Design and Art Australia Online

caricaturist, engraver, editor and businessman, was born in Tours, France, son of a prosperous merchant; he was baptised Louis Marcellin Martin-Cremière. Educated at a Jesuit seminary, Martin (who reversed the order of his baptismal names in Australia and dropped the second half of his surname) had a good knowledge of the classics and spoke several European languages. Conscripted into the French Army, he found this so uncongenial that his family purchased a substitute (killed in the Franco-Prussian War); Martin became a merchant in New Caledonia. After his firm closed in the mid-1860s Martin came to Brisbane then moved to Rockhampton where he opened the Cigar Divan, a tobacconist shop. Subsequently, he was a commission agent, moneylender, sharebroker and teacher of languages.

Martin’s most notable venture was the founding in 1881 of a satirical weekly journal, The Rockhampton Laughing Jackass . It survived only a year, during which time its occasional lithographer was H.G. Eaton . Martin himself provided the illustrations in the early months when wood engravings were used while the very tardy delivery of a lithographic press was awaited then frequently drew lithographs (less successfully) when the promised Eaton effort did not eventuate. He produced the Jackass virtually single-handed. Its earliest, rather crude cover includes a jackass and a snake in a tree watched by a frog (Martin’s persona). When the lithographic cover finally appeared, it was more elaborately detailed and professionally drawn but lacked the sparkle of Martin’s original effort. Although his later drawings in the Jackass are sometimes rough (and obviously hurried), Martin was a skilled as well as prolific artist. He produced caricatures, cartoons and illustrations for over thirty years, beginning with those in Rockhampton 'Punch’ and 'Mosquito’, magazines he founded as well as illustrated although they apparently existed only as one or two manuscript copies, privately circulated and/or displayed at Martin’s clubby Cigar Divan in East Street. No issue of either is known.

Albums and numerous loose sheets of caricatures by Martin from the 1870s to the early 1890s are held by the University of Central Queensland (donated by the Rockhampton District Historical Society). The sole complete copy of the Jackass , with numerous interleaved original illustrations in watercolour and wash, is in the Rockhampton City Library. His original brush watercolour drawings include a cartoon of a crowd of men swimming and preparing to enter the water titled Rockhampton Baths… Frequented by the Best Society Only – Cost £15.0.0 (the men’s exclusive bathing pool in Murray Lagoon at the Botanic Gardens), Tom the Bellman (a caricature of Tom Bevis , town crier and scene-painter of Rockhampton, dated 1878), St Peter (the Rockhampton gaoler carrying the keys of the gaol), Le Quart d’Heure de Rabelais (a mysterious haunted townsman, sheeted ghost and fleeing animals), No Singhalese, No Sugar (a naked fearful Pandora on an opening box observed by an astonished gentleman in tropical dress – a reference to the importation of Pacific and Asian labour for the North Queensland cane-fields) and The Major’s New Recruits: Plenty More at Dan Briss’s (Albrecht Feez, the police commissioner, mounted on a hobby-horse among a collection of soldiers from the local toyshop).

Laying the Foundation Stone for the Girls’ Grammar School, Rockhampton (c.1890) depicts the school’s chief benefactor, the Scotsman John Ferguson, seated in triumph on top of the stone with a squashed, bearded, bespectacled man underneath – evidently the editor of the local newspaper who was opposed to the chosen site. They are being observed by Martin – a frog in academic dress – one of the school’s trustees. The local figures remain full of life even when the allusions are no longer comprehensible and it is easy to see why his good-humoured, witty drawings were so admired. In 1882 W.T. Bennett produced at least two cabinet photographs, each containing about twelve of Martin’s single caricatures of local men (Capricornia Institute).

Drawing books full of original caricatures were produced at least from 1868, the year Martin raffled two books of cartoons showing what everyone got up to during the Queen’s Birthday picnic at Stanwel (unlocated). They were offered at the Presbyterian Bazaar to assist the church’s fund-raising efforts, even though Martin himself was a practising Roman Catholic who sang in the church choir. Three Martin albums donated to the fledgling Rockhampton and District Historical Society were lost in the 1951 fire. Mr T.A. Dunlop, a former Mayor, donated an album of 1878 caricatures by Martin to help replace them – now one of the Society’s most treasured items. Some framed Martin caricatures given to the School of Arts by Myriel Walker’s grandfather, George Silas Curtis, were salvaged from the Council’s dispersal of the collection (under Mayor Rex Pilbeam) in 1955.

Martin offered his talents as singer and sportsman as well as artist to numerous fund-raising events for charity and was involved with the local School of Arts. Although he remained so quintessentially French that his contemporaries considered him unlikely ever to accept British institutions and customs completely, he was eventually naturalised. He died in 1908, survived by his wife and two daughters. Two sons had died in childhood.

Writers:

Staff Writer

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

1989