R.E. Minchin reflects British taste for the exotic over Australian nature as an artist and Adelaide Zoo director
R.E. Minchin's Pewsey Vale, SA,(1864) from an album of his watercolours.
Image courtesy Art Gallery fo South Australia
Richard Ernest (R.E.) Minchin brought a prevailing British taste and sensibility to his work as an artist and as founder of dynasty that ran Adelaide Zoo from 1883 into the early 20th Century.
Minchin was a skilled artist, employed as a drawing master by Prince Alfred College and also gave other lessons in painting. He was a longtime member and secretary (1887-92) of the South Australian Society of Arts.
The eighth son of an Anglican minister, Minchin and his brother had joined his family’s exodus from County Cork in Ireland and arrived in South Australia on the Stag in 1850, with letters of introduction to sheriff Charles Burton Newenham and Irish-born pastoralist Charles Bagot.
Richard Minchin worked on one of Bagot's stations near Kapunda before moving around 1854 to Victoria, where he was clerk of court at Bacchus Marsh. Minchin returned with new wife Ellen and their first child to Adelaide, where he landed a clerical job with the civil service, becoming a draftsman with the land titles office.
Minchin was foundation secretary and treasurer of the South Australian Acclimatization Society, founded by chief justice Samuel Way, with other members including Joseph Fisher, William Magarey and Henry Scott of Mount Lofty, who had an extensive songbird collection.
The society was chiefly concerned, as Way said, with introducing and domesticating select “animal, insect and bird species” from the British Isles “whether useful or ornamental ... in the hope that they may be permanently established here and impart to our somewhat unmelodious hills and woods the music and harmony of English country life”. It also hoped the “insect-destroying birds of the mother country” would help diversify South Australian agriculture.
Society members successfully fought to get a section of the Botanic Garden in 1882. Land near the Albert Bridge was given for a zoo, and Minchin appointed its first director. The zoo officially opened in 1883 with Thomas Elder as president of the Zooloogical Society of South Australia. Thomas funded the purchase of an elephant, Miss Siam, and the large rotunda.
Two lions were donated by South Australian governor James Fergusson and John Henry Angas. Although the zoo gained a pair of Tasmanian tigers, its emphasis on exotic, rather than Australian, animals became a long-standing pattern at the zoo.
Minchin was sent to South East Asia and Europe on purchasing expeditions. Back from the 1889 trip to Europe on a similar quest, Minchin settled into the new director's residence. He made one more trip to Hong Kong and caught a disease that left him an invalid and forced to retire to Mount Barker where he died 10 days later. His son Alfred succeeded him as director, serving for more than 40 years.
