Travelling for love

As those of you who’ve ever had an 84 Charring Cross Road type of epistolary exchange with a stranger, you will know about the power of the letter to elicit mounting curiosity in the other.

This is exactly what happened between the two people in this photograph: John Henry Nicholson, the eccentric author of the Adventures of Halek, and Anna Katharina Sophia Cordes, German-born translator of German and Swedish, of San Francisco, California.

Their love story was about the meeting of minds, forged via a correspondence across two continents, over a shared delight in language, ultimately resulting in marriage the day after their first meeting in Brisbane, 7 July 1905, despite their 23-year age difference. Their ‘pretty romance’ became the stuff of gossip columns in 1905:

My interest in this photograph was sparked by a query from the South Australian Museum, who were trying to solve the puzzle as to how a now-extinct Queensland ‘Paradise Parrot’ collected by J. H. Nicholson, had come to be in the collection of the Swedish Museum of Natural History.

The State Library holds the papers of John Henry Nicholson (1838 – 1923), but there was nothing in those papers I could find about the bird, so how the bird fetched up in Sweden  remains an unsolved mystery.

What I did discover was that John Henry Nicholson was born in England, and came to Australia as a lad of 16 in 1854. After various adventures in whaling and gold mining, he fetched up in Queensland, dabbling in bird collecting and taxidermy, which he abandoned for a career in education. He became a teacher, setting up private schools in Toowoomba, Warwick and ultimately Nundah. Nicholson was considered brilliant - he spoke several languages, including German, wrote novels and poems, played piano, composed music and patriotic songs, but is remembered principally for his novel, The Adventures of Halek, a curious (some say unreadable) allegorical tale, inspired by Piligrim’s Progress. The moniker ‘Halek’ (the Hebrew work for ‘pilgrim’) stuck, and marks his grave at the Nundah cemetery.

The eldest of twelve, Nicholson had grown up in a distinguished family of literary and scientific note – nearly everyone was a specialist in something. His father John was an eminent biblical scholar, and orientalist; his uncle,  John Waring, was an architect, painter and intellectual; another uncle, William Nicholson, a scholar; a brother, Henry, became a famous palaeontologist; his grandfather, Rev Mark Nicholson had been a Fellow of Queen's College Oxford and president of Codrington College, Barbados; one of his sisters, Annie, was a writer and biographer. It was inevitable that Nicholson would shine at something, and shine he did.

The Nicholson family also had a connection with Ludwig Leichhardt, who they’d befriended after meeting him at the University of Göttingen. This led to the Nicholsons financing his journey to Australia, without which none of his exploration would have happened. Leichardt named the Nicholson River  in north Queensland in honour of the family.

But I digress.

Our photograph was probably taken in 1905, the year of Anna’s arrival from San Francisco and subsequent marriage to Nicholson. By this time Nicholson had abandoned his teaching roles due to increasing bouts of melancholia, and was working as the District Registrar of Births Deaths & Marriages at Nundah which provided a modest yet regular stipend.

Anna was born in Bremervorde, Germany in 1861, but emigrated to America with her parents as a teenager, settling eventually in San Francisco where she became known as a scholar and translator of German and Swedish.

Anna had been given a copy of Halek by Pehr Olsson Seffr, a Stanford University biologist who had met Nicholson in Brisbane, and with whom she had consulted over a point of Swedish translation. Anna became increasingly intrigued with the book and its author, and by 1905 Nicholson, by now a widower (his former wife, Anna Wagner, also German, died in 1901), having decided that he had ‘met his infinity’, decided to throw in his lot in Brisbane and travel to California, only to come down with dengue fever and be unable to travel. So instead, Anna sailed to Brisbane, via New Zealand and Sydney. They were married the day after her arrival.

Tragically, their limerence was cut short by Nicholson’s admission to the Goodna Mental Asylum, only three months into their marriage. Nicholson would languish there, with only occasional outings, for the next 18 years, until his death in 1923.

Vance Palmer, who knew Nicholson, wrote the following of Anna:

“She was so plainly a person who had never lived by other people’s conventions; there was an air about her of one who had never played safe or thought of doing so. She was individual without being aloof, serene without being other-wordly, and when she turned to say something to the old man her eyes gleamed with a subdued gaiety as if they had a private language and enjoyed a secret joke on life together” [1]

Three years after Nicholson’s death in 1926, Anna remarried. Her second husband was Dudley Eglington, F.R.A.S., another elderly scholar, amateur astronomer, and founding  member of the Brisbane Astronomical Society, who had been a friend of Nicholson’s. By the time of his marriage to Anna, Eglinton had lost his sight.

Eglinton had been involved with the Brisbane School of Arts and associated Technical College, and is considered to have been the forerunner of technical education in Queensland. Anna and Eglinton wrote many articles together for the Queensland press about astronomy, under the byline ‘D and A.C. Eglinton’. With other female members of the Brisbane Astronomical Society, Anna also presented papers and debated the latest theories on subjects such as comet behaviour.

Anna died on the 16th October 1948 at the age of 87, 11 years after Dudley’s demise, and was buried at the Toowong Cemetery, with the Eglinton family.

[1] Uncle Halek’ in: Palmer, Vance. Intimate Portraits and other pieces: essays and articles by Vance Palmer selected with an introduction by H.P. Heseltine