Picturing Alfred Howitt

21 April 1865

It was a perfect April day in Melbourne. Through clear skies, the pale afternoon light cast long shadows of a subdued autumnal hue. The crispness in the air offered a portent of winter, lending a fitting solemnity to the occasion: not morose or sombre, but not bursting with the frivolity of summer either. From Treasury Place to Russell Street nearly 10,000 Melburnians gathered to witness the unveiling of Charles Summers’ monument to Burke and Wills. Volunteers from every rifle and horse brigade across Victoria had been called up to line the route. And then, at 4 pm, Governor Sir Charles Darling revealed the colossal bronze and granite tribute to the doomed explorers, accompanied by a barrage of artillery and a 17-gun salute from the Castlemaine Volunteers in honour of their fallen comrade Robert O’Hara Burke.

The unveiling ceremony, like everything else about the Burke and Wills memorial, was monumental, befitting the creation of a new mythology. Since the announcement of the government’s plan to erect the statue, it had been a source of considerable speculation and debate. By far the largest and most ambitious public artwork in Australia, its production had been a minor feat of technical mastery. At the time, Summers’ figure of Burke was the largest bronze ever cast in a single piece anywhere in the world. Crowds had gathered at the artist’s foundry to see this artisanal marvel emerge from the furnace. It would be eighteen months before Summers put the finishing touches to the Burke and Wills monument, adding a series of bas-relief panels to its vast granite base. But, like most public artworks in Australia, the monument was not without its detractors. Chief among these was a chorus contesting the accuracy of the likeness of the two figures. One anonymous writer, signing his name ‘Q’, fumed in the Argus:

Professing to be statues of Burke and Wills, these figures are not the figures of Burke and Wills. The man with the ideal boots and the heroic shirt, and the sublime head of hair, is no more like the late lamented Mr. Burke than it is like the Emperor of China. There is not one trace of resemblance between the hero he was, and as I knew him, and the hairy hero as he is represented by the cunning hand of Mr Summers. It might be Castor and Pollux, or Damon and Pythias, or any other pair of fabulous characters.¹

These were incendiary remarks, and within a week Summers’ supporters had rallied to his defence. But rather than attempting to defend the accuracy of Summers’ portraits, their response was a counterattack against colonial ignorance and philistinism:

In the person of ‘Q.’ and those of his class, we find the attempt to fight over again, on crude-minded colonial grounds, the very old and long-battled battle between every-day nature and high art; reality and ideality; matter of fact and aesthetics; in short, between high art and low art, or that which verges upon artisan work, as to his insincere talk about the real and ideal.²

In summoning the defence of ‘high art’, Summers’ supporters brandished a long- favoured talisman of artists under attack. A portrait, they argued, was more than simply mimesis, and a monument had loftier aims than likeness. Serious artists should not be concerned with such trifles, they continued: that was the inferior role of artisans, craftsmen or photographers. Using a path of logic that has been well trod since the time of Aristotle (and is trotted out every year in the clamour of critical chatter that surrounds Australia’s high-profile portrait prizes), Summers’ defenders argued that a great portrait should do more than capture likeness; it should express the very essence of its subject. So, in a sense, the anonymous critic of the Argus was right: if the essence of the Burke and Wills monument was the celebration of heroism, bravery and virtue, it stood to reason that this essence would share some visual similitude with the heroes of ancient mythology.

September 1866

By September 1866, when the bas-reliefs were finally installed on the Burke and Wills monument, Alfred William Howitt was comfortably ensconced at Bairnsdale in Gippsland, awaiting the imminent birth of his first child. Since 1863 he had been the police magistrate for the Omeo Goldfields, his jurisdiction covering 150 square miles of Victoria’s alpine district. Howitt had become a minor celebrity in Melbourne for his role as the leader of the relief expedition to rescue the survivors of the Burke and Wills party. His image had been included on the bas-relief located at the rear of Summers’ monument.

Howitt’s sister Anna Mary had been a frequent visitor to Summers’ studio in Rome while the artist worked on the commission, and Howitt had provided his own field-sketches to the artist to assist him in producing the bas-relief panels. It is also likely that Summers had seen the widely circulated 1863 studio portrait of Howitt by Melbourne photographers Batchelder and O’Neill, which had formed the basis of an etching by Samuel Calvert for the Illustrated Australian News. Despite this, Summers’ depiction of Howitt is as fanciful as that of the doomed explorers that towers above it. Leaning sympathetically forwards, Howitt is portrayed as a gentle-looking bushman with a kind eye, offering a comforting (if somewhat foreshortened) hand to the emaciated figure of John King. To his right, a bewildered Aboriginal family look on in trepidation.

Alfred Howitt arrived in Australia in September 1852 aged twenty-two, with his father William and his brother Charlton. In England, his parents had moved in literary circles, associating with the likes of William Wordsworth, Hans Christian Andersen and Charles Dickens. Both William and Mary Howitt were respected authors and publishers but it is Howitt’s mother who is perhaps best remembered, for her poem ‘The Spider and the Fly’.

William’s motivations for visiting Australia were, first, to visit his younger brother Dr Godfrey Howitt, who had set up a successful practice in Melbourne along with establishing himself as a prominent amateur botanist and entomologist; second, to try his hand at prospecting on the goldfields; and lastly, to collect material for a literary work on the colony of Victoria. After two years of limited success on the goldfields, William and Charlton returned to England. The experience provided William with inspiration for several successful volumes of fact and fiction. Alfred, however, had developed a taste for bush life. In a note that would provide a striking augury of his future as one the founders of Australian anthropology, he wrote to his sister Anna Mary:

I have a tremendous hankering after tent life … I am sure that in some state of existence I must have been a blackfellow and have lived in a mimi on possum and grubs. I am sure it would be very nice to wander about in a blanket and eat everything one could get if one had not been spoilt by being civilised.³

Over several years, Howitt honed his bush skills on a series of expeditions across uncharted regions of Victoria. His dexterity as a bushman made him an immediate candidate to lead the 1861 expedition in search of Burke and Wills. It has been regularly suggested that had Howitt been appointed instead of Burke to lead the initial expedition, it would not have ended in disaster. Indeed, there is good reason to make such claims, for after rescuing John King, the sole survivor of Burke and Wills’ party, and returning to Melbourne, Howitt promptly turned around and returned to Coopers Creek to retrieve the bodies of Burke and Wills. Both expeditions were accomplished without loss of life to any of the men under his command.

Besides his prodigious skills as an explorer, Howitt’s success might also be attributed to the marked differences between his character and that of Robert O’Hara Burke. Howitt was a quiet, modest man without the overweening ego that led Burke into peril. At the same time, it is his modesty that makes him a harder man to mythologise. As the hysteria around Burke and Wills reached its zenith, Howitt was happy to retreat to Gippsland and remain the quiet bit-player, propping up the base of mythology’s monument.

29 August 1900

It was not until 1900, three years before his death, that the esteemed Dr. A.W. Howitt sat for his first proper portrait, painted by the renowned Heidelberg School artist Tom Roberts. He had been convinced to sit for the painting by the young professor of biology at Melbourne University, W. Baldwin Spencer. Although three decades Howitt’s junior, Spencer was a dear friend and one of Howitt’s most influential champions. A year earlier, Spencer had dedicated his masterwork The Native Tribes of Central Australia to Howitt, ‘who laid the foundations of our knowledge of Australian anthropology’.

Like the dedication, the portrait commission was an attempt by Spencer to immortalise a man whose achievements he felt were in danger of being lost to history. So in August 1900 the likeness of the seventy-year-old Howitt was rendered in oils by one of Australia’s greatest portrait painters. Spencer was greatly enamoured of the likeness, writing later to Howitt’s daughter: ‘It is only a rough and hasty sketch of his head, which I am now more than ever glad that I persuaded him to sit for … it shows him just as he was with his wonderful forehead and deep set eyes.’⁴

Beyond merely an accurate likeness, Roberts’ portrait reveals a marked generational difference between its sitter on the one hand and its artist and commissioner on the other. For if Spencer feared that Howitt’s foundational scientific achievements were in danger of being lost to history, it was precisely because Howitt belonged to an earlier generation—a generation of amateur scientists of broad-ranging interests—that was being rapidly superseded by an era of specialisation in the arts and the sciences, which Spencer and Roberts might be said to epitomise in their respective disciplines. The commissioning and painting of Roberts’ 1900 portrait of Howitt, then, might be seen to betray an awkward cross-generational relationship. Roberts’ portrait of Howitt is not painted with the intimacy of a contemporary, such as his 1891 portrait of Smike Streeton age 24 (Art Gallery of New South Wales), but rather, it is the respectful if slightly fusty rendering of an elder statesman. While it is full of admiration for Howitt’s achievements, it is tempered by the recognition that the younger generation has surpassed them.

October 1854

In October 1854 Alfred Howitt prepared to undertake his first exploratory expedition in Australia, in the company of naturalist Wilhelm von Blandowski and artist Edward LaTrobe Bateman. They set out to survey unexplored territories around the Mornington Peninsula and collect specimens for the newly founded Museum of Natural of History in Melbourne. Through his uncle Godfrey, Alfred had been introduced to most of the leaders of Melbourne’s nascent scientific community, but this expedition led Howitt to become a notable contributor to the development of Australian botany, geology, zoology and anthropology. Over the next half-century, there would hardly be a single major scientific volume produced in Australia that did not, in some way or another, reference the name of Alfred Howitt.

Initially this involvement was due to Howitt’s extraordinary skills as a bushman. Nineteenth-century science was built upon a distinct hierarchy between collectors and experts. Talented explorers such as Howitt were sought out to trek the distant reaches of the colony in search of new specimens, which could be sent back for study and classification by the metropolitan specialists. Combining his assiduous attention to detail and his considerable bush acumen, Howitt soon became one of the most significant Victorian collectors, sending a constant stream of valuable and exotic material to the likes of Frederick McCoy at the National Museum of Victoria and Ferdinand von Mueller at the National Herbarium. In return, they would name several species in his honour. Thanks to McCoy, Howitt would be commended with a species of fossilised mollusc (Trigonia howitti), the upper Devonian species of fossilised plant Archaeopteris howitti and a lizard, the Gippsland Water Dragon (Physignathus lesueurii howitti), while von Mueller would name the sweet-smelling sticky wattle Acacia howitti after the diligent collector. Perhaps most spectacularly, in 1864 the Prospecting Board of Victoria would confer the name Mount Howitt on one of the taller peaks in the alpine chain near the Wonnangatta Valley. In the nineteenth century the process of scientific naming was highly politically loaded. Taxonomic naming was seen as a way of garnering favour with important patrons or, as in the case of Howitt, rewarding meritorious work or assistance. In other instances, however, it could used for less ingratiating purposes. In 1858 Blandowski was censured by the Philosophical Institute of Victoria after two of its members felt slighted by his naming unattractive fish after them. The incident, which was lampooned in Melbourne’s Punch, effectively ended Blandowski’s scientific career, and he left Australia in disgrace.

If Blandowski’s comparison of distinguished members of the Philosophical Society to an ugly fish—‘easily recognised by its low forehead, big belly and sharp spine’—was enough to cause offence, what impression can we gain of Alfred Howitt from the taxonomic honours he received? As Howitt was not a figure of wealth or political importance, his name was unlikely to grace high-profile species, major rivers or broad vistas, but in the small taxonomic choices made by those who knew and respected him, a clear portrait begins to emerge. Take, for instance, Frederick McCoy’s touching dedication to Howitt in his 1885 Prodromus of the zoology of Victoria:

I name the variety or probable species after that excellent geologist, magistrate, and bushman, my accomplished friend Mr. A. Howitt, who, with his multifarious and laborious duties, in so difficult a country to traverse, is always ready and willing to aid in any scientific investigation of the natural products of Gippsland, and who with infinite difficulty succeeded in procuring three specimens for me of this River-Lizard. The proverb that ‘Cows far off have long horns’ is ludicrously exemplified in the case of this Lizard, which has apparently given rise to the rumors of Crocodiles having been seen in Gippsland; a country so rugged and overgrown with forests and almost impenetrable scrub that it is an extremely rare occurrence for a white man to reach the habitat in which the Physignathus is found, in the upper reaches of the Buchan River.⁵

On the one hand, this passage highlights what we already know: that Howitt was a skilled bushman and an industrious collector. On the other, it indicates a subtle transition from Howitt being seen as a mere collector to being considered a man of science. This transition had already been noted in McCoy’s earlier Prodromus of the palaeontology of Victoria, where he hailed Howitt as an ‘excellent and zealous geologist’.⁶

Although Howitt would become best known for his role in the development of Australian anthropology, it was in geology that he would first begin to exert himself as a scientist in his own right. As police magistrate he was required to traverse long distances across his jurisdiction. By his own admission, Howitt ‘learnt in the saddle’, reading the latest scientific texts, sent to him by his sister Anna Mary in London, during long rides in the alpine terrain. Under the influence of writers such as Charles Lyell, whose Elements of Geology he encountered around 1868, Howitt began to distinguish himself as a thinker and theorist, not just a collector, bushman or explorer. Great efforts were made to have state-of-the-art geological apparatus sent from England. In the isolation of Gippsland, Howitt began to develop his own ideas and report his observations, making some of the earliest recorded observations of metamorphic geological phenomena in Australia.

September 1874

Although attracting some minor respect, Howitt’s achievements in evolutionary geology went largely unheralded. This was partly due to his isolation in Gippsland, but also to the fact that as his theoretical ideas took shape, he fell increasingly out of step with the Melbourne scientific establishment as epitomised by McCoy and Mueller. Both were creationists and part of a scientific generation disparagingly referred to by their contemporary Gerard Krefft as ‘collectors of specimens and accumulators of hard names’. Like Krefft, Howitt increasingly found himself, through personal observation and theoretical inclination, drawn towards the new theories of evolution. After encountering the writings of Charles Darwin, Howitt wrote to the eminent scientist, offering to carry out investigations on his behalf in Australia. In a letter politely declining Howitt’s offer, Darwin unwittingly set in train the foundation of Australian anthropology:

I have not at present any subject on which I want information from Australia, but I will not forget your obliging offer. If the idea has not already occurred to you, will you allow me to make one viz.—to keep full & accurate notes of the mental powers, such as capacity of abstract reasoning etc. etc. of the Australians. Also of their quasi-religious beliefs,—their curious marriage laws; & all other such points. With your means of obtaining information, & your scientific habits of thought, you could certainly write a very valuable memoir or book, in the course of a few years.⁷

Over the next three decades, Howitt would dedicate himself to this task, and in 1880 would co-author with Lorimer Fison one of the first major studies in Australian anthropology, Kamilaroi and Kurnai. It was in the emergent discipline of anthropology that Howitt was first able to confidently propose his own theories. Unfortunately for Howitt’s legacy, these theories were based largely on orthogenetic theories of cultural evolution—often referred to as ‘social Darwinism’—which quickly fell out of fashion as the colonial assumptions upon which they were based became clear.

It was Howitt’s anthropological methods, rather than his theories, that would be of lasting importance. By applying the same rigorous approach to the accumulation of data that had defined his career as a geologist and collector, Howitt helped establish anthropology as a discipline based on careful firsthand observation rather than on the accumulation of anecdotal evidence. Crucially, he recognised the central role of participatory observation in the collection of anthropological data. As part of his research for Kamilaroi and Kurnai, Howitt lived among the indigenous people of Gippsland, becoming a fully initiated member of the Kurnai. In his text he stresses that it was only through his active involvement in the Kurnai’s ceremonial and religous practices that he was able to gather a complete understanding of the meaning of their cultural practices. This realisation would have a profound effect on Baldwin Spencer and Francis Gillen, and it would define their approach in compiling The Native Tribes of Central Australia (1899). Lynette Turner has noted that ‘the emergence of ethnography in the modern sense of participant involvement is generally regarded as the defining moment of modern social anthropology, and thus coincides with the theoretical and methodological rejection of classical evolutionism’.⁸ Thus, paradoxically, while it was Howitt’s evolutionary theories that made him more than just a ‘collector’ in the eyes of his contemporaries, it is precisely this latter role in which he secured his reputation as the ‘father’ of Australian anthropology.

24 December 1860

On Christmas Eve, as he camped in the Wonnangatta Valley, Howitt wrote to his sister in England:

This is Moroka Valley … I called the place from where this view is seen de Guerard’s Range as he was with me at the time. I said, ‘You have six months work there before you on the river’—he replied, ‘dere is not seex months, dere is seex years.’ He says that one view would repay him for the whole journey from Melbourne.⁹

Over the next six years, Eugene von Guérard would immortalise the Moroka Valley in a series of paintings and prints that would help redefine Australian landscape painting. By the turn of the century, however, von Guérard’s paintings were seen as glaringly passé, his achievements swept aside by a progression of artists grappling to capture the essence of the Australian landscape. Compared to the rugged naturalism of Tom Roberts or Arthur Streeton, it was clear that the sublime classicism of von Guérard belonged to a different era. But like the Australian landscape, Alfred Howitt remains an elusive figure. His life and work cannot be easily confined to a single episteme. Neither the grandeur of a Summers monument nor the impressionism of a Roberts oil painting seem able to capture his essence. Perhaps this is why he has been such a difficult figure to mythologise, and why there are no monuments to this Victorian hero. But maybe in Gippsland, as the sticky wattle’s bloom wafts sweetly over the lake and the light across Mount Howitt catches on the stunning blue and yellow markings of a Gippsland Water Dragon as he suns himself in the morning light, the trace of Alfred Howitt remains: a modest whisper to a figure who in a small way changed the face of Australian science.

Copyright henry Skerritt 2011