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Archive Stories/Symptomatic Histories: The Commemoration of Australian Frontier Space at Purrumbete, 1840–1902

2013; Routledge; Volume: 18; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/13264826.2013.788048

1755-0475

Karen Burns,

Cultural Heritage Management and Preservation

Abstract The essay analyses commemorations of the colonial period in the Federation art and architectural program of the Purrumbete homestead (1840–1902), a country house near Camperdown in the western district of Victoria. Using Aboriginal Protectorate and judicial archives, it reconstructs Purrumbete's early spatial and racial frontier relationships in order to reinterpret the Federation depiction of colonial Purrumbete. The 1901–1902 rebuilding and mural works produced coded signs of a violent frontier past. The bloody nature of the colonial encounter surfaced in Purrumbete's Federation representation as a set of symptoms: “suddenly manifested knots of association or conflicted meaning”.Footnote1 This paper brings new archival documents to light, re-reading the oral and painted accounts of the homestead's origin, and concludes by arguing for the importance of repressed, illegible, and cryptic evidence in cultural representations of frontier history. Acknowledgements Earlier versions of this essay were presented at “Interspaces: Art + Architectural Exchanges From East to West”, The University of Melbourne, 20–22 August 2010, convened by Dr Flavia Marcello and Dr Anthony White; Interstices 2011 “Under Construction Symposium”, University of Tasmania, 25–27 November 2011, convened by Professor Stephen Loo; and at the Annual Society of Architectural Historians of Australia and New Zealand Conference, University of Tasmania, 5–8 July 2012, convened by Dr Stuart King and Professor Stephen Loo. The conference convenors and audiences helped develop this paper. Thanks as well to Gini Lee for providing many of the illustrations for this article. Notes 1. Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992, 66. 2. The Purrumbete heritage classification acknowledges the social significance of the family, observing: “Purrumbete homestead is of historical significance for its association with the leading Victorian pastoralist family, the Manifolds. Developed from 1839 into one of the largest and most successful farming properties in Victoria, it remained in their ownership until 1983, and epitomises the pastoralist era in Victoria. It reflects the wealth and success of the Western District of Victoria pastoralists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The early recording of the property, by Captain Walter Synot in 1842 and Eugene von Guerard in 1857–[185]8, is also of note”.The National Trust statement of significance includes the following: “Purrumbete is [one of] the earliest established pastoral runs in the Shire of Hampden and one of the oldest properties in Victoria which has been occupied firstly by influential early colonist John Manifold and then by successive generations of descendants since 1838. The family is recognised for their benefactions and contribution to the development of the Camperdown district. The homestead is a distinguished design of Guyon Purchas and most notable for the splendid Art Nouveau interiors and important historical murals painted by Walter Withers in 1901. Purrumbete homestead is of architectural significance as an outstanding example of Arts and Crafts architecture in Victoria and as a highly important example of the work of architect, Guyon Purchas. The interiors, in particular the main hall, drawing room and dining room, display highly developed, and highly significant, Art Nouveau interior design. The unique integration of six original paintings by Walter Withers, recording the development of Purrumbete, is also highly significant as is the intricate timber work produced by Murray and Crow”.Both classifications are listed at vhd.heritage.vic.gov.au (accessed 20 July 2011). 3. Julie Willis and Philip Goad, “A Myth in Its Making: Federation Style and Australian Architectural History”, in Andrew Leach, Anthony Moulis, and Nicole Sully (eds), Shifting Views: Selected Essays on the Architectural History of Australia and New Zealand, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2008, 133. 4. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed., London/New York: Verso, 1991. 5. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 6. 6. See Chris Brooks, The Gothic Revival, London: Phaidon, 1999. 7. A critical interrogation of the historiography and category, “Federation Architecture”, and the dominance of domestic buildings in definitions of the term is offered by Willis and Goad, “A Myth in Its Making”, 132–142. Two exceptions to the interest in domestic Federation are Kirsten Orr, “The Sydney General Post Office: A Metaphor for Australian Federation”, Limina: A Journal of Historical and Cultural Studies, 13, (2007), 66–79; and Conrad Hamann, “The Federation City”, in Philip Goad (ed.), Melbourne Architecture, Sydney: The Watermark Press, 2009, 78–81. 8. Leigh Astbury, City Bushmen: The Heidelberg School and the Rural Mythology, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1985, 150. 9. Dell Upton, “The VAF at 25: What Now?”, Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture, 13, no. 2 (2006/2007), 8. 10. Raymond Evans, “The Country Has Another Past: Queensland and the History Wars”, in Francis Peters-Little, Ann Curthoys and John Docker (eds) Passionate Histories: Myth, Memory and Indigenous Australia, Canberra: ANU E Press and Aboriginal History Incorporated, 2010, 56. 11. Dr David Rowe and Lorraine Huddle, in association with Wendy Jacobs and Pamela Jellie, Purrumbete Homestead. Conservation Management Plan, November 2001, Heritage Victoria, Box No. 8697, extensively detail the late-nineteenth-century extensions. More general architectural histories of western district homesteads, including Purrumbete, can be found in Timothy Hubbard, “Towering Over All: The Italianate Villa in the Colonial Landscape”, Ph.D. thesis, School of Architecture and Building, Deakin University, 2003; Kerry Jordan, “Houses and Status: The Grand Houses of Nineteenth-Century Victoria”, Ph.D. thesis, Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, University of Melbourne, 2004; and a visual taxonomy is provided in Lisa Byrne, Harriet Edquist, and Laurene Vaughan (eds), Designing Places: An Archaeology of the Western District, Melbourne: Melbourne Books, 2010: 134–146. 12. Fanny Withers, “The Historic Manifold Estate Panels”, in Andrew MacKenzie (ed.), Walter Withers: The Forgotten Manuscripts, Lilydale, Victoria: Mannagum Press, 1987, 62. 13. John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994, 360. For details of the Manifolds' first incursions, see W. G. Manifold, The Wished-for-Land, Newtown, Victoria: Neptune Park, 1984; and James Bonwick, Western Victoria: Its Geography, Geology and Social Condition. The Narrative of an Educational Tour in 1857, Geelong: Thomas Brown, 1858, 24. 14. Robert Dundas Murray, A Summer at Port Phillip, Edinburgh: William Tait, 1843, 192. 15. Janet C. Meyers has argued for the “material importance of domestic objects in facilitating the recreation of English identity abroad”. See Janet C. Meyers, Antipodal England: Emigration and Portable Domesticity in the Victorian Imagination, Albany, NY: State University of New York, 2009, 1. See also John Plotz, “The First Strawberries in India: Cultural Portability in Greater Britain”, Victorian Studies, 49, no. 2 (Summer 2007), 659–684. 16. See Astbury, City Bushmen. 17. The image of Batman's landfall, produced for the 1888 publication, Victoria and Its Metropolis, is reproduced in Graeme Davidson, The Rise and Fall of Marvellous Melbourne, Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1978, 242. 18. See Art and Architecture, 1 October 1904 (incorrectly labelled January 1904), for Sydney architect John Barlow's 1904 call for a return “to the old fitness of early settler designs”, cited in Conrad Hamann, “Paths of Beauty: The Afterlife of Australian Colonial Architecture, Part 1”, Transition, 26, (Spring 1988), 37, note 38. 19. See Hamann, “Paths of Beauty”, 32–35. Purchas' design seems closer to the work of the expatriate Canadian, John Horbury Hunt, who had practised in New South Wales and invented local versions of the North American “Shingle Style” vernacular. See Peter Reynolds, Lesley Muir, and Joy Hughes (eds), John Horbury Hunt: Radical Architect, 1838–1904, Sydney: Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales, 2008. 20. See William B. Rhoads, “The Colonial Revival and American Nationalism”, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 35, no.4 (December 1976), 239–254. 21. Hamann, “Paths of Beauty”, 32–33. 22. Hamann, “Paths of Beauty”, 35. 23. H. Aram Veeser, “The New Historicism”, in H. Aram Veeser (ed.), The New Historicism Reader, New York/London: Routledge, 1994, 19. 24. Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World, Oxford/New York: Clarendon Press, 1991, 6. 25. George Tibbits, “An Emanation of Lunacy: Victoria”, in Trevor Howells and Michael Nicholson (eds), Towards the Dawn: Federation Architecture in Australia 1890–1915, Melbourne: Hale & Iremonger, 1989, 82. 26. See State Library of Victoria, Walter Withers, 1854–1914, Manuscripts, MS 7976, Box 1508/1 (d.) 27. Charles C. Griffith, The Present State and Prospects of the Port Phillip District of New South Wales, Dublin: William Curry, Jun and Company, 1845, 2. As Griffiths' biographer notes, the book was—amongst other things—“a denunciation of insecure squatting tenure”. See Carole Woods, “Griffith, Charles James (1808–1863)”, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/griffith-charles-james-3671/text5733 (accessed 16 September 2012). 28. The Act granted squatters leasehold of 14 years and allowed squatters to be compensated for “improvements” undertaken on their properties. See S. H. Roberts, The Squatting Age in Australia, 1835–1847, rev. ed., Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1964. 29. David Trudinger, “Contributor Biography”, in Peters-Little, Curthoys and Docker, Passionate Histories, xviii. 30. An account of the Keilambete Protectorate Station is given in Jan Critchett, A “Distant Field of Murder”: Western District Frontiers 1834–1848, Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1990, 141–156. For the Wesleyan Mission, see Heather Le Griffon, Campfires at the Cross: An Account of the Bunting Dale Aboriginal Mission 1839–1851 at Birregurra, near Colac, Victoria, North Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2006. 31. Ian D. Clark, Aboriginal Languages and Clans: An Historical Atlas of Western and Central Victoria, 1800–1900, Melbourne: Department of Geography and Environmental Science, Monash University, 1990. Aboriginal place names are taken from Ian D. Clark and Toby Heydon, Dictionary of Aboriginal Place Names of Southwest Victoria, Northcote, Victoria: Victorian Aboriginal Corporation for Languages, 2002. 32. The guides were noted by George Lloyd Thomas, Thirty-Three Years in Tasmania and Victoria, Being the Actual Experiences of the Author Interspersed with Histories, Jottings, Narratives and Counsel to Emigrants, London: Houston and Wright, 1862, 415–421. The source of the information is unattributed. Robert von Stieglitz, “Memories of Robert von Stieglitz”, Ancestor, 135, (April 1967), gave an account of the 1838 expedition, which included himself, two Manifold brothers, and two other Van Diemonians, Cowie and Stead, but Stieglitz failed to mention the Aboriginal guides. 33. Le Griffon, Campfires at the Cross, 152. 34. George Augustus Robinson, Diary entry, 6 April 1841, in Ian D. Clark (ed.), The Journals of George Augustus Robinson, Chief Protector, Port Phillip Aboriginal Protectorate, Vol.2, Melbourne: Heritage Matters, 1988, 127. 35. Robinson, Diary entry, 6 April 1841, in Clark, The Journals of George Augustus Robinson, 127. 36. Michael Cannon, Who Killed the Koories? Melbourne: William Heinemann, 1990, 52–54. 37. Ian D. Clark, Scars in the Landscape: A Register of Massacre Sites in Western Victoria, 1803–1859, Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, 1995; and Critchett, A “Distant Field of Murder”. 38. When Robinson first meets Eurodap, he notes “he was quite delighted to see me”, which suggests Eurodap knew who Robinson was and had an interest in him. See Robinson, Diary entry, 6 April 1841, in Clark, The Journals of George Augustus Robinson, 127. 39. R. Brough-Smyth, The Aborigines of Victoria: With Notes Relating to the Habits of the Natives of Other Parts of Australia and Tasmania (1876), repr. 1972, South Yarra, Melbourne: John Currey, O'Neil Pty Ltd; and James Dawson, Australian Aborigines: The Languages and Customs of Several Tribes of Aborigines in the Western District of Victoria, Australia, Melbourne: George Robertson, 1881. 40. R. Brough-Smyth, The Aborigines of Victoria, Vol. 2, 234, describes the stone “mia-mys” (sic) and, 235, conveys the information from Peter Manifold on the stone windbreaks. 41. Robinson notes that at Keilambete, the “huts” were covered with turf when the rain arrived (133) and that most of the inhabitants were Djargurd wurrung people (128). At Lake Bulluc (Bolac), he notes both the bough structures and “native huts” like “those on the west coast, in form of a neich” and an accompanying sketch depicts the domes, waurns, and bough shelters. See Robinson, Diary entry, 1 April 1841, in Clark, The Journals of George Augustus Robinson, 119. 42. Maggie Mackellar, Strangers in a Foreign Land: The Journal of Niel Black and Other Voices from the Western District, Melbourne: The Miegunyah Press, 2008, 189; and Robinson, Diary entry, 13 March 1840, in Clark, The Journals of George Augustus Robinson. 43. Robinson, Diary entry, 28 March 1841, in Clark, The Journals of George Augustus Robinson, 111. 44. Robinson, Diary entry, 28 March 1841, in Clark, The Journals of George Augustus Robinson, 111. 45. R. V. Billis and A. S. Kenyon, Pastoral Pioneers of Port Phillip, Melbourne: Macmillan, 1930, 20. 46. R. V. Billis and A. S. Kenyon, Pastures New: An Account of the Pastoral Occupation of Port Phillip, Melbourne: Macmillan, 1930, 40; Billis and Kenyon describe the first house erected by Thomas Manifold in the Port Phillip district in the second half of 1836 as of mud and thatch. Thomas arrived in July 1836 with 340 sheep. Billis and Kenyon use the notes compiled by Captain Lonsdale at the end of 1836. However, the later “Purrumbete” homestead complex of a later date and on a different site was pisé, according to family history. Although Miles Lewis argues for the predominance of cob building, rather than pisé, in Port Phillip (see Miles Lewis, Victorian Primitive, Carlton, Victoria: Greenhouse Publications, 1977), Niel Black's diary notes that that “peasie” or “mud building” is “the favourite house for small buildings” in “South Australia”. Black's description of the use of formwork is unmistakably a description of pisé building, not cob. See Mackellar, Strangers in a Foreign Land, 181. It is clear from the surrounding text that Black is referring to his district in southern Australia and not the colony of South Australia. 47. Claire A. P. Willsdon, Mural Painting in Britain 1840–1940: Image and Meaning, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. 48. Anne Dunlop, Painted Palaces: The Rise of Secular Art in Early Renaissance Italy, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009, 167. 49. Thomas Puttfarken, The Discovery of Pictorial Composition: Theories of Visual Order in Painting 1400–1800, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000, 20. 50. Stephen Bann, Romanticism and the Rise of History, New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995. 51. Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005, 7. 52. See Philippa Levine, The Amateur and the Professional: Antiquarians, Historians and Archaeologists in Victorian England 1836–1886, Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986, 179. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 197–199, notes the emergence of historians from Michelet onwards, who presumed to speak with, and on behalf of, dead people. 53. Compare with Willsdon, Mural Painting in Britain, 1840–1940, 326, where it is observed that mural painting on the Continent imagined mural painting as an effective medium affording entry into dreams and emotional states. 54. Thomas Puttfarken draws the term, “bounded image”, from Meyer Schapiro. See Puttfarken, The Discovery of Pictorial Composition, 16–20. 55. The list of scenes for the mural program was supplied by William Manifold's uncle, who was also the station manager and custodian of oral family knowledge transmitted to him by the first generation of settlers. The scene list is reproduced in MacKenzie (ed.), Walter Withers, 58, but the sequence in the final mural cycle is differently numbered to Matson's original list. Matson describes scene one as the “1st” and scene two as “2nd”, then reverts to a different system, describing scene three as “No 2”, scene 4 as “No 3”, etc. 56. As Robin Skinner observed (personal communication, July 2012), the sheep raid scene legitimates the family's actions and claim to land. 57. Georges Didi-Huberman, Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art, trans. John Goodman, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State Press, 2005. 58. Norman Bryson, “Georges Didi-Huberman, Devant L'Image: Questions posée aux fins de l'histoire de l'art”, The Art Bulletin, 75, no. 2 (June 1993), 337. 59. Didi-Huberman, Confronting Images, 1–9. 60. Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body, 66. 61. Susan van Zyl, “Psychoanalysis and the Archive: Derrida's Archive Fever”, in Carolyn Hamilton (ed.), Refiguring the Archive, Dordrecht/London: Kluwer Academic, 2002, 47. 62. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz, Chicago, IL, and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1998, 18–19. 63. van Zyl, “Psychoanalysis and the Archive”, 47. 64. Arthur Lloyd and John Manifold, “Deposition to Nicholas Fenwick”, Deposition Book, Geelong Police Office 1838–1841, entry for 12 September 1840, Public Records Office of Victoria, Series No. VPRS, 109. 65. Quoted by Bruce Pascoe, Convincing Ground: Learning to Fall in Love with Your Country, Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2007, 64, quoting Graham A. McGarvie (ed.), McGarvie Family History 1844–1944, Horsham, Victoria: McGarvie Family History Editorial Committee, 1995, 164. 66. The incident is reported by two current histories of the Western District. See Cannon, Who Killed the Koories?, 54; and Pascoe, Convincing Ground, 64. 67. Le Griffon, Campfires at the Cross, 112–113. See Clark, Scars in the Landscape, 138, which dates the incident to 1838 and notes that on 16 March 1840, Superintendent C. J. La Trobe sent Robinson documents relating to the murder of an Aborigine near Lake Colac. 68. Lyndall Ryan, “Settler Massacres on the Australian Colonial Frontier, 1836–1851”, in Philip G. Dwyer and Lyndall Ryan (eds), Theatres of Violence: Massacre, Mass Killing and Atrocity throughout History, New York/Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2012, 101. 69. Evans, “The Country Has Another Past”, 38, 47. 70. Bryson, “Georges Didi-Huberman”, 337, was rightly suspicious of any generalised claim for the failure of images to represent, but persuaded by Huberman's endeavour to historicise “the text or image that builds representational failure into itself”. For theoretical remarks on the specific historical conditions that structure an archive's emergence, see Antoinette Burton (ed.), Archive Stories: Fact, Fictions and the Writing of History, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005, 6. 71. See note 3 and Harriet Edquist, “Stony Rises”, in Byrne, Edquist, and Vaughan, Designing Places, 175. 72. See Critchett, A “Distant Field of Murder”, 99. 73. Australian Parliamentary Monograph, Parliament of Australia, Parliamentary library, Chapter 1: “Federation and the Geographies of Whiteness”, 4, http://www.aph.gov.au/library/pubs/monographs (accessed 21 July 2011). 74. Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men's Countries and the Question of Racial Equality, Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2008, 138. 75. Willis and Goad, “A Myth in Its Making”, 139, quote George Tibbits' observation that Australian nationalist architecture at the end of the nineteenth century was a “manifestation of race […] when Australia wished to see itself not as part of Asia or the Pacific but as white”. 76. “Federation and the Geographies of Whiteness”, 18. 77. Willsdon, Mural Painting in Britain, 1840–1940, 3. 78. Finbar Barry Flood, “Signs of Violence: Colonial Ethnographies and Indo-Islamic Monuments”, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, 5, no. 2 (2004), 43, defines the indexical as having “a causal or existential relationship to its referent”.