Catalogue 63 New Century Antiquarian Books Late Spring 2012

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[18] TURNER, James A. [Australian Bush Life] A complete set of 46 colour-printed postcards, published 1904 – circa 1907. Melbourne, Osboldstone & Co. [and Robert Jolley], n.d. but 1904ff. 46 colour-printed, captioned postcards; loose as issued, many postally used, a complete set in excellent state preserved loose in a collector’s album.$2200 RARE COMPLETE SET: AN OUTSTANDING SOCIAL DOCUMENT FROM THE EARLY FEDERAL ERA James Alfred Turner, was born in February 1850 at Bradford, in Yorkshire. His father was a senior accountant in a Bradford bank, something that would later give rise to one of the many myths about Turner – that he was a retired banker who only painted as a hobby. Although evidently well-to-do and probably of independent means, Turner was, however, an artist with formal training. He arrived in Melbourne in April 1873 with his brother Charles, evidently intending to establish himself as a professional artist at a time when Melbourne was one of the great booming cities of the world. His earliest-known painting in Australia, “The Kangaroo Hunt”, was dated in the year of his arrival. After over a decade of life in Melbourne, in 1888 he bought a small holding at Kilsyth, at the foot of the Dandenong Ranges, and it is this world of the small holder in the Victorian ranges that inspired, and is so meticulously recorded in, his paintings. While Turner exhibited with Victorian Artists’ Society, the Australian Art Association, the Victorian Academy of Arts, the Yarra Sculptors’ Society, the Melbourne and <strong>New</strong> Melbourne art clubs, his only major commission appears to have been the fourteen paintings of bush life that philanthropist gold-digger James Oddie commissioned him to execute in 1884 as a gift to the Ballarat Fine Art Gallery. Whatever evidence we have, much of it gossip, suggests that Turner genuinely painted for his own satisfaction and not for his livelihood. He recorded in exceptional detail the daily life among the small rural settlers in the ranges north of Melbourne, a subject that appealed to several contemporary artists, including, for example, Frederick McCubbin – most notably in his great 1904 triptych, “The Pioneer”. It is the life McCubbin celebrates that Turner had set out to record in a prolific and detailed series of mainly small, but some huge, oil paintings, watercolours, and gouaches. His faithful record of the typical incidents of rural life did not please contemporary and later art critics, who considered him a mere illustrator, their minds set firmly on his style and not his substance. Others were less censorious, recognising him as “our best known painter of incident” and that he painted with “peculiar exactness”. The Melbourne Argus, in its 1908 obituary, grasped his purpose better: “an artist who not only understood and appreciated the beauty of the bush, but could depict faithfully its life and character. He was, as a rule, content with small canvasses, homely incidents and quiet aspects of nature. At times he was exceedingly happy in his landscapes and would often touch a very high if not inspired note. No man ever
painted the realisms of a forest fire and its fighting better than he, or with more absolute truth. He was a very conscientious man, painting chiefly to please himself, without any suspicion of pot-boiling, never allowing work to leave his hands until he was thoroughly satisfied”. It is his “peculiar exactness” that make Turner’s work so unique an historic resource. No camera could capture the spirit of a time and a way of life as he did, recording in often painstaking detail not only the larger aspects of life in the bush but also their context, with the impedimenta of everyday life, the tools, the buildings, the makeshifts, the rituals. It is said that a trained eye can even identify the species of his trees. Certainly, the untrained eye can see the precise design and construction of every axe, shovel, plough, billy can, saddle, shirt, neckerchief, – everything– that he portrayed in his paintings. What makes Turner’s contribution to the social documentation of the period so valuable is not just that his work is prolific but that it was widely popularised, as no other artist or indeed photographer was. In about 1904 the first of his small canvases was reproduced on a postcard and by 1907, when Turner died suddenly and young, forty-six of his studies of rural and bush life had been issued in the series, providing a visual record of a contemporary artist that was at the time unexampled in Australia. The series was generally untitled but a small number of cards have the series title "Australian Bush Life" added to the card title. The postcards were produced by the Melbourne printers Osboldstone & Atkinson, subsequently Osboldstone & Co., a firm known for their colour-printing. Contemporary advertisements, however, suggest that the publication and distribution was undertaken by Robert Jolley, who had a special line in ephemeral pieces such as souvenirs, postcards, and pictorial novelties. The forty-six cards were issued in sets of six or twelve cards, and continued to be issued well up to the 1920s. With each issue – now virtually impossible to distinguish – there were some trivial changes to the captions and, more significantly, there were various ‘novelty’ or special issues produced over the years, with gilt deckled edges or with seasonal greetings printed in gilt on the image, for example. Some in the series were essentially ‘sublet’ to advertisers, with their brands printed on the card. Some of the series were reproduced in the 1920s as folded greeting cards. Some of the postcard images even ended up as dinner mats and folding pocket calendars, others were reproduced in larger format as commercial prints. The huge popularity of Turner’s postcard images in the first decades of the twentieth century is a story in its own right. It is easy to dismiss this as a hangover of late-Victorian sentimentality, or of nationalist nostalgia, or some other equally dismissive epithet. But the evidence is against this. Many extant cards have been used by contemporaries and it is regularly the case that for every “Meet you Friday” there are tthose that comment on the image, explaining it to a correspondent overseas or a confirmed town dweller, or simply discussing the type of incident or person depicted. To these writers the incidents and circumstances are real and recognisably so. The handful of Turner postcards from the James Baird Scott archive in Museum Victoria are a good example. The series of Turner’s postcards have been long and popularly collected by cartophiles. Complete sets are, nevertheless, rare with several cards being, for no apparent reason, very elusive indeed. The present set is a complete one, the cards in very good to fine state. A good number of cards are postally used and the cancellation stamps show that most were issued in the earlier stages of publication. A desirable, important, and comprehensive social record of a prominent aspect of Australian life at the turn of the century.
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Page 3 and 4: [2] BEAVER, Wilfred N. Unexplored N
Page 5 and 6: [4] DUTTON, Henry Hampden. Across A
Page 7 and 8: [6] FORREST, Sir John. “The Kimbe
Page 9 and 10: [10] [THE GREAT DEP- RESSION: The P
Page 11 and 12: [11] HUNT, Dame Agnes Gwendoline. R
Page 13 and 14: [13] NORTH AUSTRALIAN LEAGUE. The C
Page 15 and 16: [15] [QUEENSLAND: BOER WAR] Queensl
Page 17: [17] SOUTER, D.H. and Sidney BEAUMO
Page 21 and 22: [20] AUSTRAL WIRE FENCE AND GATE Co
Page 23 and 24: many well-heeled rural customers wh
Page 25 and 26: [23] BRITISH GENERAL ELECTRIC Compa
Page 27 and 28: [26] DANKS, John & Sons Pty Ltd. Ca
Page 29 and 30: [28] G.E. FULTON and Co. Illustrate
Page 31 and 32: [29] GRACE Bros. Grace Bros.’ Gen
Page 33 and 34: [31] GEO. P. HARRIS, SCARFE & Co.,
Page 35 and 36: [33] HOMECRAFTS Pty Ltd. Radio and
Page 37 and 38: [35] SMITH, Alex. Australian Home C
Page 39 and 40: social concerns of the day through
Page 41 and 42: [37] ARTHUR J. VEALL Pty Ltd. Veall
Page 43: Books are offered subject to prior

Catalogue 63 New Century Antiquarian Books Late Spring 2012

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