As a result of the ABC's Late Night Live recent coverage of the documentary produced by Robert George , The Many Loves of Geoffrey Dutton , poet, author, editor and critic , member of a prominent South Australian family, here is a repeat of a 2014 related Little Darwin special outlining a Magnetic Island connection .
Collector and researcher , Gary Davies , of Magnetic Island ,seen on the right , with the footscraper he bought at the grand 1978 Dutton estate contents sale.
Years after the auction , dealers and collectors spoke in awe about the event , the Duttons said to be regarded as South Australian royalty in their heyday .
Francis Dutton made a fortune in mining , became the SA Premier and later the state’s Agent –General in London.
The day of the auction , Anlaby , with its elegant , long driveway, large courtyard surrounded by numerous buildings , a folly overlooking the tennis court ,which also served both as a grandstand and a water tower, had shrunk to a small holding .
Professor Geoffrey Dutton, born in 1928 , had literary and publishing interests and upset the conservative Adelaide Club with his republican views . He resorted to pig farming in a vain and desperate bid to keep the estate going .
During his time running Anlaby literary and artistic guests included Patrick White, Yevtoshenko , Max Harris , Sidney Nolan and John Olsen.
Buyers came from many parts of Australia for the closed circuit television auction,staged in a large tent. Gary, a keen secondhand dealer ,drove to the property early , eager to have a close look at what was offering .
He noticed there were trucks unloading old wares and suspected the auction was being "padded out"- a common activity in Adelaide ( and elsewhere )-to cash in on well- attended sales . Because of this ,Gary said he closely studied the printed catalogue and checked, as much as possible, that items he was interested in came from the estate.
As mentioned earlier in Little Darwin , Gary, keen on Australian literature, had taken a copy of Geoffrey Dutton’s poems to Anlaby and got him to autograph it for him.
Like so many in the big crowd, Gary and his wife explored the sprawling estate , a woman , believed to be Geoffrey Dutton’s wife,, the prominent artist and author Ninette,came up and said they were in an area not open to the public . The huge library , built up over the years , had already been sold to a prominent bookdealer, thought to be from Melbourne.
ADELAIDE - DARWIN FIRST
Items of interest included model yachts and the radiator and other spare parts for the 25hp , four cylinder , Talbot car driven from Adelaide to Darwin by Harry Dutton-Geoffrey’s father - and Murray Aunger in 1908. Aboriginal artefacts said to have been given to the two pioneers on the Darwin car trip were included in the auction .
In what had been an office , Gary bought the paper files , ephemera. This included a circa 1890s , large leather bound stationery sample catalogue with pages bearing watermarks and envelopes - described as a beautiful work of art by Gary . On a spike was a cluster of paperwork , some addressed to Squire Dutton, related to stumpjump ploughs , steam engines , brochure after brochure , receipts with duty stamps attached , correspondence .
A wonderful buy , for a mere six to eight dollars each, were a quantity of shearers forms, two or three metres long , like pews , each branded H. R. Dutton on the base . When the Dutton empire was riding the golden fleece boom- Anlaby Australia's first sheep stud- it took seven months for a large team of shearers to clip some 70,000 sheep .
Other purchases included the billiard cue holder, above, used as an umbrella and walking stick stand. The smal l table is also from Anlaby.
When Gary was living in Bordertown , SA , the National Trust bought some of the shearers forms and other items from the Anlaby auction.
COLONIAL GUNBOAT PHOTOGRAPH
Another person who attended the auction is former Melbourne and Adelaide antique dealer , Alan Jones , who recently moved from Malaysia to Ireland with his wife , Pat. His Adelaide business, at Largs, went under the deceptive name , The Junkery . An avid collector , he is a man of many skills and even turns wire coat hangers into model aeroplanes .
Over the phone from Ireland , he recalled the Anlaby sale . A great buy , he said , had been a Huon Pine desk with lift up leather panels .
Being a keen collector of nautical items , he also bought a photograph which appeared to be a bridal party posing against the colonial South Australian gunboat , Protector, skippered at one stage by Captain Creswell, father of the Royal Australian Navy.
In 1900 , the Protector headed for the Boxer Rebellion in China , but arrived after the siege . During WWII the vessel was recquisitioned by the US Army and on a voyage to New Guinea was damaged in a collision with a tug at Gladstone and ended up a rusting hulk on Queensland's Heron Island , still visible today.
UNUSUAL ANLABY FINDS
This writer visited Anlaby several times in the l980s and met its then owners , Dutchman Hans Alders and his wife, Gill, from Echuca, Victoria , who put much time and effort into restoring the glory of the homestead , turning it into a bed and breakfast .
They brought with them from Echuca an impressive collection of early horse- drawn vehicles, including a sombre, glass sided hearse , complete with black plumes, a Cobb and Co. coach . Gill threw herself into restoring the massive rose gardens which had made Anlaby famous worldwide , there being 14 gardeners at the time .
In his autobiographical , Out In The Open , Geoffrey Dutton wrote that his mother had a gun with which she shot rosellas attacking her roses . While entertaining Lady Spencer, whose son , John Althorp , Princess Diana's father , working as an ADC at Government House in Adelaide, she shot a bird on the wing which fell into the guest's teacup.
Dutton went on to say his mother complained that between rats , rosellas and the Labor Party it was difficult to get a decent rose to grow.
As I walked about Anlaby , in an empty building running off the courtyard , hanging from a nail was an early Glass car tyre , with an attached faded note saying it was used on the run from Adelaide to Darwin.
The Alders asked me to keep an eye out for anything related to Anlaby, Gill especially interested in books on old roses. A 1935 souvenir booklet I bought at auction stated that in the nearby town of Eudunda , Francis Dutton had been known locally as “the Squire.”
While rummaging through a jumble of books in a Port Adelaide secondhand shop , I found a 1903 revised and enlarged edition of the Poems of Henry Clarence Kendall , containing a Henry Dutton bookplate, Geoffrey Dutton’s paternal grandfather.
Fossicking through an op shop in Angaston ,I came across several boxes of paperbacks , mainly Sun Books, and some letters from Geoffrey Dutton , co-founder of the publishing house , all of which I bought . One of the letters related to the break up in the early 1980s between Dutton and his wife , renowned enameller, artist and broadcaster Ninette, greatly interested in gardens and wildflowers . After living in Canberra for a time , she moved to the Blue Mountains in New South Wales.
There was a copy of Geoffrey Dutton’s book, published by Penguin/Viking, about Australian literature –Snow on the Saltbush –the cover of which was by artist John Olsen, who had signed the title page.
One misty July when my wife and I visited Anlaby it presented an English vista with jonquils , paper whites and snowdrops in profusion. We also went to a nearby old church built as a memorial to Helen Elizabeth Dutton and 16 - year - old Ethel Dutton, the latter having been drowned at Granite Island , Victor Harbour , after being swept into the sea by a large wave in 1892.
