art printer and lithographer, was born in Glasgow, Scotland, on 20 February 1822. In London he worked with John Penman, printing plans during 'the railway mania’, as Galbraith many years later described the experience. He commented that he seemed to have 'worked nearly the whole of the year 1847 at the rate of nine days a week’. Galbraith and Penman both read John Stephens’s pamphlet on South Australia (1838) and decided to migrate. They arrived at Adelaide in the Hooghly on 5 December 1848.
Soon afterwards they met George Hamilton, at that time a clerk in the Treasury, and purchased his lithographic press. Galbraith recalled the occasion thus: '[Hamilton] had dabbled a little in lithography. He could, however, make nothing of it, and was quite ready to sell to the first purchaser what printing material he had, so I bought it, and I am sorry now that I did not preserve it as a curiosity to show the present generation how little we required in the old days to make a living’. With Hamilton’s equipment the two set up the printing business of Penman & Galbraith in Grenfell Street. Galbraith noted: 'As the one who did it, I may add that the first large job in lithography in South Australia was an octavo circular for Mr. Platts, a well-known stationer of the day, who occupied a shop in Hindley Street’.
Galbraith married Janet, née Davies, on 28 January 1852 and remained in Adelaide for the rest of his life. Penman & Galbraith became South Australia’s longest-running and most important art-printing establishment before the partnership broke up in 1883. Among hundreds of other items, they published S.T. Gill’s two series, Heads of the People and Views in Adelaide , and Gill’s Old Colonists’ Festival Dinner print. They also published the original sheet music of Caroline Carleton’s Song of Australia , with music by Carl Linger, winner of a prize of 20 guineas offered by the Gawler Mechanics Institute in 1859 (a contender for the position of official Australian national song in a referendum held in 1974); a view of the Gawler Institute building appears on the cover. In 1854 they lithographed The Emu: An elegant and brilliant Polka composed by O.F.V. Reyher [of] Adelaide , priced at 2/6 (Miss R. Barnard’s copy from Rev. J.E.M. Myer(?) is in ML SV*BIRD – AUS/11), decorated with a crude but charming lithograph of two emus in the landscape. With his son, another William, he produced a view of The First Congregational Church in South Australia , and other work.
After the firm was dissolved, Galbraith worked for Mr Varden for some years until increasing deafness (from which he suffered most of his life) forced him into retirement soon after he turned seventy. After his wife died, he continued to live at his home in Charles Street, Norwood, with his two unmarried daughters, always taking an active interest in politics and in the public life of the colony. He was 'an omnivorous reader, and very fond of poetry, and sometimes he wrote topical rhymes’, stated his obituary. A lifelong member of the Caledonian Society, he occasionally sent 'verses of a reminiscent and patriotic character’ to its St Andrew’s Day gatherings. William Galbraith died at home on 16 February 1911, survived by his three daughters and three sons.
- Writers:
- Staff Writer
- Date written:
- 1992
- Last updated:
- 2011
