John Clements Wickham b. 21 November 1798

Also known as Captain John Clements Wickham
  • Artist (Draughtsman)
English naval officer and police magistrate who would marry into the Macarthur family after serving on the Beagle for over a decade. In the course of his expedition, Wickham produced detailed drawings of Indigenous rock engravings.

sketcher, naval officer and police magistrate, was born in Leith, Scotland, on 21 November 1798, son of Lieutenant Samuel Wickham RN and Ellen Susannah, née Naylor. He joined the Royal Navy as a midshipman in 1812 and later served as lieutenant under P.P. King in a survey expedition off the coast of South America. In 1831-36 he was second in command on board the Beagle under Captain Robert FitzRoy , becoming commander in 1837-41 for the Beagle 's survey of the north-west coast of Australia.

No official artist was on board, so Wickham helped provide the visual records of the voyage. An informal sketch of Clovelly, Watson’s Bay (ML), was made on 8 November 1838 while the ship was awaiting a favourable wind to leave Sydney Harbour. Another pencil sketch, Inscription Tree, Water Valley, Victoria River [Northern Territory] , was given to the Mitchell Library by Wickham’s son in 1905, together with his 'Description of the River Victoria on the N.W. Coast of New Holland’ (which his officers had discovered and he had named), but the rest of the large family collection of his drawings and papers (intended for publication) was unfortunately destroyed in a fire. Official coastal profiles from the voyage in the Hydrographic Department of the Ministry of Defence at Taunton, England, include several by Wickham. A collection of 94 detailed drawings of the great gallery of Aboriginal rock engravings on Depuch Island off the coast of Western Australia, which Wickham, J. Lort Stokes and possibly some of the other officers recorded in June 1840 in the belief that they were the first white viewers of these splendours, was sent by Wickham to Sir Francis Beaufort at the Admiralty, London, who submitted them to the Royal Geographical Society’s journal in 1841. A plate of details also appeared in Stokes’s Discoveries in Australia (London 1846). Stokes had examined 'the human figures, the animals, the birds, the weapons, the domestic implements, the scenes of savage life’ depicted in such profusion by the Ngaluma people and pondered on 'the curious frame of mind that could induce these uncultivated people to repair, perhaps at stated seasons of the year, to this lonely picture gallery … to admire and add to the productions of their forefathers’, while Wickham more pragmatically noted that it was 'difficult to conjecture’ what many were intended to represent.

Handing over the command of the Beagle to Stokes and invaliding himself out of the navy at Sydney on 24 March 1841, Wickham reported back to London then returned to New South Wales in the Fly , commanded by Captain Blackwood . On 27 October 1842 in St John’s, Parramatta, he married Anna Macarthur to whom he had been engaged for four years; they had two sons and a daughter. Anna died in 1852 and five years later he married Ellen Deering of Ipswich, Queensland, and had a further two sons. From 1843 to 1853 Wickham was police magistrate at Moreton Bay (Brisbane, Qld), then government resident. He lived in Newstead House on the Brisbane River (now a museum) which he had purchased in 1847 from his brother-in-law Patrick Leslie. Having refused the position of colonial treasurer when Queensland became a separate colony in 1855, Wickham subsequently retired to Biarritz, France, reputedly in straitened circumstances. He died there from a stroke on 6 January 1864.

Writers:
Staff Writer
Date written:
1992
Last updated:
2011