sketcher and farmer, was born on 25 March 1821, second of the seven children of Rev. John Ramsden Wollaston and Mary Amelia, née Gladstanes. He arrived at Fremantle, Western Australia, in the Henry with his parents, brothers and sisters on 20 April 1841 and they settled on a farm near Port Leschenault. With his brothers and a local thatcher, William assisted his father in erecting a substantial, if architecturally eccentric, church at Picton. He also sketched interior and exterior views of it, his drawings being sent back to England to be lithographed. Prints survive in one of the record books of the Cambridge Camden (later Ecclesiological) Society in the Cambridge Antiquarian Society library and elsewhere. Although William’s original sketches have disappeared, it can be presumed that these very competent and informational lithographs owe much to others, for when John Wollaston asked a family friend in England to arrange for the drawings to be lithographed 'and one of each sent to every principal subscriber to my church fund’, he added: 'Perhaps Tullie could copy William’s drawings first, more perfectly’.
Even so, John Wollaston evidently thought his son’s artistic skills superior to his own. On 20 April 1842 he wrote in his journal: 'Poor William has been so occupied that he is obliged to postpone a sketch of our house; this, however, will be best since it is not finished; and our friends may as well have the comfort of seeing it’. A similar entry for 30 April 1843 notes that, due to the 'hut’ being unfinished, William has been unable to draw it: 'perhaps he may still make a hasty outline on a sheet of this paper to be put up with this, but more drawing paper must be sent to him if anything larger is required’. In September 1843, writing of the new house at Bunbury, John mentioned that when the house was in order he would 'endeavour to draw a plan and get William to sketch it’.
When his parents moved to Albany in 1848, William Wollaston and his brother George went to South Australia and settled near Port Lincoln. They were joined by Edward the following year and later by their mother and sister, who left Western Australia in the Augusta Kaufman on 24 December 1856 after John’s death.
- Writers:
- Staff Writer
- Date written:
- 1992
- Last updated:
- 2011
