sketcher, watercolourist and schoolmaster, was born in London on 25 September 1824 [1825?], son of William Cook Cawthorne. He lived in England, Scotland and South Africa before migrating to South Australia with his parents on board the Amelia in 1841, aged seventeen. To support himself and his sick mother, he opened a school in Currie Street, Adelaide, and supplemented his income with freelance surveying and sketching. Cawthorne married his cousin, Mary Ann Georgiana Mower, on 24 June 1848; they had two daughters and five sons.
In 1852, after briefly and unsuccessfully joining the Victorian goldrush, he became the second headmaster of Pulteney Grammar School in Adelaide and remained in that position until 1855 when he opened his own Victoria Square Academy. In December 1855 he exhibited over 200 of his sketches at his academy – 'all having a colonial interest attaching to them’ – as well as collections of shells, fossils, minerals and precious stones. A reviewer noted equivocally that 'the greater number of the pictures have not … in any degree sacrificed truthful depiction to artistic feeling’. Greatest interest was 'excited by the department illustrative of the manners, habits and customs of the aborigines of this country’. About this time Cawthorne wrote a story of pre-colonial Kangaroo Island, 'The Islanders’, which was later published as a serial in the Illustrated Adelaide Post . His knowledge of the subject was probably gained while visiting his father, Captain William Cook Cawthorne, the first keeper of the Sturt Lighthouse on Cape Willoughby. During the 1850s he also wrote a thirty-five-page narrative poem based on a Port Lincoln legend, 'The Red Kangaroo’ (not published until 1900), and a memorial tribute to the life and work of his friend Johann Menge, the mineralogist (published 1859).
In the 1860s and 1870s a number of engravings after Cawthorne’s sketches of South Australian scenes and events appeared in both the Illustrated Adelaide Post and the Illustrated Melbourne Post , many being engraved by Albert Cooke . From 1869 to 1874 Cawthorne was proprietor of the Illustrated Adelaide Post . His other publications include Who Killed Cockatoo? (Adelaide c.1870), one of the earliest known Australian illustrated children’s books. Although loosely based on the nursery rhyme 'Who killed Cock Robin?’, it depicts Australian rather than English birds and animals. The text, as Marcie Muir states, is livelier than most early colonial books and the illustrations are well drawn and engraved. His Journal of a Tour in Terra Australis by Markum and Sketchum was compiled in 1844 (manuscript with pen-and-ink sketches, DL), and he wrote a lively 'Journal of a Tour in the North’ that appeared in the South Australian Register on 13 January 1851. An interesting series of paintings made on a trip from Port Adelaide to the Burra, including Burra Creek, December 1850 , are now in the Mitchell Library.
Cawthorne’s 'Rough notes on the manners and customs of the natives’ was delivered as an illustrated lecture in 1864 but not published until 1927 (by the South Australian branch of the Royal Geographical Society of Australasia). The South Australian Register commented that the lecture, 'if not highly instructive was very interesting and in some parts exceedingly amusing’. He illustrated it with ten large views of Aboriginal pursuits. Four showed different methods of catching wallaby and crayfish, while others depicted Aboriginal weapons.
A prolific and vivacious recorder of Aboriginal and European colonial life, Cawthorne’s range is typified by his three watercolours shown in the 1847 Adelaide exhibition of the works of colonial artists: Tekartoo, a Native Beauty ; Mangrove Coast, Gulf St. Vincent ; and Kuraa Palte, Corroborrie of Natives . Four watercolour portraits of Aborigines sold in 1980, initialled 'W.A.C.’ (as Cawthorne normally signed his work), that had been first exhibited on 29 March 1845 were: A Native from the Darling , an untitled portrait, Churguracoo and Wira Maldira . He showed sketches in the first exhibition of the South Australian Society of Arts at Adelaide in 1857, but no titles are given in the catalogue.
- Writers:
- Tregenza, Jean
- Date written:
- 1992
- Last updated:
- 1989
