Description

Extended Data

Birth Place

Falmouth, Jamaica

Biography

sketcher, was born at the port of Falmouth, Jamaica, circa 1822/23. Her full name was Frances Minto Gibbes and she was the fifth child and third daughter of Colonel (then Major) John George Nathaniel Gibbes (1787-1873) and Elizabeth Gibbes (née Davis, circa 1790-1874). One of Fanny’s older sisters was the sketcher and watercolourist Mary Murray (née Gibbes). Fanny’s Indian-born mother was the daughter of an English clergyman while her father was the London-born son of a Barbados sugar planter. A veteran of the wars against Napoleon, Colonel Gibbes had been appointed to the well-remunerated post of Collector of Customs at Falmouth by the British Government in 1819. (Falmouth was then Jamaica’s wealthiest maritime trading centre after Kingston.) Fanny’s carefree Caribbean existence ended sharply at the age of four or five, when her father took the family back to England to live. His constitution had been undermined by Jamaica’s climate and he was forced to obtain a transfer to the customs’ collectorship at the North Sea port of Great Yarmouth in Norfolk. Fanny immersed herself in books on her return to England, earning a reputation as a bluestocking. She also was taught the social skills and graces that young Englishwomen of her class were expected to acquire during the late-Georgian era. These included the capacity to play at least one musical instrument, a facility in French and the ability to dance, embroider and sketch. During their time in Norfolk, the Gibbes family resided by the sea in Great Yarmouth itself, and at Hobland Hall, in the tranquil East Anglian countryside. There was no further upheaval in Fanny’s life until 1833, when her father applied successfully for a transfer to the collectorship in Sydney, New South Wales (NSW). As head of the colony’s Customs Department, he would be allocated a seat in the NSW Legislative Council and draw a base salary of 1000 pounds a year, which was more than he was receiving at Great Yarmouth. Fanny, her parents and six of her seven siblings arrived in Sydney, from London, aboard the Resource on 19 April 1834. Colonel Gibbes would remain the Collector of Customs for NSW for a record term of 25 years, during which time Sydney grew from a penal settlement into a cosmopolitan trading city. One of his first actions was to lease a Palladian villa on Sydney’s Point Piper as a home for his family. Known as Point Piper House (or Henrietta Villa), the Gibbes’ new residence had been built by one of the Colonel’s predecessors, the extravagant Captain John Piper. It was surrounded by a European-style garden and native trees and commanded sweeping views of shipping movements on Sydney Harbour. On 23 January 1838, Fanny sketched two views of Point Piper (Historic Houses Trust). The first sketch shows a portion of the house’s verandah and garden, with the water beyond. The second depicts the whole house from a vantage point located in the harbour, probably Clarke Island. Another sketch showing the Point Piper House’s garden and verandah is also extant (National Library of Australia). Regrettably, most of Fanny’s other sketches are lost although there does survive a small pencil portrait that she did of her brother, William John Gibbes (1815-1868), in 1843 (private collection). It should be noted that Fanny’s father supported the work of several Sydney artists. They included the marine painter Frederick Garling , who worked for Colonel Gibbes at the Sydney Customs House, and William Nicholas , who executed drawings and watercolour portaits of members of the Gibbes family. Colonel Gibbes was also on friendly terms with the landscape painter Conrad Martens . (During the 1830s, Martens did drawings and watercolours of Regentville, near Penrith, NSW, which was the rural seat of William John Gibbes’ father-in-law, Sir John Jamison (1776-1844).) In 1843, Fanny attended the wedding in Sydney of her favourite sister, Mary, to Terence Aubrey Murray, a budding politician, pastoralist and proprietor of two famous NSW sheep stations: Yarralumla on the Limestone Plains and Winderradeen in the Collector Valley. That same year, Fanny, her parents and her unmarried siblings moved across the harbour to Kirribilli Point, on Sydney’s north shore. Here Colonel Gibbes had erected, on a spectacular five-acre site, a sandstone bungalow, which he called Wotonga House. (Wotonga nowadays forms part of Admiralty House – the official Sydney residence of the Governor-General of Australia.) During her seven-year stay at Wotonga, Fanny would travel to Yarralumla from time to time to visit Mary Murray (1817-1858). She would be accompanied on these expeditions, which involved an arduous 300-kilometre coach trip over rough country roads, by her younger sister Matilda Gibbes (1826-1916), herself an enthusiastic amateur sketcher. Fanny possessed a lively mind and a witty turn of phrase but most prospective suitors found her too plain-looking and forthright for their liking. Her parents feared that she would never marry but during the 1840s, she met and fell in love with an Irish-born farmer and amateur naturalist from New Zealand named Alfred Ludlam (1810-1877). Ludlam returned Fanny’s affection, courting her at Wotonga where he was a house guest. The Gibbes family nicknamed him “Old Bricks” because of his solid, dependable character. On 1 October 1850, Fanny and “Old Bricks” were married at St Thomas’ Anglican Church, North Sydney (where, coincidentally, Conrad Martens was a parishioner). Fanny went to live across the Tasman with Ludlam on his sheep property, Newry, in Lower Hutt. Not long after their arrival at Newry they hosted, in 1851, an official dinner for the Governor of New Zealand, Sir George Grey. Ludlam proceeded to embark on an active career in public life, supporting a variety of cultural and civic institutions in Wellington and entering the political arena in 1854. He represented Hutt in New Zealand’s First, Second and Fourth Parliaments and represented the same area on the Wellington Provincial Council in 1853-56 and again in 1866-70. Fanny and her husband narrowly escaped death one night in February 1855 when a massive earthquake struck the Wellington region, destroying Newry homestead and sending a brick chimney crashing down around them. They rebuilt Newry and Fanny, who was keen on horticulture, helped Ludlam to establish a showpiece garden on the property which was later opened to the public. Ludlam was one of the founders, too, of the Wellington Botanic Gardens in 1868. Fanny’s father and mother died at Yarralumla homestead in 1873 and 1874 respectively. (They had been living in retirement at Yarralumla since 1859 – the year in which Terence Aubrey Murray sold the property to Fanny’s youngest brother, Augustus Gibbes.) In a codicil to his will, Colonel Gibbes left Fanny 'the piece of worsted work framed and glazed, the four coloured drawings by Mr. Fred Garling [ Frederick Garling ] viz Point Piper House, the Ship in which my dear son Edmund sailed for England and died [in 1850], Mt Keera and a scene in the Domain; also her mother’s gold watch and chain’. The Ludlams travelled to England for an extended holiday following the death of Mrs Gibbes. In London, Fanny was reunited with her eldest brother, George, a retired War Office official, whom she had not seen since her departure for Australia in 1833. Fanny, however, had been complaining of abdominal discomfort for some time. She took ill and died of a “stoppage in the bowel” on 5 March 1877, at 2 Clifton Terrace, Kensington. Ludlam returned to New Zealand where he died 10 months after his beloved wife, having devoted his final days to acts of charity. There were no children of the marriage. Writers: Gibbes, Stephen Date written: 1992 Last updated: 2007

Born

b. c.1822

Summary

Fanny Gibbes was a sketcher and the younger sister of well-known sketcher and watercolourist Mary Murray. Gibbes' surviving sketches depict views of Sydney's Point Piper House, where she lived with her family after arriving from England. An associate of Conrad Martens and Frederick Garling, Gibbes later lived in New Zealand with her husband Alfred Ludlam.

Gender

Female

Died

1877

Age at death

55