Saturday, January 23, 2021

Sir Patrick and His Centenary “Skeleton.”

Sir Patrick and His Centenary “Skeleton.”
Sir Patrick and His Centenary “Skeleton.”
 
[Source: Livingston (Hop) Hopkins, Sir Patrick and His Centenary “Skeleton.”, The Bulletin, Vol. 7 No. 344 (4 Sep 1886 p.3) http://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-507919499] 
The Celebration of The Centenary.
The Proposals of The Government.
"In the Legislative Assembly last night, Sir Patrick Jennings, in accordance with his promise to Sir Henry Parkes, made a statement in regard to the mode in which the Government propose to celebrate the centenary of New South Wales. It will be seen that the suggestions made the other day by Sir Henry Parkes are to a certain extent to be carried into effect.
"Sir Patrick Jennings said:—'lt is not my intention to go beyond a skeleton or sketch of the programme which I have made a memorandum of, thinking it the most appropriate way of celebrating what will be the most important event in our history—the celebration of our birth. The Government have, of course, been inundated with suggestions with regard to what is conceived to be the best way of signalising this event. The House, as we are aware, has been moved by propositions that have been brought before it from time to time as to what is conceived to be the best way of signalising this event. We acknowledge the great importance of the event. We acknowledge that everything done should be worthy of the occasion, and we, as a Government, have endeavoured to give that consideration to this question, which is undoubtedly one of great importance, and I shall now proceed, without attempting to make any reference further to the great importance of the occasion—for I do not conceive it to be the time to make a speech about that—to inform the House what are the intentions and what are the wishes of this Government in order to signalise the celebration of the event in question.'" Daily Paper.

Contexts

Although the first issue of The Bulletin was published on 22 January 1880, it was not until the 4 September 1886 issue that the editors gave Livingston Hopkins (or 'Hop') the freedom to create full-page illustrations for the editorial or 'masthead' cover. Before 1886, this page mostly consisted of topical news and, typically, a biography of a local or visiting 'celebrity', including a perfunctory engraved portrait. Why The Bulletin changed its visual format and style after 4 September 1886 is a complex question that I address in a separate section.
The historical background to Hopkins' (or 'Hop'), Sir Patrick and His Centenary“Skeleton", was the controversy over the plans and funding for the public commemoration of the Centenary of the founding of the Colony of New South Wales. The newspaper caption included in illustration was originally printed in the Sydney Daily Telegraph. It reported the verbatim speech of the Premier, Sir Patrick Jennings, to the NSW Legislative Assembly, the popularly elected 'lower house' of a bicameral  parliamentary system, concerning the planned Centenary celebrations. In the speech, Jennings, nominated 23 January 1788 as the 'birth' of the Colony. This was when the site for the permanent British settlement was found at Sydney Cove by members of the party seeking to establish a penal colony for British subjects. This event is nowadays celebrated annually on 26 January as Australia Day.
The Daily Telegraph article also describes a 'skeleton' proposal put to the Legislative Assembly, including an invitation for the Prince of Wales—the heir to Queen Victoria—to officiate events. One of the foreshadowed events was the opening of the sewerage system designed to release untreated wastewater off the shores of Bondi beach! Here Hopkins uses a human skeleton doing a handstand as a trope to not only subdivide the image into regions for self-contained units, or 'cartoonlets' as he would refer to them, but also an symbolic inversion of the celebratory 'birth' metaphor introduced by Premier Jennings. 
 

Detail: 'That the Prince of Wales be invited to open the Bondi Sewer'
Hopkins thus contrasts the aspirations of the ruling Colonial elites to celebrate their achievements, against the fate of the workaday inhabitants of New South Wales who suffered from official neglect, maladministration and corruption. Where this neglect involved public health, such as providing sanitation infrastructure for the expanding population of Sydney and other urban centres, the outcomes included actual death and disease. By inverting of the symbolic-order from 'birth' to 'death', and the social-order from 'elite' to the 'workaday' population, Hopkins was also to extract humour from a utilitarian event, such as the opening of a sewerage pipeline. This is best illustrated in the central 'cartoonlet' involving the imagined opening of the sewerage works by the Prince of Wales (see above).

Notes

Edited at
Labels: , , , , , , ,