An address to the inhabitants of the colonies established in New South Wales and Norfolk Island. Written in the year 1792.

London : Printed for the author : and sold by Mathews, Strand; Deighton, Holborn; Trap, Paternoster-Row; and Goff and Amey, No. 8, Ivy-Lane, 1794. Duodecimo (170 x 100 mm), original paper wrappers, inside upper wrapper with ownership inscription of ‘Margaret Amey, No 8 Ivy Lane, May 23d 1808’, upper wrapper with ownership inscription of Rev. William Cowper ‘Stroud – Port Stephens, The Property of Rev. W. M. Cowper, afterwards Dean of Sydney’, and the later nineteenth-century ownership inscription of ‘W. H. H. Yarrington’ at head of title; pp. [2], viii, 74; title-leaf expertly restored at fore-edge, otherwise internally very good; housed in a custom morocco and cloth clamshell box.

‘… the first book circulated in Australia and the first book directed to an Australian audience … As a book designed to be distributed among the convict population of New South Wales it is, not surprisingly, very rare’ (Wantrup).

A significant association copy, with a chain of ownership extending back to a friend of the author who was one of the pamphlet’s distributors.

Rev. Richard Johnson was chaplain to the First Fleet and the first clergyman in the colony. In his address he exhorts its inhabitants to set a moral example for ‘the poor unenlightened savages who daily visit us, and who reside amongst us’. He laments much of what he has witnessed during his time there, in particular the ill-treatment and suffering of the convicts at the hands of their overseers, and the moral degradation and degeneracy amongst the prisoner, military and even civilian population.

The present example has a noteworthy association with the author: it bears the ownership inscription of Margaret Amey, whose 8 Ivy Lane address is the same as that of the firm of Goff and Amey, as recorded in the pamphlet’s imprint (although curiously, Goff and Amey are listed in Kent’s Directory for 1794 as silk dyers, not as the sellers of religious tracts). Andrew Sharp, in his biography of Samuel Marsden, refers to Margaret Amey as being a friend of Richard Johnson:

‘During 1808, when Marsden and [John Mason] Good first met, Marsden settled in with a Mrs Margaret Amey, at 8 Ivy Lane, Newgate Street: friend of Richard Johnson – whose wedding she had attended before he went to New South Wales – and well entrenched in a local evangelical network….’ (Andrew Sharp. The World, the Flesh and the Devil: the life and opinions of Samuel Marsden in England and the Antipodes, 1765-1838, Auckland University Press, 2016, p. 1).

In fact, Margaret Amey was a witness at the weddings of both Marsden and Johnson.

It seems reasonable to speculate that Margaret Amey gave her copy of Johnson’s Address to assistant colonial chaplain Rev. William Cowper (1778-1858), who arrived in Sydney in August 1809, having being personally recommended for the position by Amey’s friend, Samuel Marsden. The pamphlet then passed into the possession of Cowper’s son, Rev. William Macquarie Cowper (1810-1902). Sydney-born W. M. Cowper spent 20 years as chaplain at Port Stephens (1836-1856). He then served briefly as Acting Principal of Moore Theological College and as the incumbent of St. John’s, Bishopthorpe (Glebe), before succeeding his father as minister of St Philip’s Church, Sydney in 1858. Later the same year he was appointed Archdeacon and Dean of Sydney. His inscription on the upper wrapper was therefore probably written no earlier than the 1860s.

The book later passed into the hands of yet another Church of England clergyman, William Yarrington, who was ordained as a deacon of the Church of England in Sydney in 1870, and as a priest in 1872. Yarrington subsequently served in the regional towns of Balranald, Yass, and West Maitland, before his final appointment as minister of St. Luke’s, Burwood and Concord, where he retired in 1909.

Ferguson, 187; Wantrup, 23

Provenance:

The Longueville Collection of Voyages and Travels to Australia and the South Seas, London, Sotheby’s 25th June 1992, lot 134

private collection, Sydney