sketcher, architect and public servant, was in Melbourne by 10 August 1852, when he was appointed to the newly created Victorian government’s Colonial Architect’s Department, under Henry Ginn, at a salary of 8s a day. In his letter of application, Lane had stated that he had worked in the Public Works Department in Canada and enclosed references from the Archaeological Institute. He had also worked in England, tendering references from several leading English architects, including Sir Charles Barry, architect of the new Houses of Parliament, Westminster. Having apparently proved less satisfactory than these impressive references implied, Lane’s position in Melbourne was terminated in October, but he was employed the following year as a sub-warden on the Victorian goldfields, returning to the Colonial Architect’s Office on 1 January 1854 as a clerk of works at Ballarat. He remained there until March 1855 on the generous salary of £500 a year, plus a special allowance for quarters, rations and forage.
Lane was back on the goldfields in 1856, combining the job of sub-warden on the Mount Egerton goldfields (for which he received £750 a year) with that of miner and quartz-crusher on the Mount Egerton diggings. By 1857 he was listed as sub-warden, Chinese protector and chairman of the local court at Yackandandah. From 1858 to 1867 he was warden at Yackandandah and in 1865-67 also police magistrate. He remained a police magistrate until 1876, then disappears from government records. When John Sadleir wrote his entertainingly malicious Recollections , he included Lane as another magistrate and warden who frequented Beechworth (where Sadleir was stationed), Yackandandah being some 15 miles away and Lane, despite his generous salary, having 'little or nothing to do’.
Lane was government architect at Ballarat at the time of the miners’ revolt at Eureka and later used to recount how he had saved the government camp by his skill in planning its defences, although in Sadleir’s opinion: 'These defences consisted in lining the walls of the mess room with bags of oats and bales of hay so that the officers could sit in some comfort and security at their meals, while being sniped by unfriendly diggers’. This is Lane’s only firmly documented architectural work and it sounds apocryphal. However, he also seems to have been the architect 'Lane’ who tendered for the erection of a church at Ballarat in October 1854, government architects not then being forbidden private work.
Two watercolours by Lane are known (LT): Camping Ground near Avenal, Victoria, Australia (1853) and The Buckland near the Camp (1862). The latter, a view of the Buckland Hotel and Post Office, includes Chinese miners passing by on the road to the diggings.
- Writers:
- Staff Writer
- Date written:
- 1992
- Last updated:
- 2011
