead, he surveyed the terrain from a dray hauled by bullocks. Apart from his own observations, he relied on his Indigenous interpreter, Piper, who relayed Kulin topographical knowledge back to the surveyor general. Mitchell reciprocated this vital geography with gifts. On being told by a Kulin woman of the whereabouts of wetlands he wrote in his journal, ‘I presented her with a tomahawk.’

Mitchell marked his charts with around a dozen words from the Kulin language groups. He ignored hundreds more. When told by Piper that a river was called the Temiangangdeen, he dismissed it as much too long. In his journal he could be enthusiastically lyrical, ‘the balmy air was sweetened with a perfume resembling hay, which arose from the thick matted herbs and grasses.’ He was also sadly prophetic.

After climbing Pyramid Hill, he wrote, disturbingly, ‘As I stood, the first European intruder on the sublime solitude of these verdant plains, as yet untouched by flocks or herds, I felt conscious of being the harbinger of mighty changes.’ Indeed, he was. The ridges were covered with timber and scrub. The low-lying ground between the Hopkins and Merri Rivers was swampy. The sandhills were grass matted. Along the higher ground, the Booval Hills, the Gulidgang lived, and on the flats held their corroborees and dances. Two years of drought that had begun in 1838 urged settlers to seek new pastures. The schooner Adelaide arrived in Lady Bay in 1844.

Over five thousand years earlier volcanic activity, spumes of smoke and rivers of molten lava, had stretched from what was to be the heart of Melbourne all along the coast to what is now the South Australian town of Mount Gambier. The resultant soil, Andisol, was rich in plant nutrients. Warrnambool grew along these natural ridges, which were self-suggestive of street formation and town planning. A main thoroughfare became the cratylic Lava Street. Sandstone was abundant and sturdy homes were constructed. The settlers created pastures as far as the eye could see. There were a thousand herds of cattle and as many flocks of sheep. Meat and wool were underpinning the young colony’s wealth.

By the time Joseph and Charlotte settled in Warrnambool, the population had swelled to over two thousand inhabitants. It was the peak of the gold rush. The town quickly created its infrastructure. There was to be a railway link with Melbourne and a tramline running within the town from Fairy Street to the jetty on the bay. The sheep and cattle grazed on land the Kulin once inhabited, fished and farmed. The outskirts of Warrnambool and every other gold field township was pockmarked, scarred land. Clear streams were turned into cloudy and murky rivulets. The miners learnt from the Kulin as they provided models of shelter, survival and