Design and Art Australia Online

sketcher, collector, explorer and horseman, was born in Croft, near Darlington, Yorkshire, and came to South Australia in the 1860s to join his uncle Edward Stockdale at Lake Hawden Station. Through the racing and steeple-chasing interests he developed at Hawden he became acquainted with Adam Lindsay Gordon and made several sketches of the poet. Gordon’s portrait 'from life’, drawn in 1863, was later issued as a lithograph along with other Stockdale sketches, including Type of Overlander or Old Time Journey Horse Now Extinct , which were possibly lithographed by the Photoline Printing Company of 515 George Street, Sydney, the firm that issued Stockdale’s Racing at the Last Fence (1865) showing Gordon on Cadger and Stockdale on Zetland taking a hurdle side-by-side. A caricature, See our Conquering Hero Comes , depicting Gordon on Cadger is probably also by Stockdale (who finished the race a close second). Another sketch, Ride after Wild Horses with A. L. Gordon and Tom Hales (a famous jockey), is bound with Stockdale’s manuscript notes on Gordon (ML A739). Stockdale had a lifelong interest in racing and finally had his own stable.

An undated collection of very competent sketches by Stockdale (ML A1578) includes drawings of an emu, a kookaburra, Hawk’s Bill Turtle and a wombat, the last annotated by Stockdale: 'De Rougemont says this creature flies/ His readers say De Rougemont lies’. A number of sketches of Aborigines, their implements and weapons, were apparently conceived as illustrations to a proposed publication on the Aboriginal people of Australia, the text of which partly exists in manuscript form (ML A1579), though never published. According to his obituary Stockdale, 'an exceedingly clever draftsman, made innumerable black and white drawings to illustrate this work, but his health gradually failed, and he was unable to see his great work completed.’ He contributed articles on Aborigines (and other subjects) to various periodicals, especially the Town and Country Journal and the Evening News and illustrated some.

Stockdale amassed a large collection of Aboriginal artefacts during his travels into the interior, particularly on his 1884-85 and 1885-86 expeditions through the then unexplored Kimberley region of WA. These trips, he stated, had been made entirely at his own expense, the first costing him in excess of £3,000. In 1891 he travelled to Port Essington and the Alligator River in the Northern Territory. Bush Sketches with Pen and Pencil by Harry Stockdale (ML), a lithograph compiled from twelve small sketches apparently drawn on the 1891 Alligator River expedition, includes N.A. Aborigine (Port Darwin) in Corrobborree [sic] Costume , Creek on the Alligator Plains , Alligator River Native N.A. and Types of Australian Kangaroo .

Stockdale died at his residence, Linacre, at Randwick (a Sydney suburb with a famous racecourse) on 30 January 1919. His collections of artefacts were subsequently sold to Sir William Dixson and to an unknown European museum.

Writers:

Staff Writer

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

2011