Design and Art Australia Online

watercolour painter, architect, engineer, administrator and police commissioner, was born on 19 April 1821 in Muddiford, Hampshire, son of Vice-Admiral George Henderson and Frances Elizabeth, née Walcott-Sympson. Educated at the King’s School, Somerset, and at the Royal Military Academy, Henderson had a distinguished career in the Royal Engineer Corps. After two tours of duty in Canada, he was appointed WA Comptroller-General in 1849 to prepare for the imminent arrival of convicts. With a small contingent of pensioner guards and seventy-five convicts, he arrived at Fremantle in the Scindian on 1 June 1850. He spent thirteen years in the colony (with regular trips to England) before selling out his commission as lieutenant-colonel and returning home in 1863. There he succeeded Sir Joshua Jebb as surveyor-general of prisons and inspector-general of military prisons. In 1869 he became chief commissioner of the Metropolitan Police and, as such, responsible for the monarch’s personal safety on all state occasions. Created CB in 1868 and KCB in 1878, Sir Edmund resigned on 8 February 1886 after being blamed for a riot in Trafalgar Square for which he was later fully exonerated.

A very tall, fine-looking man with mutton-chop moustaches, Henderson was reputed to be a gifted raconteur with a keen sense of humour. He was twice married: in 1848 to Mary Murphy at Halifax, Nova Scotia, and in 1857 to Maria, daughter of Rev. J. Hindle of Higham, Kent. A caricature by his subordinate Lieutenant Le Mesurier shows him towering over his second wife and his daughter. Henderson died on 8 December 1896, predeceased by both wives and his only son and survived by several daughters.

Not only a skilled draughtsman, Henderson was also a competent watercolourist. Gentle impressionistic sketches made during his years in Western Australia reflect the changing colonial scene. He painted pensioner villages, kangaroo hunts and local landscapes. Most surviving works, such as Fremantle Harbour (1862) and Collie River (1859), are in private collections. During the 1850s several of his sketches were engraved for the Illustrated London News . Those reproduced on 28 February and 14 March 1857 comprise views of Bunbury and York, a camp of Aborigines of Western Australia and Culham, in the Upper Valley of the Swan —competent if rather conventional picturesque scenes with some lively foreground embellishment (possibly added in London), such as a mob of horses alarmed by an Aboriginal hunter in the last.

Undoubtedly Fremantle’s two most impressive buildings, and Henderson’s outstanding contribution to Western Australian architecture, are the convict establishment east of the port and the lunatic asylum to the west. The convict establishment, modelled on the lines of the Portland and Pentonville prisons in England, was completed in 1858. The gaol incorporated new technological methods of ventilation, communication and a subterranean sewerage system, while indigenous materials such as local limestone, jarrah and she-oak shingles were used to advantage. The whole complex was encompassed by solid limestone walls, outside of which stretched rows of two-storeyed stuccoed houses for officers, low slung warders’ cottages and pensioners’ barracks, in nice relief to Henderson’s gracious residence, The Knowle (later Fremantle Hospital), which stood apart to the south-east. His sketch of his home is also privately held.

Henderson began the Fremantle Asylum in 1861 after returning, via South Africa, from leave in England where he had resolved the initial planning problems. The grand façades suggest English Victorian Gothic Revival influences, but the roofs and gables are 'patently Cape Dutch’. Completed in 1865 in local limestone, the building has been described as being no precise imitation of any contemporary institution but a happy synthesis of ideas, materials and techniques available at the time. Originally designed to stand amid spacious gardens, the asylum (now on a reduced site) was restored in 1970 to become a Maritime Museum and Arts Centre.

Writers:

Birman, Wendy

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

2011