Clubmen of Old Melbourne

Athenæum Club Melbourne: A New History of the Early Years 1868–1918
by Paul de Serville
Athenæum Club, 2013, 514 pages

In mid-1868 two new clubs were established in Melbourne, the Athenæum and the Yorick. Plans for the Athenæum were under way by April when the proprietor, the architect J.G. Knight, advertised for staff and for tradesmen to begin renovations of the building he had leased in Collins Street. A prospectus was sent out to the press and on May 2 the Age and the Herald announced: 

The special aim of the founders of the club is to promote social and kindly intercourse between persons of kindred tastes and dispositions, and to establish a common ground on which gentlemen of intelligence and character may meet together irrespective of class distinctions or personal wealth.

The same day Marcus Clarke wrote about the Yorick in the Australasian:

I heard something about a literary club being established the other day. The subject was mooted a long time ago. I hope that it will come to the birth. May I suggest, however, as a peripatetic and an impartial observer, that it should be confined, not perhaps to absolute literary men, but to men of some pretensions to knowledge of literature.

The Yorick is remembered in literary contexts through the membership of Clarke, Adam Lindsay Gordon and Henry Kendall, and from Hugh McCrae’s colourful account of it in the Bulletin, reprinted in My Father and My Father’s Friends. It had a distinctively bohemian aura, which Clarke was concerned to highlight. Clarke wrote in the Australasian on May 9:

as Timmins, one of our number, incautiously told his wife that we keep a skull on the mantelshelf, there is much suspicion and terror abroad. I may briefly mention, however, that the story of the newspaper lad being scraped to death with oyster shells at a late supper, and buried in the back kitchen, is not absolutely true in all its details; also, I may, without breaking faith, refute the accusation made by a friend, that the members sit on tubs around the room, smoke green tea, and drink neat kerosene out of pewter pots. More I cannot reveal.

The Athenæum’s splendid premises were described at length in the Argus, June 29:

The dining-hall itself, which has a very elegant appearance, is 55 ft. long by 30 ft. broad, and is arranged somewhat in the style of a café, with tables to seat parties of eight, well lighted by an open-framed lantern-roof, the beams of which are decorated with red and gold; and with its lofty walls, coloured green of a particularly delicate shade, the room has a very cheerful aspect, while a further agreeable effect is produced by an ornamental border of mauve and red, carried round the walls at their union with the ceiling.

The Yorick was rather different. Henry Kendall described being taken there by Clarke:

He popped into a dingy passage leading towards what appeared to be a bill-sticker’s back skillion. About half way up this corridor there loomed through the darkness a narrow, suspicious-looking flight of stairs. At the foot of this my little friend paused, and instructed me to follow him, warning me at the same time to be careful of the steps. Careful I certainly was, but a more villainous ladder I never ascended. However, we scrambled to the top, and lo! … Facing the landing an old door opened into an aromatic room, which, I was informed, did duty as “the reading, talking and smoking-den.” The most remarkable items of its furniture were the spittoons—useful utensils in their way no doubt, but distressingly plentiful and palpable …

Nearly half the foundation members of the Yorick were also members of the Athenæum—including the journalists and newspaper men Marcus Clarke, James Smith, James Neild, Charles Bright, George Walstab, Alfred Telo, Thomas Carrington, F.W. Haddon and G.C. Levey. Initially, Paul de Serville writes of the Athenæum, “the original membership had a strong scientific and literary representation”. Journalists and doctors had a significant presence. Gradually it defined itself. Less posh and expensive than the Melbourne Club, less bohemian than the Yorick, it attracted politicians, “which made the club unusual, and marked the start of a long association between the Athenæum and Melbourne’s political world”. The business world was well represented with “a large group of merchants, warehousemen, agents and brokers of all kinds—stock and station agents, mining brokers, sharebrokers—as well as mining men and auctioneers”. There were comparatively few pastoralists, but a substantial number of racing men like Captain Standish, Herbert Power and Thomas Lyttleton.

Its early history was shaky. In 1871 it temporarily closed, reopening under a new proprietor, James Hay. At a later crisis, the committee took over ownership in 1918. Over the years it grew from strength to strength and still survives. The Yorick was absorbed by the Savage Club in 1966.

The early records of the Athenæum are incomplete and sometimes meagre, but de Serville has supplemented them by drawing on contemporary newspaper reports and memoirs to provide an invaluable account of the club’s history, which he sets in the larger history of Victoria’s development. He has exhaustively identified the members from the few surviving lists, and provided succinct biographical and genealogical details of their professional and commercial interests and their family connections, illuminated with telling anecdotes that bring them alive. Beautifully produced, Athenæum Club is generously illustrated with contemporary portraits and photographs of members and of Melbourne street scenes and architecture.

De Serville carefully explores the club’s early tribulations in the context of Melbourne’s recession of the mid-1860s and the collapse of the land boom and the consequent bank closures of the mid-1890s. As he pointedly remarks, whereas parts of Melbourne society frowned on gambling at the race track, they were deeply involved in gambling with mining shares and property speculations. The fortunes of many of the Athenæum members were intimately involved. Many were ruined. The pastoralist Hugh Glass had debts of half a million pounds in 1869 and “died of an overdose of chloral, administered at his request by his son”. In the collapse of the land boom in the early 1890s the solicitor Theodore Fink twice made a secret composition, “a confidential means by which an individual could make arrangements with his creditors which remained unknown to the world”; he survived, in due course becoming chairman of the Herald & Weekly Times Ltd. Henry Gyles Turner, whose recollections of Marcus Clarke usually included a rebuke for Clarke’s financial improvidence, was chairman of the Commercial Bank when it collapsed as a result of its extensive loans to building societies and land banks. The journalist James Smith lost his entire savings.

As Geoffrey Blainey writes in his foreword, “Paul de Serville has now written more than anybody in Australia—and maybe in England too—on the themes of clubs and their members.” His Port Phillip Gentlemen and Pounds and Pedigrees brilliantly anatomised the nineteenth-century middle- and upper-class society of Victoria and its membership of the Melbourne, Athenæum, Yorick and other clubs. They are essential reading for any serious student of nineteenth-century Australian history and culture. With his genealogical expertise and his antiquarian care for detail, de Serville has not only provided an always fascinating and readable account of that milieu, but has also provided a uniquely rich source of detailed information for future historians, biographers and cultural commentators concerned to establish spheres of influence, and the possibilities of contact, who was likely to have known or met whom.

The enduring myth of Australia as a democratic and egalitarian society has produced its labour history and social historians. But fully to understand the complexity of Australia’s past and development, its political and economic establishment needs comparable examination. The Athenæum was one of those clubs that catered for that establishment.

Michael Wilding’s latest book is a novel, Asian Dawn, published in July by Arcadia