Character and Art

TLM-P's actions and writings reveal much about his character, and this section is just some additional titbits.

TLM-P's son Robert, who was 11 when his father died, described him as being 'justly renowned for his courtly bearing and usage of words. He was veritably an aristocratic statesmen of old and could smile through the harshest of Parliamentary insults' The only thing that cause him to lose his temper was any insult to Queen Victoria or towards 'Monarchy as a phenomenon', on the apparent grounds that the Queen was 'his distant cousin'.¹⁾ This view of TLM-P has been accepted unquestioningly by other writers, perhaps most influentially by the Australian Dictionary of Biography. Certainly if he adopted an overly courtly bearing, it fits in with Rachel Henning's perception of him in 1863 as 'I suppose it does not require any great talent to be a Postmaster General. I hope not, for such a goose I have seldom seen. He talked incessantly and all his conversation consisted of pointless stories of which he himself was the hero.'²⁾ Yet TLM-P's diary for 6 October 1863 suggests a more pertinent reason: he described the Henning's house as 'a comfortable humpy' and dismissed Rachel and her sister with the slighting comment that 'Mr Henning … has unmarried sisters living with him, somewhat passed their first youth'. It should be noted too, that TLM-P may not have been at his best: he stayed with the Hennings while on a tour of inspection that would leave most people exhausted: during 54 days inspecting postal services, he rode 1,017 miles (1,636 km) as well as travelling by sea. Additionally, if TLM-P was such an ardent monarchist it did not stop him marrying Nora Barton who blithely wrote to his elder daughter that of course she thought Australia should become a republic, though she did not expect it until the next generation!³⁾

These photos from TLM-P's album were, respectively, taken in Melbourne and Sydney. The images are designed to reveal a prosperous man who has succeeded in his adopted land.

This image of TLM-P is c. 1859⁴⁾

Though TLM-P was clear that his father's love of buying fine art left his mother battling to provide for the family, he shared his father's love of art. The Brisbane Art Gallery refers to the paintings he left the gallery in his will: 'The European collection was established with a bequest of 17th century Dutch paintings to the state of Queensland in 1892 by pastoralist and legislative councillor Thomas Lodge Murray-Prior.'⁵⁾

A much more problematic aspect of TLM-P's career is the connection between nineteenth century masculinity, the brutal takeover of aboriginal lands, and the colonial to (as it was later put) 'populate or perish'. Nineteenth century Queensland was relatively isolated and sparsely populated by whites, so settlers like TLM-P idealised the land as 'vast uninhabited stretches of country waiting to be filled by resolute, hardworking Britons … Progress - conceived in the masculinist framework of aggressive expansion, ruthless destruction of the Aboriginal people, economic development and environmental exploitation - needed not only capital, brawn and sheer determination to succeed, but healthy young citizens'.⁶⁾

Historian Angela Woollacott has argued that the concept of manhood in the colonies was intertwined with acceptance of frontier violence. TLM-P is one of her two case studies, but she appears to value viewpoints on gendered grounds. She unquestioningly accepts Rosa Praed's version of events despite Rosa never quite making the transition from being a novelist to that of an accurate memoirist and attributes TLM-P's memoir of the Hornett Bank massacre to Rosa. Nevertheless, her argument, supported by other historians, is worth considering: that 'frontier violence was accepted within evolving definitions of manhood and hence political responsibility … when we link frontier violence to gendered authority, mid-nineteenth century ideas of manhood might look a little less peaceable and restrained'.⁷⁾ I suspect that TLM-P was too complicated to be a satisfactory stock figure in any historical argument, though it would be possible to mount a case that his identification with royalty, insistence on a 'courtly' bearing and even his art collection that he bequeathed to the public, was at least partly motivated by a desire to assert himself as a civilised man, and to distance himself from the grim reality of wrenching land from its traditional owners.