sketcher and letter-writer, was born on 29 April 1826 in Bristol, Somerset, eldest child of Rev. Charles Wansbrough Henning and Rachel Lydia, née Biddulph. With her sister, Amy, she left for Sydney on board the Calcutta in 1854 to join another sister, Annie, and their brother, Biddulph, who had leased a farm at Appin, New South Wales, the previous year. They soon moved to Biddulph’s farm on the Bulli Mountain. The Dwelling at Mount Keira (private collection), a conventionally picturesque view of the cottage in the Illawarra rainforest, has been attributed to her. Homesick and unhappy, Rachel returned to England in 1856 but came back to New South Wales in 1861, joining Biddulph in Queensland the following year on his run, Exmoor, in the South Kennedy district. Somewhat to her surprise, she discovered that she loved station life.

Rachel Henning is now known for her letters, many of which were written to another sister, Etta Boyce, who had remained in England; others were to Amy after her marriage to Thomas Sloman. The Letters of Rachel Henning were first published in the Bulletin in 1951-52 (with illustrations by Norman Lindsay) and subsequently in several book editions. They give a personal and very lively view of rural life in Australia, particularly that on her brother’s Queensland property. They also reveal that like many well-bred Victorian girls Rachel learned to sketch in youth and pursued this activity in Australia.

Unfortunately, sketching activities are recorded only in her early years when Henning was convinced that anything colonial was inferior. One of a pair of locally 'finished’ young ladies who visited her from Melbourne produced an album 'filled with her own and her schoolfellows’ drawings … utterly below criticism. The worst of our “Mount” drawings in the earliest days of learning were works of art compared to them’, she wrote in 1863. When she mentioned her own sketching activities in 1861 she noted that she preferred to copy and enlarge vignettes from a Thomas Creswick illustrated edition of Tennyson rather than draw local landscapes. These she found 'very curious, being so utterly un-English [and] not exactly beautiful’; yet soon she was enamoured of the bush landscape and its flowers.

Henning’s Queensland years seem to have allowed little time for painting. After her marriage on 3 March 1866 to her brother’s overseer, Deighton Taylor, she records enjoying poetry and music but no sketching is mentioned. Nevertheless, a grey wash view of Biddulph’s Exmoor homestead (c.1862-67, (Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney), 'a long low building, built of dark-coloured slabs of wood with a veranda in front, and the doors and windows opening on to it’, and a watercolour of a group dining under canvas by a river in the bush (Bowen Historical Society) have been attributed to her, the latter possibly a view near her home on the Myall River where her husband managed a timber-logging business.

Rachel Henning was especially fond of gardening and is said to have created gardens wherever she lived. She died at Biddulph’s home, Passy, Hunter’s Hill, Sydney, on 23 August 1914. Deighton Taylor predeceased her in 1900 and they had no children.

Writers:

Kerr, Joan

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

2011