Design and Art Australia Online

sketcher, merchant and stockman, was born on 30 June 1818 in Montrose, Scotland, son of a merchant. At the age of about fourteen he was sent to Glasgow to work for a chemical manufacturer. He attended lectures on chemistry and natural philosophy and won prizes for drawing which, he later wrote, he learnt from a German. On 23 August 1838 he sailed in the Portland for Sydney and soon secured a job at Glenlee, a cattle station 250 miles away. In October 1839 when overlanding 800 cattle to Adelaide, he started a butterfly collection. Returning to Glenlee via Sydney, he purchased a box of watercolours so he could sketch his butterflies and sent the paintings back to England. On a second droving expedition from Glenlee in August 1840, Webster continued to add to his collection. He then used his box of watercolours to record the butterflies on the spot.

In April 1841 Webster joined his eldest brother at William’s sawmill on the Hokianga River, New Zealand. He fought in the Maori Wars and for several years acted as an agent for Brown & Campbell, trading with the Maoris. When gold was discovered in California in 1849 he sailed in the Noble to San Francisco. In 1851 he sailed with Benjamin Boyd in his armed yacht the Wanderer to the Pacific Islands where Boyd hoped to establish a 'Papuan Republic or Confederation’. After Boyd was killed by natives of Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands on 15 October, Webster took command, still under attack by war canoes. The Wanderer set sail for Sydney, but was wrecked on 12 December near Port Macquarie. When he finally reached Sydney, Webster presented the collections made on the Wanderer 's 'last and fatal cruise’ to the Australian Museum. By September 1853 his sketches made on the voyage had been worked up by George French Angas into twenty-five watercolours, intended as illustrations to Webster’s book of the voyage: 'Five of these drawings are of birds and fish; the latter distinguished, like the coral groves among which they wander, by the most brilliant hues’. Other illustrations were of the islanders and scenes in various parts of Polynesia. Three of Angas’s watercolours were exhibited at the 1854 Australian Museum Exhibition.

After visiting the Turon (NSW) and Victorian goldfields, Webster returned to England late in 1853 to arrange publication of his book and to raise finance for a gold-mining venture. He showed his Wanderer illustrations at a meeting of the Royal Society and, at the request of Queen Victoria, at Buckingham Palace. (Whether these were his own sketches or Angas’s watercolours is unknown but the latter seems the more likely.) Yet no London publisher was interested; The Last Cruise of the Wanderer was eventually published in Sydney in 1863 by F. Cunningham. It had only ten illustrations. The Auckland Institute and Museum holds seventeen of Webster’s watercolours, fifteen signed and dated 1851. A further nineteen are attributed to Angas, three signed and some showing evidence of the signature having been erased. Seven of the ten Angas watercolours used as illustrations in The Last Cruise of the Wanderer are in this collection; they are faithful to Webster’s original sketches.

After returning to New Zealand in 1855 Webster married Emily Russell and went into partnership with his brother A.S. Webster in the timber business. In 1874 he retired to his 700-acre property at Opanani, near Hokianga Heads. When Webster published his Reminiscences in 1908 he made no mention of Angas. He died at his son’s residence in Devonport aged ninety-four; his wife and five of his eleven children had predeceased him.

Writers:

Staff Writer

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

2011