Design and Art Australia Online

sketcher, professional photographer, calligrapher, tutor, clerk, storekeeper and miner, was born in Hampshire, England on 22 March 1838, second son of John Noel Thurston and his wife, Eliza . He reached Sydney on 4 September 1853 as a passenger in the barque Ann Holzberg , his older brother John Bates Thurston (later Sir John, Governor of Fiji 1887-97) being a member of the crew. Horatio’s mother and three sisters joined him in Sydney on 23 December 1853. Horatio worked for a time on the New South Wales goldfields at Hanging Rock and Peel River diggings, in a merchant’s office at Sydney and as a storekeeper in Newcastle. Early in 1856 he moved to Mudgee as a storekeeper, briefly became tutor to the children of George Tailby, a squatter of Fernside, Rylstone, then was employed as an attorney’s clerk in Mudgee. On 9 June 1863 he married Tailby’s daughter Jane; they had ten children.

In 1867/1868 Horatio Thurston set up as a professional photographer and stationer in Mudgee. A studio portrait of his sister Emily survives from this period (p.c.). His brother John had taken lessons in photography at Sydney in 1864 before searching for botanical specimens in the Pacific Islands and Horatio possibly learned his trade at the same time. For a while John Thurston sold photographs in the Pacific Islands for a living, but Horatio’s Mudgee studio does not seem to have been as profitable. In 1870-71 he was town clerk at Mudgee, but he had reverted to being an attorney’s clerk by December 1871 when he gave this as his occupation on the birth certificate of his sixth and fourth surviving child (a 9-month-old son had died the previous January from inhaling a prairie-grass seed).

Later Horatio Thurston was appointed secretary and librarian of the Mudgee Mechanics Institute and appears to have made quite a success of these positions. It was reported that the Institute’s (School of Arts’) exhibit at the Mudgee Agricultural Show in March 1879 included 'a court of fine arts, &c., embracing some choice pictures and miniatures, penmanship, minerals, sericulture, conchology, and taxidermy, the work principally of H. Thurston, custodian of the School of Arts (who not only merited his prizes for the worth of his exhibits, his own work, but also praise for his efforts to make the School of Arts Exhibition all that it should be)’. He died at Mudgee on 6 July 1881 after a fall from a horse.

Writers:

Symons, Berry

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

2011