Bulletin

Issue: September/October 2007

News

The politics of crockery - Standards were maintained in a re mote Victorian parsonage

The Reverend Willoughby Bean owned many ceramics with a transfer printed- design. Some show a pretty black pattern similar to seaweed, others forests or Asiatic pheasants. Many in blue feature the well-known willow pattern.

These fragments from the Bean household crockery speak volumes to historical archaeologist Dr Alasdair Brooks and his colleagues Dr Susan Lawrence and Dr Jane Lennon. From them, they can assess the degree to which the Reverend was able to maintain a comfortable middle-class life on the outer reaches of the British Empire.

The Beans lived five kilometres from Port Albert, on the then-remote coast of South Gippsland, between 1848 and 1858. The excavation of the former Bean parsonage, now just an empty grazing paddock, could help archaeologists establish a benchmark of material wealth prior to the Gold Rush.

Dr Brooks is an expert on ceramics. In addition to his work in Gippsland, he has previously worked on collections from Wales, the Outer Hebrides in Scotland and Central Virginia in the United States, allowing him to make comparisons between the Bean establishment and other remote 19th-century households.

‘Willoughby Bean seems to have owned quite a range of household objects,’ says the investigator. ‘Along with porcelain, transfer-printed earthenware is regarded as one of the most expensive types of ceramic. Goods fashionable in Britain made it out here pretty quickly.’

The Reverend was the first permanent Anglican minister in Gippsland. Port Albert, the only port, was located close to the parsonage, allowing the Beans to keep up their purchases. The port was operated by a private company, Turnbull and Co, and their records provide further evidence of the purchasing preferences of the Beans.

Dr Brooks’ eyes light up when he reveals a special find from the Bean crockery, the oldest ceramics ever found on a land site in Victoria. The small white salt-glazed stoneware fragments belong to a cup or other small hollow vessel, made between 1720 and 1790. It must have been at least 50 years old when the Beans arrived.

Analysis of the total assemblage of fragments is still underway. Finds of crystal stemware, for example, support the picture emerging from the decorative distribution of the ceramics of an attempt to maintain a comfortable living standard on the Gippsland Frontier.

The Bean household’s goods were of a far better standard, for example, than a contemporary site in remote Scotland where much of the earthenware is of the less-expensive hand-painted style.

The crockery will also be analysed in terms of function. People in the Outer Hebrides, for example, had very few plates and virtually no cups and saucers. Most of the fragments came from bowls.
‘This indicates that they were not too fussed about, or simply unable to participate in, afternoon tea nor formal dinners,’ says Dr Brooks.

‘They were mostly eating stews out of bowls.’ Curiously, poor white worker households living amongst slaves in Central Virginia owned more cups and saucers than similar households in England, suggesting that they made a point of keeping up standards.

‘Tea drinking came in as a formal activity in the seventeenth and eighteenth century when trade to the east opened up,’ says the archaeologist. ‘By the mid-nineteenth century tea drinking was practised far more broadly across social classes but there is still an echo of its association with an elite activity.’

The study of the Bean site is part of a broader project ‘Life on the Edge’ which aims to gain a better understanding of the material culture of pre-gold rush settlement in regional Victoria. It is funded by an ARC grant.

A central goal of the research team is to make comparisons of decoration and function between the Bean materials and pre- and post-gold rush sites in colonial Australia.

‘I find the changes in everyday life in the eighteenth and nineteenth century fascinating as the British Empire evolved from the first empire centred on North America to one centred on India and the Dominions,’ says the researcher.

Mass-produced goods provide evidence of how people lived their lives in the colonies. Many of the patterns on ceramics can be traced to the Romantic period.

‘All of these historical movements do impact. For example, a transfer printed plate is at face value just a plate you eat off. That is its primary function at manufacture. Yet a consumer may display it rather than use it. This will change the context of its use.’