Julius Henschke brings classical sculpting skills to ornaments for Adelaide city's notable buildings, monument

Julius Henschke sculpted the angels for the national war memorial on North Terrace, Adelaide. Also, the Corinthian capitals for parliament house (top right) and architectural features for the Art Gallery of South Australia (bottom left).

(Albert) Julius Henschke was the creative skill adding ornament to some of Adelaide city’s most classic buildings.

Henschke sculpted the angels for the national war memorial on North Terrace, the Corinthian capitals and other architectural features on parliament house (about 1938), the Australian Mutual Provident Society building (1936) and the Art Gallery of South Australia (1937), and the emblem of the Savings Bank of South Australia on its King William Street building (1941).

Born in 1888 at North Rhine (later Keyneton) in the upper Barossa Valley, the sixth child of Paul Gotthard Henschke, farmer and winemaker, and his wife Johanne Mathilde. Paul's Henschke’s father Johann Christian had arrived from Prussia in 1841.

Julius Henschke attended the North Rhine Lutheran school then trained as a monumental mason, stonemason, and sculptorat Tanunda where he opened his own business at Tanunda in the 1920s. Many gravestones in Barossa Valley cemeteries carry his Henschke Tanunda trade name. He also may have carved the fonts in churches. He moved to Adelaide in 1926 to become master mason at the South Australian Monumental Works.

In 1926, the architect Louis Laybourne Smith commissioned the sculptural elements of the National War Memorial in Adelaide to George Rayner Hoff, who made one-quarter-size plaster models in his Sydney studio. Henschke scaled up the models and carved the Angaston-marble reliefs of angels in situ as the memorial was constructed. This work from 1927 to 1931, was his major achievement.

Hoff also commissioned Henschke to carve two independent statues from his plaster models: the portrait of Len Lye, that won the Wynne Prize in 1927, and Australian Venus (1932), that went to the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Henschke was never acknowleged for this work.

He carved war memorials at Tanunda (1920) and Freeling (1923) and the Tanunda monument to E.H. Coombe, who’d defended Barossa Valley people “of German extraction” during World War I. Henschke was one of these. Although a patriotic third-generation Australian, Henschke was refused the commission for the Gawler South war memorial in 1920 solely because of his German name.

Henschke also painted many signs and illuminated addresses, the interior decoration of the church at Gnadenburg in the Barossa Valley (later obliterated), and The Good Shepherd in Alawoona Lutheran church. One of his last works was the base of Maurice Lambert's equestrian statue of King George V, in Angas Gardens, Adelaide, unveiled in 1956.

Henschke was a skilled player of the euphonium, a long-serving member of the Tanunda Brass Band and its deputy leader about 1925. The vigneron Cyril Henschke was his nephew.