Aboriginal customs: the ceremony of depilation.

Artist:

William Anderson Cawthorne (1825-1897)

Sketcher, watercolourist and schoolmaster, was born in London on 25 September 1824 [1825?], son of William Cook Cawthorne. He lived in England, Scotland and South Africa before migrating to South Australia with his parents on board the Ameliain 1841, aged seventeen. To support himself and his sick mother, he opened a school in Currie Street, Adelaide, and supplemented his income with freelance surveying and sketching. Cawthorne married his cousin, Mary Ann Georgiana Mower, on 24 June 1848; they had two daughters and five sons.

In 1852, after briefly and unsuccessfully joining the Victorian gold rush, he became the second headmaster of Pulteney Grammar School in Adelaide and remained in that position until 1855 when he opened his own Victoria Square Academy. In December 1855 he exhibited over 200 of his sketches at his academy – ‘all having a colonial interest attaching to them’ – as well as collections of shells, fossils, minerals and precious stones. A reviewer noted equivocally that ‘the greater number of the pictures have not … in any degree sacrificed truthful depiction to artistic feeling’. Greatest interest was ‘excited by the department illustrative of the manners, habits and customs of the aborigines of this country’. About this time Cawthorne wrote a story of pre-colonial Kangaroo Island, ‘The Islanders’, which was later published as a serial in the Illustrated Adelaide Post.