William Wardell's 1859 St John's College - a rare realisation of Pugin's ideal Catholic College?

William Wardell’s St John’s College, Sydney, considered the grandest and architecturally most distinguished university college in New South Wales, is an exceptional example of 19th century Gothic Revival architecture.  The information board outside the college states that St John’s is ‘a rare realisation of Pugin’s ideal Catholic College’ and further that ‘it demonstrates [Pugin]’s profound influence on the work of Wardell’. This is but a small part of the story. The commission for St John’s College was far more complex.  The correspondence between the architects, William Wardell, Edmund Blacket and others, and St John’s Council indicates that right from the beginning there was a general lack of understanding of Wardell’s original design concept for the building. This has continued to the present day, as evidenced by the information on the board outside St John’s College, in which it is incorrectly assumed that Wardell’s proposal included a quadrangle as featured in Pugin’s ‘ideal College’. This paper, based largely on primary sources, investigates such claims about St John’s, considers William Wardell and the Gothic Revival, examines St John’s College within the University of Sydney – its design and its translation and posits a few conclusions leading to new understandings.

China in a book: Victorian representations of the 'celestial kingdom' in William Dalton’s 'The wolf boy of China'

Despite the wealth of material related to China in Victorian and Edwardian children’s literature, relatively few scholarly works have been published on the subject. Critics who have discussed the topic have tended to emphasize the negative discourse and stereotypical images of the Chinese in late nineteenth-century children’s literature. I use the case of William Dalton’s The Wolf Boy of China (1857), one of the earliest full-length Victorian children’s novels set in China, to complicate previous generalizations about negative representations of China and the Chinese and to highlight the unpredictable nature of child readers’ reactions to a text. First, in order to trace the complicated process of how information about the country was disseminated, edited, framed, and translated before reaching Victorian and Edwardian readers, I analyse how Dalton wove fragments from his reading of a large archive of texts on China into his novel.
Although Dalton may have preserved and transmitted some ‘factual’ information about China from his sources, he also transformed material that he read in innovative ways. These are reflected in the more subversive and radical parts of the novel, which are discussed in the second part of the essay. In the final section, I provide examples of historical readers of The Wolf Boy of China to challenge the notion that children passively accept the imperialist messages in books of empire.

When William Wallace was a unionist

  James Russell Thompson was a successful businessman from Airdrie in Scotland. He arrived in the Victorian gold-mining town of Ballarat in 1853, having previously struck gold on the Ovens goldfields. Deafness caused by his earlier career in mining prevented Thompson from becoming involved in public life in Ballarat but, dying a wealthy man in May 1886, he was able to leave significant bequests to relatives and requested that his remaining estate be put towards the purchase of statues for Ballarat's sprawling botanic gardens. A fellow Scot, Thomas Stoddart, was executor of Thompson's estate, and was able to procure for the gardens numerous monuments and statues made of Italian Carrara marble. The most notable of Stoddart's procurements was the statue of the Scottish hero William Wallace. The Ballarat Star noted that "the statue of Wallace was decided on as a compliment to Mr Thompson's love for the country he came from-an effigy of the greatest character ... in Scottish history or legend". The statue of Wallace in Ballarat's botanic gardens was unveiled and bequeathed to the city on May 24, 1889. It is one of very few outside Scotland.

Interview with William Pomat

William Pomat is a Papua New Guinean who studied in Australia on two occasions; at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in 1992-1993, and at the University of Western Australia (UWA) in 2001-2004. On both occasions he studied on Australian Agency for International Development (AusAID) Scholarships. At UNSW, he completed his Masters in Immunology and at UWA he completed he PhD in the same field. The interview was conducted on 9 July 2014 by Dr. Jonathan Ritchie of Deakin University and Dr. Musawe Sinebare of the Pacific Adventist University. This set comprises: an interview recording, and a timed summary.

Interview with Paulus William Kei

Paulus William Kei is a Papua New Guinean who studied at the Southbank Institute of Technology in 2006-2007. He studied on an Australian Development Scholarship (ADS) and completed a Diploma in Biotechnology. The interview was conducted in English on 17 December 2014 by Dr. Jemma Purdey of Deakin University. This set comprises: an interview recording, and a timed summary.

Popular imperialism, Scottish identity, and William Wallace in an Australian colonial city

The narrative of William Wallace holds a prominent position in the current conception of England as a negative referent for Scotland’s national identity—its binary “Other”, against which Wallace valiantly fought. This article considers a contrasting understanding of Scottish national identity from the late-nineteenth century, and explores the events surrounding the unveiling of a statue of William Wallace in Australia during the year of 1889. It illuminates how settlers interpreted this national hero in such a way that demonstrated loyalty to the Union and Empire, and accommodated a convergence of English, Scottish, Irish, and Welsh migrants in a British colonial city. The article highlights how statues, the ceremonies surrounding them, and their public reception help us to investigate the symbolic, ritualistic, and performative dimensions of identity formulation. It considers how public monuments, providing a sense of authority to particular groups, can marginalise others by acting to settle cultural competition, and will reflect on competing interpretations of the statue at its unveiling.