Sublimity and amenity at Lindt's Hermitage

Abstract

Perceived by the white settler as a primordial land lacking variety and natural grandeur, the Australian landscape, despite multiple incursions since colonisation, had yet to be reconciled with the aesthetic criteria of either the picturesque or the sublime. It took some imagination, therefore, to suggest that in certain respects the Yarra Ranges, reaching to just over 500 metres above sea level at Black Spur near Lindt's Hermitage, might be compared to the Swiss Alps of at least four times this height. The Melbourne based journalist James Smith (1820-1910) was able to propose this conceit by drawing on an aesthetic paradigm witnessed by him in the Swiss Alps and echoed, he believed, in the Yarra Ranges: cultivation and habitation could co-exist in a landscape of primordial forests . By drawing upon these conflicting aesthetics, Smith's reading of the Swiss Alps offered a new paradigm for the interpretation of Victoria's alpine forests. The aim of this paper is to explore how John William Lindt's (1845-1926) Hermitage and garden, identified by Smith in 1901 as a realisation of the ideal traveller's retreat, participated in the promotion of such ideals.

Full text

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Sublimity and Amenity at Lindt’s Hermitage
From 1880 to 1910, the German born-Australian photographer John William Lindt
(1845-1926) produced a series of photographs documenting the Healesville district, and
later his garden and residence, in the Yarra Ranges sixty kilometres east north-east of
Melbourne. Purchasing his 80 acres from the Department of Crown Lands and Survey
in 1894, his home, which he called The Hermitage, became the principal location for his
photographic work from 1895 until the year of his death in 1926. Within easy travelling
distance from Melbourne, Lindt converted his home into a guest house where friends and
visitors were welcomed to join together in soirées of food, wine, art, song. His images
depict an exotic garden of European trees and flowers ensconced in a natural setting
of giant eucalypts and tree ferns. Lindt’s photographic record of these gardens and the
surrounding environs was in turn supplemented by two written documents:
Trip to the
Blacks’ Spur
(1880), written before he made his home in the area, and
Companion
Guide to Healesville, Blacks’ Spur, Narbethong and Marysville
(1904), which he wrote
with fellow photographer and bushwalker, Nicholas John Caire (1837-1918).1
The authors have previously published an analysis of Lindt’s Hermitage and its
immediate environs against a reading of the theories of the German naturalist Alexander
von Humboldt (1769-1859).2 The current paper will explore an alternative, yet
complementary, influence on Lindt’s project, the writings of the Melbourne based critic,
journalist, and author James Smith (1820-1910).
In the last three decades of the nineteenth century, Smith produced a series of critical
essays on the landscape scenery of Victoria. The motive underpinning these writings
was a desire to assert the suitability of Victorian landscapes, and specifically those of the
mountain forests found in the Yarra and Dandenong Ranges, as sites for recreational
travel for the popular masses. Smith argued this by aligning the mountain forests of
Victoria with those of the Swiss Alps, asserting the beauty of both was dependent on
the balance of ‘sublimity’—a primordial landscape of great variety and diversity—and
S
Sublimity and Amenity at Lindt’s Hermitage
CATHERINE DE LORENZO &
DEBORAH VAN DER PLAAT
q
Catherine De Lorenzo is an art historian and Senior Lecturer in the
Faculty of the Built Environment, University of New South Wales, Sydney.
Dr. Deborah van der Plaat is an independent art and architectural historian
who currently works as a Senior Research Assistant to Dr. De Lorenzo.

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‘amenity’—human acts of cultivation and settlement.3 For Smith, this co-existence of
aesthetic oppositions not only determined the mass appeal of the Swiss mountains,
but also gave reason and means to nineteenth-century recreational travel; mental relief
through aesthetic awakening.
Perceived by the white settler as a primordial land lacking variety and natural grandeur,
the Australian landscape, despite multiple incursions since colonisation, had yet to be
reconciled with the aesthetic criteria of either the picturesque or the sublime. It took
some imagination, therefore, to suggest that in certain respects the Yarra Ranges, reaching
to just over 500 metres above sea level at Black Spur near Lindt’s Hermitage, might be
compared to the Swiss Alps of at least four times this height. Smith was able to propose
this conceit by drawing on an aesthetic paradigm witnessed by him in the Swiss Alps and
echoed, he believed, in the Yarra Ranges: cultivation and habitation could co-exist in a
landscape of primordial forests. By drawing upon these conflicting aesthetics, Smith’s
reading of the Swiss Alps offered a new paradigm for the interpretation of Victoria’s
alpine forests. The aim of this paper is to explore how Lindt’s Hermitage and garden,
identified by Smith in 1901 as a realisation of the ideal traveller’s retreat, participated in
the promotion of such ideals.
In this paper the authors propose that Smith’s writings were as much a generator of ideas
for the design of Lindt’s Hermitage, as they were a description and a promotion of them.
The argument relies on a close reading of the Smith material pertaining to the Healesville
area in general and to The Hermitage in particular. Central to this argument is an analysis
of Smith’s reconciliation of ‘sublimity’ with ‘amenity’ to his understanding of the sublime
and the picturesque. Lindt’s appropriation of these ideas for his mountain retreat informs
both his design of the estate and his representation of it.
Smith, Lindt and Victoria’s alpine forests
Lindt once described The Hermitage as ‘specially designed as an artist’s home in the
forest primeval, and possess[ing] sufficient accommodation to receive about thirty
guests’.4 Embedded in the dense eucalyptus forests that cloak the Blackspur in the Yarra
Ranges, the complex consisted of a home, a studio (his former 1840s Gothic Revival
home ‘Ethelded’ at Hawthorn), various additions to accommodate guests, and some
garden follies. Carved bargeboards, finials, chamfered wooden posts, and other decorative
features linked an eclectic central European aesthetic to the contemporary arts and crafts
movement in Melbourne. Lindt’s co- author, Nicholas John Caire, described the crafted
buildings as having been designed ‘on the Swiss chalet principle’, and elsewhere as ‘after
the Swiss Chalet style’, although Lindt’s inclusion of roughly-hewn log bridges suggested
a less cultivated, more rustic, sensibility.5
At the time of development, the estate would have been covered with the districts’ distinctive
fern trees and Mountain Ash, the latter reaching 115 metres (see Figure 1). Lindt and
Caire loved their ‘straight dove-grey trunks’ supporting a protective canopy for the Silver
Wattle, Blackwood, Golden Wattle, Myrtle Beech, and the breathtakingly beautiful tree

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Sublimity and Amenity at Lindt’s Hermitage
ferns nestled in the valleys
below.6 As his photographs
show (see Figure 2, page 51),
Lindt cleared the land before
embarking on an ambitious
redevelopment where his
assorted buildings and exotic
planting matured into a
blended landscape of exotic
and naturally-recolonised
plants.
James Smith admired the
result. In 1901, Smith
describes Lindt’s residence,
guest house and garden as
a perfect realisation of the
traveller’s retreat:
‘Thirteen miles from
Healesville, the coach lands
you at the Hermitage,
which fulfils to the letter the
wish of the poet [William]
Cowper, when he wrote:
O, for a lodge in some
vast wilderness—
A boundless contiguity
of shade;’ 7
Only 7 years after Lindt moved to the Black Spur he was able to draw attention to the
wild hop, clematis, native pepper tree, rowan, ‘Christmas tree’ and ‘blue berry’. The
‘unexpected variety’ of native and exotic plantings, he concluded, ‘impart…a special
charm to the…mountain forest in this most secluded region, where a refreshing coolness
is obtainable in ferntree gullies during the most fervid heat of summer’.8 Although the
natural rainforest provided endless botanical variety, Lindt had amplified the experience
by introducing both exotic plants and architectural ornamentation.
Three years later, Lindt acknowledged Smith’s praise by reproducing large sections of his
essay in the
Companion Guide
. Describing the journey from Healesville up the Black
Spur to The Hermitage, Lindt notes:
The surroundings of this famous pleasure resort have been so ably described
by the facile pen of Mr. James Smith in the Special Centennial Number of “The
Leader” that we may be pardoned for quoting his text verbatim.9
Figure 1 ~ John William Lindt, Lindt’s Hermitage. “Fern Gully” from Bridge, n.d.
(Trobe Picture Collection, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne. H85.40/44)

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He then proceeds to do so. Indeed the final five pages of his introductory essay reproduces
Smith’s 1901 essay almost word for word.
The bond linking Smith and Lindt appears to be a shared love of the wilderness of
Victoria’s alpine forests and of the desire to make these sites accessible to the recreational
traveller. Some fourteen years after arriving in Australia, the German born Lindt
established a successful photographic business in Melbourne in 1876, producing images
of local industry, identities, and landholdings supplemented by ethnographic portraits of
Australian Aborigines and the native peoples of New Guinea, the New Hebrides, and Fiji.
Suffering a decline of business as a consequence of the 1890s depression, Lindt closed his
Melbourne studio in 1895 and moved to The Hermitage at Black Spur. His house, garden
and its surrounding environs become a focus of his photographic work from this point on.
Smith also emerges as an émigré enamoured with the forest landscapes of Victoria.
Arriving in Melbourne from England in 1854, Smith immediately secured work as a
journalist, critic and author, publishing essays in the leading papers and periodicals of the
day including the
Age
, the
Argus
, and the
Victorian Review
. Described by the historian
Lurline Stuart as a ‘cultural activitist,’—one who ‘deliberately and consistently takes
action to promote and disseminate culture’—Smith’s writings embraced a prolific array of
subjects including literary and art criticism, local politics and religion, mental and physical
health, the environment, and spiritualism.10
From 1872 to 1901, Smith wrote over ten articles in which he described the botany,
geography and emerging industries found in the Yarra Ranges and the Dandenongs.11
Multiple intents appear to have motivated these meditations. In his 1886 essay, ‘Up
in the Redlands,’ Smith offers a review of his visit to St Hubert’s Vineyard in Lilydale,
in the company of the estate’s owner Hubert de Castella. Two other shorter texts,
‘Road near Fernshaw’ (1872) and ‘A Sketch near Macedon,’ (1874) critically assess the
representation of the mountain landscape by the Swiss-born artist Louis Buvelot. In ‘A
Strange Community’ (1884), Smith envisions the Upper Yarra Valley as the site for an
imagined utopian community. Many of these essays are, however, highly descriptive,
outlining the physical phenomena which could be witnessed by the traveller as he or she
moved throughout the landscape by horse-drawn carriage or train. Examples of this genre
include his ‘Historical Sketch of Victoria’ (1886) and his 1901 essay the ‘Picturesque:
Victorian Landscapes and Landscape Art’.
Like many of his contemporaries, Smith was convinced of the aesthetic deficiencies of the
Australian landscape when compared to that of England. Only in terms of scale, could the
Australian landscape be favourably compared to that of Britain. Having completed the
final leg of a Grand Tour which took him through much of western Europe, England and
Scotland, Smith had observed that the English countryside was unable to compete with
the expansive nature of the Australian landscape, and that English fields, to ‘the eye of an
Australian, look singularly small, … the woods and plantations equally diminutive…and all
the trees…dwarfed.’12 Size, however, was no real match for the beauty of the botanical
specimens that defined the English landscape, which Smith saw as being inherently

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more picturesque than their Australian equivalents.13 In 1901 Smith concludes that ‘the
monotonous expanse of sun-burnt country’ of the Australian landscape, ‘with its sparse
and stunted trees’ and ‘fringing and intermittent creeks’ offered ‘no attractions whatsoever
to the modern Dr. Syntax, who might be tempted to set out on a road in search of the
Picturesque.’14 The long held ‘verdict’ that Australia was an ‘ugly region’ that ‘has come
from the hands of nature in a crude unfinished state’ and has been ‘colonised some
thousands of years before it was ready for the reception of white man’ only encouraged
the opinion that ‘the best thing’ the colonist could do was to capitalise on the continent’s
‘economic resources’ and to go back ‘home’ as soon as he had made his ‘pile.’ Once ‘home,’
not only would the colonist, once again, have ‘something worth looking at,’ he would also,
and more importantly in Smith’s view, ‘be within an easy distance of the Tyrolean Alps, the
romantic Dolomites and the lakes and mountains of Switzerland and Italy.’15
The scenic beauty of the latter is explored by Smith in a series of earlier writings,
‘A Wedding Tour in Italy’ (1855)— two articles on places visited during a trip from
France to Italy by rail, steamer and diligence with a fictional wife— and
From Melbourne
to Melrose
(1888)— a collection of 29 articles originally published in the
Argus
from
1882-1884 outlining the places visited by Smith during a tour of Europe and Britain in
1882.16 If these essays are compared to his later studies of the Victorian Alps, the central
motif informing Smith’s reading of the Victorian landscape, and Lindt’s Hermitage,
becomes apparent: his desire to identify instances where sublimity and amenity meet.
The simultaneous presence of these aesthetic constructs in both Swiss and Australian
scenery enables Smith to draw affinities between the two landscapes that transcend the
topographical and botanical focus of past comparative studies.
Savage grandeur with the utmost refinements of cultivation
Smith’s celebration of the Swiss Alps, like that of many of his contemporaries, rested on
the ability of its landscape to evoke the sublime:
Among the passes of the Alps you are awed by their majesty, and inspired with
a feeling of profound devotion by the sublimity of those stupendous masses that
veil their stainless summits in the clouds, until—
“The dilating soul, enrapt, transfused
Into the mighty vision passing—there
As in her natural form, swells vast to heaven.” 17
This enactment of the sublime is realised in Smith’s view by the presence of extreme
topographical and botanical contrasts, preferably of great antiquity, which motivate within
the observer both a sense of awe and terror. In the Alps the tourist is confronted almost at:
‘every turn of the road [with] some new beauty …some fresh combination of
grandeur and loveliness…; snow-covered domes and spires sharply outlines
against a sky of the intensest [sic] blue; forests clothing the mountain sides with
robes of the richest verdure; cataracts gleaming like molten silver in the sun,
leaping from ridge to ridge, as if with a wild impatience to mingle their waters
with the torrent that is raving and raging at such an awful depth below.’ 18

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In the first instance, Smith’s focus on the topographical diversity of the Swiss landscape
recalls a picturesque celebration of variety.19 Smith’s interest, however, rests on the capacity
of the Swiss landscape to express sublime values, to evoke both an infinite and timeless
nature. ‘One the greatest charms of Swiss travel,’ Smith points out, ‘for whether you cross
the Alps by way of Mont Cenis, the Splugen or the Simplon,’ is ‘the discovery that age
cannot wither them, nor custom stale their infinite variety.’20 This was partly realised in the
geological scale and magnitude of the ‘alpine architecture’—the valley cliffs and mountain
crags—against which the ‘pyramids are [but] things of yesterday’ and the ‘Colosseum,
the baths of Caracalla, and the palaces of the Caesars’ little more than ‘insignificant…
playthings.’21 For Smith, the Swiss landscape was in this respect, like Burke’s Longinian
sublime, a place of terror and uncultivated brutality.22 While the ‘everlasting Alps,’…
impress you with a sense of magnitude and majesty, of cold abstractions and the loftiest
solitude,’ the crystalline cliffs and gorges cut by mountain cataracts also revealed a wild
and savage nature impervious to all influences of civilisation.23 Here narrow roads abut
‘massive and stupendous walls’ and teeter on the edge of gorges where ‘five hundred feet
below…an angry river, compresses within a torturous and gloomy bed…with a deafening
roar.’24 Menace is evoked by boulders that ‘threaten to fall and overwhelm the traveller,’25
‘rocks of stupendous and impenetrable massiveness’ that ‘seemingly bar the way’ of the
walker,26 and the unpredictability of ‘winter avalanches’ capable of bringing down a
‘whole grove of pine trees’ and leaving them ‘barkless and white, like so many skeletons,
bleaching in the sun.’27 Adding to this the ‘excitement occasioned by a certain amount of
danger as the diligence proceeds at full speed down a winding road, with a wall of rock
2,000ft high upon one side and an ugly precipe of 2,000ft deep upon the other,’ ensured
that not only would ‘no drowsiness be experienced’ by the observant tourist but that the
‘eye’ would be constantly ‘charmed’ and the ‘mind… exhilarated.’28
Such consequences, were however, not only evident in the Alp’s immense scale. It could
also be found in the ‘secrete recesses… hidden sylvan solitudes’ or ‘cascades of singular
beauty’ which dotted the Swiss landscape.29 Finding in such retreats the ‘freshness of the
early world’, one could glimpse an ‘authentic’ nature and native culture which had not
been ‘sophisticated and demoralised by the flood of English and American tourists,….
annually let loose over the beaten tracks of travel in Switzerland and Italy.’30 Also found
was a ‘solitude’, which, like the magnificence of the mountain architecture or the variety
of its topography, was able to ‘[stir] the feeling infinite… .’
While the idea of a primordial wilderness evoking in its variety and solitude both a
sense of terror and of the infinite was fundamental to Smith’s classification of the Swiss
landscape as sublime, it was not the sole factor determining the appeal of its scenery. For
Smith, it was the coupling of this wilderness with evidence of cultivation which ultimately
underpinned its true aesthetic value. Significantly, evidence of this union was not to be
found in the isolated wilderness of the Alps, but in the contrast of this landscape with the
more populated areas bordering the Swiss and Italian lakes. Accepting that there is more
‘imposing mountain architecture’ and ‘luxuriant vegetation’ in other parts of the world,
he doubts that the ‘grandeur and loveliness of this beautiful earth make themselves felt

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anywhere with more irresistible force than at Montreux, on the Lake of Geneva.’ The
‘special and untiring charm’ of this landscape, he concluded, stemmed from its:
combination of sublimity with amenity, of distant peaks and glaciers, where
eternal winter reigns, with terraces close at hand, that will bye and bye be a
mass of purple and gold when the grapes ripen; of the most august forms with
the most alluring and winsome details; of savage grandeur with the utmost
refinements of cultivation; and it is, above all, the magnificence and variety of
colour, the incessant change and counterchange of light and shade, the lustre
that fades away in one place to reappear in another, [and] the glory that glows
upon the mountain and the gloom that gathers of the lake, to be transposed in a
few fleeting minutes… .32
The co-existence of these seemingly contradictory aesthetic agendas, in that they coupled
a primordial and thus a-historical landscape with signs of progressive and cultural
sophistication, was a phenomenon that was replicated for Smith throughout the Swiss
and Italian Alps. For the traveller, this was most apparent in the contrast generated from
seemingly impenetrable wilderness serviced with well maintained bridges, fences, walking
paths, and seats, all positioned for ‘the best vantage points of view.’33 Not only did such
devices permit the recreational traveller to gain access to sights and scenes that would
otherwise have been denied, they also set up a series of unexpected visual contrasts, in
which the traveller could constantly delight. ‘To-day,’ Smith notes, ‘one is constantly
surprised to continually find dwelling-houses in places to which one might have imagined
no human foot had ever penetrated, gardens where you would only expect to see rocks,
vineyards in apparent solitudes, and cultivated fields hidden amongst lofty precipices.’34
For Smith, it was the delight stemming from such unexpected contrasts which underpin
the aesthetic appeal of the Swiss and Italian Alps.35
Smith’s Swiss conceit
Travelling through the southern districts of eastern Australia, seemingly in search of
a landscape able to inspire the recreational tourist, Smith’s praise of Victoria’s alpine
forests constantly returns to the affinities he felt this landscape had with that found in
Switzerland. In the ‘Picturesque: Victorian Landscapes and Landscape Art’ (1901), under
the subheading of ‘Eastern Switzerland,’ he imagines the geographic consequences of the
Yarra and Dandenong Ranges, had they been ‘raised from 3000 feet to 4000 feet above
their present elevation’ to bring them in line with the Swiss and Italian Alps.36
Their icy summits would have been petrified into ‘motionless torrents, silent cataracts,’ as
Coleridge denominated the glaciers, and these would have led to the formation of another
Lake Leman, overspreading what are now the Yarra Flats. The Acheron and the Goulburn
would have been transformed into another Rhone, flowing northward like it; and the
Yarra would have equalled the Rhine in the volume of its waters… .37

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He goes on to note that the village of Healesville, the main entry point into the Yarra
Ranges for those travelling from Melbourne, ‘resembles a Swiss village in all but its
architecture…It has the same irregularity of contour, the same inequality of surface, and
the same environment of mountains, folding it in their fond embrace,… .’38 He also drew
analogies between many of the principle routes crossing the Victorian ranges and the great
Swiss passes whereby the winding road from Alexandra to Buxton, for example, seemed
not unlike the ‘ascent of the Simplon on the Swiss side.’39
Significantly the visual cues which stimulated this reminiscence in the traveller, were
for Smith, the presence of a number of shared geographical, botanical and aesthetic
characteristics. Like their Swiss counterpart, the landscapes of the Yarra and Dandenong
Ranges exhibited a great botanical and geographical diversity. Described by Smith as a
‘varying landscape...of remarkable beauty and wide extent’ which stemmed from ‘rich
and wooded valleys,’ these forests possessed ‘more shades of colour in the foliage than
is customary in the Australian bush—pinks and mauves, tawny orange and old gold,
mingling with the various tints of green.’ Complemented by the juxtaposition of the
‘gleam of water,’ ‘fat pastures in the bottom lands,’ and ‘labyrinthine mountain[s] of
different altitudes’ a scene was produced that ‘every few minutes changes in position and
elevation.’40 Coupled with a ‘vegetation tropical in its luxuriance’ of ‘undergrowth… so
dense as to be almost impenetrable, …timber ranges from 200 to 300 feet in height’ and
the ‘rank growth of trees, shrubs, herbage, climbing plants and parasites generally, and
most of these in such endless variety’ ensured that ‘this huge aggregation of forest’ was
exempt ‘from the reproach so often brought against the Australian bush, that it is wanting
in diversity of foliage and colour.’41
Smith’s focus on variety, as in his writings on the Swiss Alps, suggests an interest in the
picturesque rather than the sublime. Such a conclusion is supported by the very title of
his 1901 essay in which he outlines most fully his opinions pertaining to the Victorian
landscape. Significantly his descriptions of the region also rarely employ the term sublime.
Such an observation demonstrates Smith’s understanding that in no way did the mountain
forests of Victoria equal the monumental dimensions and scale of the Swiss Alps. Smith’s
principle focus appears rather to rest on the ‘sylvan solitudes’ of the Victorian ranges.
‘Plunging only a short distance into the forest,’ one soon finds oneself in the midst of
a ‘primitive nature,’ of ‘forest solitudes that maintain the virgin beauty which has been
their characteristic for unnumbered and innumerable centuries.’42 As in the Swiss Alps,
the witness of this ‘silent leafy wilderness’ could ‘bridge centuries with a flash of thought’
and travel back to ‘dim and distant periods when strange monsters—winged serpents and
armoured lizard—lived in the darkling forest tarns and cut the air with scaly plumes.’43
Guaranteeing solitude this ‘primeval forest’ also evoked terror and trepidation. Fed by
‘summer storm’ and winter melts, Stevenson Falls just north of the Hermitage, is described
by Smith as a tortured torrent that ‘frets and fumes and brawls’ before ‘bound[ing]
down an ‘umbrageous ravine.’ The ranges which skirt the falls are vividly presented as
‘extremely precipitous, and combine the characteristics of an Australian forest with those
of the Asiatic jungle, in so far as the closeness and complicity of the undergrowth are

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Sublimity and Amenity at Lindt’s Hermitage
concerned.44 The road, offering the tourist access to the scene, is ‘carried along a mere
cornice, from the outer edge of which the ground drops in a sheer descent and overlooks
the summits of trees two hundred feet high.’45
For Smith the combination of these physical attributes produced a wilderness landscape
‘to which the epithet “magnificent” may be justly applied.’46 It was, however, evidence
of European habitation within the Victorian wilderness which confirmed the region’s
beauty and affinity with the mountain scenes of Switzerland. In much the same way as
the recreational traveller through the Swiss Alps was constantly surprised to find ‘gardens’
in ‘apparent solitudes,’47 the tourist who alights at one of the stations in the Yarra and
Dandenong ranges could observe that ‘the wilderness and grandeur of primitive nature…
are blended with the amenities and the humanising influences of civilisation.’48
This combination, Smith suggested, was most evident in the contrast of forest and
settlement. Throughout the Victorian mountain ranges, one could witness ‘the evidences
of the conflict which has been going on since the dawn of creation—man wrestling
successfully with the forces of nature, subjugating them to his imperious needs, and
making the earth smile with fruitfulness and rejoice with plenty.’49 While much of Smith’s
writings focused on the ‘primeval wilderness’ he also wrote of ‘cleared spaces’ and ‘tokens
of settlement.’ These, in contrast to the surrounding bush, associate:
themselves with pleasant thoughts of homesteads and family life and the
domestic affections, of farms and gardens and fruitful orchards won from
the primeval wilderness, of the varieties and activities of agricultural life, of
the busy drama of material progress enacted by men and women with sturdy
arms and steadfast determination, and of the gradual formation of a coherent
community out of a scattered settlement.50
However, the extreme ‘fecundity’ of the forest landscape, Smith warned, enabled it to
easily revert to its original condition, noting that at the abandoned village of Fernshaw
near Healesville, ‘all traces of human habitation and human culture’ had been ‘pretty well
obliterated.’ ‘A few exotic trees denote the former whereabouts of gardens won from the
forest: but in all other respects, the spot has relapsed to its primitive wilderness.’51
An alternate and less obvious expression of this contrast was echoed for Smith in the
contrasting forms and interdependent geographies of the forest plants, and specifically of
the giant eucalypts or Mountain Ash and tree-ferns, both of which are abundant within
the region. For Smith, the contrast of ‘the forest tree in lofty brotherhood—each worthy
to be “the mast of some great admiral”’ which ‘rise like stately pillars, for a hundred feet
in height before [nature] suffers them to put forth branch and leaf’ and ‘the fragile shrubs
and flowers… woven into a robe of tapestry for the earth below’ personify the divergent
characters of nature; one primeval and treacherous, the other nurturing, predictable
and stable. Here ‘the very fern-trees seem to derive some sap and sustenance from the
dead timber of the forest Goliaths that lie rotting at their feet’ in a setting of ecological
interdependency.52

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For Smith it was the reciprocal nature of this process, the spectacle generated from a
contrast of wilderness and settlement—and at times abandonment and regeneration—
which determined the true value of recreational travel through the Yarra and Dandenong
Ranges, be it by train or road. Journeys such as those from Marysville to Tallarook—
one that takes you from the Acheron to the Goulburn valley—reveal a ‘succession of
mountain, forest and … purely champaign [sic] scenery.’ The ‘charm’ of this geographical
progression stems not only from the ‘variety’ it presents but from the striking contrast
which is offered by the ‘grandeur of the landscapes at the outset of your journey, to their
amenity at its close.’
The valley of the Acheron in the first instance, and that of the Goulburn, in the second,
abound in ‘motives’[sic] for the landscape painter. In the former you find the wildness
of Nature; a certain august majesty in the sculpture of the mountains which looks down
upon it; and a picturesque interchange, in its solemn forest vistas, of light and shadow,
combined with such receding lines of the stately and columnar shafts of the lofty trees, as
recall the vast perspective of an Egyptian temple; only instead of the encroaching sand,
you have a rich undergrowth of luxuriant vegetation. The valley of Goulburn, on the
other hand, is full of pleasant evidences of human industry—farms, and orchards, and
pastures in which milch kine and sleek and glossy beeves fatten, attesting to the fertility of
the soil, and the enterprise, success and prosperity of its cultivators.53
Why is it that Smith turned to the landscapes of the Swiss Alps as a model for his
reading of the forests of the Victorian ranges? The motive informing
From Melbourne
to Melrose
was to produce a ‘handbook for the increasingly large number of Australians
who take a holiday run through Europe, when they find their minds and bodies require
the refreshment of change.’54 Ironically, Smith notes in his 1901 essay that Victoria had
long been discredited as a field of travel. The colonist seeking both physical and mental
escape was forced to leave Victoria and return to Europe as the ‘local landscape’ offered
no attraction to those in search of the picturesque.55 This criticism, Smith notes, stemmed
from a focus on the plains to the north and west of Melbourne, a ‘monotonous expanse
of sun-burnt country’ dotted with ‘sparse and stunted trees.’56 He argued that a more
appealing landscape was found to the east, in the mountain forests of the Yarra and
Dandenong Ranges. Here the traveller would find a geniune ‘scenery’ able to ‘charm the
eye of a painter.’57
Smith’s allusion to the painted landscape, coupled with his use of the term ‘picturesque’
in the title of his essay, suggests that Smith had found in the Victorian forests an area
of the Australian landscape which conformed to the canon of the English picturesque.
The topographical diversity and botanical luxuriance of the region supported such a
conclusion. The primordial status of the forest, a quality of the ranges much celebrated
by Smith, however, makes such a conclusion problematic.
Caroline Jordan has argued that a mass experience of the picturesque in Britain was
achieved by the day trippers’ ‘escape from modernity via ecstatic meditations on nature
and the heroic British past.’58 Through the addition of antiquarian or historical vignettes

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to tourist spaces, such as the Wye Valley, the ‘pleasure pilgrim’ was able to experience
an ‘intensely felt nostalgia’ for a past that ‘did not tolerate the intrusion of the present.’
In Australia, which was perceived by the settler to lack a ‘legible (read white) history of
any depth,’ and which constructed the Aboriginal culture as ‘timeless’ and thus ‘without
history and civilisation,’ it was difficult to find a natural landscape, be it varied or not, able
to evoke this sense of nostalgia.59
The lack of opportunity to draw on history when describing and representing the
landscapes of the Victorian mountain forests was in many respects doubly problematic.
First, the landscape itself, while varied and diverse, was deemed to be ‘primordial’ and
‘ancient’, and thus, much like its original occupants timeless and possessing no history.60
Such values in turn demonstrate an affinity with the sublime rather than the picturesque.
Second, the sole indicators of human, or more specifically white, habitation were the
settlements established by men and women living in the present, representing the ideals
of progress rather than a romantic past. As Smith himself acknowledged, the life lived in
the hills of the Victorian Alps was one of ‘plenty of hard work and very little recreation
… and the most lively imagination would fail to invest its prosaic realities with a halo of
romance or with an air of poetry.’61 While thatched cottages and creaking windmills were
accepted within the picturesque repertoire, these were intended as nostalgic expressions
of times past rather than the celebration of industry and progressive development. As
the English picturesque poet and painter John Dyer argued in 1725, the charm of such
structures, together with the more impressive ruins of triumphal arches and castle keeps,
lay in their decay, where the ‘sweep of time’ introduces both an element of ‘beauty and
surprise no modern building can give.’62
The coupling of the primordial and progressive witnessed by Smith in the Victorian Alps
demonstrated that an alternative model to the English picturesque was needed. Smith
found this alternative in the meeting of sublimity and amenity he detected in the Swiss Alps.
Not only did the Swiss paradigm offer the modern traveller escape through a meditation
of the sublime, but it also accommodated the presence of progress—represented not only
by cultivation and settlement, but also by the very mechanisms—the railways, roads and
carriages—which delivered the tourists to the sites of sublime tourism.
Photographic interpretations of The Hermitage garden
For Lindt, it is this same contrast of grandeur and amenity which becomes the motive not
only for the design and development of The Hermitage and its garden, but also of his
photographic representation of the region. In addition to describing The Hermitage in
1901 as the ideal traveller’s retreat, Smith also argued that it united scenery able to ‘carry
you back to the morning of time and remind you that they are coeval with the Age of
Stone in the North’, with a ‘lodge in which private enterprise has assembled the comforts
and conveniences of civilisation.63 In presenting Lindt’s garden through his own texts
and images, attention can be drawn to attributes of the sublime and amenity that might
otherwise escape detection. In other words, Lindt’s photographs of his property can be
read as a meta-narrative integrating wilderness with amenity.

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In Lindt’s opening chapter of the
Companion Guide
, so substantially—and shamelessly—
dependent upon Smith’s rapturous account of his Hermitage, he includes a number of
images to complement the text. Significantly they begin with images of the means of
travel—the railway terminus at Healesville and the horse and dray coach awaiting the
train at Marysville Station, required to take tourist to the guesthouse. Then followed
several views of Healesville, showing a thriving new township, where regeneration is yet to
integrate the architectural developments but where a variety of distant mountains ensure
the wider landscape setting of the whole is not overlooked. At the point in the text when
he starts quoting Smith at length, Lindt selects an image, presumably by co-author Caire,
of a corroboree re-enactment at the Aboriginal settlement of Coranderrk, 6 kilometres
from Healesville. Lying slightly to the north of Healesville, Coranderrk’s geography
reveals more gentle slopes than craggy mountains and soaring vegetation, but it was
the site of an Aboriginal Station (from 1863 to 1922) and thus, within a colonialist and
racially-determined framework, served to underpin the depiction of the region as having
primeval credentials.64 This is followed by an image of ‘Rourke’s Bridge, near Healesville’,
two images of the Hermitage, to which we’ll shortly return, and finally another bridge,
this time over the Badger River, again near Coranderrk. Both the bridge scenes, seen from
the creek beds, suggest a minimal intrusion of amenity into what appears to be dense and
unspoiled bushland.
Ever the entrepreneur, Lindt’s images always show The Hermitage as being accessible
and as providing amenity. The two images of The Hermitage that accompany Smith’s
quote in the
Companion Guide
, prioritise amenity over wilderness. By implication, the
evocative title
‘The Hermitage’ from Tree House
(see Figure 2, which is virtually the same
but carries a different title) frames the aerial shot of The Hermitage—as if seen from a
wild place on its periphery.
The various buildings comprising the estate read as a tiny village with a miniature chapel.
In fact, the turreted spire is anchored to the balustrade of a footbridge marking a change
of direction and an ideal stopping point to admire the garden. The whole is seen to be
nestled against bush in the background and a heavily landscaped and cultivated garden
in the foreground. Steps, paths and bridges help to define the opportunities established
for the visitor to explore the carefully designed garden. The high vantage point of the
photographer, plus the distant mountains visible in the background, may betray traces of
the idea of wilderness, but undoubtedly the bulk of the image suggests amenity provided
in the buildings and the landscape.
The authors have argued elsewhere that Lindt was inspired by Humboldt in the selection
of a sub-tropical landscape for his mountain retreat.65 Lindt was attracted to Humboldt’s
belief that the natural ‘luxuriance of vegetation’ (as at Black Spur) could be brought to
complete perfection by having exotic plants enhance a sense of botanical diversity.66 It may
seem that
‘The Hermitage’ from Tree House
fails to reveal these arguments, given that so
much of the rich landscape that attracted him to the area in the first place appears to have
been destroyed in the effort to establish a cultivated garden. One could argue, however,
that for a gardening enthusiast such as Lindt, who must have been able to foresee the

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cultivated and regenerated landscapes maturing together into the interdependent garden
advocated by Humboldt, the image held out the promise of native and exotic fecundity.
Indeed, the image published in 1904 (although probably taken some years earlier) was
replicated in 1912 by which time a sense of amenity in the wilderness could be seen to
have been achieved.
Summer: Lindt’s Hermitage, Black’s Spur
(Figure 3) shows the
maturing trees hiding the spired folly and the entrance steps to the property.
It could be argued that the earlier
Tree House
image gains its sense of civilised amenity
within a primeval, and thus sublime, landscape in part by the evocative title and in part
in the photographer’s foresight that such a naturally fertile landscape would eventually
recover its presence.
The text accompanying the panoramic view of The Hermitage and garden within the
Companion Guide
, citing Smith’s earlier 1901 description, demonstrates both Smith’s
and Lindt’s association of this scene with the sublimity of an ‘ocean tempest’,67 and
Lindt’s intent to reveal it to his guests, either directly by inviting them to climb one of
the many tree houses, or indirectly through his photography.
The views of from The Hermitage, or rather from the crow’s nests, which have been built
high up in three of the tallest trees accessible, embrace a wide range of country. Stretching
away for a distance of 20 miles, in a south-easterly direction, the horizontal line as it
Figure 2 ~ John William Lindt, J. W. Lindt’s Hermitage, Narbethong, [ca. 1890-1910] gelatin silver, 15.4 x 19.6 cm [virtually the
same as the image “The Hermitage” from Tree House in Companion Guide to Healesville, Blacks’ Spur, Narbethong and Marysville,
Melbourne: The Atlas Press. 1904 opp. P. 14]. (La Trobe Picture Collection, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne. H94.170/1)

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Figure 3 ~ John William Lindt, Summer, Lindt’s Hermitage, Black’s Spur, c. 1912 (Mitchell Library, State Library of New South
Wales. ML REF: SV2B/Bla S/2)
sweeps round the Cathedral rock, on the extreme left, to the Dome, which faces you as
you carry your eye round to the right of that comprehensive semi-circle, resembles in its
undulations the ground-swell of the ocean, after a magnificent tempest.68
Lindt’s co-author, Nicholas Caire, explained that it was the elevation of the site and the
view it offered of the adjacent ranges, which determined the siting of the Hermitage.69
The ‘shadow effects of fleeting clouds on these hills’ during a summer storm struck Lindt
as ‘border[ing] on the sublime’.70
Lindt’s second Hermitage image in his chapter was of tourists arriving at the lych-gate at
the entrance to his property.
The Gate House at “The Hermitage”
, shows some guests
seated in a horse-drawn carriage around which others are standing. It would seem that
the earlier image shown in the
Companion Guide
of a carriage awaiting train passengers
at Marysville station (p.6), had returned to gather passengers for their journey back
to Melbourne. The dozen or more people suggest popularity; the horse and carriage,
accessibility. The idea of coexistence underpinning Smith’s examination of wilderness
and amenity, can here be seen in the integration of architecture (the poles holding up
the shingled gate-house roof) and landscape (strong verticality of the tree trunks), and
native plants (ferns, tree ferns and grasses) framing introduced species. A slightly higher
and more distant shot of the same lych gate was published in the same year as a collotype
postcard,
[Illegible] Between Healesville and Hermitage, Black Spur
(Figure 4).
Importantly, the latter image shows two early motor vehicles crowded with sightseers,
reinforcing again the popularity and accessibility of the site, especially for those with
independent means to arrange for their own transport to the site. Both the framing

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and the effect are roughly similar in these images. Picturesque rather than sublime
in aspiration, the images capture a little of the raw bush as it leads the eye into the
sophisticated cultural setting. The gate house, like the homestead immediately behind,
suggests that careful attention has been paid to the design and crafting of the structure:
the pole columns may seem rustic but the wooden detailing between the columns and
the pagoda-like flattening of the hipped roof, indicate that a very different aesthetic has
been sought from that of the improvised slab-and-bark huts that featured in earlier Lindt
series on the Australian bush.71 The log bridges and tree houses may have been designed
to suggest resourcefulness and simplicity, but the architectural detailing on the gate and
various buildings on the estate suggests a cultivated imagination recalling European
memories and the arts and crafts movement.
Although the images of Lindt’s Hermitage garden in the
Companion Guide
, taken from
above and outside, may have relied on an implied context of having been metaphorically
framed by the adjacent wilderness, those he shot from within the garden itself were able to
more fully realise the coupling of wilderness with amenity. One image will suffice to show this.
Woman on Bridge, the Hermitage
shows a woman taking advantage of the wooden
bridge to admire the fern growing at the edge of the brook. Her presence in the image
is more than decoration: far from being lost or terrified in the bush, she appears to enjoy
her solitude. Absorbed in observing nature, she pauses before continuing a journey into
the dense sub-tropical undergrowth, made all the more inviting by the brilliant sun rays
penetrating its canopy. Humboldt’s ideas of science enhanced by art, and Smith’s of
wilderness by amenity, are here given visual expression. The woman is no idle
flâneur
strolling the city streets, but an active observer of nature, supported in her endeavours
Figure 4 ~ John William Lindt, [Illegible] between Healesville and Hermitage, Blacks{?] Spur, [ca. 1904] postcard, collotype,
8.8 x 13.8 cm. (La Trobe Picture Collection, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne. H96.200/750)

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by minimal design interventions. If Humboldt is correct, her – and by extension our –
aesthetic engagement with nature is a sign of her ‘modern’ and ‘cultivated’ mind.72
If, also, one were to see the woman through the eyes of James Smith’s compelling 1884
article about a ‘Strange Community’ of French-speaking Swiss exiles in the area, one
might more readily understand her purpose in the image. Smith told the story of the
utopian Christian community’s harmonious existence derived from a daily commitment to
industry and art. After four hours ‘physical exertion either in handicrafts or the cultivation
of the soil’ there was abundant time for ‘many comforts…and…numerous enjoyments…
alive to the beauties of nature, and to the sweet and gracious influences of art.’73 In
Smith’s fabrication, penned ten years before Lindt purchased his land and arguably
serving as a blueprint for Lindt’s enterprise, women were active contributors to the ethos
of the community. In Lindt’s images, women, more frequently than men, are shown
taking an active interest in the garden and surrounds. [They are also often depicted, when
not studying nature, as actively engaged in some useful activity such as sewing]
Clearly, amenities such as bridges, pathways, stairs, balustrades, seats, pavilions, were not
provided solely to emulate European pleasure resorts: Lindt and his wife ‘minister[ed] to
the pleasure and convenience of visitors’ because they has a business to run.74 Amenities
feature strongly in Lindt’s numerous postcards of his ‘Perfect Pleasure Resort’, often
embellished with vignettes, captions and poetry, to reassure the recipient that the
necessary comforts were on hand. Often, on the one card, the homestead and guest
Figure 5 ~ John William Lindt, [Woman on bridge, The Hermitage], n.d. stereotype. (La Trobe Picture Collection, State Library of
Victoria, Melbourne. H85.40/29)

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accommodation were coupled with glimpses into the old growth forest (see Figure 6),
adorned with sprigs of native flora, or even (clumsily) accompanied by one of his 1870s
images of the Gumbayngirr, Bundjalung and Thungutti peoples of the Clarence River,
Grafton, New South Wales!
We have already established that not only did Smith admire Lindt’s estate, but that Lindt
in turn quoted the writer at length in his own book on the region. By now it should
be apparent that the connection between the two men goes back much earlier than the
1901 article by Smith. Indeed, the architecture inhabited by Smith’s fictitious ‘Strange
Community’ appears to have served as a virtual blueprint for Lindt’s own cluster of
buildings. One could be excused for mistaking the following quote from the 1884 article
as a description of the Hermitage buildings as they were presented in Lindt’s collotype
postcards (Figures 6 and 7) from ca. 1903:
There were no two chalets alike…the native woods had been turned to excellent
account in this respect, and certain of the galleries, with their ornate carving
carefully polished, were of remarkable beauty…Each of these buildings…had
been constructed with a special eye to their picturesqueness. There were …
broad bargeboards, ornamented with bold and effective carvings, the same open
galleries similarly decorated, the same projection of the upper storeys over the
lower, and the most quaint little pignons at the angles, possessing no earthly use,
but evidently introduced for the sake of gratifying the eye.75
Little wonder James Smith liked Lindt’s Hermitage with buildings ‘bent upon adorning
the landscape’: it was as indebted to his ideas as was Lindt’s subsequent use of his text.
Nonetheless, when Lindt reinterpreted Smith ‘strange community’, he rejected the latter’s
tendency to promote the kind of asceticism one identifies with the German Nazarenes artist
community in early nineteenth century Rome.76 Perhaps Lindt’s lych gate, traditionally
marking the entrance to church yards where the corpse was briefly rested before entry to
the burial grounds, was one cue to a quasi-religious experience. Once through the gate,
however, any experience of spiritual, moral, intellectual and physical well being was to be
addressed through the redemptive force of nature, both original and cultivated. Figure
7 shows a rural retreat bathed in full sunlight where the two women strolling along the
path to the ‘vast wilderness’ will encounter welcoming shade. The couplet from Cowper’s
poem is once again deployed (and essentially misconstrued) by Lindt to embellish a
Romantic reading of the site.

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Figure 7 ~ John William Lindt, A Perfect Pleasure Resort. The Hermitage on the Blacks Spur. Oh for a lodge in some vast wilderness/
A boundless contiguity of Shade (Cowper). n.d. postcard, collotype, 8.8 x 13.8 cm. (La Trobe Picture Collection, State Library of
Victoria, Melbourne. H85.40/37)
Figure 6 ~ John William Lindt, A Perfect Pleasure Resort. The Hermitage on the Blacks Spur via Healesville, Victoria, Australia,
[ca. 1903] postcard, collotype, 8.8 x 13.8 cm. (La Trobe Picture Collection, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne. H96.200/747)

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Conclusion
Lindt’s pleasure resort in the Black Spur was as close an instance of amenity within
wilderness as one could find near Melbourne. It was a demonstration that aspects of
the central European landscape—mountains, ravines, wilderness, and even snow on
occasion— could be ‘found’ in Australia and made accessible to its tourists. This was
not done by stripping the land of its native vegetation and replacing it with firs. On the
contrary, the very distinctive local plants—complimented here and there with introduced
varieties—were crucial for the analogies with Switzerland and the sublime, to work. In
other words there was a strange inversion whereby a referencing of characteristics of
European Alps in articles describing the Yarra Ranges and the Dandenong State Forest,
enabled a greater appreciation of the local geographical terrain. One artist who seamlessly
worked on this elision both in his garden design and in his photographic records of it,
was J.W. Lindt. At his best he understood that his garden could enable the visitor to
perceive a ‘connection between the sensuous and the intellectual’, qualities prioritised
in his photographic representations of it.77 Whereas Humboldt had derided a tendency
of the artist to foresake ‘accuracy’ and ‘poetry’ for ‘sentimental effusions’ and ‘external
adornments’, Lindt sometimes succumbed to this impulse —in his garden design as much
as his photographic representations of it.78 In the name of amenity James Smith had
provided Lindt with a compelling framework for taming the wild, sometimes through
interventions (a pathway into the unknown, a contemplative figure) but just as often
effected through the arts of design and composition. Whether carefully providing optimal
viewing positions, or making use of them for his own artistic compositions, or showing
others taking advantage of the amenities he provided, Lindt clearly grasped the value of
showing that the apparently impenetrable sub-tropical rainforest could be tweaked to
welcome white tourist.

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References
1 [Lindt, J. W], Trip to the Black Spur: [occupying four days], Spectator Publishing Co, Melbourne,
1880, and [Lindt, J.W. and N.J. Caire], Companion Guide to Healesville, Blacks’ Spur, Narbethong
and Marysville. Melbourne: The Atlas Press, 1904. [later editions, 1913, 1910-1919]. Multiple
spellings of Black Spur exist. We are using the spelling employed by the Oxford Companion to
Australian Gardens. Lindt commonly referred to the site as “Black’s Spur” or “Blacks’ Spur.” When
quoting Lindt, his spelling will be used.
2 Catherine De Lorenzo and Deborah van der Plaat, ‘More than meets the eye: photographic records
of Humboldtian imaginings,’ Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary study of literature, December,
vol. 37, no. 4, December 2004, pp. 237-253; Catherine De Lorenzo and Deborah van der Plaat,
‘“Our Australian Switzerland”: Lindt, Humboldt, and the Victorian Landscape,’ Journal for the History
of Gardens and Designed Landscapes, vol. 24, no. 2, 2004, pp. 133-149.
3 James Smith, From Melbourne to Melrose, The Centennial Publishing Company, Melbourne, Sydney,
Adelaide and London, 1888, pp. 251-52.
4 Jack Cato, The Story of the Camera, Melbourne: Georgian, 1955, p. 493.
5 [Lindt and Caire], Companion Guide to Healesville, Blacks’ Spur, Narbethong and Marysville, p. 41
and p. 52 respectively. The title page of the Guide implies an anonymous authorship, but each
chapter separately acknowledges the authors. Leading art critic and travel writers of the day, James
Smith, also evoked Switzerland, but drew analogies with the landscapes rather than the architecture:
‘Healesville resembles a Swiss village in all but its architecture’. See Smith, op. cit., 13.
6 Details on the botanical characteristics of the tree come from Eric Rolls, Australia: a biography (St
Lucia: Queensland University Press), 2000, p. 215. The description of the trunks from [Lindt and
Caire], p. 9.
7 James Smith, ‘Picturesque: Victorian Landscapes and Landscape Art,’ The Leader, Special Century
Number, January 1, 1901, p. 13. William Cowper’s (1731-1800) poem, Task, cite the opening lines
as: ‘Oh for a lodge in some vast wilderness,/ Some boundless contiguity of shade,/ Where rumour of
oppression and deceit,/ Of unsuccessful or successful war, / Might never reach me more!’ His poem
is not so much an exercise in Sublime or Romantic imaginings, as a heartfelt desire to find a remote
and soothing place devoid of slavery. Smith’s error was to be reproduced by Lindt in both his writing
and in the production of a postcard using the poet’s couplet.
8 See Smith, op. cit., pp. 12-13. Smith’s description is quoted by Lindt in the Companion Guide.
9 [Lindt & Caire], Companion Guide to Healesville, Black Spur, Narbethong and Marysville, p. 11.
10 Lurline Stuart, James Smith: The Making of a Colonial Culture, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, London,
Boston and Wellington, 1989, pp. x-xi. For Smith’s writings see: Lurline Stuart, A Very Busy Smith:
An annotated Checklist of the works of James Smith, nineteenth century Melbourne Journalist and
Critic, Centre for Bibliographic and Textual Studies, National Centre for Australian Studies, Monash
University, Melbourne, 1992.
11 James Smith ‘To the Black Spur,’ Australasian, 24 Feb 1872, p. 231; ‘Road near Fernshaw: by
Buvelot,’ Australasian Sketcher, 1 Nov 1873, p. 134; Historical Sketch of Victoria, Landsdowne Press,
Sydney, Auckland, London & New York, 1974 (1886: Originally published in Picturesque Atlas of
Australia); ‘A Sketch near Macedon,’ Australasian Sketcher, 31 Oct 1874, pp. 167 & 170; ‘A Strange
Community,’ Argus, 16 August 1884, p. 4;‘Up in the Redlands,’ Once a Month 4, 1886, 298-301;
‘Vallambrosia,’ Argus, 17 March, 1888, p. 5; ‘The Northern Slope of the Macedon,’ Argus, 21 March
1891, p. 4; ‘A Mountain Playground,’ Argus, 18 Feb 1893, p. 4; “Picturesque: Victorian Landscapes
and Landscape Art,’ in The Colony of Victoria. A Record of Fifty Years of Progress from Responsible
Government to Federation, Special Century Edition of The Leader, 1901, pp. 12-22.
12 Smith, From Melbourne to Melrose, p. 313.
13 Smith, From Melbourne to Melrose, p. 313.
14 Smith here refers to The Tour of Dr. Syntax in search of the Picturesque, a joint work of James Combe
and Thomas Rowlandson, lampooning the writings of William Gilpin, first published in The Poetical
Magazine in 1809, first appeared as a separate volume in 1812 and later reprinted in many editions.
15 James Smith, ‘Picturesque: Victorian Landscapes and Landscape Art ‘, p. 12.

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16 James Smith, ‘A Wedding Tour in Italy: Chapter the First,’ The Melbourne Monthly Magazine, no. 1,
May 1855, vol. 1, p. 5-12 & June 1855, pp. 111-17; From Melbourne to Melrose, The Centennial
Publishing Company, Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide and London, 1888.
17 Smith, From Melbourne to Melrose, pp. 217-218.
18 Smith, From Melbourne to Melrose, pp. 239-240.
19 Uvedale Price (1747-1829) notes ‘we may conclude, that where an object, or a set of objects are
without smoothness or grandeur, but from the intricacy, their sudden and irregular deviations,
their variety of forms, tints and lights and shadows, are interesting to a cultivated eye, they are …
picturesque.’ Uvedale Price, Essays on the Picturesque, as Compared with the Beautiful and the
Sublime, vol. 1 (1794). London, 1810, pp. 43-53, 87-92, reproduced in Harry Francis Mallgrave
(ed.), Architectural Theory: An anthology from Vitruvius to 1870, Oxford: Blackwell, 2006, p. 311.
20 Smith, From Melbourne to Melrose, pp. 239-240. For Burke, Infinity had the capacity to fill the mind
with delightful horror and was ‘the most genuine effect and truest test of the sublime.’ Infinity was
in Burke’s scheme expressed when the eye was unable to perceive the boundaries of a particular
phenomenon, be it the extension of a landscape into the distant horizon, the fall of a waterfall
into a gorge, or the peak of a mountain shrouded in cloud. Variety was also a quality which was
accommodated by Burke’s categories of Succession and Uniformity which could be used to develop
the ‘artificial infinite,’ the illusion of infinity through the uniform repetition of elements to suggest
continual progression. Burke notes however, if this sense of progression is disrupted, ‘owing to the
inordinate thirst for variety,’ very ‘little taste’ is achieved. Edmund Burke, ‘A Philosophical Enquiry
into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful’ (1757) in The Works of Edmund Burke,
vol. 1, London: G. Bell & Sons, 1913, pp. 74-5, 100-8. [Reproduced in Mallgrave, pp. 278-280]
21 Smith, From Melbourne to Melrose, pp. 237-238.
22 Smith, From Melbourne to Melrose, pp. 220-219.
23 Smith, ‘A Wedding Tour in Italy,’ pp. 8-9.
24 Smith, ‘A Wedding Tour in Italy,’ pp. 8-9.
25 Smith, ‘A Wedding Tour in Italy,’ pp. 8-9.
26 Smith, From Melbourne to Melrose, pp. 237-238.
27 Smith, ‘A Wedding Tour in Italy,’ pp. 8-9.
28 Smith, Melbourne to Melrose, p. 239.
29 Source of stanza not cited. Smith, From Melbourne to Melrose, pp. 220-221.
30 Smith, From Melbourne to Melrose, pp. 220-219
31 Citing the 19th century canto of Childe Harold [Byron]. The full citation included is: ‘In solitude,
where we are least alone/A truth which through our being then doth melt/And purified from self: it
is a tone/ The Soul and source of music, which makes known/ Eternal harmony, and sheds a charm/
Like to fabled Cythera’s love/ Binding all things with beauty –t’would disarm/The specter Death, had
he substantial power to harm.’ Smith, Melbourne to Melrose, pp. 239-40.
32 Smith, From Melbourne to Melrose, pp. 251-52. Candice Bruce acknowledges the dual themes
of the terror and strangeness in the Victorian landscape paradoxically juxtaposed against more
amenable scenes of progress and prosperity as a characteristic of Smith’s writings on the Australian
landscape. Bruce sees this as evidence of Smith’s development of an ‘imaginary’ landscape where
the strangeness of the Australian landscape is jumbled together with his nostalgic imaginings of both
a European and English landscape. Bruce, however, fails to recognise the reconciliation of these two
themes –sublimity and amenity- is also a feature of Smith’s writings on the Swiss landscape. If the
credibility of Smith’s thesis of a tempered Swiss sublime is accepted, it not only demonstrates that
his reading of the Australian landscape was not ‘imagined’, but offered him a paradigm to deal with
the inherent contradictions of primordial wilderness and white settlement (discussed in more detail
below).Candice Bruce, ‘The Nostalgic Landscape,’ Australian Journal of Art, vol.14, no.2, 1999, pp.
118-119.
33 Smith, From Melbourne to Melrose, p. 252.

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34 Smith, From Melbourne to Melrose, p.261.
35 Uvedale Price argues the picturesque is the middle station between the sublime and beauty in
an attempt to unite the ‘utility of classical beauty’ with the astonishment of the sublime. It could
be argued that Smith’s interest in convenience can be equated to Price’s utility, however Smith’s
accommodation of the modern & the progressive in his reading of the Victorian landscape (discussed
below) invalidates such a proposition. Price, Essays on the Picturesque in Francis Mallgrave, pp. 307-
312.
36 Smith, ‘Picturesque: Victorian Landscapes and Landscape Art ‘ p. 13.
37 Smith, ‘Picturesque: Victorian Landscapes and Landscape Art ‘ p. 13.
38 Smith, ‘Picturesque: Victorian Landscapes and Landscape Art’ p. 13.
39 Smith, Historical Sketch of Victoria, p. 152.
40 Smith, Historical Sketch of Victoria, p. 152.
41 Smith, ‘Picturesque: Victorian Landscapes and Landscape Art’ p. 13-14.
42 Smith, Historical Sketch of Victoria, pp. 146-7.
43 Smith, Historical Sketch of Victoria, p. 147.
44 Smith, Historical Sketch of Victoria, p.153.
45 Smith, Historical Sketch of Victoria, p. 154.
46 Smith, Historical Sketch of Victoria, p. 152; ‘Picturesque:’ p. 13.
47 Smith, Historical Sketch of Victoria, p. 261.
48 Smith, Historical Sketch of Victoria, p. 261.
49 Smith, Historical Sketch of Victoria, pp. 146-147.
50 Smith, Historical Sketch of Victoria, p.147
51 Smith, ‘Picturesque: Victorian Landscapes and Landscape Art,’ p. 13.
52 Smith, Historical Sketch of Victoria, p.147.
53 Smith, ‘Picturesque: Victorian Landscapes and Landscape Art,’ p. 15.
54 Smith, Historical Sketch of Victoria, Preface.
55 Smith, ‘Picturesque: Victorian Landscapes and Landscape Art’ p. 12.
56 Smith, ‘Picturesque: Victorian Landscapes and Landscape Art’ p. 12.
57 Smith, ‘Picturesque: Victorian Landscapes and Landscape Art,’ pp. 13-14.
58 Caroline Jordan, ‘Progress versus the Picturesque: white colonial women and the aesthetics of
environmentalism in colonial Australia 1820-1860,’ Art History, vol. 25, no.3, Sept 2002: 344-345
59 Jordan, ‘Progress versus the Picturesque’, p. 345.
60 Smith recognises this dilemma as early as 1860 when he attributes the absence of ‘historical
associations’ to the primordial status of the Australian landscape. Smith, The Essayist, Examiner and
Melbourne Weekly News, 26 May, 1860, p. 8.
61 Smith, Historical Sketch of Victoria, p. 148.
62 John Dyer, ‘letter’ [describing the ancient ruins of Rome], 1724, cited in Christopher Woodward, In
Ruins, Chatto & Windus, London, 2001, p. 123.
63 Smith, ‘Picturesque: Victorian Landscapes and Landscape Art,’ p. 13.
64 The image shows three men all brandishing tools such as spears, boomerangs and woomeras. The
seated man in the centre appears to be wearing a kingplate and is covered by a skin cloak. The two
men at either side have ceremonial ‘paint’ on their faces and naked torsoes, and although they wear
trousers they also have stringed gum-leafs loosely draped around their abdomens.
65 See footnote 2.

Deborah van Der Plaat anD Catherine De lorenzo v
61
S
Sublimity and Amenity at Lindt’s Hermitage
66 Alexander von Humboldt, Cosmos: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, trans. vol.
2, E.C. Otté. London: Henry G Bohn, 1849, p. 452.
67 Mary Mackay, ‘All that mighty mass of rock: the geological sublime.’ Art and Australia, 31, no. 3
(1994), p. 346.
68 [Lindt and Caire], Companion Guide, p. 14.
69 [Lindt and Caire], Companion Guide, p. 40.
70 [Lindt and Caire], Companion Guide, p. 7.
71 In the early 1870s when working in Grafton, Lindt photographed the settlement of Solferino on the
upper Clarence River in northern New South Wales,. Even more rustic shots of the Australian bush
were taken in Victoria in the early 1880s. For evidence of these see Shar Jones, J.W. Lindt: Master
Photographer. Melbourne: Currey O’Neil Ross Pty Ltd on behalf of the Library Council of Victoria,
1985, plates 65 and 66,
72 Humboldt, Cosmos, 2, pp. 372-375.
73 Smith, ‘Strange Community’.
74 Smith quoted in [Lindt and Caire], p. 16.
75 Smith, Strange Community, p. 4.. The authors would be interested to hear from readers who may
know of other Australian architectural and landscape projects inspired not by a memory or a pattern
book, but by an evocative text.
76 Fritz Novotny. Painting and Sculpture in Europe, 1780-1880, Pelican History of Art. Harmondsworth:
Pelican Books, 1960.
77 Humboldt, Cosmos, 2, p. 438.
78 Humboldt, Cosmos, 2, p. 438.
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