Constance Matilda à Beckett b. 1860

Also known as Riley, Craig, Aunt Connie, née à Beckett Constance Matilda Brett
  • Artist (Painter)
Colonial female who painted for distraction, while her family was parodied in her nephew's novels as the product of a nouveau-riche convict father, whose descendants are now known as the Boyd family.

painter, was the younger sister of the artist Emma Minnie Boyd and a granddaughter of Sir William à Beckett, the first Chief Justice of Victoria. The life of the à Becketts has been fictionally portrayed in Martin Boyd’s sagas of colonial families, The Montforts and the Langton books. The second youngest of six children, Constance grew up at The Grange, Harkaway, built by her parents, Emma (née Mills), daughter of a wealthy ex-convict property-owner and Melbourne’s first brewer of beer, and the Hon. William Arthur Callander à Beckett MLC, the Chief Justice’s eldest son.

In 1888 at All Saints Anglican Church, St Kilda, Constance married Frank Pilkington Brett, who worked with a Melbourne firm of solicitors. After leaving the shelter of The Grange she lived in style at Malvern and later South Yarra in a way that departed from the à Beckett family’s sedate practice in which neither conspicuous displays of wealth nor work ethic had any place. Martin Boyd plots this socio-cultural shift in his portrayal of the Bretts as the Rileys (in The Montforts ) and the Craigs (in A Difficult Young Man ). He was never comfortable with the newly acquired bourgeois values of his Aunt Connie, but his character Helena Craig, modelled on one of her daughters, is represented as embodying an ideal of innocence, beauty and grace. Flattering to the colonial enterprise, this ideal is associated with the potentialities of a new country at the antipodes – potentialities revealed in its acclimatised native-born. Indeed, in the Art Deco terms of Boyd’s vision, Helena is Essential Australia. In A Difficult Young Man a dominant anti-bourgeois strain in her cultural make-up, reinforced by something in the Australian environment that rejects artificiality, allows Boyd’s type of the à Beckett-Brett to pass through the embrace of moneyed Melbourne (exemplified by the 'upholstered’ ladies of Toorak) to a higher destiny.

Like her more famous sister, Constance took the activity of painting for granted as a genteel diversion. She is likely to have been the model for the young woman seated on the floor in Emma Minnie Boyd’s Afternoon Tea (1885, Bendigo AG), a painting apparently set in the drawing-room at the Boyd family house, Glenfern, East St Kilda – the other figure being Lucy Charlotte Boyd (née Martin), great-grandmother of Mary Boyd . Connie sometimes accompanied Emma Minnie to Mrs Boyd’s for tea, as Emma (Mills) à Beckett’s diary entry for Saturday, 23 May 1885 testifies. The flavour of the sisters’ colonial life is captured by their mother in her diaries detailing the à Beckett family activities. For example, on 4 November 1855 Emma records: 'W.A.C. [the young ladies’ father], Minnie, Connie and I went to the ball at Govt House … about 1500 people there’. In connection with W.A.C. a’Beckett’s place in 'Melbourne Society’, it is interesting to note that Martin Boyd, when giving a disguised account of the life of his mother, Emma Minnie, is anxious to suggest, if not Australian egalitarianism, at least a spontaneous transcending of class. In A Difficult Young Man , Boyd has his fictional stand-in, Guy Langton, observe:

Our parents were unusually careless of differences of class, and I have seen Laura, dressed in silk and feathers, with diamonds and white gloves and a lace parasol, returning from a Government House garden party, stop a man driving a herd of Ayrshire cows along a Toorak road, and discuss their points with him.

Writers:
Dobrez, Patricia
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011