[Music]

Australian Album 1857

Sydney, J.R. Clarke, Music Publisher ('Allan & Wigley, Lith. Printers'), 1857.

Large quarto, [v] leaves (all with either recto or verso blank), comprising the frontispiece (a portrait of the visiting Austrian violinist Miska Hauser), pictorial title, dedication, preface, and contents, plus eight separately printed pieces of sheet music (for piano) with pictorial covers (one in colour); there is a blank leaf between each piece. With the exception of the preface and contents leaf, all text and illustrations are lithographed.

Gilt-pictorial blue watered cloth (featuring the title within a large floral garland; the same design is stamped in blind on the rear cover); all edges gilt; cloth a little marked and worn at the extremities, with minor loss to the head and foot of the spine; endpapers and first and last pages a little foxed; most pages are offset; a very good copy, with the contents in excellent condition. The contemporary gift inscription to 'Margery C Metcalfe / from / Wm H M / Jany 1st 1857' is written in ink on the flyleaf.

The artwork is by Edmund Thomas (1827-1867); the ten plates include three portraits and scenic views of Sydney Heads, Rose Bay, and the North Shore, as well as 'Allan Cunningham's Monument in the Botanic Gardens'. The pieces are BOULANGER, E.D.: The Last Rose of Summer (12 pages); HAUSER, Miska: Australian Flowers (8 pages); MARSH, S.H. (with poetry by Mrs HEMANS): Far o'er the Sea (10 pages); HAUSER, Miska: The Bird upon the Tree (12 pages); MARSH, Henry: The Pic Nic Polka (8 pages); ELLARD, Frederic: Morceau de Salon Lucrezia (12 pages); STANLEY, William: The Rose Bay Quadrilles (8 pages); and ALARY, G.: Variations (8 pages). The pagination includes the cover artwork in each case. The preface, dated December 1856, is by a very young Frank Fowler (1833-1863), journalist and author: 'In 1855-58 he visited New South Wales for his health and intended to write a popular book on his travels [and he did].... Fowler identified himself with the colony and had grandiose plans for the establishment of a national literature.... In 1858 [he] returned to England [where] he died aged 30 from brain fever.... Fowler's style reveals a poetic, romantic and ebullient personality' (Australian Dictionary of Biography). A sample from the preface will prove the point: the compositions 'are all new - all colonial. Here - in this city - they were played, printed, and published. True, some of the composers are foreigners; but still this book is as much an Australian production as a cluster of grapes from the German vineyard at Kissing Point. We can send the work home as a specimen of what we can do out here at Botany Bay - as an index of our education, refinement, art-feeling. And it is fitting we should attest our social progress by some annual publication of this character. Nothing else will do it so completely and so well. It vindicates our connexion with old-world genius and skill; and proves that we are not destitute of some of the haughty lineaments of European civilization'. Ferguson 6318 (noting the artist and with a useful list of the plate content, but not mentioning the composers or their compositions). Reading between the lines in Fowler's preface, one gets the distinct impression that this album is a 'first thus' for the colony - and possibly for the country.