The Leafy Tree: The Lindsay Family and Siblinghood in Australia

ABSTRACT

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, social, cultural and political change were mediated through sibling networks. During this period in Australia, no middle-class family was more culturally influential than the Lindsay family, many of whom became internationally renowned artists and writers. This paper examines the Lindsays’ sibling bonds from childhood into adulthood and explores how the social relationships and networks created between the siblings acted as cultural incubators. The Australian settler-colonial context provides a unique lens through which to understand the importance of sibling relationships throughout the life cycle, and speaks to broader patterns around the intense character of sibling relations during this period.

KEYWORDS:

• Siblinghood
• settler-colonial studies
• life-cycle studies
• children’s history
• gender history

Introduction

Lisnacrieve, the Lindsay family’s sixteen-roomed home in the gold-mining town of Creswick on Dja Dja Wurrung Country in western Victoria, buzzed with activity. It was dinner time and Robert and Jane Lindsay sat beside their five eldest children – Percy, Robert, Lionel, Mary and Norman – at the long dining room table with Flora, the children’s governess. Voices carried from the kitchen and the protesting wail of an infant echoed from the nursery. When plates were emptied and appetites satiated, the night’s ‘usual activities’ began:

Percy might bring in his last sketch and put it up for criticism. Dad, if not needed in the surgery, would settle in an armchair by the fire with his pipe and a book. Mother, on the opposite side with her sewing basket, would have an ear cocked for signs of trouble from the nursery. And the night would begin. Lionel marshalling his books and papers at one end of the dining table. Norman at the other end with paper, ink and pens oblivious to any movement in the room. Sometimes I [Daryl] would strum on the piano; one of the slow Beethoven movements or bits from the latest comic opera with Perce, if he had not gone out for the evening, singing lightly or playing the flute. Sometimes one of us would look at Norman’s drawing over his shoulder and, without looking up, he would say, ‘I think that makes the shine on the armour better’. As the night wore on, Robert would return from some social engagement. And so to bed no doubt most of us to read until the small hours.¹

This scene is described in Daryl Lindsay’s 1965 autobiography The Leafy Tree, almost seventy years after it occurred. Daryl’s memories of family life are recalled with ‘photographic clarity’, a testament to their enduring importance to the author’s identity.² Absent from this scene are the four Lindsay girls and the other Lindsay boy, Reginald. We can imagine that Mary may have been reading or playing the piano, or perhaps assisting her mother with a screaming infant Jane Isabel, the youngest sibling. Ruby could have been scribbling quietly in the corner, while Pearl was most likely out with one of her many admirers.

The Lindsay brood were overseen by their strict, religious mother Jane, and their less watchful, somewhat indulgent father, Robert Charles. Jane (nee Williams), daughter of a Methodist Minister, had grown up in Fiji and Ballarat, fervently absorbing her father’s teachings. Robert, an Irish doctor, migrated to Australia in 1864 and set up his practice in Creswick. The pair married in Ballarat in 1869. Jane was the household’s authority figure, driven by her stringent Methodist theology which she tried, and mostly failed, to impart to her family. Though Norman claimed that his parents had an unhappy marriage,³ no other evidence suggests that Jane and Robert did not maintain a loving, supportive union. They had ten children: Percival (1870–1952), Robert (1872–1951), Lionel (1874–1961), Mary (1877–1968), Norman (1879–1959), Pearl (1883–1968), Ruby (1885–1919), Reginald (1887–1917), Daryl (1889–1976) and Jane Isabel (1894–1965). The Lindsays shared blue eyes and beak-like features; the majority were quick talkers, loud-mouthed, opinionated and curious and were possessed ‘by the same restless incessant activity’.⁴ From childhood, the siblings were bound by a sense of family loyalty and duty and a creative family spirit underlining the rest of their lives.

Their contributions to Australian art and literature are unparalleled by any other group of siblings in Australian history. Five of the ten children became professional artists. Landscapist Percy, the eldest sibling, took inspiration from his hometown’s surroundings for his oils. Lionel devoted his talents to printmaking and gained local and international renown for his woodcuts and etchings. Norman, the most celebrated sibling, was a multi-medium artist and author, famed for the 1918 children’s book The Magic Pudding. Ruby was well regarded for her delicate illustrations which adorned popular books and magazines before her untimely death from Spanish Flu in 1919. And Daryl, late to the artistic game, turned to equestrian and outback scenes before taking on the Directorship of the National Gallery of Victoria. In his biography of Norman Lindsay, Douglas Stewart asks: ‘But what can explain how five of the Lindsay family developed, with equal inevitability so it seems, into artists, writers and … classical enthusiasts?’⁵ And how, we ask, were they able to make such a significant contribution to the culture of an emerging settler-colonial nation? In this article, we argue that the answers to these questions lie in the attachments the Lindsay siblings forged in childhood that endured into adulthood.

Sibling bonds are some of the most enduring and defining of human relationships. The dynamics of siblinghood are historically and culturally constituted, yet the strength of sibling ties cuts through time and place. The history of family has traditionally focused on the hierarchical and productive parent-child relationship. Lateral relationships, those between siblings, are generally overlooked.⁶ In the last few decades, scholarship on siblinghood has flourished, particularly in developmental psychology, anthropology, sociology and literary studies.⁷ Historians have begun to use siblinghood as a historical axis to explore a range of cultural, social, economic and political phenomena. Leonore Davidoff’s earlier work on the British family informed her seminal text Thicker than Water: Siblings and Their Relations 1780–1920 on the centrality of siblinghood in Victorian England.⁸ Subsequent histories have explored siblinghood in different historical periods and across continents. Annette Atkins and Charlotte Dallett Hemphill both survey siblinghood’s role in American history; Atkins’ study highlights the emotional intricacies of nineteenth-century siblinghood while Hemphill’s later work argues that sibling networks provided a ‘cushion’ against pre-and-post revolutionary change.⁹ Amy Harris explores the tensions between sibling egalitarianism and patriarchal authority in Georgian England, emphasising the importance of sibling support from childhood to adulthood.¹⁰ Christopher Johnson and David Warren Sabean’s edited collection examines sibling relations in European kinship networks from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries.¹¹ Several other studies centre on particular families or sibling groups to explore intergenerational familial change, of empire and globalisation, or of migration and economic forces.¹² Each history elucidates the key role siblings played in fostering self-expression and identity, sustaining kinship ties and family traditions, and serving vital emotional and practical needs. These scholars also demonstrate how sibling networks both produced and navigated social change. In the nineteenth century, siblinghood was a powerful tool in shaping modern formations including the family, bourgeois society, and the nation.¹³ Indeed, the history of sibling relations reveals the interrelationship between the family and society, and as Davidoff puts it, they highlight links between psychic processes and public life.¹⁴ Despite the transformative potential of using siblinghood as a category of historical analysis, the subject is largely absent from histories of Australian settler-colonial history.¹⁵

Siblings were an almost universal feature of the colonial Australian family. Families were large: in 1891, over 60 per cent of Australian families had six or more children, and 80 per cent had at least four.¹⁶ Removed from broad kinship networks and often geographically isolated, Australians turned inwards to immediate kin for companionship and care, and sibling ties took on greater importance.¹⁷ Indeed, while the Lindsay siblings were all highly individualistic, they operated within an interdependent familial network, and many shared an ambitious and artistic nature fostered by an intellectually stimulating childhood environment. As Johnson and Sabean note, while notions of the ‘self-motivated individual’ proliferated in the nineteenth century, the individuated self ‘was in fact embedded in the web of family and kinship’.¹⁸ This article demonstrates that adult career trajectories cannot be understood by studying home life alone: sibling relationships in particular need to be analysed. We show that the Lindsay siblings created their own artistic culture and were driven to creative expression with minimal parental fostering and even against parental wishes.

Furthermore, while the family unit has long been recognised as a driver of settler-colonialism the role of sibling networks in the dynamics of settler-colonialism is skated over in Australian family histories.¹⁹ As the case of the Lindsay siblings shows, middle-class sibling networks were crucial to upholding and mediating settler-colonialism and its concomitant processes of nationhood and White Australia. As influential writers and artists, the Lindsays were key participants in the cultural and pictorial aspects of settler-colonialism, often drawing on imagery and ideas from their childhoods.²⁰

This article offers a starting point for the study of sibling relationships in the Australian settler-colonial context. While it focuses on the white, middle-class family in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there are a range of sibling ties to be explored in the Australian historical context including those of working-class families, non-British settlers, and First Nations people. The Lindsay family, as renowned individuals and prolific creators are a fruitful case study to explore siblinghood’s dynamics in a middle-class settler-colonial family during this period. It is perhaps a perceived lack of sources that has prevented Australian historians from delving into the topic of siblinghood. Materials, particularly those from childhood, can be lost to time having passed through several hands or disappeared with no clear custodian. As is noted by family historians, the sporadic and fragmented nature of sources is part of the difficulty and the joy of piecing together family narratives.²¹ Yet the Lindsays left a vast, if scattered, archive of letters, autobiographies, photographs, artworks, novels and magazines that testify to their interconnectivity in childhood and adulthood. Three of the Lindsay brothers penned autobiographies; in each of these narratives, the powerful presence of the sibling bond is woven throughout life stories.²²

A chorus of historians and writers have studied the Lindsay family, or more aptly its individual members.²³ Most of this scholarship, written in the second half of the twentieth century, spotlights individual siblings in biographical studies. The Lindsays deserve fresh examination that focuses on the lateral ties threaded across their lives. Inspired by social history life courses approaches, we examine the Lindsays sibling ties in childhood and adulthood. Taking a qualitative rather than the quantitative approach of traditional life course methods, we trace the Lindsay sisters and brothers as they move through the lifecycle and pinpoint the influences of juvenile experience in later life.²⁴ A life course approach, however, risks allowing adulthood to overshadow childhood in its focus on juvenile experience as merely formative of later life trajectories. Studies of historical siblings which take a lifelong view perpetuate this trend, presenting childhood as a prologue to the ‘real’ story of adult life.²⁵ Inspired by children’s history methodologies, we centre child-produced sources and examine with equal acuity the Lindsays’ childhoods and adulthoods.²⁶

This article moves chronologically through the Lindsays’ life courses. First, we examine how the Lindsays’ childhood ties and artistic sensibilities were fostered through play within and nearby the family home. Secondly, we trace the Lindsays in adulthood, examining how this family culture remained operative throughout the Lindsays’ lives. The movements of the Lindsays are contextualised within broader national narratives, including the emergence of the child-centred family, the cultural fervour of the 1890s and the rising nationalism of the early twentieth century. Sibling networks based on financial, creative and emotional interdependence, like that of the Lindsays, were significant mediators of social change. This case study examines the power of sibling bonds during this period and the role of these sibling networks in facilitating the links between private and public realms at the turn of the twentieth century. Importantly, this article omits an aesthetic appraisal of the Lindsays’ creative output, instead analysing how sibling networks shaped their work and life.

Childhood

‘Mary is thumping on the Piano, and Daryl, sweet love, is howling. I wish I were down with you, I hate living here’.²⁷

Domestic life was not always blissful at Lisnacrieve. The sprawling home felt cramped when filled with ten children, two parents, servants, and periodic smatterings of relatives and friends. The Lindsay children had complicated sibling relationships that were influenced by unique familial circumstances and by broader patterns of Australian family formation.

As with all large families, alliances and feuds were formed in Lindsays’ childhoods. As Davidoff has noted in the British context, the high nineteenth-century birth rate meant that offspring were often born over several years, sometimes stretching into several decades, forming the ‘long family’.²⁸ The eldest Percy was twenty-four years older than his youngest sibling Jane Isabel. This ‘intermediate generation’ of older siblings occupied adolescence and early adulthood between their parents and infant siblings.²⁹ Often older children acted as ‘caretakers, educators, and playmates’ for the younger, sometimes taking on the role of pseudo-parents.³⁰ Mary, the eldest girl, Norman wrote ‘seems to have taken a proprietorial charge of me’ in their childhood.³¹

In large families those closest in age would usually form pairs.³² Pearl and Ruby, the former bright and gregarious and the latter shy and reserved, born within two years of one another, were intimate companions in their girlhood.³³ Daryl and Reginald, also born two years apart, were also close. They attended the state school together, and Reg taught Daryl how to box in the Lisnacrieve kitchen. Norman was in awe of his elder brother Lionel and his circle of mischievous, boozing friends.³⁴ Some were on the fringe of the sibling dynamic. Robert, the second born, was ‘a delicate child’, often left out of sibling games. Mary was the only one ‘who really understood him’.³⁵

While extremely close, the Lindsay siblings could feel much annoyance and animosity towards one another. Physical violence was common-one evening in 1895 Norman wrote ‘Bert has one of his slapping fits on, and is slapping me all the time. I’ve spoken to him severely and I’ll kick him when he comes round again’.³⁶ Robert, in a rage, locked Daryl into a clothes basket. Space was at a premium. Lionel shared a bed with Robert, which ‘was not a happy arrangement … Bedtime usually turned into an occasion for fisticuffs, with Lionel as victor’.³⁷ Younger brothers were viewed as irritating and burdensome. Norman’s later short stories based on his childhood reveal that he was rarely allowed to tag along with Lionel.³⁸ Despite their differences, the relationships between the Lindsay siblings were their closest, most constant and emotionally fuelled bonds; family loyalty and duty acted as a bulwark against external intrusions. For example, Daryl recalled that ‘despite our private our rows at home’ Reg would ‘knock the head off any boy who laid a hand on me at school’.³⁹

“Some kind of culture”

In his memoir Daryl remarked that ‘during the family’s youth … the young Lindsays imbibed naturally what might be called … some kind of culture’.⁴⁰ The groundwork for this culture was laid in a supportive home environment, which provided resources to create and play coupled with free time to make believe.

Robert and Jane encouraged their offspring to pursue their interests, but it was each child’s ‘individual efforts’ which educated them.⁴¹ Late nineteenth-century middle-class Australian households encouraged a sense of self, cultivating and resourcing each child’s individual interests.⁴² The Lindsay house was filled with books. Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, French classics and other seminal works, often illustrated by famous artists, fed the Lindsays’ literary and pictorial tastes. Materials with which to draw, paint and write were plentiful, and the children had time to play and create.⁴³ Changing ideas of childhood, which coalesced in the mid-nineteenth century, fuelled awareness that childhood ‘had rights and privileges of its own’, including the right to learn and play, and time, space and resources, like toys, were produced for their leisure.⁴⁴ While the Lindsay boys were freed from labour, the girls undertook unpaid domestic work and childcare. However, as members of a middle-class household many daily tasks fell to servants, freeing the children to pursue their own pastimes.⁴⁵

Though it was their father’s coin that paid for their creative supplies and his library that provided literary inspiration, parental encouragement did little to nurture the Lindsay family culture.⁴⁶ Robert Charles, though a loving patriarch, like most fathers of the time was not expected to be intimately involved in his children’s upbringing.⁴⁷ Jane was strict and tried to curb her daughters’ time for art and reading – though she encouraged all her children to paint, she did not believe fiction was a suitable genre for girls. Mary had to hide her novel consumption from her mother.⁴⁸ The youngest Jane Isabel was not encouraged to pursue art by her mother who wanted one devoted and docile child by her side.⁴⁹ Though Jane and Robert provided their children with a comfortable upbringing, it was the Lindsay sisters and brothers who mutually fostered an environment which allowed for the voracious consumption of literature, abundant artistic production, unbridled imagination and creative expression.

The siblings’ creativity was cultivated by and grounded in their play. Lisnacrieve formed the stage for the Lindsays’ leisure. Middle-class Victorian families, which dominated the demographic landscape by the 1880s, built domestic havens modelled on British homes that doubled as playgrounds for adventurous children. Younger children were relegated to the nursery, but the elder Lindsays spent evenings in the Lisnacrieve sitting room. Friends from other distinguished families in Creswick partook in ‘musical evenings at home’, singing Gilbert and Sullivan operas and performing comedic skits.⁵⁰ Amusement was also found outside the home: the Lindsay children visited other families and relatives, saw touring theatre companies, and attended concerts, charity balls and dances at the Creswick town hall.

In the Lisnacrieve garden and the neighbouring Wesleyan church grounds the children played improvised games inspired by well-known narratives and contemporary events, like the Boer War.⁵¹ Lionel, ‘the natural leader of his brothers and sisters’, was often the director in such military exploits and his wide reading often flavoured their imaginative play.⁵² Lionel and Norman, accompanied by friends, would swim at the local Creswick lake, while Daryl and Reg explored the diggings every Saturday with friends.⁵³ Here the boys can be described as ‘petty imperialists’, surveying, conquering and extracting from Djaara land, colonising space through their play.⁵⁴ Indeed, nascent racism often underscored the Lindsay boys’ relentless pursuit of entertainment. Recollections of visiting the Creswick Chinese camp reveal early understandings of ‘the other’, the residents described as a source of ‘amusement’ by Daryl.⁵⁵ Norman’s short stories inspired by his boyhood render racist depictions of Chinese inhabitants, imbued with the rhetoric of the White Australia policy.⁵⁶

The Lindsay children’s freedom to make-believe underpinned their creative outputs.⁵⁷ In her discussion of the Burney family, a late-eighteenth-early-nineteenth-century British brood of writers, Lorna Clark claims that the siblings acted as creative conduits, supporters, and rivals in childhood. A familial culture which ‘encouraged play, self-expression, and artistic creation’ emerged and resulted in collaborative creative efforts.⁵⁸ Similarly, the Lindsay siblings’ familial culture valued playfulness, which fed their creative expression.

As seen in the opening of this paper, the Lindsays, particularly the boys, often worked alongside one another, and writing and art was central to their leisure time. Daryl remarked that it was common to see ‘all those boys drawing on the floor’.⁵⁹ Percy participated in an art class with watercolourist Walter Withers in 1882, which inspired several brothers to take up painting. Norman, a sickly boy, spent much time indoors cultivating a love and talent for drawing.⁶⁰ Percy and Lionel, early students at Creswick Grammar School, founded the school magazine Boomerang–Norman inherited this publication and revived its production in 1895.⁶¹ Brotherly encouragement only went so far. Norman tried to motivate Daryl to take up art, though Daryl ‘never really took it seriously’ in his youth.⁶²

Siblings could act as muse and subject for art. Norman sketched ‘Goo’ (Isabel) during one of her screaming fits.⁶³ Percy’s art featured his brothers and sisters; one work, painted in 1894, likely portrays his younger sisters on a stroll through the Creswick countryside.⁶⁴

Relations between the Lindsay siblings were somewhat egalitarian, but ingrained sexism coloured their worlds. As Davidoff notes, opposite-sex siblings in the nineteenth century could define themselves with and against their counterparts, with brothers’ manhood defined against the womanhood displayed by their sisters.⁶⁵ The masculine world of rough and tumble portrayed in Lionel and Norman’s biographies, as well as Norman’s stories, often excludes the female members of the household.

The Lindsay girls’ play and creations are difficult to locate. Though Australian girls were painted as free and tomboyish in popular discourse, cultural norms dictated that maturing girls should rein in their limbs, voices and desires.⁶⁶ While Mary was a prolific letter writer, none of the Lindsay girls wrote memoirs, and little of their juvenilia survives.⁶⁷ Like their brothers, the Lindsay girls used familial subjects as creative inspiration. Ruby was ‘never without a sketch book or pencil in her hands’ and aged 14 would draw family members gathered by the fire.⁶⁸ Ruby, like Norman and Lionel, had ‘only one interest in life – to learn to draw’.⁶⁹ Barred from pursuit of art herself in her girlhood, Mary put her efforts into cultivating Ruby’s talent, providing her earliest encouragement.

Mary’s influence can also be witnessed in the Lindsay literary culture. Reading fuelled Lindsay games and in turn, inspired their writing and art. Mary and Lionel particularly were avid readers, influencing and encouraging their siblings’ cultural tastes. Mary gifted Daryl a copy of Pride and Prejudice when he was 12 years old, ‘with a few comments on what to look for in those writers’.⁷⁰ Scholarship has been devoted to mothers as imparters of literacy to their children, but the influence of older siblings is overlooked.⁷¹ Lionel borrowed from the local Mechanics Institute and collated his own library.⁷² The siblings used this collection, and Norman owed Lionel ‘a considerable debt’ for introducing him to ‘the best standards of art and literature’.⁷³

Omnivorous reading inspired artistry. Norman drew scenes from his favourite Shakespeare plays at 14, including Hamlet and Alexandre Dumas’ Three Musketeers.⁷⁴ Not all the siblings participated in their juvenile literary and artistic culture – neither Pearl, Reginald nor Isabel cared for books or art.⁷⁵ Yet they were part of the broader Lindsay culture, and it appears that they participated in entertainments and were often swept up in a familial drive for fun.⁷⁶

In young adulthood the Lindsay siblings retained the sense of play, theatricality and imagination introduced at Lisnacrieve. They continued to co-create imaginative worlds which informed their artistic outputs, and childhood memories scattered the pages of both Lionel and Norman’s novels. As young men, while living together on Little Lonsdale Street in the heart of bohemian Melbourne, Norman and Lionel developed an obsession with pirates, attempting to write a novel on the subject, and dressing in pirate costume.⁷⁷ On trips home in the 1890s, Percy, Lionel and Norman would bring friends up from Melbourne. Young Daryl remembered that Norman would ‘marshal the family and guests’ into costumed tableaus which he would then photograph. Many of these scenes became models for his pen drawings. Indeed, Norman’s Have Faith (1932) is almost an exact replica of a photograph taken of the Lindsay siblings in a tableau in 1899 (Figure 1).⁷⁸ As children’s folklorist June Factor emphasises the ‘artistry in child lore and the playfulness in adult art’ are intimately connected.⁷⁹

Figure 1. Ruby, Norman, Pearl, Percy, Reg, Bill Dyson and Mary in Creswick Garden, c. 1899 an unknown artist, gelatin silver photograph on paper (sheet: 16.4 cm x 21.6 cm, image: 15.7 cm x 20.7 cm), Collection: National Portrait Gallery, purchased 2008.

Adulthood

The sense of creativity and drive inculcated in the Lindsay siblings in childhood continued into adulthood, although each of the siblings followed different paths. Early patterns of companionship persisted: as Amy Harris notes, sibling relations in childhood offered ‘bridges to adulthood’ and ‘necessary supports for lifelong social, financial and material success’.⁸⁰ Beyond the creative furnace of Lisnacrieve, the Lindsays fashioned their own visions of family life dictated by both choice and familial obligation. The Lindsays exemplified what Davidoff has termed the ‘dance of intimacy and separation’ defining adult sibling ties during this period, characterised by ‘deep affection and involvement, but also rivalry’.⁸¹ When the physical intimacy created within their childhood home faded, the siblings sustained their relationships through various forms of ‘kin-keeping’.⁸² Bound by a ‘strong sense of family duty and loyalty’ and a shared past, they forged economic, professional, and social networks, continuing to shape one another’s physical, emotional, and creative landscapes.⁸³ At different times, the Lindsay siblings lived, worked, travelled, and socialised together. In periods of distance and absence, they sustained their bonds through letter writing, consulting each other in every personal and professional decision.

In the Victorian period, sibling relationships in adulthood were often determined by the time and reason each sibling left the family home; in the context of the ‘long family’, this happened at varying intervals and often over decades.⁸⁴ Percy was the first to leave Lisnacrieve in the 1890s, pursuing an artistic career in Melbourne, and moving there permanently in 1897. Lionel followed. According to Lionel’s biographer Joanna Mendelssohn, ‘Percy’s presence in Melbourne brought home to him the urgent necessity of establishing a career, not just for his own sake, but for that of his family’.⁸⁵ In turn, Lionel encouraged his siblings to join him in the city, and in 1896 Norman, aged 16, arrived to attend the National Gallery School, Australia’s most prestigious art school. The brothers formed a creative trio, settling at the artists’ colony Chartersisville in Ivanhoe. On their periodic visits home, they acted as conduits to the wider world, regaling their siblings with tales of ‘la vie boheme’. This was a common phenomenon, elder brothers bringing home with them ‘new ideas and codes of behaviour’.⁸⁶ Ruby followed in her brothers’ footsteps in 1904 at 17, studying at the Gallery School and living with Percy in Alphington. Daryl found his brother’s home visits to be ‘enchanting affairs’, and he too left home at 17.⁸⁷

While Percy, Lionel, Norman, Ruby and Daryl traded home cooked meals for a ‘precarious bohemian existence and wider horizons of city life’, not all the Lindsay siblings felt this pull.⁸⁸ Pearl, Mary and Jane chose the country and family life, while Robert and Reginald strayed for work and for war. Although many of the less determined Lindsays shared an interest in art and literature – Mary had her letter writing, Robert a flair for costume design – it was, in Daryl’s words, a lack of a ‘devouring urge to create’ that prevented them from pursuing creative careers.⁸⁹ While Percy was a successful landscape artist, he too lacked the ‘personal ambition’ of his siblings, and preferred country life and socialising to laborious studio time.⁹⁰ Norman attributed Percy’s lack of motivation to his ‘happy childhood’ as the eldest sibling, which allowed him to become confident, popular and devoid of responsibility; by the time the younger siblings arrived the ‘maternal urge in our mother had hardened into the puritanic hatred of all tolerance for a freed release of the flesh and the spirit in the adventure of life’.⁹¹

In adulthood, the Lindsays re-negotiated their childhood roles, the desire to form distinct identities creating ever-shifting power dynamics. While Percy was the first born, his laid-back attitude forced Lionel to become the paternal elder brother. Daryl called Lionel the ‘moving spirit’ of the family; instinctively a nurturer, Lionel took financial responsibility for his family and encouraged his siblings’ creative endeavours – often to the detriment of his own.⁹² Daryl, the youngest boy and self-described ‘lone wolf’, developed an interest in horse portraiture and later large equestrian compositions when working as an overseer. Despite Daryl’s initial disinterest, Norman encouraged his brother to ‘take up … the family failing for art’ helping Daryl get started at The Lone Hand.⁹³ Norman, regarded by Daryl as the ‘most talented member of the family’, was an imaginative dreamer with an industrious work ethic, whose ambition for fame often threatened family ties.⁹⁴

Gender of course informed the Lindsay siblings’ roles in adulthood. In some ways, the family ethos of creative achievement transcended restrictive gender ideologies. Atkins notes that sibling groups helped to foster egalitarian societies between brothers and sisters.⁹⁵ As we have seen, Ruby and Mary were somewhat encouraged by their brothers to partake in the family culture. However, contemporary gender norms meant the Lindsay girls were often denied the same opportunities as their brothers. Mary was practical, hard-headed, and self-sacrificing. She fulfilled the role of dutiful eldest daughter, helping to run the household, care for her younger siblings, and nurse her mother in old age. While her brothers encouraged her to write professionally, she remained at the family home until she died. According to Norman, she was ‘embittered over past frustrations, suffering an anger against the wretched little strictions she was surround with in youth’.⁹⁶ While Jane Isabel ‘would always be content to stay close to her adored mother’, Pearl was married and widowed by 1915, later moving to Ballarat with her children.⁹⁷ Ruby became ‘the beauty of the family’, remaining hard-working in her pursuit of a career in illustration, with the encouragement of her brothers and sister Mary.⁹⁸ During Ruby’s student years, Mary sent her sister one pound a week to assist with living costs; according to Daryl, Mary ‘moved heaven and earth, with moral and financial support, to make things easy for Ruby during her first years in Melbourne’.⁹⁹ This form of assistance was common among sisters in the long nineteenth century.

The creative networks and partnerships forged between the Lindsay children both diminished and strengthened in adulthood. The Lindsays themselves were conscious of this, Daryl noting that ‘all large families such as ours with strong individual personalities get split up into different camps’.¹⁰⁰ Norman said of Mary and Robert’s lifelong companionship: ‘it happens like that between some members of a family, as if their genesis was from the same paternal or maternal hereditary cell’.¹⁰¹ The strong sense of familial loyalty established in childhood played out in adulthood, as the Lindsay siblings’ provided one another with advice, financial and emotional support, and defended one another publicly. For example, Robert was chaperone for his elder sister while Mary provided her brother with domestic and emotional support. During WWI, while Robert was working in the English Consul’s office at New Orleans, Mary joined him there to ‘keep house’, and later, ‘when he [Robert] got news that our mother was not likely to live much longer, he came back to Australia to keep Mary company’.¹⁰² Robert and Mary’s co-dependent sibling dynamic underscores the unique relationships that could be forged amongst sibling duos; sisters often took on the role of pseudo wife for unmarried brothers, acting as housekeeper and confidant.¹⁰³ Norman’s primary source of intimacy and inspiration remained his elder brother Lionel, despite long periods of absence and animosity. Norman’s ‘slavering hero-worship’ of Lionel in childhood grew into ‘affection and admiration’.¹⁰⁴ Norman and Mary, or ‘Mame’ as he called her, also shared a ‘lifelong friendship’ based on ‘mutual affection … mutual understanding’ and ‘unity of mind’, facilitated by ‘an equal experience in the first years of life, with a strong sympathetic union between us’.¹⁰⁵ Daryl was born the year Lionel left home, and they became close in 1919, sharing a love of art collecting, a fervent nationalism and strong familial duty.¹⁰⁶ These partnerships served emotional and practical needs that often superseded other social and familial relationships. Indeed, during a period of conflict between Lionel and Norman, Norman confessed: ‘I can afford to lose the others’ [intimacy], but not yours’.¹⁰⁷

Siblings in the city

For the Lindsays who left Creswick, life was split between Melbourne, Sydney and time spent abroad. The years between 1890 and c. 1914 were a period of intense physical, creative, and financial interdependence between Lionel, Norman, Percy, and later, Ruby. Their familial relationships were essential to each sibling’s negotiation of public life – the Lindsays ran in the same social circles, championed one another’s work, shared employment opportunities, negotiated business deals, and exhibited together. This sibling network was reminiscent of the Victorian ‘family firm’: joint enterprises between sibling groups founded on collective aspiration and held together by family loyalty.¹⁰⁸

Once they arrived in the country’s cultural capitals, the Lindsays were swiftly embedded in the creative and intellectual elites. Melbourne in the late 1890s was a bustling city, emerging from the Depression and regaining its place as a major commercial and industrial hub. The Lindsays’ generation of brothers and sisters witnessed a period of intense national feeling, rising social and political tensions, and the emergence of nationalist and socialist movements. The movement towards Federation coincided with a desire amongst white settlers to forge a distinctive Australian culture extricated from British domination. Melbourne at this time was a vibrant cultural centre, boasting ‘a small group of intellectual bohemians’ helping to define new creative and literary traditions.¹⁰⁹ Norman, Lionel and Percy adapted to urban life together, living in rented rooms, generating social networks, and securing jobs at various magazines. The commercial art market was weak at this time, and the Lindsay brothers survived through Lionel’s financial savvy. The brothers joined student clubs, frequented music halls, theatres, prize-fights, and brothels. Other creative sibling groups dominated the Lindsay’s social circle, including: ‘the Dysons – Ted, Ambrose, Bill [Will], Etty and Jean … the theatrical Tait brothers and Bess Norris, a talented artist who later married Nevin Tait’.¹¹⁰ Indeed, influential sibling networks can be found across Australia during this period: there were the entrepreneurial Geach siblings, the pioneering filmmakers the McDonagh sisters, the theatrical Coppins, and the politically and spiritually minded Deakins. In the case of the Lindsays, associations between sibling groups led to romantic entanglements and, in some cases, marriage.¹¹¹ The Lindsays recorded this historical moment in the pages of the novels and magazines they illustrated, including several influential contemporary periodicals: The Hawklet, Free Lance, Clarion, Tocsin and Rambler in Melbourne, and later The Bulletin and The Lone Hand in Sydney. The Lindsay’s facilitated one another’s careers, providing each other with opportunities for work. When Ruby arrived in Melbourne in 1904, she lived with Percy, and while studying she took occasional jobs at the Hawklet and The Bulletin, where both Lionel and Norman were already employed.

During this period, sibling networks helped to mediate historical change by maintaining and advancing bourgeois culture and articulating rising national sentiment. Scholarship on siblinghood in nineteenth-century Europe, Britain and the United States emphasises the integral role sibling relations played in developing the nation-state while supporting one another in their adaptation to rapid societal change.¹¹² According to Johnson and Sabean, the contributions made by the intellectual and creative elite across Europe and Britain to national prestige and cultural capital often came from groups of brothers and sisters who nurtured one another’s talents.¹¹³ In Australia, such sibling networks took on a particular meaning in the settler-colonial context. By maintaining their sibling network and fostering one another’s creative development, the Lindsay’s acted as cultural incubators, their artwork helping to depict and create a national pictorial identity emphasising childlike imagination, comedy, as well as classical and romantic literature. Simultaneously, they acted as cultural mediators of the settler-colonial imaginary, giving pictorial expression to racist, misogynistic, and antisemitic attitudes pervasive amongst white settlers. In the 1890s, Lionel financially supported Norman while the two illustrated for Free Lance, a self-described ‘white paper for white people’ supporting Progressive era reform.¹¹⁴ Along with friends and journalists Ted Dyson and Randolph Bedford, Norman and Lionel helped popularise Australian ‘larrikin’ journalism; they illustrated regular columns on life ‘In Bohemia’, while promoting racism and antisemitism. This form of journalism celebrated white settler Australia’s origins in working-class organisation, supported women’s suffrage, divorce law reform, Aboriginal land rights, while facilitating an image of national identity based on the archetypal ‘larrikin’ male: anti-authoritarian, easy going, and a heavy drinker with a fighting spirit, the larrikin epitomised images of Australian masculinity and identity during this period.¹¹⁵ Lionel and Norman’s performance of larrikinism and their bohemian lifestyle found expression in the pages of Free Lance, and the cultural world they inhabited was chronicled in cartoons depicting progressive politics, theatre, sport, and commerce.

In 1901, Australia federated, and Norman started working at the country’s most prestigious illustrated magazine, The Bulletin, where Lionel joined him in 1903. Here, Norman cultivated a reputation as the finest illustrator in Australia, representing the magazine’s nationalist and conservative editorial policy. His cartoons promoted the rising interests of white settlers in creating a ‘White Australia’: First Nation’s people, Chinese and Jewish migrants were caricatured, mocked and belittled, set outside of the boundaries of ideal citizenship.

At The Bulletin, Lionel and Norman’s relationship was both strengthened and tested. In 1904, Norman’s produced a highly criticised artwork, Pollice Verso that offered a Nietzschean attack on Christianity. Coming to his aid, Lionel publicly defended Norman in the Bulletin. As Mendelssohn notes: ‘The childhood pattern of older brother defending younger against the attacks of outsiders was being re-established in the wider world’.¹¹⁶ However, during this period, the sibling dynamic was slowly reversed; up until that point Lionel had been a paternal figure in Norman’s life, until Norman’s career superseded his brother’s.

Sibling rivalry

Over the twentieth century, travel, work, social and domestic life broadened the Lindsays’ milieu. The siblings settled in different parts of the country and the world, and their roles realigned through marriage and other commitments. The Lindsay’s became aunts and uncles, and family traditions of kin-keeping were transmitted to the next generation. While the siblings’ changing obligations often strengthened the centrality of familial identification, some ties faltered as old wounds surfaced and new conflicts arose.

World War I instigated tectonic shifts in the nation’s social patterns and institutions. In 1917, Reginald died on the Somme, a loss profoundly affecting his siblings. Norman turned to mysticism and spiritualism, while Lionel doubled down on his conservatism, and the two struggled to reconcile their divergent worldviews. These tensions were compounded by Norman’s decision to use private family narratives as fodder for his 1930 novel Redheap, a tale of siblings growing up in country Victoria, without family consultation. In the novel, based on the lives of the ‘Piper’ family, the central character Robert Piper is positioned against a power-hungry elder brother, a domineering elder sister, and a shy but seductive younger sister. Lionel, Daryl and the Lindsay’s mother, Jane, felt betrayed by what they believed was Norman’s abandonment of family loyalty for public notoriety.¹¹⁷ Historian Robert Darby suggests that the banning of Redheap in 1930 was in part instituted by intervention on behalf of Jane, who was outraged by Norman’s exposure of family stories and the lives of local Creswick residents.¹¹⁸ This betrayal also unearthed childhood and early adult animosities. Lionel’s envy of his brother’s talent and success, and the sacrifices he made to propel Norman’s career, lay beneath his assertions of disloyalty. By 1903, when Lionel returned to Sydney to work with Norman at The Bulletin, Norman had become the most successful illustrator in the country, and, as Mendelssohn notes, ‘for the first time in his life Lionel was not leader of his younger brother, but his advocate and his disciple’.¹¹⁹

Even during periods of distance and animosity, the Lindsays were fundamental to one another’s personal and familial narratives. In a letter to Lionel in 1917, Norman wrote of the profound ‘long intimacy’ between them:

For no growing old should spoil it: this is the one and most important thread in our lives … I can think of no other means of saying that you are as wrong as hell if you misjudge my affection for you, or that I do not keep in my heart an abiding sense of admiration for the big brother who was always so much bigger and better than the small brother, and to whom was given at birth the spirit of enlightenment, by which the small brother learned to think, feel, see and do.¹²⁰

The strength of feeling in this passage is staggering. Even in his thirties, Norman’s position as the ‘small brother’ is an inescapable marker of his identity. The sibling relationship is embedded within Norman’s life narrative; the strongest and most enduring thread in his life.

The ‘dance of intimacy and separation’ between the Lindsay siblings in adulthood informed each aspect of their lives; love, marriage, work, creativity, loss, and the effects of social and cultural change were mediated through the sibling network. As friends, carers, mentors, and rivals, the siblings shaped one another’s social and emotional worlds. Family patterns of power and family rituals established in childhood carried on into adulthood, informing their adult behaviours, life choices and creative outlooks. Family duty and loyalty were at the core of the Lindsays’ moral ethos: these values were both the strength of their bond and their perceived betrayal the reason for the erosion of the family unit.

Conclusion

As the Lindsay siblings matured into old age, some resentments faded, although both Lionel and Daryl remained distant from Norman. The value of the sibling bond shifted; practical interdependence gave way to a shared familiarity based on a common past. Norman and Daryl’s relationship with Mary was sustained through correspondence and regular visits to Lisnacrieve, where they shared reminiscences of childhood. At Lisnacrieve, Mary managed family memories and archives, taking on the role of ‘kin-keeper’ and ‘gather[ed] the threads of our individual lives’.¹²¹ Mary’s careful composition and maintenance of the Lindsay family narrative helped to solidify the siblings as part of Australia’s cultural memory.

From 1967, a replica of Lisnacrieve’s family parlour has been on display at Ballarat Art Gallery. Mary offered the Gallery a bequest of furniture, family portraits, art and memorabilia to populate the reconstruction, fulfilling her role as kin-keeper even in her final years. Here, the spirit of the Lindsay family is preserved for posterity. It is significant that the family sitting room continues to symbolise the Lindsay family culture and spirit. It reflects the significance of the middle-class home in fashioning the creative, intellectual and emotional bonds between siblings. While each Lindsay sibling went on to forge their own paths, the family narrative, Lisnacrieve, and the relationships shared between siblings remained a constant guiding presence in each of their lives. The study of siblings as a historical category and within the framework of life course analysis further demonstrates the crucial link between childhood and adulthood in identity formation and the creation of a shared familial narrative. Sibling dynamics are rooted in childhood, and these relationships continue throughout the life cycle; they ebb and flow but remain an ever-present intangible link to shared histories.

Viewing history through the lens of familial life reveals the interrelationship between private lives and the public world. The study of siblinghood highlights how kinship ties could be highly significant in public life at the turn of the twentieth century in Australia. The absence of extended kinship networks in Australia meant that brothers and sisters formed the centre of family life, as well as wider social relationships. Sibling networks became a powerful force in shaping settler-colonial formations, including the cultural imaginary of the settler-colonial nation.

We hope this study provides the impetus for further investigation of siblinghood in Australian history, and in other settler-colonial contexts. There is much work to be done on the significance of sibling ties within other social and economic strata, as well as across ethnicities and in different time periods. Surveying historical siblinghood in these contexts can offer a fresh vantage point from which to view the Australian settler-colonial past and present.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Thea Gardiner

Thea Gardiner researches and writes on the place of women in Australian historical memory. She is a PhD scholar in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne. Her doctoral research examines the life of the Australian artist and political activist Portia Geach (1873–1959). Her book, Mab: The world of Mab Grimwade, was released in October 2023 by Melbourne University Publishing.

Catherine Gay

Catherine Gay is a Hansen Trust PhD Scholar in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne. Her doctoral research examines the lives and material culture of First Nations and settler girls in nineteenth-century Australia. Catherine is a Research Associate at Museums Victoria.

Notes

1. Daryl Lindsay, The Leafy Tree: My family (Melbourne (Vic.): F Cheshire, 1965), 79–80.

2. Ibid., 80.

3. Norman Lindsay, R. G. Howarth, and A. W. Barker, Letters of Norman Lindsay (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1979), 614.

4. Douglas Stewart, Norman Lindsay: A Personal Memoir (Melbourne: Nelson, 1975), 10.

5. Ibid., 11.

6. Christopher H. Johnson and David Warren Sabean outline the transition from ‘vertical’ to ‘horizontal’ kinship structures occurring during the nineteenth century, in which sibling relations took on heightened importance. See: Christopher H. Johnson and David Warren Sabean, Sibling Relations and the Transformations of European Kinship, 1300–1900 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2011).

7. See, for example: Victor G. Cicirelli, Sibling Relationships Across the Life Span (United States: Springer US, 1995); Prophecy Coles, Sibling Relationships (London; New York: Karnac, 2006) Michael E. Lamb and Brian Sutton-Smith, Sibling Relationships: Their Nature and Significance Across the Lifespan (New York; London: Psychology Press, 2014); Ann Buchanan and Anna Rotkirch, Brothers and Sisters: Sibling Relationships Across the Life Course (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).

8. Leonore Davidoff, Thicker than Water: Siblings and their Relations, 1780–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

9. Annette Atkins, We Grew Up Together: Brothers and Sisters in Nineteenth-century America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000); Charlotte Dallett Hemphill, Siblings: Brothers and Sisters in American History (Cary, United States: Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2011); Lorri Glover, All Our Relations: Blood Ties and Emotional Bonds among the Early South Carolina Gentry (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2000).

10. Amy Harris, Siblinghood and Social Relations in Georgian England: Share and Share Alike (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017); Amy Harris, Being Single in Georgian England: Families, Households, and the Unmarried (Oxford, N Y: Oxford University Press, 2023)

11. Johnson and Sabean, Sibling Relations.

12. Emma Rothschild, The Inner Life of Empires: An Eighteenth-Century History (Princeton; Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2011); Emma Rothschild, An Infinite History: The Story of a Family in France Over Three Centuries (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021); Bernard Capp and Bernard Capp, The Ties That Bind: Siblings, Family, and Society in Early Modern England (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2018); Shannon Devlin, ‘‘Hope for happier days’: happiness in the letters between siblings in nineteenth-century middle-class Ulster families” in Happiness in nineteenth-century Ireland ed. Mary Hatfield (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2021): 141–58.

13. Ibid., 14.

14. Davidoff, Thicker than Water, 4.

15. An exception is the work of John Rickard, who traces Victorian sibling dynamics within the families of Australian Prime Minister Alfred Deakin and high court Judge H. B. Higgins. See: John Rickard, “Reading the Victorian Family,” in History on the Couch: essays in history and psychoanalysis ed. J. Damousi and R. Reynolds (Melbourne, 2003), 90–5.

16. Patricia Grimshaw, “The Australian Family: An Historical Interpretation,” in The Family in the Modern World: Australian perspectives eds. A. Burns, G. Bottomley, and P. Jools (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1983), 43.

17. Patricia Grimshaw, “Women and the Family in Australian History – a Reply to the Real Matilda,” Historical Studies 18, no. 72 (1979): 414.

18. Johnson and Sabean, Sibling Relations, 2.

19. On the importance of family across the British Empire see: Esme Cleall, Laura Ishiguru and Emily J. Manktelow, “Imperial Relations: Histories of Family in the British Empire,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 14, no. 1 (2013); Elizabeth Elbourne, Empire, Kinship and Violence: Family Histories, Indigenous Rights and the Making of Settler Colonialism, 1770–1842 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023); Andrew J. May, “The Troubled House: Families, Heritance and the Reckoning of Empire,” Genealogy 7, no. 1 (2023): 8. For the Australian context see: Penelope Edmonds and Amanda Nettelbeck, “Precarious Intimacies: Cross-Cultural Violence and Proximity in Settler Colonial Economies of the Pacific Rim,” in Intimacies of Violence in the Settler Colony: Economies of Dispossession around the Pacific Rim, ed. Penelope Edmonds and Amanda Nettelbeck (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2018), 8.

20. For more on Australian artists’ role in crafting settler-colonial identity see: Jeanette Hoorn, Australian Pastoral: The making of a white landscape (Freemantle, WA: Fremantle Press, 2007); Leigh Astbury, City Bushmen: The Heidelberg school and the rural mythology (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1985).

21. See, for example: John Rickard, “Pointers to the Future of Family History,” Australian Historical Studies 44, no. 3 (2013): 457–62.

22. Lindsay, The Leafy Tree; Sir Lionel Lindsay, Comedy of Life: An Autobiography (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1967); Norman Lindsay, My Mask: For What Little I know of the Man Behind It, An Autobiography (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1973).

23. Joanna Mendelssohn, Lionel Lindsay: An artist and his family (London: Chatto & Windus, 1988); Joanna Mendelssohn, Letters & Liars: Norman Lindsay and the Lindsay Family (Pymble, NSW: Angus & Robertson, 1996); Pearl Goldman, Memories of Norman Lindsay and the Theatre (Southport, Qld: John A. Elliott for the Gold Coast and Hinterland Historical, 1999); Stewart, Norman Lindsay.; R. C. Littlewood and Ruby Lindsay, Ruby Lindsay: 1887–1919 (Prahran East, Vic: Douglas Stewart Fine Books, 2010); S.G. Walker, “Ruby Lindsay: A Professional Artist of the Suffrage-Era,” Lilith: A Feminist History Journal, 23 (2017): 23–33.

24. G.H. Elder, “Family History and the Life Course,” Journal of Family History 2, no. 4 (1977): 279–304; T. Hareven, “Historical Changes in the Family and the Life Course: Implications for Child Development,” Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 50, no. 4/5 (1985), 8–23; G.H. Elder, “Families and Lives: some Developments in Life-Course Studies,” in Family History at the Crossroads: A Journal of Family History Reader, ed. T.K. Hareven and Andrejs Plakans (Princeton, 1988), 179–200.

25. Amy Harris’ Siblinghood and Social Relations in Georgian England is an exception. She imbues childhood with great significance as she examines the whole life course, dipping in and out of childhood and adulthood throughout the book.

26. K. Moruzi, N. Musgrove, and C. Pascoe Leahy (eds), Children’s Voices from the Past: New Historical and Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2019).

27. Norman to Percy and Lionel, Creswick, 1895 in N. Lindsay, Howarth, and Barker, Letters of Norman Lindsay, 16.

28. Davidoff, Thicker than Water, 78.

29. Ibid., 82.

30. Ibid., 82.

31. Lindsay, My Mask, 3.

32. Davidoff, Thicker than Water, 120.

33. Mendelssohn, Lionel Lindsay, 37.

34. Norman To Mary, Springwood, 1954 in Lindsay, Howarth, and Barker, Letters of Norman Lindsay, 458.

35. Lindsay, The Leafy Tree, 66.

36. Lindsay, Howarth, and Barker, 16.

37. Mendelssohn, Lionel Lindsay, 29.

38. Norman Lindsay, “Fatty Bennet,” The Lone Hand, 9, 52, (1 August 1911), 314–5.

39. Lindsay, The Leafy Tree, 2.

40. Lindsay, The Leafy Tree, 41–2.

41. Ibid., 41–42.

42. Thea Gardiner, “The Paradoxical Life of Portia Geach,” (D. Phil, University of Melbourne, Forthcoming); Gillian Brown, Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 14.

43. Increased resources for elite children can also be seen in the eighteenth century. See: Harris, Being Single in Georgian England, 50.

44. Hugh Cunningham, Children and Childhood in Western Society Since 1500, 2nd ed. (Oxford, New York: Routledge, 2014), 30; Brian Sutton-Smith, A History of Children’s Play: The New Zealand playground,1840–1950 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 152.

45. Grimshaw, “Women and the Family in Australian History,” 420–21.

46. This contrasts to other studies of siblings, which show that parents fostered strong values in their children See: Harris, Being Single in Georgian England, 35.

47. Claudia Nelson, Family Ties in Victorian England (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger Publishers, 2007), 50–1.

48. Mendelssohn, Lionel Lindsay, 30–1.

49. Ibid., 41–2.

50. Lindsay, The Leafy Tree, 30; Norman to Mary, Springwood, 1953, in Lindsay, Howarth, and Barker, Letters of Norman Lindsay, 443.

51. Norman Lindsay, ‘A Cousin’, reproduced in Norman Lindsay and Keith Wingrove, Norman Lindsay on Art, Life and Literature (St. Lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press, 1990), 30; Norman Lindsay, ‘Saturdee’, The Lone Hand, 3, 15 (July 1908), 316–326, http://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-390678413; ; June Factor, Captain Cook Chased a Chook: Children’s Folklore in Australia (Ringwood, Vic: Penguin, 1988), 114; Victorian children’s play was often influenced by their environment and local colonial legends: Museums Victoria, HT 42,343, Eunice McLeod, to Dorothy Howard, Response to Dr Howard’s Request for People to Contact her about their Childhood Games, 21 Jul 1954.

52. Mendelssohn, Lionel Lindsay, 25.

53. Norman Lindsay, ‘Fatty Bennet’, 314; Lindsay, The Leafy Tree, 24–5.

54. Ruth Colton, “Savage Instincts, Civilizing Spaces: The Child, the Empire and the Public Park, c. 1880–1914,” in Children, Childhood and Youth in the British World ed. S. Robinson and S. Sleight (Houndmills, Basingstoke; Hampshire, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 267; The idea of ‘petty imperialists’ is expanded in the Australian context in Fiona Gatt & Catherine Gay, “Re-Living the Early Days’: Memory, Childhood and Self-Indigenization, North Melbourne, 1934–1935’, Postcolonial Studies, ahead of print (2022), 10.1080/13688790.2022.2049466.

55. Lindsay, The Leafy Tree, 19–20, 27.

56. Lindsay, ‘Saturdee’, 317.

57. Jerome L. Singer, “Imaginative Play and Adaptive Development,” in Toys, Play, and Child Development ed. Jeffery H. Goldstein (Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 6–7.

58. Lorna J. Clark, ‘Teaching “The Young Idea How to Shoot”: The Juvenilia of the Burney family’, Journal of Juvenilia Studies 1 (2018), 21.

59. Lindsay, The Leafy Tree, 41.

60. Mendelssohn, Lionel Lindsay, 32–3.

61. Lindsay and Wingrove, Norman Lindsay on Art, Life and Literature, xii.

62. Lindsay, The Leafy Tree, 179.

63. Lindsay, Howarth, and Barker, Letters of Norman Lindsay, 17.

64. A portrait of Daryl by Percy is reproduced in: Lindsay, The Leafy Tree, 78; see also: Art Gallery of Ballarat, accession number 1970. 85, P. Lindsay, Girls on footbridge, 1894.

65. Leonore Davidoff, “Kinship as a Categorical Concept: A Case Study of Nineteenth Century English Siblings,” Journal of Social History 39, no. 2 (2005): 411–28.

66. Davidoff, Thicker than Water, 65; John Rickard, Australia: A Cultural History, 3rd ed. Australian History (Clayton, Victoria: Monash University Publishing, 2017), 77.

67. Two paper dolls, made by Mary and Ruby as gifts for family friends, are an example of their juvenilia’s ephemerality. Collection of Art Gallery of Ballarat.

68. Lindsay, The Leafy Tree, 69.

69. Ibid., 69.

70. Ibid., 76.

71. Mary Hilton, Morag Styles, and Victor Watson, eds., Opening the Nursery Door: Reading, Writing, and Childhood, 1600–1900 (London, NY: Routledge, 1997).

72. Lindsay and Wingrove, Norman Lindsay on Art, Life and Literature, x.

73. Norman to Mary, Springwood, 1961 in N. Lindsay, Howarth, and Barker, Letters of Norman Lindsay, 560.

74. J. Hall, ‘Norman Lindsay’, The Lone Hand, 6, 34 (February 1, 1910), 350–1, http://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-403206915.

75. Lindsay, The Leafy Tree, 67; 73.

76. Norman to Mary, Springwood, 1953 in N. Lindsay, Howarth, and Barker, Letters of Norman Lindsay, 445; Lindsay, The Leafy Tree, 67–8.

77. Mendelssohn, Lionel Lindsay, 90.

78. See: Norman Lindsay, Have Faith, etching printed in blue ink, 1932, copyright the Lindsay Family estate, from: https://www.printsandprintmaking.gov.au/works/32075/.

79. June Factor, “Captain Cook Chased a Chook: children’s folklore in Australia: Its Origins, Development, Characteristics and Functions within a Changing Historical and Cultural Context” (D.Phil, University of Melbourne, 1989): 190, http://hdl.handle.net/11343/35770.

80. Harris, Siblinghood and Social Relations in Georgian England, 18.

81. Davidoff, Thicker than Water, 133–34.

82. Hemphill uses ‘kin-keeping’ to describe the efforts of adult siblings to preserve family ties in colonial America. See Hemphill, Siblings, intro.

83. Mendelssohn, Lionel Lindsay, xii.

84. Davidoff, Thicker than Water, 134–35.

85. Mendelssohn, Lionel Lindsay, 64.

86. Davidoff, Thicker than Water, 127.

87. Lindsay, The Leafy Tree, 50.

88. Ibid., 62.

89. Ibid.

90. Lindsay, The Leafy Tree, 63.

91. Norman to Mary, Springwood, 1966 in Lindsay, Howarth, and Barker, Letters of Norman Lindsay, 614.

92. Lindsay, The Leafy Tree, 196.

93. Ibid., 77.

94. Ibid., 54.

95. Atkins, We Grew Up Together, 56.

96. Norman to Keith Wingrove, Springwood, October 1951 in N. Lindsay, Howarth, and Barker, Letters of Norman Lindsay, 393–94.

97. Mendelssohn, Lionel Lindsay, 125.

98. Lindsay, The Leafy Tree, 67.

99. Ibid., 77.

100. Ibid., 175.

101. Norman to Keith Wingrove, Springwood, October 1951 in N. Lindsay, Howarth, and Barker, Letters of Norman Lindsay, 419.

102. Ibid.

103. See: Harris, Being Single in Georgian England, 68; 94.

104. Norman to Lionel, Springwood, c.1917 in Lindsay, Howarth, and Barker, Letters of Norman Lindsay, 86.

105. Norman to Mary, Springwood, 1961, Lindsay, Howarth and Barker, Letters of Norman Lindsay, 60.

106. Lindsay, The Leafy Tree, 175.

107. Norman to Lionel, Springwood, c. 1919 in Lindsay, Howarth, and Barker, Letters of Norman Lindsay, 143.

108. See: Stana Nenadic, “The Small Family Firm in Victorian Britain,” Business History 35, 4 (1993): 86–114; Emma Rothschild, The Inner Life of Empires: An Eighteenth-Century History (Princeton; Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2011).

109. Lindsay, The Leafy Tree, 69.

110. Ibid., 69.

111. Ruby married family friend Will Dyson in 1909, after Lionel had married Will’s sister Jean in 1903. Norman’s first wife, Catherine Parkinson was also a family friend.

112. See, for example: Johnson and Sabean, Sibling Relations, 15–16; Hemphill, Siblings, 108–126.

113. Johnson and Sabean, Sibling Relations, 15–16.

114. ‘Advertising’, Free Lance 1, 16, (August 6, 1896), 2, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article171429789.

115. For more on the larrikin in Australian history see: Melissa Bellanta, Larrikins: A History (QLD: University of Queensland Press, 2012).

116. Mendelssohn, Lionel Lindsay, 118.

117. Mendelssohn, Lionel Lindsay, xii.

118. Robert Darby, “The Banning of Redheap: Sober Facts about an Inflammatory Fiction,” Labour History, no. 105 (2013): 171–85, https://doi.org/10.5263/labourhistory.105.0171.

119. Ibid.

120. Norman to Lionel, 1917, Springwood in Lindsay, Howarth, and Barker, Letters of Norman Lindsay, 92.

121. Lindsay, The Leafy Tree, 196.