Thomas FLINTOFF

English (c. 1809)–1891
worked in Australia 1853–91

The Ware brothers, Jeremiah George (J. G.), Joseph and John, may have been among the pioneers Thomas Chirnside had in mind when he wrote to Lieutenant-Governor La Trobe in 1853: ‘No doubt Port Phillip is the Eden of the whole … on the Geelong side and Western District, they appeared thoughtful for the future—industrious and persevering, willing to put their shoulder to the wheel and overcome all difficulties.’1 Twenty-year-old J. G. and eighteen-year-old Joseph arrived from Van Diemen’s Land in 1838 to take up land in the Western District. They were soon joined by the younger John. Various stations passed through their hands and, by the middle of the century, J. G. held Koort-Koort-Nong; Joseph, Minjah; and John, Yalla-y-Poora. Great success at breeding high-class sheep and stud shorthorn cattle underpinned their prosperity and, when J. G. died after being thrown from his sulky in 1859, the Geelong Advertiser wrote:

Mr Ware was one of the most enterprising settlers in the colony, and altogether a man of a stamp too rarely met with. In his own neighbourhood he has left a blank which will not soon be filled up. His loss is a loss to the whole community.2

Robert Dowling was painter ‘by appointment’ to the Ware family, but when John Ware sought a portrait of his late brother, Dowling, who had already painted J. G. in c. 1856 (in the collection of Warrnambool Art Gallery), had left the Western District, returned to Tasmania and sailed for England. John Ware went instead to an artist skilled in painting portraits from photographs—probably Thomas Flintoff of Ballarat. Flintoff had arrived in Victoria in 1853 via the Californian goldfields and was a professional photographer as well as a painter. The portrait of J. G. Ware captures the subject’s look and vigour—a contemporary described him as ‘an energetic looking man with black eyes, beard and moustaches’.3

1 T. F. Bride, Letters from Victorian Pioneers, Melbourne, 1898, reprinted 1969, pp. 336–7.

2 Geelong Advertiser, 25 October 1859, p. 3.

3 Diary of William Adeney, 1841, quoted in R. A. McAlpine, The Shire of Hampden 1863–1963, Camperdown?, 1963, p. 47.

Terence Lane