Craft and the Colonial Environment: Natural Fancywork in the Australian Album

Duggins, Molly

doi:10.1057/978-1-137-57337-7_10

Molly Duggins⁴

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture ((PNWC))

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Abstract

Natural fancywork offered leisured Victorian women a versatile vehicle to mediate a transforming natural world shaped by industry, trade, and imperialism through the incorporation of a range of natural materials into domestic decoration. Focusing on a number of leaf and flower, seaweed and shell, and feather arrangements in two albums compiled from the 1840s to the 1880s by members of the Bingle family, early settlers in the colony of New South Wales, I suggest that such natural fancywork was particularly suited to memorialize the distant English environment and to intimately connect with Antipodean nature. Through collected specimens of flora and fauna, wrought into decorative arrangements on the album page, such fancywork represented a material alternative to the colonial picturesque that was enlisted in constructing a native aesthetic.

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Notes

1.
Such compositions were valued not for their originality but, as Nancy Bercaw has noted, “for their skill of execution and the success with which the maker tastefully expressed herself through her chosen medium and subject matter.” Nancy Dunlap Bercaw, “Solid Objects/Mutable Meanings: Fancywork and the Construction of Bourgeois Culture, 1840–1880,” Winterthur Portfolio 26, no. 4 (1991): 246.
2.
Talia Schaffer, Novel Craft: Victorian Domestic Handicraft and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 14.
3.
Schaffer, Novel Craft, 9.
4.
Charles Kingsley , Glaucus; or, the Wonders of the Shore (London: Macmillan, 1855), 50.
5.
Amanda Vickery, “The Theory and Practice of Female Accomplishment,” in Mrs. Delany and Her Circle, ed. Mark Laird and Alicia Weisberg-Roberts, 94–109 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 98.
6.
Constance Classen , “Feminine Tactics: Crafting an Alternative Aesthetics in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” in The Book of Touch, ed. Constance Classen, 228–39 (Oxford: Berg, 2005), 236.
7.
For more on Mary Delany, see Mark Laird and Alicia Weisberg-Roberts, eds., Mrs. Delany and Her Circle (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press), 2009. For a discussion of the Parminter cousins and A La Ronde, consult Susan Pearce, “Material History as Cultural Transition: A La Ronde, Exmouth, Devon, England,” Material History Review 50 (1999): 26–34.
8.
Susan Pearce, On Collecting: An Investigation into Collecting in the European Tradition (London: Routledge, 1995), 14; Susan Stewart, “From the Museum of Touch,” in Material Memories, ed. Marius Kwint, Christopher Breward, and Jeremy Aynsley, 17–38 (Oxford: Berg, 1999), 31, 35; Classen, “Feminine Tactics,” 233–34.
9.
Pearce, “Material History as Cultural Transition,” 30–32.
10.
Thad Logan, The Victorian Parlour (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 159.
11.
Barbara Gates, Kindred Nature: Victorian and Edwardian Women Embrace the Living World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 167–68.
12.
Ann Bermingham, “The Picturesque and Ready-to-Wear Femininity,” in The Politics of the Picturesque: Literature, Landscape and Aesthetics Since 1770, ed. Stephen Copley and Peter Garside, 81–119 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 81–82.
13.
Katherine Grier, Culture and Comfort: People, Parlors, and Upholstery, 1850–1930 (Rochester: Strong Museum, 1988), 1. See, for instance, Shirley Hibberd, Rustic Adornments for Homes of Taste, introduced by John Sales (London: Century Hutchinson, [1856] 1987).
14.
Ann B. Shteir, “‘Fac-similes of Nature’: Victorian Wax Flower Modelling,” Victorian Literature and Culture 35 (2007): 660.
15.
Andrea Kolasinski Marcinkus, “Nature Fancywork: Women’s Discourse with Nature Through Craft in Late Nineteenth-Century America” (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, 2008), 92, 103, 109.
16.
Leaf and Flower Pictures, and How to Make Them, 2nd ed. (New York: A.D.F. Randolph, 1860), 8.
17.
Leaf and Flower Pictures, 40.
18.
Leaf and Flower Pictures, 9.
19.
Leaf and Flower Pictures, 8.
20.
Leaf and Flower Pictures, 65.
21.
Leaf and Flower Pictures, 64, 66.
22.
Ann Toy, “Timethrift, or All Hours Turned to Good Account,” in Hearth and Home: Women’s Decorative Arts and Crafts 1800–1930, ed. Ann Toy, 15–21 (Sydney: Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales, 1988), 21.
23.
See, for instance, Maureen Daly Goggin and Beth Fowkes Tobin, eds., Women and Things, 1750–1950 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate), 2009, and Tim Barringer, Geoff Quilley, and Douglas Fordham, eds., Art and the British Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009).
24.
Toy, “Timethrift,” 15, 16.
25.
Caroline Jordan, Picturesque Pursuits: Colonial Women Artists & the Amateur Tradition (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2005), 52–53, 85; Ian Turner, “Preface,” in Colonial Crafts of Victoria: Early Settlement to 1921, ed. Murray Walker, 11 (Melbourne: Crafts Council of Australia, National Gallery of Victoria, 1978), 11.
26.
Jordan, Picturesque Pursuits, 88, 111.
27.
Linda Young, Middle-Class Culture in the Nineteenth-Century: America, Australia, and Britain (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 10; Terrence Lane and Jessie Serle, Australians at Home: A Documentary History of Australian Domestic Interiors from 1788–1914 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1990), 126, 58.
28.
Jordan, Picturesque Pursuits, 89.
29.
Joan Kerr and James Broadbent, Gothick Taste in the Colony of New South Wales (Sydney: David Ell Press, 1980), 25.
30.
Annabella Boswell, Annabella Boswell’s Journal (North Ryde, NSW: Angus and Robertson), 1987, 16; Toy, “Timethrift,” 17–18; Jordan, Picturesque Pursuits, 88.
31.
Boswell , Annabella Boswell’s Journal, 29, 129.
32.
Boswell , Annabella Boswell’s Journal, 46, 111.
33.
Hooker, “Hunt and the Home,” 158.
34.
Jordan, Picturesque Pursuits, 158.
35.
Claire Hooker, “The Hunt and the Home: Women Scientific Collectors,” The World of Antiques and Art (1999–2000): 158–59. Hooker argues that colonial women were prominent collectors of aboriginal artefacts, particularly “Aboriginal women’s goods, baskets, carry bags, cooking utensils” (“The Hunt and the Home,” 159).
36.
Jordan, Picturesque Pursuits, 75; Marcinkus, “Nature Fancywork,” 53.
37.
See, for example, the entry from 4 March 1847 in Boswell’s journal: “We spend the morning in the drawing-room end of the verandah, where Lady Mary has established herself with her work” (Annabella Boswell’s Journal, 151). For more on the significance of the verandah as a gendered site in colonial visual and literary texts, consult Tanya Dalziell, “Beyond the Verandah: Elizabeth Jolley’s The Orchard Thieves and Drusilla Modjeska’s The Orchard,” Journal for the Association of the Study of Australian Literature (1996): 50–56.
38.
Patricia Dobrez , “Constance à Beckett (1860–1944), Untitled Bush Scene (Kookaburras), 1872,” in Heritage: The National Women’s Art Book, ed. Joan Kerr, 273 (Roseville East, NSW: Craftsman House, 1995), 273.
39.
James Broadbent, “The Chore and Art of House Furnishings,” in Hearth and Home: Women’s Decorative Arts and Crafts 1800–1930, ed. Ann Toy, 29–32 (Sydney: Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales, 1988), 30.
40.
Toy, “Timethrift,” 19; Martha Sear, “‘Curious and Peculiar?’ Women Taxidermists in Australia,” in Past Present: The National Women’s Art Anthology, ed. Joan Kerr and Jo Holder, 85–91 (Sydney: Craftsman House, 1999), 87.
41.
Annette Shiell , Fundraising, Flirtation and Fancywork: Charity Bazaars in Nineteenth-Century Australia (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2012), 7.
42.
Martha Sear, “‘Common Neutral Ground’: Feminizing the Public Sphere at Two Nineteenth-Century Australian Exhibitions of Women’s Work,” in Seize the Day: Exhibitions, Australia and the World, ed. Kate Darian-Smith, Richard Gillespie, Caroline Jordan, and Elizabeth Willis, 14.1–14.18 (Clayton, VIC: Monash University ePress, 2008), 455–56, 472.
43.
Sear, “‘Common Neutral Ground,’” 475.
44.
Miss Bingle commonplace book, 1841–50s, Bingle family further papers, 1810–76, MLMSS 7724, and Bingle family scrap album, 1856–80s, PXA 941, both Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW. Of note in the Bingle family scrap album are a number of early Australian calotypes (ca. 1850–55) by the surgeon, politician, and amateur photographer, Joseph Docker, whose property, Thornthwaite, abutted the Bingle family’s estate, Puen Buen, at Dartbrook.
45.
Miss Bingle commonplace book, 1841–50s, Bingle family further papers, 1810–76, MLMSS 7724, and Bingle family scrap album, 1856–80s, PXA 941, both Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW.
46.
Nancy Gray, “Bingle, John (1796–1882),” in Australian Dictionary of Biography (Canberra: Australian National University, 1966). http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/bingle-john-1780/text2001; John Bingle , Past and Present Records of Newcastle (Newcastle, NSW: Bayley, Son, and Harwood, 1873).
47.
Bingle family sewing kit, 1854, R 916, and Scrapbooks of Sarah Cross Little, 1853–1908, Papers of Sarah Cross Little, MLMSS 7115/1, both Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW.
48.
Scrapbooks of Sarah Cross Little, 1895–1908, and Papers of Sarah Cross Little, MLMSS 7115/1, both Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW.
49.
Sarah Cross Little, “The Littles of ‘Meikledale’, Langholm, Dumfries, Scotland and the Families They Are Connected with Collected and Arranged by S.C. Little,” 1897, Papers of Sarah Cross Little, MLMSS 7115/2, Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW.
50.
Little , “The Littles of ‘Meikledale’.” (underscore in original).
51.
These pages are decorated with hand-drawn calling cards arranged in dynamic medleys. Boswell signed the album on 2 July 1857.
52.
Renate Dohmen, “Memsahibs and the ‘Sunny East’: Representations of British India by Millicent Douglas Pilkington and Beryl White,” Victorian Literature and Culture 40 (2012): 155.
53.
Ian McLean, “The Expanded Field of the Picturesque: Contested Identities and Empire in Sydney Cove 1794,” in Art and the British Empire, ed. Tim Barringer, Geoff Quilley, and Douglas Fordham, 23–37 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), 26; Dohmen, “Memsahibs,” 159–60.
54.
Jordan, Picturesque Pursuits, 13.
55.
Kerr and Broadbent, Gothick Taste, 25. The commonplace book includes English views set in Westmoreland and Cumberland, while the Bingle family scrap album contains a number of European views from the late 1830s, possibly corresponding to John Bingle’s 1838 continental tour. See John Bingle, Illustrated Tour through Germany, Belgium and France, D 62, Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW.
56.
Silhouette portrait of Sarah C. Bingle, 1837, Bingle family scrap album, 1856–80s, PXA 941, Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, 109; Jordan, Picturesque Pursuits, 110.
57.
Similar in style to paint-by-number compositions, greeting cards were printed with blank spaces to accommodate pressed botanical specimens and were sold in undecorated form from retailers or embellished with naturalia at local bazaars. Toy, “Timethrift,” 121.
58.
Berlin woolwork was a mass-produced form of needlework that allowed for the efficient copying of patterns through their application to a coarse canvas filled through with inexpensive coloured wool. Schaffer, Novel Craft, 42.
59.
Kerr and Broadbent, Gothick Taste, 16.
60.
Janet Myers , Antipodal England: Emigration and Portable Domesticity in the Victorian Imagination (Albany, NY: SUNY Press), 2009.
61.
Dohmen , “Memsahibs,” 156.
62.
Leaf and Flower Pictures, 12, 15, 24–25.
63.
Leaf and Flower Pictures, 39. “An Ivy Leaf from Kenilworth, or One from Rome or Athens; a Leaf from South-America, California, Australia; Any Such Token, Adds Much to the Interest of an Herbarium” (20).
64.
Beverly Seaton, The Language of Flowers: A History (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995), 181. The experience of the arrangement was further enhanced through its album context governed by an arc of concealment and revelation determined by the turning of its pages that evoked the temporal swing of presence and loss. See Geoffrey Batchen, Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance (Amsterdam: Van Gogh Museum, 2004), 49.
65.
Dried leaf arrangement from “Puen Buen,” Bingle family scrap album, 1856–80s, PXA 941, Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, 55.
66.
Leaf and Flower Pictures, 12.
67.
Tom Griffiths, “A Natural History of Melbourne: The Culture of Nature Writing in Victoria: 1880–1945,” Australian Historical Studies 23, no. 93 (1989): 351.
68.
Molly Duggins, “‘The World’s Fernery’: New Zealand and Nineteenth-Century Fern Fever,” in New Zealand’s Empire, ed. Katie Pickles and Catharine Coleborne, 102–23 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), 102.
69.
Leaf and Flower Pictures, 43.
70.
Caroline Ford, “Gazing, Strolling, Falling in Love: Culture and Nature on the Beach in Nineteenth-Century Sydney,” History Australia 3, no. 1 (2006): 8.3–8.4.
71.
Boswell, Journal, 151.
72.
Leaf and Flower Pictures, 43–44. A music book is recommended in particular.
73.
Sydney Morning Herald, 13 August 1859, 8.
74.
The wreath arrangement is inscribed in pencil at the bottom of the page, “Newcastle 1852,” with the additional notation, “S.C.B. 31st Aug 1853,” on the back, with the former potentially referring to the date the specimens were gathered and the latter to the date of their arrangement.
75.
Leaf and Flower Pictures, 45.
76.
Leaf and Flower Pictures, 29.
77.
Leaf and Flower Pictures, 39; Molly Duggins, “‘Which Mimic Art Hath Made’: Crafting Nature in the Victorian Book and Album,” in Of Green Leaf, Bird, and Flower: Artists’ Books and the Natural World, ed. Elisabeth Fairman, 47–64 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 60.
78.
This arrangement is inscribed “SCB/ 18th April 1854, 16 Nov 1850.” Leaf and Flower Pictures, 42.
79.
Sarah Cross Bingle, seaweed lyre, Bingle family scrap album, 1856–80s, PXA 941, Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, 145. A similar seaweed lyre arrangement in better condition is in a late nineteenth-century album in the National Herbarium of NSW and reproduced in Robyn Stacey and Ashley Hay, Herbarium (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 143.
80.
Sarah Cross Bingle, seaweed wreath inscribed “Newcastle, Seaweed arranged by S.C. Bingle to Sarah Agnes Little, 1857,” Bingle family scrap album, 1856–80s, PXA 941, Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, 147.
81.
Jordan, Picturesque Pursuits, 110.
82.
Colonial Australian examples are found in the album of Miss Eliza Younghusband, 1856–1865, National Library of Australia; album of Minnie Strachan, ca. 1870, State Library of NSW; album of Tasmanian views, 1870s, collection of Tim McCormick; Seaweed gift albums, 1850s–1902, National Herbarium of NSW; Franklin House, Launceston, TAS; Toy, “Timethrift,” 117; Murray Walker, Colonial Crafts of Victoria: Early Settlement to 1921 (Melbourne: Crafts Council of Australia, National Gallery of Victoria, 1978), 103; Cornelia Cox Innes, “Recollections of Life in Tasmania,” in Life at Clarendon: The Reminiscences of Cornelia and Rosa Cox, ed. A. H. Johnson, 3–5 (Launceston: National Trust of Australia, 1988), 3.
83.
See Maria Nugent, “An Economy of Shells: A Brief History of La Perouse Aboriginal Women’s Shell-Work and Its Markets, 1880–2010,” in Indigenous Participation in Australian Economies II: Historical Engagements and Current Enterprises, ed. N. Fijn, I. Keen, C. Lloyd, and M. Pickering, 211–27 (Canberra: ANU ePress, 2012), 211–27.
84.
Sarah Cross Bingle, emu feather bouquet, 1857, Bingle family scrap album, 1856–80s, PXA 941, Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, 85.
85.
Logan, Victorian Parlour, 197–98; Arthur McIntyre, Contemporary Australian Collage and Its Origins (Roseville, NSW: Craftsman House, 1990), 13.
86.
The article goes on to note, “[t]he mode of hunting is similar to that of kangarooing, and requires an equally good mount and swift dogs,” “Emu Hunt,” Illustrated Sydney News , 16 November 1864: 4 with an engraving on 5.
87.
Hooker, “Hunt and the Home,” 157. By extension, colonial Australian women were also complicit, as several scholars have suggested, in consigning the original occupants of the land to a romanticized prehistory incompatible with colonialism. See, for instance, Dobrez, “Constance à Beckett,” 273; Jordan, Picturesque Pursuits, 171–75.
88.
Dohmen , “Memsahibs,” 160.
89.
Ariane Fennetaux, “Female Crafts: Women and Bricolage in Late Georgian Britain, 1750–1820,” in Women and Things, 1750–1950, ed. Maureen Daly Goggin and Beth Fowkes Tobin, 91–108 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), 104.
90.
Album of Sarah Mathew, Grey Collection, Auckland Public Library. I am indebted to Julia Lum for bringing this album to my attention.
91.
An emu-feather fan attributed to Wintle is in the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney. Joan Kerr, ed., Heritage: The National Women’s Art Book (Roseville East, NSW: Craftsman House, 1995), 173.
92.
Sear , “‘Common Neutral Ground,’” 475.
93.
Lane and Serle, Australians at Home, 48; “Advertisements,” Argus (Melbourne), 24 September 1872: 4.
94.
Ann Stephen, “Margaret Preston,” in Heritage: The National Women’s Art Book, ed. Joan Kerr, 180–01 (Roseville East, NSW: Craftsman House, 1995).

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National Art School, Sydney, NSW, Australia
Molly Duggins

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University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Grace Moore
Monash University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Michelle J. Smith

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Duggins, M. (2018). Craft and the Colonial Environment: Natural Fancywork in the Australian Album. In: Moore, G., Smith, M. (eds) Victorian Environments. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57337-7_10

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57337-7_10
Published: 08 March 2018
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