Current La Trobe Society Fellowship Recipient - 2009

The following Fellowship has been approved for funding for a period of six months.

Dr Helen MacDonald
The Mysterious Life of Henry Condell, Melbourne’s first Mayor
Book manuscript

Melbourne's first mayor Henry Condell was a mysterious man. Between 1839 and 1853 in the Port Phillip District he was variously an alderman, mayor, magistrate, brewer, hotel keeper, husband and father, yet little of any substance is known of him. Condell was a colonial everyman: the troublesome son of a well-to-do Scottish family, who only really succeeded in making himself in antipodean Melbourne after leaving Van Diemen's Land following the death of a woman he had assaulted.

Yet this man held positions of authority in the District and, strangest of all, was chosen by evangelical firebrand and moralist John Dunmore Lang in 1843 as a pristine Presbyterian candidate for the first New South Wales Legislative Council. Presently it is impossible to understand how Condell came to be thought the best choice for the positions he held. Nor do we know anything about his wife Marion – who was always trailing in Condell's wake as he left her behind first in Edinburgh, then in Hobart Town and finally in Melbourne.

This project will remedy a blind spot in our colonial past by exploring the cultural history of the Port Phillip District through the prism of Henry Condell's life-and-times.