Silvester Diggles (1817-1880) was sent north to Moreton Bay on the Boomerang steamer in November 1854 to repair and tune the pianofortes of the district.
He found a town crying out for musical instruction, art and entertainment, and decided to bring his family north to Brisbane Town early in 1855. He advertised his services in musical instrument repair, music lessons, art lessons, miniatures and photography.
Silvester Diggles possessed a great gift for music, but it is for drawing that he is remembered today. His work on insects and birds is masterly, but in his early years in Brisbane, he recorded some sketches of people and places that have long vanished.
Meeting Dundalli.
It was during Silvester Diggles’ first trip to Brisbane that he encountered Dundalli, the legendary indigenous resistance figure.
The indigenous leader had been convicted on 21 November 1854 of the murders of William Boller and Andrew Gregor in the Pine River area in the mid-1840s. Dundalli was under the death sentence, awaiting execution at Brisbane Gaol. (Dundalli had to wait for his execution until 5 January 1855, because a scaffold had to be built, and a hangman brought up from Sydney.)
Presumably, Diggles asked the governor of the gaol for permission to make a sketch of the condemned man. The encounter took place on 5 December 1854, and the sketch appeared in the Illustrated Sydney News of 16 December 1854. The drawing shows a bearded man in an open-necked shirt, and is only remarkable because of the fact that the artist met and drew the subject, who had never been depicted by a European before. One wonders what Dundalli and Diggles thought as the sketch was made. (A conversion of the sketch by to colour using AI makes it more relatable to the modern eye.)
The above sketch of the North Brisbane Hotel was probably made on the same visit to Brisbane in November-December 1854.
1858 Views of Brisbane
Although Silvester Diggles is best known for his masterly illustrations of insects and birds, he completed a series of studies of Brisbane using pencil on cream wove paper. The Queensland Art Gallery has several examples of these sketches in its archives.
Fortitude Valley, 1858
Kangaroo Point, 1858
The suburb of Kangaroo Point, just across the river from Brisbane Town’s centre, was the home Silvester Diggles chose for his family for the rest of his life.
Diggles was known as a genial, affable man, devoted to family, art, music and his church. There was only one thing that made him cross – the overloading of the Kangaroo Point Ferry. It was enough to stir letters to both the Moreton Bay Courier and the town council. They were very politely worded letters, but something approaching irritation had occurred.
View from New Farm.
In the 1870s, a picture of Silvester Diggles appeared in a photograph album, sharing space with an extraordinary ensemble of stage actors, politicians and Royals. I suspect that the long-forgotten owner of the album collected cartes-de-visite and the portraits of actors from photographers’ studios.
We have no publicly available works of Silvester Diggles, other than his masterly natural history studies after 1858. Perhaps more will be found and made available.
Citations for all of the Silvester Diggles Blog Posts are included here.
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