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'Melbourne by 1856 was growing in confidence and grandeur, as Henry Gritten’s fine painting of Swanston Street depicts. Captain Charles Swanston, the man after whom the bustling thoroughfare was named, would have been gratified. Swanston—heroic soldier of the Honourable East India Company, Van Diemen’s Land banker, legislator, pillar of Hobart Town society, fomenter of the squatting rush to Victoria—could always recognise a good commercial opportunity. His business tentacles stretched around the globe. Yet following the catastrophic collapse of the Derwent Bank, his desperate dash to the California goldfields and his mysterious death at sea, he was virtually expunged from the public record. In reviving Swanston’s remarkable story from a dusty, almost forgotten treasure trove of bank archives, Eleanor Robin brings to light his considerable contribution to the economic, political and social life of Van Diemen’s Land and his leading role in the settlement of Melbourne.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Works about this Work
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Susan Priestley Review of Eleanor Robin, Swanston: Merchant Statesman
2020
single work
review
— Appears in: Australian Journal of Biography and History , April no. 3 2020; (p. 173-177)
— Review of Swanston : Merchant Statesman 2018 single work biography 'The 1940 discovery in a disused flour mill on the outskirts of Hobart of the entire archive of the local Derwent Bank, from its founding in 1828 until its closure and liquidation, 1849–54, would thrill anyone with a historical bent, then or since. Archivists, on the other hand, might gasp at the somewhat chancy handling of the collection before what remained finally reached safe haven in the University of Tasmania archives. But at least it escaped the recycled paper drive of wartime Australia that induced the indiscriminate culling of some records, official as well as private. Eleanor Robin writes about the archive’s discovery and subsequent mining by historians and others in an absorbing introduction to this biography, which seeks to reinstate Charles Swanston (1789–1850) in Australian historical memory.' (Introduction)
-
Susan Priestley Review of Eleanor Robin, Swanston: Merchant Statesman
2020
single work
review
— Appears in: Australian Journal of Biography and History , April no. 3 2020; (p. 173-177)
— Review of Swanston : Merchant Statesman 2018 single work biography 'The 1940 discovery in a disused flour mill on the outskirts of Hobart of the entire archive of the local Derwent Bank, from its founding in 1828 until its closure and liquidation, 1849–54, would thrill anyone with a historical bent, then or since. Archivists, on the other hand, might gasp at the somewhat chancy handling of the collection before what remained finally reached safe haven in the University of Tasmania archives. But at least it escaped the recycled paper drive of wartime Australia that induced the indiscriminate culling of some records, official as well as private. Eleanor Robin writes about the archive’s discovery and subsequent mining by historians and others in an absorbing introduction to this biography, which seeks to reinstate Charles Swanston (1789–1850) in Australian historical memory.' (Introduction)
Awards
- 2018 shortlisted Ashurst Business Literature Prize