|  H-Anzau | Home | About the Journal | Copyright | Articles | Reviews | Conference Papers | Resources | Search |

Reviewed by Ann Beedell, Faculty of Humanities, Griffith University.

In the context of Australian cultural history the name McCrae may for people of a certain age have a familiar enough ring. Melbourne based, there were a few of them: Georgiana (1804-1890) painter and diarist; her attractive, bohemian son George Gordon (1833-1927); and his son, the poet Hugh Raymond (1876-1958). It was Hugh McCrae who in 1934 first published a version of his grandmother's journal that was to become one of the standard 'Australiana' classics. As Georgiana's Journal. Melbourne 1841- 1965 it was republished by Angus & Robertson as recently as 1992 .

Even so, subsumed in the welter of cultural studies and critical theory publications of recent years, and overlaid by more recent and more significant figures in Australian art and letters, the name may have lost much of its earlier resonance. This is all the more reason then to welcome a new professional biography of the woman who was the intellectual and emotional pivot of the McCrae dynasty. It is certainly long overdue. Indeed, apart from the heavily cut and 'edited' journal itself, a n honours thesis or two, a few scholarly articles, and a uselessly polite entry in Percival Serle's 1949 two-volumed Dictionary of Australian Biography (the details of which must surely have been supplied by Hugh McCrae), there are no other published sources of new information and I have to say at this juncture that much of the factual detail presented in this review comes straight out of the Niall biography: it really is nowhere else to be found. It is Niall's real achievement that she has marshalled together so prodigious an amount of new material. A thus ungrateful quibble nevertheless, interposes itself: that perhaps this painstakingly researched, elegantly written, and attractively presented book has come too late. In the sixties, seventies, or even eighties, it might have been hailed. Today, at least from a scholarly point of view, the question is whether this handling of the Georgiana McCrae story promises rather to extinguish than to generate ongoing interest.

As told by Niall the story is roughly as follows. Born in London 15 March 1804, Georgiana McCrae was the illegitimate, but acknowledged daughter of Jane Graham and George Gordon, Marquise of Huntly, heir to the Gordon dukedom. She grew up with her mother, who may perhaps have been an actress, in the paradoxical world of Somers Town, on the wrong side of Euston Road, then something of a down-market enclave of struggling emigre French aristocrats and local radicals, artists and writers. Educated by both aristocratic French Catholic nuns and Protestant liberals with the object of her achieving some kind of 'independence', she ultimately chose art, rather than music (she possessed apparently a beautiful mezzo voice and was a talented pianist) as a means of attaining that end. She was to become the pupil of landscape artist John Varley, John Glover, Dominic Serres, and portrait painter and miniaturist Charles Hayter. Attractive, educated, talented and gregarious, in the 1820s after her mother's mental disablement she lived for some time at Gordon Castle first with her grandfather the 4th duke, and after his death in 1827, in the household of the 5th and last duke of Gordon, her father, and his plain young duchess ( and Georgiana's nemesis), the heiress Elizabeth Brodie, whom he had married in 1813.

Georgiana's own (second) choice in marriage, (the first thwarted by the duchess) was the promising but fortuneless young lawyer, Andrew Murison McCrae, a remote Gordon cousin. They were married in September 1830. In October 1840, with financial help from the duchess, Georgiana with her four children (one had died in infancy) followed her husband to New South Wales, or, more precisely, the barely established squatter settlement at Port Phillip.

She seems to have quickly found a social niche in Melbourne within a relatively refined and educated group which included the families of McCraes' own brothers and sisters, William Westgarth, the Godfrey Howitts, and the family of the Superintendent himself, Charles LaTrobe. Almost certainly the most skilled portraitist i n Melbourne, in the lean depression years of the early 40s Georgiana was however expressly prevented by her husband from receiving paying commissions. Bourgeois social practice forbade that a gentleman's wife earn money by the use of her talents.

Having lost through financial reverses the house they built in Melbourne, by 1845 McCrae had given up his law practice and had moved the family (six children plus their young tutor John McLure ) to Arthur's Seat, a squatter's run on Mornington Peninsula. In the house she designed there Georgiana held frequent court to visitors from not too far distant Melbourne, reared her six children, kept her journal and intermittently sketched and painted. But within seven years the venture had failed and in October 1851 they returned to Melbourne. Gold had intervened in the colony's economy and McCrae was given an official post as police magistrate at Alberton, Gippsland, worth 3600 plus allowances, but he went there alone.

In Melbourne, Georgiana rejoined her old social circle enlarged as it now was with gold-seeking, emigrant, or visiting artists and writers: among whom, Godfrey Howitt's brother the radical writer, William Howitt and his writer wife Mar y, the poet R. H. 'Orion' Horne, the young Pre-Raphaelite sculptor Thomas Woolner and his friend Edward LaTrobe Bateman, painter Julie Vieusseux, as well as the Swiss/Russian artist Nicholas Chevalier. She also met at this time the writer Louisa Ann Meredith. Niall remarks: 'The piano and the dining-room-table, her emblems of sociable ease and culture, were again in constant use.' (p.208). She formed out of these new contacts several life-long friendships, particularly those of Chevalier and Meredith, but her own creativity, perhaps following the death of her ninth and last child, three-year-old Agnes in 1854, seems to have withered.

The biography jumps quickly from this point (c.1854) to the death of the Duchess of Gordon in 1864, and the clearly visible keystone of the book's narrative structure, the trauma of the will. The great question doggedly set up in the narrative, 'Would she or wouldn't she honour her husband's wishes in regard to Georgiana's ten-thousand pound legacy?' was finally answered in the negative. No she would not. The subsequent marriage breakdown and Georgiana's bid for a separation, Andrew McCrae's withdrawal to Europe, return and death, Georgiana's dependent, but comparatively lively if bitter old-age, and in May 1890, her death, which warranted an obituary by Henry Gyles Turner. (Argus 7 June, 1890), are all dealt with in under 30 pages.

Throughout, the authorial voice is urbane and authoritative; quibbling here and there with Hugh McCrae's interventions and omissions; offering reassuring psychological explanation for otherwise mysterious behaviour; explaining ( sometimes questionably) relevant historical connections; untangling threads of rumour and innuendo; weaving an apparently seamless narrative around a handful of individuals who are all rather suspiciously unresistant to this too, too silken manacle. A closer look at the narrative structure begins to suggest why. Niall appears to have sacrificed their potential for truly transcendent idiosyncrasy to the demands of narrative decorum: a form of authorial control which I suspect Georgiana McCrae herself would have recognised and spurned, just as she eventually recognised and spurned the controlling power of colonial bourgeois ideals of social decorum.

One of the unfortunate results of this approach is to 'even down' the chief protagonists to the point where they become almost interchangeable pegs in the grand plan. This is achieved very much at their expense. Take the treatment of Elizabeth Brodie, 5th Duchess of Gordon. Considering her role in the story (as told ), Niall paints her with a somewhat disingenuous even-handedness. Georgiana's spiteful nemesis, the ultimate betrayer of her weak husband's best intentions not only disinherit s Georgiana, but virtually rubs her out of the family record. Yet she is also shown as a woman to be admired and respected in her own right in the niche she created for herself , first, against all the odds, as duchess, and then when a childless dowager in the public sphere as a wealthy Evangelical philanthropist. Such admirable balance sits awkwardly in a text in which so much is made to ride upon her private vindictiveness toward the book's subject. It is no trivial point that the book all but ends with her death, rather than with Georgiana's.

Niall's other questionable balancing act is her treatment of Andrew McCrae. His son George, who was to become the ultimate conduit for Georgiana's posthumous fame, as Niall observes, ostentatiously banished him to the fringes of the story. She rightly seeks to correct this: to show him as a man misunderstood and even persecuted by a perhaps too-perfect wife (pp.171, 203). But at the same time she turns him and the marriage into the other great negative sub-plot of the story with the effect that his marital demands and neglects (although seldom actually heard directly) are second in importance only to the machinations of the duchess in creating the narrative limitations within which Georgiana is placed.

The absence of the truly knowable spawns the view that all biography is in any case fiction. Anyone who has written one, or the other, or both, knows tha t this is not the case. But there is of course no obligation upon the reader to make th e distinction. Niall has certainly not written this biography as a work of fiction, her research and scholarly apparatus attest to that. Yet in her narrative structure and in her tropes of melancholic/ romantic irony she has made it available as such.

Perhaps as a caveat, Niall remarks in the 'Epilogue':

It is against all the odds that a detailed life of Georgiana McCrae could be written. Biography for the most part deals with those who make their mark in the public sphere; hers was a private life of the kind which is rarely documented in t he detail which can evoke the drama of personality. (p.257)

It is almost as if the precious reliquaries, 'tended and kept with a devotion that was medieval' as W. B. Dalley remarked of the McCrae archive in his foreword to the first 1934 edition of the journal, having been finally (all?) brought out, may now be returned to the 'sideboards, trunks, cupboards and chest of drawers' of the McCrae family guardians, in the knowledge that they will almost certainly never be disturbed again. The definitive biography has been written. Pace!

But this function of biography as funerary urn entitles us to suspect after all that the only reason Georgiana's name survives today is because her descendants have willed it to be so. And might not the basis of their pride in their ancestor be the same as the basis of that coy embarrassment which has, possibly, so long delayed biographical scrutiny? That she was a duke's illegitimate daughter? A fact discreetly veiled in all Hugh McCrae's commentaries, although well enough known to Georgiana's own contemporaries. And might not Melbourne's fascination with Georgiana have been founded in the same double-edged truth? Here is William Westgarth in 1888 recalling her at the family cattle station on Mornington Peninsula in the late 1840s.

The year following, when my dear old friends, Mr and Mrs A. M. McCrae, had betaken themselves from hard lines of law to the pleasant variety of an Arthur Seat cattle station, pleasant to their town visitors at least, I oftener than once looked in upon them from Melbourne. They had the life and adornment of a large family of pretty curly-headed young boys and girls, some of them with the aristocratic fine black hair and cream-white skin of their accomplished mother. (Westgarth 1888: 50)

And here is the next generation: William Bede Dalley Jnr, journalist and barrister speaking in 1934:

In the first place it is fantastic that a woman of Georgiana's grace should have been part of the muddle of shacks and humpies that was Melbourne. (McCrae 1992: xii 'Foreword to the First Edition')

For Georgiana McCrae to survive, for her life to still have meaning for us, what she does not need is the disingenuous detachment and decorum of a Brenda Niall. Rather the cruel perpetrations of a Peter Ackroyd, or even a Jeannette Winterton. Having said which, it is nevertheless to Brenda Niall's credit that enough has been retrieved out of which a resurrection might yet be effected.

Notes:

McCrae, Hugh (ed.) 1992 Georgiana's Journal. Melbourne 1841-1865 (Sydney, Angus and Robertson)

Westgarth, William 1888 Personal Recollections of Early Melbourne & Victoria (Melbourne and Sydney, Angus and Robertson)

Ann Beedell is a postgraduate student within the Faculty of Humanities, Griffith University, and author of The Decline of the English Musician 1788-1888. A Family of English Musicians in Ireland, England, Mauritius and Australia (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1992). She is currently researching a PhD on music in Australian culture 1850- 1900.

Published: {Publication Date} http://www.jcu.edu.au/aff/history/reviews/{File Name}.htm