Sherlock Holmes in Australia

In “The Boscombe Valley Mystery”, in The Strand Magazine of October 1891, Charles McCarthy, who had been in Australia, is found dead by the Boscombe Pool in Herefordshire. His son heard him call “Cooee!”, which Holmes points out is “a distinctly Australian cry”, and then something about “a rat”. Holmes sends to Bristol for a map of the Colony of Victoria, covers part of it with his hand, and lets Watson read ARAT, then BALLARAT. The murderer is McCarthy’s landlord, John Turner, who robbed a gold convoy on its way from Ballarat to Melbourne in the early sixties and has lived on it since. “Black Jack of Ballarat was the name I went under,” he confesses, “and our party is still remembered in the colony as the Ballarat Gang.” McCarthy had driven the wagon.

Sidney Paget drew Holmes on his way there, in a railway carriage, in a deerstalker: the first he gave him. The text says only “close-fitting cloth cap”. The Strand had been on sale in Hobart and Launceston since its first number, and thirteen months later the Illustrated Sydney News printed the story with Paget’s carriage and all, under “Australian Rights Secured and Reserved.”

J. C. Williamson paid a thousand pounds for the Australian rights to William Gillette’s play Sherlock Holmes, the biggest price, the Referee said, that a local manager had paid for any drama. He opened it not in Sydney or Melbourne but at the Theatre Royal, Perth, on Saturday 26 July 1902, “for the FIRST TIME in AUSTRALIA”, under the patronage of the Governor. Harry Plimmer, from Wellington, played Holmes; Lumsden Hare was Watson, J. B. Atholwood Moriarty and May Chevalier Alice Faulkner. The scenery was late from the port, the curtain fell after half past eleven, “and most people lost their trams and trains”.

Plimmer took it to Adelaide. For Melbourne Williamson had found Cuyler Hastings, a Toronto lawyer turned actor whom Gillette had chosen to lead one of his own American companies; he opened at Her Majesty’s on 13 September 1902, and for two years toured the play round Australia and New Zealand, from Kalgoorlie and Broken Hill to Dunedin. His last Holmes in Australia was at the Theatre Royal, Adelaide, on 2 September 1904, billed as “Absolutely the Farewell”.

Arthur Conan Doyle reached Fremantle in the P&O Naldera on 17 September 1920: himself, his wife Jean, their sons Denis and Malcolm, their daughter Jean, Jakeman the maid and Major Wood, his secretary, seven in all. The Australian spiritualists had asked him to come. For five months he lectured on “Death and the Hereafter” and showed spirit photographs, in Adelaide, Melbourne, Geelong, Bendigo, Sydney, Brisbane and Perth and in four cities of New Zealand; by his own count, given in Sydney at the end of January, it came to twenty-five meetings and 50,000 people.

The Argus would not welcome him: “He represents a force which we believe to be purely evil.” Brisbane’s Truth drew him in a deerstalker on his hands and knees, following the spirits’ footprints. And everywhere they asked him about Holmes. When he reached Sydney a boy in the crowd at the station put it plainly: “The bloke that wrote Sherlock Holmes.” At the Millions Club lunch he told them that when he retired Holmes to a bee farm, two or three women wrote offering to keep house for him; in Brisbane the Daily Mail photographed him at an apiary, in a bee veil.

In 2009 Derham Groves posted twelve Australian newspaper advertisements that borrowed Holmes, from a cough cure in 1924 to a petrol in 1954. Every one of them is on Trove, and here they are from the newspapers’ own pages, with the earliest pictorial one found since, a Melbourne dry cleaner’s of 1922.

Most were national campaigns, printed in papers all over the country within a week or two: Woods’ Great Peppermint Cure, Crompton lamps, Texaco, the coal economy drive of 1944 and C.O.R. petrol. Cyclone fences ran theirs in Melbourne and Adelaide, the Sydney County Council in Sydney. One was a single shop: Spurgins, tobacconists and gentlemen’s hairdressers, opposite the Post Office in Queen Street, Brisbane.

Watson Holmes Jackamara is an Aboriginal detective in three short stories and two novels by Mudrooroo: “Westralian Lead” (in Crimes for a Summer Christmas, 1990), “The Healer” (in More Crimes for a Summer Christmas, 1991, where he plays Santa Claus), Wildcat Screaming (1992), The Kwinkan (1993) and “Home on the Range” (in Murder at Home, 1993). He is a constable, then a detective, then a Doctor of Criminology, in Western Australia and in Queensland.

Derham Groves wrote to Mudrooroo in May 1991, and Mudrooroo wrote back from West End, Brisbane, on the 26th about the stories he had in hand, among them one that would tell how Jackamara got his name. Groves cut seven linocuts on cloth of the stories’ characters while he was an artist in residence at Bundanon, and made them into an artist’s book, Dr Watson Holmes Jackamara, in an edition of 21, with a copy of the letter on the back of the sheet.

Derham Groves is an architect, and taught architecture at the University of Melbourne. His architecture thesis of 1981 was a design for a Sherlock Holmes Centre; the University of Minnesota keeps a copy in its Sherlock Holmes Collections, with his letters to the collector John Bennett Shaw. In 1985 the Baker Street Irregulars, who invest each member under a name from the stories, invested him as “Black Jack of Ballarat”; Peter Blau’s Sherlockian newsletter, Scuttlebutt from the Spermaceti Press, calls him their first Australian member. His press, the Black Jack Press, has printed his Holmes books since 1997.

He helped assemble Holmes Away from Home at the State Library of Victoria in 1987, writing in its catalogue on the early Australian productions of the plays, and has made Holmes exhibitions at the University of Minnesota and the University of Melbourne since. From time to time he set his architecture students Holmes projects: a house for one of the villains, a hotel for the Irregulars, the victims of the stories as Barbie and Ken dolls.