Stately Homes
Authors: Margaret Allen and Denise Noack
Martindale Hall is a stately home, a Georgian-style mansion with Italian Renaissance features, built by the young Edmund Bowman in 1879/80 on his Mintaro property of 9,000 acres.
The house and its furnishings cost him £36,000. The house had all the modern conveniences, a cooking range shipped from England, sixty gas lights powered by an ‘atmospheric gas machine’ and hot and cold water piped throughout the house to the fabulous bathrooms.
It was one of many such large houses dotted across South Australia (and Australia), built by those who had made a fortune in pastoral or mining ventures, or land speculation.
Read about Martindale Hall’s first families—the Bowmans and the Mortlocks.
These grand houses with imposing entrances and staircases, large rooms for entertaining on the ground floor, and private quarters for the family upstairs depended upon a number of servants to wait on the family and to run the house and surrounding gardens. The servants’ living quarters were in small rooms at the back of the house or out in the stables.
The fortunes that enabled the building of these grand houses came from the spoils of the recent taking of Indigenous lands. As Thomas Bowman said: ‘We have taken the lands from the blacks.’1
“We have taken the lands from the blacks.”
The Bowman family had been squatters with leases along the Wakefield River from around 1843 when the squatters could make fortunes. The area was then virtually a mint ‘in which money might be coined by the aid of sheep’.2
Indigenous peoples, like the Ngadjuri, were overrun by the settlers who had superior weapons, brought new diseases and were determined to remove them from their lands and way of life. The Mount Bryan massacre of 1844 saw at least six and possibly up to thirty Ngadjuri killed. The Indigenous people who survived the frontier era were made dependent on rations and/or dispatched to mission stations such as at Point Pearce on Yorke Peninsula. Their culture and way of life were swept away by the newcomers.
In South Australia, middling families who came to the colony with some capital in its earliest days were able to become very rich. Having a stately home announced that one had ‘made it‘ in colonial society and was socially superior to everyday people.
Thus, the Bowman family built Barton Vale and Martindale Hall, the Hawkers built Bungaree, and the Tennants had Princess Royal homestead and Essenside. Sir Thomas Elder had the luxurious Birksgate and his brother-in-law, Robert Barr-Smith, had the vast Torrens Park, just to name a few. Such families typically sent their sons to St Peters College and to Cambridge University. The men belonged to the exclusive Adelaide Club. They intermarried and constituted themselves as ‘colonial gentry’, a powerful group that dominated the colonial economy, society and politics. Not everybody was convinced of their superiority. Rowland Rees, a colonial MP, asserted the colonial gentry was ‘a mushroom, conceited, varnished aristocracy [who] had grown up thinking themselves the crown of colonial greatness and chief glory of colonial society’.3 The ‘mushroom’ aristocracy referred to wealthy people who had sprung up from nowhere like mushrooms.
“A mushroom, conceited, varnished aristocracy [who] had grown up thinking themselves the crown of colonial greatness and chief glory of colonial society.”
The owners of these houses did not bring attention to how they had become wealthy but instead set out to imitate the ideal of a noble long-established ancestral country home in Britain, ignoring the fact that many such grand houses were also based on fortunes amassed from violent and exploitative colonialism, particularly the slave trade, and to the domination of India and other colonies.
Recent research has shown how much the great British stately homes display and embody the spoils of imperial warfare, trade and bureaucratic service. Here the material traces of African conquest, Caribbean slavery and the Indian Raj have come ‘home’ to rest on British soil.4
It is important to bring these difficult histories into view and to understand how the oppression and exploitation of people in the past has contributed to inequalities in the present.
The Smoking Room at Martindale seems to echo the model of the ancient British baronial hall, with its display of weapons and objects gathered from around the British Empire and from China and Japan.
The Bowman family enjoyed a luxurious lifestyle at the Hall, but in 1891 economic pressures saw them sell off their many pastoral properties and finally they sold Martindale Hall and its surrounding land to the wealthy pastoralist William Tennant Mortlock (1858-1913). Mortlock had extensive pastoral properties across South Australia. With his wife, Rosye—who was herself from the very rich pastoralist family the Tennants—Mortlock enjoyed a grand life at Martindale, hosting house parties, visiting polo and cricket teams and the Adelaide Hunt Club. With his manager, he tended his fine merino flock. He and Rosye made a grand tour of Europe in 1903 and he brought back a number of items to display at Martindale. He even brought some donkeys back from Spain to work on his various properties.
Their son, John Andrew Tennant Mortlock (Jack) (1894-1950) inherited the property in 1913, living in Martindale and in his family’s numerous other houses in North Adelaide, on the Eyre Peninsula. In 1914, the southern portion of the estate was resumed for closer settlement.
Jack enjoyed travelling around and collecting items for Martindale. After his marriage in 1948, he lived with his wife, Dorothy, at ‘Yalluna’ in suburban Millswood. In 1965, in accordance with Jack’s will, the Hall was deeded to the University of Adelaide. The ideal of the stately home now seemed dead.
Between 1965 and 1985, the Hall was used infrequently for student residential camps and workshops, and for balls and haunted-house tours. In 1986, the university gave the Martindale Hall and forty-seven acres surrounding it to the state government.
Footnotes
- Elizabeth Warburton, The Bowmans of Martindale Hall (University of Adelaide, 1979), 25. ↩︎
- Warburton, Bowmans of Martindale Hall, 27. ↩︎
- Dirk Van Dissel, ‘The Adelaide Gentry, 1880–1915: A Study of a Colonial Upper Class’ (master’s thesis, University of Melbourne, 1973), 11. ↩︎
- Margot Finn and Kate Smith, ‘Introduction’, in The East India Company at Home, 1757–1857, ed. Margot Finn and Kate Smith (UCL Press, 2018), 1. ↩︎