Design and Art Australia Online

sketcher, architect, surveyor and selector, was born in London on 31 July 1813, eldest son of James Woodward Turner, a prosperous builder and surveyor, and his first wife Ann, née Rockley. Thomas attended boarding school between the ages of eight and twelve and finished his education at Baron House Academy, Surrey in 1826-27. On 23 October 1829, he left Portsmouth in the Warrior with his father and step-mother Maria (his mother’s sister) and six of the seven other Turner children for the recently founded Swan River Colony in Western Australia. James Turner migrated with substantial capital and seven labourers, three of whom were accompanied by their families.

On arrival at the Swan River on 12 March 1830, the Turners and the other would-be settlers found that no suitable land was available in the district and on government advice they pioneered a settlement at Flinders Bay some 200 miles to the south. This settlement, which became Augusta, was depicted by Thomas Turner in watercolour paintings and maps dating from 1830 to 1845: simple, competent records of the development of this small, isolated and struggling place. His views include Augusta. Hardy’s Inlet; First Settlement May 1830 (Art Gallery of Western Australia [AGWA]) and several views looking across Seine Bay to the homes of the early settlers, including the Turners’ Albion House (1836, c. 1837, 1838, 1840s, AGWA) and the homes of the Bussell and Molloy families (1833, p.c. England). He also drew landscapes in the district, e.g. Limestone Cliff, Turnerian Stream, Sussex, West Australia, 1835 (AGWA).

Within a few years the Turners’ fellow landholders abandoned the area, as did most of the indentured labourers. Despite years of determined work by the family, the lack of trading opportunities finally defeated the Turners too. Thomas and his two brothers settled at Turnwood in 1832, 4½ miles by water from the parental homestead at Augusta, where they built a cottage and farm buildings and cleared and farmed the land. This was abandoned four years later after local Aborigines burnt the place down. Late in 1838 Thomas, George and John Turner settled at The Spring, within 2 miles of their father’s property, but again this proved not commercially viable. In 1840 Thomas set off with his brothers to farm at the Vasse, having earlier surveyed and mapped the Sussex district between the two places with his brothers. His Vasse sketches include views of the major home in the district, the Bussells’ Cattle Chosen (1835, 1836, AGWA).

At Dunsborough, near Busselton, Turner married Elizabeth Heppingstone on 27 April 1846. They lived in several parts of Western Australia from April 1840 to July 1852, then moved to Perth. In November he and Elizabeth, their three children and Thomas’s sister Sarah left in the Chusan for the Victorian goldfields, hastily selling their property for substantially less than its market value. After sixteen months living in a tent at Campbell’s Creek, Castlemaine, they settled on a farm at Taradale (Vic.). In August 1854 Sarah wrote to her sister that Thomas was thinking of building a cheap wattle-and-daub house with rammed earth walls, despite a prejudice against this material by settlers used to brick or stone: 'I tell Thos. he must show them what a respectable comfortable house may be made of it, you may depend on Thos. doing the cheapest and best he can and in course of time bricks etc. will come down in price’.

The family moved into the Taradale townsship in 1859 and 'Thos.’ set up formally as an architect, surveyor and mapmaker. Among his commissions was the design and supervision of the Early English Gothic Revival church of Holy Trinity at Taradale, completed 1859. In 1869 Turner exhibited, for sale, a watercolour design for a church at the Ballarat Mechanics Institute. By then he had been working from 24 Doveton Street at Ballarat for some months, having transferred his building and architectural practice there in 1868 though he continued to visit Taradale until 1872. Turner’s ink and wash drawing of nearby Elphinstone and Mt. Alexander is dated 1868. Two undated watercolours, a view of a bridge and View of Taradale from the Westward , are thought to have been done about the same time. A wash drawing, Taradale , is dated 1868 on the back. All are in the Mitchell Library.

The family next moved to Melbourne and Turner was employed as a draughtsman by the Crown Lands Office from 1874. After several moves around Victoria he and his wife settled with their younger son, Edwin, at Bargo, New South Wales in 1880, moving to Sydney three years later. In 1885 Thomas selected 2500 acres at Digby Grange, near Gunnedah, then sold out to Edwin and took up a selection at Brandon in the Forbes district. Thomas died on 3rd July 1895 -the notice of his death appeared in 'The Argus’ Thursday 4 July 1895:
Deaths. Turner – On the 3rd inst., at 8 Phillipson-street, Albert-park, Thomas Turner the dearly beloved husband of Elizabeth Turner, father of Mrs. Thomas Gardner, Carlton; E. W. Turner, Gunnedah, N.S.W.; Tom H. Turner, Horsham; Geo. R. Turner, Bunbury, W.A.; and J. R. Turner, Tamworth, N.S.W., aged 82 years.

Turner’s artistic training came more from his father than from drawing lessons at boarding-school (of which sketchbooks survive). As Chapman notes, many of his drawings of houses bear a marked similarity to the architectural drawings which fill his father’s London sketchbooks (British Library). In turn, Thomas’s surveying skills, also acquired from his father, were duly passed on to Edwin whom he took on surveying expeditions. In 1860, while resident at Taradale, Thomas Turner was appointed a mining surveyor, receiving his surveyor’s certificate the following year.

Thomas Turner’s first colonial building job was to help erect the prefabricated house which James Turner had brought out from England. In later life he compiled a picture diary which included this house, and the twenty-nine other residences in which he had lived, from sketches made earlier on the spot. Several of the houses were built and presumably designed by Turner. His drawings show a sharp eye for domestic detail and include humble buildings and people going about their everyday life. Well able to convey the mood of a place, his Augusta drawings are most evocative of its isolation and poverty. Other sketches were the product of expeditions into the countryside, either on surveys or for his own enjoyment.

Writers:

Staff Writer
pathfinder

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

2015