painter, art teacher, pastoralist and utopian socialist, was born on 21 May 1843 at Echunga, South Australia, second child of Stephen Hack and Elizabeth Marsh, née Wilton. Sent to his grandparents in Gloucestershire to be educated (at Sandbach Grammar School, Cheshire, and at the University of Heidelberg), Wilton rejoined his father’s pastoral enterprises in the mid 1860s. After the 1865-67 drought he abandoned his run, Pinaroo, and became a drawing master at various schools in Adelaide. In 1868 his pen-and-ink copy of Landseer’s The Combat won a prize at the twelfth annual exhibition of the South Australian Society of Arts. It was commended in the South Australian Advertiser of 12 December 1868 but its lack of colour was considered monotonous. On 10 May 1870 Wilton Hack married Anne Maria Stonehouse and they had at least four children.

Hack began visiting prisoners at Yatala Gaol during his drawing-master years (1868-73) and presumably taught the anonymous artist who painted a unique series of lively watercolours of prison life in a sketchbook dated 1877 (Mortlock Library) attributed to 'one of the prisoners’. Hack went to Japan as a missionary in 1873 but returned to Adelaide in 1876 to obtain government permission to settle some hundreds of Japanese families in the Northern Territory. The scheme came to nothing. He subsequently floated gold-mines in New South Wales, attempted to create a utopian socialist village for the unemployed at Mount Remarkable, South Australia, studied Theosophy in India and Ceylon (Sri Lanka), and travelled to England in 1890 promoting Western Australian gold mines. Returning to Glenelg, (South Australia), he settled down to oil and watercolour painting as a full-time career until his daughter married and his wife died (in 1911). Then he went to Western Australia to visit two of his sons and there had a serious accident. Aged almost 73, he married his nurse, Minnie Alice Wierk, on 26 April 1916. Hack died at Beverley, Western Australia, on 23 February 1923. A sketchbook of elegant drawings in the Mortlock Library mainly records foreign scenery, plus a few South Australian subjects such as the beach at Glenelg, dated 1894.

Writers:

Staff Writer

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

2011