THE LIFE OF CONRAD MARTENS 



perhaps for its detail but the touch, for such a practised draughts- 

 man, is like a beginner's, and there is no feeling for the copper- 

 plate line. Wisely, he returned to lithography as a means 

 of increasing his output. Albums and books of views were 

 in demand with both the public and the booksellers, but, happily, 

 the commercial genius who thought of the picture postcard had 

 yet to burden the world with his invention. Long practice with 

 the pencil had made lithography an easy process for Martens ; it 

 was, besides, the current method of the sketcher for passing his 

 authentic touch on to his public. Cox, Prout, and Harding had 

 employed it successfully, and Martens, in turn, published his set 

 of twenty views, Sketches in the Environs of Sydney, in 1 850- 1 . 

 This he produced locally to his sorrow, for the lithographs were 

 a poor lot and the paper likewise bad ; he must have been dis- 

 heartened with the result, for to hide his printers' clumsiness 

 (" bunglers " he called them) he was put to retouching the prints 

 by hand. 



Colonel Mundy, at first sight of Sydney the Sydney of the 

 View in 1 846, had said : "It might be Waterford or Wapping, 

 with a dash of Nova Scotian Halifax."* For the truth is, the 

 Englishman changes readily his skies, but never his habit of mind, 

 and wherever he colonizes he sets up a microcosm of the Old 

 Land the eating and drinking customs whereof endure here 

 even unto this day. 



There was no Australianism before Kendall, and his influence, 

 at the earliest, dates from 1862. In the forties New South Wales 

 was still a Crown Colony, and the educated classes, naturally 

 enough, regarded themselves as transplanted Englishmen. It was 

 a good thing for Martens that so many squatters, proud of their 

 wealth and possessions, had built fine homesteads in imitation 

 of the country seats of England. Georgian architecture, with 

 adaptations fitting it for a warmer climate in most cases intro- 

 duced by retired Indian army officers has left this country the 

 richer for a tradition of good taste. The city magnates, too, 

 insisted upon investing their dignity with those Palladian mansions 

 which evoked the Gothic rage of Ruskin. Everywhere the sense 

 * Mundy, Our Antipodes, vol. 1, p. 38. 



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