sketcher, amateur photographer, tutor, regional historian and geographer, came to Sydney as a cabin passenger in the barque Countess of Durham on 18 September 1838. A native of Glasgow, he was quite well educated and may have worked briefly for the Union Bank of Australia in Sydney before going to Maitland to assist in Dickson’s general store. About 1842 Gardner again moved north, to become tutor (at £15 a year, plus keep) at Henry Dumaresq’s Saumarez Station, near Armidale.
William Baker’s Australian County Atlas (Sydney 1843 46) included Gardner’s map of the northern districts, a contribution which reflected the wide travels of an astute observer and competent draughtsman. Although more notable for detail than for accuracy, this first significant published map of an important squatting area was favourably reviewed in the Sydney Morning Herald in July 1846. In March 1846, shortly before leaving Saumarez, Gardner sent a corrected copy of his map to Governor Gipps, noting that it showed the locations of over 700 stations beyond the legal boundaries of occupation and providing explanatory notes extracted from those he had compiled for his 'own amusement’. He hoped that publication of the map and description would pay his passage home to Scotland.
It is not known whether Gardner did revisit Scotland after 1846 but at some time, perhaps before his arrival in New South Wales, he had stayed long enough in Georgia (USA), to become interested in the cultivation of cotton. In 1848 the Maitland Mercury published his pamphlet On the Cultivation of the Cotton Plant in New South Wales (republished two years later in expanded form with his map). Gardner’s other published work was An Enquiry into the Effect Produced by the Deluge upon Alluvial Deposits of Gold in Australia (Maitland 1856).
After Saumarez, it seems that Gardner was employed as a tutor at Moredun Station (October 1853-September 1854), Rockvale Station (October 1854-September 1855), John Barker’s Mount Mitchell Station and, finally, at Andrew Coventry’s Oban Station (1858 60). One of John Barker’s daughters recalled her tutor as a stout, jovial man of wide learning, a keen amateur photographer and painter, the owner of a stereoscope with views of his native country and a keen student of history who 'wrote in bulky volumes far into the night by the light of a candle’.
The young English diarist Henry Edwin Williams, who met Gardner in the 1850s, considered him 'a very clever, intelligent and scientific old gentleman’ who had 'written much on the affairs of the colony’. On 10 September 1860 the 'old gentleman’, then aged fifty-eight, died from 'water on the lung’ in the middle of his teaching labours at Oban Station. The Armidale Express recorded: 'His usefulness was extensively known and generally acknowledged; his ability and attainments commanded respect; and his urbanity and kind disposition endeared him to a wide circle of sorrowing friends’. Gardner, a bachelor, was buried at Oban where, in November 1973, the Armidale Historical Society erected a memorial on his hitherto unmarked grave.
Two of Gardner’s 'bulky volumes’, appropriately endorsed with such mottoes as 'Steady Application with a habit of Observation promotes Knowledge’ and 'Diligentia omnia superat’, are preserved in the Mitchell Library. Titled Productions and Resources of the Northern and Western Districts of New South Wales , they record in fine copperplate script an astonishing quantity and variety of information about northern New South Wales in the 1840s and 1850s. The contents like the sources are eclectic, the style is rather ponderous and the organisation is random, yet the work remains a cornerstone of New England history and geography.
The volumes teem with Gardner’s naive, even crude, yet detailed illustrations of landscapes, plants and animals, Aboriginal customs, weapons and implements, early station buildings and aspects of pioneer squatting life. While some maps and botanical sketches were touched with watercolour, most were executed in pen and grey wash with some sepia toning. William Gardner’s unsophisticated art was largely didactic, with care and skill reflected in informative detail rather than artistic style. Clearly he was more at ease with a quill than with a brush but the historical value of his sketches is at least matched by their primitive charm.
- Writers:
- Gilbert, Lionel A.
- Date written:
- 1992
- Last updated:
- 2011
