Cindy McCreery

Sea stories and sea pictures: George Gordon McCrae and late nineteenth-century maritime Australia

From the 1850s through the early 1900s, the Victorian artist George Gordon McCrae kept a close eye on the shipping entering Port Phillip Bay near Melbourne. In addition to merchant vessels and private pleasure craft, McCrae recorded the visits of foreign warships in hundreds of lively pen, ink and watercolour sketches. But McCrae was a writer as well as an artist, whose mind was as much concerned with the past as the present. McCrae juxtaposed images of modern vessels with written and visual descriptions of ships central to the European “discovery” of Australia. This essay explores McCrae’s representations of both contemporary and historical maritime scenes in sketches, with some attention to poems and historical articles, to illuminate how the sea influenced the cultural imagination of nineteenth-century Australian settlers. While the scope of McCrae’s response was perhaps unique, the themes he developed (awareness of the ongoing relevance of the sea as a means of both actual and imaginative transport, reverence for British and other European “discoverers” of Australia as role models for the new nation) were shared by his contemporaries. McCrae’s images help us to understand the maritime dimension of late nineteenth-century Australia and its importance for settler society.

Telling the Story: HMS Galatea's Voyage to South Africa, 1867

ABSTRACT This essay examines Alfred, Duke of Edinburghs visit to South Africa in 1867. Prince Alfred (1844–1900) was the second son of Queen Victoria and a career naval officer, who travelled not as a royal passenger but as Captain of the Royal Naval frigate HMS Galatea. Aboard were some 540 men and boys, from humble sailors to aristocratic equerries. How did contemporaries aboard and ashore interpret the voyage? Drawing upon a diverse range of primary sources, including photograph albums, shipboard journals, diaries, loyal addresses, newspaper reports and private as well as official correspondence, this essay argues that the story of this voyage was told in various ways. In particular, it was consciously represented, and understood, as a naval as well as a royal visit. In turn, this voyage was commemorated, and used, by individuals in and beyond the Cape for different purposes. For example, ‘Malays’ used the voyage as an opportunity to demonstrate both their distinctive ‘otherness’ as well as their ‘Britishness’. By examining such responses, we can better understand how the voyage touched peoples lives, and in particular how it contributed to South African colonists’ closer sense of identification with both the British monarchy and Empire as well as the Royal Navy.

A Moral Panic in Eighteenth-Century London? The ‘Monster’ and the Press

In 1790, panic gripped Londoners. A man stalked the streets at night, cutting women with a sharp instrument.1 Newspapers, pamphlets, broadsides and satirical prints spread the story of the attacks, and in due course, the arrest of a suspect, his two sensational trials, and their controversial outcomes. For months ‘The Monster’ affair fascinated and horrified the public.