John Baxter Mather

Last updated April 12, 2019

Not to be confused with John Mather (1848–1916), a Scottish-born painter in Melbourne

John Mather was a Scottish-Australian plein-air painter and etcher.

South Australia is a state in the southern central part of Australia. It covers some of the most arid parts of the country. With a total land area of 983,482 square kilometres (379,725 sq mi), it is the fourth-largest of Australia's states and territories by area, and fifth largest by population. It has a total of 1.7 million people, and its population is the second most highly centralised in Australia, after Western Australia, with more than 77 percent of South Australians living in the capital, Adelaide, or its environs. Other population centres in the state are relatively small; Mount Gambier, the second largest centre, has a population of 28,684.

History

Mather was born in Edinburgh, Scotland to Thomas S. Mather (c. 1824 – 20 June 1865) and Jessie Mather (c. 1826 – 20 October 1901), and emigrated with his parents to Australia around 1860, settling first in Portland, Victoria.^[1] Around 1864 they moved to Mount Gambier, South Australia, where after completing his schooling he started working as a compositor for A. F. Laurie and John Watson's Border Watch.^[2] In 1874 he left Mount Gambier for a time to work as compositor for Lawrie and Fairfax at the Portland Guardian where J. F. Archibald was an apprentice. After some initial sparring, the two became friends.^[3]

Edinburgh is the capital city of Scotland and one of its 32 council areas. Historically part of the county of Midlothian, it is located in Lothian on the Firth of Forth's southern shore.

Portland, Victoria City in Victoria, Australia

Portland is a small city in Victoria, Australia, and is the oldest European settlement in the state. It is also the main urban centre in the Shire of Glenelg and is located on Portland Bay.

Mount Gambier is the second most populated city in South Australia with an estimated urban population of 28,684. The city is located on the slopes of Mount Gambier (volcano) in the south east of the state, about 450 kilometres (280 mi) south-east of the capital Adelaide and just 17 kilometres (11 mi) from the Victorian border, it is the most important settlement in the Limestone Coast region and the seat of government for both the City of Mount Gambier and the District Council of Grant.

In 1875, he started work at Naracoorte, South Australia for the Border Watch, running its daughter publication, the Narracoorte Herald, which shortly afterwards he and George Ash acquired. In 1889 they were sued for libel by a wealthy squatter and lost everything they had.^[4] A great deal of sympathy was evinced locally for the pair.^[5]^[6]

Naracoorte is a town in the Limestone Coast region of South Australia, approximately 336 kilometres south-east of Adelaide and 100 kilometres north of Mount Gambier on the Riddoch Highway (A66).

George Ash was a newspaper editor, lawyer and parliamentarian in colonial South Australia.

He moved to Adelaide and found employment with The Advertiser as a compositor, then joined their literary staff^[7] as an art critic, a post he filled for fifteen years. From 1893 to 1899, he contributed drawings to the Adelaide Express, using the chalk plate method, at which he was particularly adept.^[8]

The Advertiser is a daily tabloid format newspaper published in the city of Adelaide, South Australia. First published as a broadsheet named The South Australian Advertiser on 12 July 1858, it is currently a tabloid printed from Monday to Saturday. The Advertiser came under the ownership of Keith Murdoch in the 1950s, and the full ownership of Rupert Murdoch in 1987. It is now a publication of News Corp Australia. Through much of the 20th century, The Advertiser was Adelaide's morning broadsheet, The News the afternoon tabloid, with The Sunday Mail covering weekend sport, and Messenger Newspapers community news. The head office was relocated from a former premises in King William Street, to a new News Corp office complex, known as Keith Murdoch House at 31 Waymouth Street.

He was at the forefront of process engraving technology; the first in South Australia to do colored monotypes.^[8] In 1900 he and Joseph Hanka founded Mather & Hanka's Excelsior Engraving Company of 4 Franklin Street, Adelaide, etching chalk plates (a fore-runner of the process plate) then making half-tone plates for printers, including The Advertiser. A year later the company was run by Mather and George Mackie^[9] By November 1903 the company was known simply as J. B. Mather, Photo-engraver, and ceased operation in late 1910. In 1913 he was employed by the Art Gallery of South Australia, revising the catalogue which H. P. Gill completed in 1903.^[10]^[11]

Franklin Street is a main street in the centre of Adelaide, South Australia.

Art Gallery of South Australia Art gallery in Adelaide, Australia

The Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA), located on the cultural boulevard of North Terrace in Adelaide, is one of three significant visual arts museums in the Australian state of South Australia. It has a collection of over 38,000 works of art, making it, after the National Gallery of Victoria, the second largest state art collection in Australia. It was known as the National Gallery of South Australia until 1967 when the current name was adopted.

Other interests

He enjoyed writing humorous verse, and contributed occasionally to The Advertiser, and frequently to the magazine Quiz and its successor Quiz and the Lantern. A few are listed here:

Township v. City Life^[12]
The Decayed Township^[13]
The Old woman (Turgenieff done into Verse)^[14]

His published books include:

Out of the Depths: based on passages in "De Profundis", Advertiser printers 1908.
In Memoriam J. M., Hassell Press, Adelaide 1927
Heine's North Sea, Advertiser printers, illustrated, 1933
A Metrical Version of Ivan Turgenieff's Poems in Prose, Advertiser printers, illustrated, 1934
My Queen Elect and other Verses Advertiser printers, 1937^[15]
The Voyagers and other Verses, Advertiser printers, 1938^[16]

He was also a landscape painter of some distinction, in watercolors, and a member of the Adelaide Easel Club. He was elected an associate of the South Australian Society of Arts.^[8]

Family

He had two brothers: Alexander Henderson Mather (c. 1861 – 13 June 1942) of Mount Gambier, and George R. J. Mather of Naracoorte. A sister, Margaret married Omar Arthur of Mount Gambier on 17 November 1875. Another sister married J. J. Driscoll of Mount Gambier.

He married Johanna Fraser (c. 1853 – 26 June 1921) in 1880; they lived at 38 Myrtle Street, Prospect, where he died.

Related Research Articles

The Border Watch is an Australian newspaper based in Mount Gambier, South Australia, owned by the Scott Group of Companies. Published Tuesday through Friday, the paper services Mount Gambier, the South Australian Limestone Coast, and parts of Western Victoria. It is the oldest and largest regional newspaper in South Australia.

Wolseley is a small South Australian town near the Victorian border. It is five kilometres south of the Dukes Highway and 13 kilometres east of Bordertown. It was first proclaimed a town in 1884.

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William Paltridge was a politician in the early days of the colony of South Australia, closely linked to the Dunn family of early settlers.

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Renfrey Curgenven DeGaris AM, generally known as "Ren DeGaris", was a businessman, pastoralist and politician in the State of South Australia.

Adelaide Punch (1878–1884) was a short-lived humorous and satirical magazine published in Adelaide, South Australia. Like the Melbourne Punch, it was modelled on Punch of London.

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John Edward Pick was an Australian pastoralist and politician. He represented the South Australian House of Assembly multi-member seat of Burra Burra from 1915 to 1918. He was sometimes referred to as "the grand old man of the north-west".

The Mount Gambier railway line was a railway line on the South Australian Railways network. Opened in stages from 1881, it was built to narrow gauge and joined Mount Gambier railway station, which was at that time the eastern terminus of a line to Beachport. It connected at Naracoorte to another isolated narrow gauge line joining Naracoorte to Kingston SE, and to the broad gauge Adelaide-Wolseley line at Wolseley, at around the same time that was extended to Serviceton to become the South Australian part of the Melbourne–Adelaide railway. There has been regular calls for its standardisation between Wolseley and Heywood since its closure over the past two decades.

Maxwell Robert Arthur "Max" Lamshed OBE, occasionally written as "M. R. Lamshed", was a South Australian journalist, historian and Red Cross official.

The District Council of Wirrega was a short-lived local government area in South Australia in existence from 1884 to 1888.

Hartley Williams was an Anglican clergyman in South Australia who ran a private school in Mount Gambier.

References

↑ "Obituary". Portland Guardian (Evening ed.). Vic. 7 April 1941. p. 3. Retrieved 11 January 2015– via National Library of Australia. This belated obituary is more complete and accurate than that of the Advertiser of 8 November 1940
↑ "Obituary". The Border Watch . Mount Gambier, SA. 9 November 1940. p. 3. Retrieved 11 January 2015– via National Library of Australia.
↑ "A Primitive Newspaper". The Mail . Adelaide. 8 April 1916. p. 10. Retrieved 12 January 2015– via National Library of Australia.
↑ "Death of Mr. J. B. Mather, Former Proprietor of "Narracoorte Herald"". The Narracoorte Herald . SA. 15 November 1940. p. 1. Retrieved 12 January 2015– via National Library of Australia.
↑ "Testimonial to Mesdames Mather and Ash". The Narracoorte Herald . SA. 7 January 1890. p. 3. Retrieved 12 January 2015– via National Library of Australia.
↑ George Ash abandoned journalism, studied law and was elected to for the seat of Albert, which encompassed Naracoorte and Mount Gambier, in the South Australian House of Assembly. He did much in Parliament to remedy the evils of dummyism, of which he had written in the Herald. He died of typhoid a mere five years later.
↑ "Metropolitan Memoranda by Aurolyous". The Mount Barker Courier and Onkaparinga and Gumeracha Advertiser . SA. 16 May 1890. p. 3. Retrieved 12 January 2015– via National Library of Australia. The digital source identifies author as Autolycus (access date 12 June 2015).
1 2 3 "Journalist and Artist". The Border Watch . Mount Gambier, SA. 2 May 1933. p. 4. Retrieved 12 January 2015– via National Library of Australia.
↑ "Advertising". The Advertiser . Adelaide. 1 July 1901. p. 2. Retrieved 12 January 2015– via National Library of Australia.
↑ "A Fine Art Catalogue". The Register . Adelaide. 19 April 1913. p. 14. Retrieved 12 January 2015– via National Library of Australia.
↑ McCulloch, Alan Encyclopedia of Australian Art Hutchinson of London, 1968
↑ "Versical Varieties". Quiz . Adelaide. 23 May 1890. p. 6. Retrieved 12 January 2015– via National Library of Australia.
↑ "Versical Varieties". Quiz . Adelaide. 30 May 1890. p. 6. Retrieved 12 January 2015– via National Library of Australia.
↑ "The Old Woman". Quiz and the Lantern . Adelaide. 16 February 1899. p. 7. Retrieved 12 January 2015– via National Library of Australia.
↑ "An Artist Sings". The Border Watch . Mount Gambier, SA. 13 April 1937. p. 6. Retrieved 12 January 2015– via National Library of Australia.
↑ "Musings and Memories". The Border Watch . Mount Gambier, SA. 27 September 1938. p. 6. Retrieved 12 January 2015– via National Library of Australia.

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[portl-1] "Obituary". Portland Guardian (Evening ed.). Vic. 7 April 1941. p. 3. Retrieved 11 January 2015– via National Library of Australia. This belated obituary is more complete and accurate than that of the Advertiser of 8 November 1940

[mount-2] "Obituary". The Border Watch . Mount Gambier, SA. 9 November 1940. p. 3. Retrieved 11 January 2015– via National Library of Australia.

[3] "A Primitive Newspaper". The Mail . Adelaide. 8 April 1916. p. 10. Retrieved 12 January 2015– via National Library of Australia.

[narra-4] "Death of Mr. J. B. Mather, Former Proprietor of "Narracoorte Herald"". The Narracoorte Herald . SA. 15 November 1940. p. 1. Retrieved 12 January 2015– via National Library of Australia.

[5] "Testimonial to Mesdames Mather and Ash". The Narracoorte Herald . SA. 7 January 1890. p. 3. Retrieved 12 January 2015– via National Library of Australia.

[6] George Ash abandoned journalism, studied law and was elected to for the seat of Albert, which encompassed Naracoorte and Mount Gambier, in the South Australian House of Assembly. He did much in Parliament to remedy the evils of dummyism, of which he had written in the Herald. He died of typhoid a mere five years later.

[7] "Metropolitan Memoranda by Aurolyous". The Mount Barker Courier and Onkaparinga and Gumeracha Advertiser . SA. 16 May 1890. p. 3. Retrieved 12 January 2015– via National Library of Australia. The digital source identifies author as Autolycus (access date 12 June 2015).

[journalist-8] 1 2 3 "Journalist and Artist". The Border Watch . Mount Gambier, SA. 2 May 1933. p. 4. Retrieved 12 January 2015– via National Library of Australia.

[9] "Advertising". The Advertiser . Adelaide. 1 July 1901. p. 2. Retrieved 12 January 2015– via National Library of Australia.

[10] "A Fine Art Catalogue". The Register . Adelaide. 19 April 1913. p. 14. Retrieved 12 January 2015– via National Library of Australia.

[11] McCulloch, Alan Encyclopedia of Australian Art Hutchinson of London, 1968

[12] "Versical Varieties". Quiz . Adelaide. 23 May 1890. p. 6. Retrieved 12 January 2015– via National Library of Australia.

[13] "Versical Varieties". Quiz . Adelaide. 30 May 1890. p. 6. Retrieved 12 January 2015– via National Library of Australia.

[14] "The Old Woman". Quiz and the Lantern . Adelaide. 16 February 1899. p. 7. Retrieved 12 January 2015– via National Library of Australia.

[15] "An Artist Sings". The Border Watch . Mount Gambier, SA. 13 April 1937. p. 6. Retrieved 12 January 2015– via National Library of Australia.

[16] "Musings and Memories". The Border Watch . Mount Gambier, SA. 27 September 1938. p. 6. Retrieved 12 January 2015– via National Library of Australia.