Here is the introduction to my essay on Francis Jerome Ernest Hart. I am obliged to keep the full essay back until my presentation to the Royal Western Australian Historical Society next February. I hope it tells a little of the story, given you are a relative. Regards
Brendan Kelly
The influence that Francis Jerome Ernest Hart occasioned upon the culture of Western Australia (WA) in the last two decades of the 19th Century has largely been understated. Hart busied his way in WA as a self-starter, free thinker, opinionist, editor, actor, public speaker, raconteur, press agent, punter, singer, musician, librettist, journalist, committeeman and organiser; a sometimes dishonest, scheming, brilliant and ultimately dissolute man.
Hart’s highflying career has been captured in a scattered fashion, including by the National Library Australia (NLA), which abridged his achievements in journalism, the theatre and music, bestowing due praise for his writing, performing and musical proficiency. The NLA also alluded to Hart’s “distinctly radical tendencies”, however his personality and influence are mostly unexplored and the biography left off post-1894 with: “little more has been discovered concerning Francis Hart’s life or career”.
The basis of the NLA biographical sketch is ‘TABLE TALK’, a Melbourne based literary magazine, which in 1894 channelled the voice of Hart himself, in a virtual self-portrait of his career. In the opening lines Hart is sold somewhat mockingly as having "suddenly sprung himself on Melbourne as an operatic librettist and a perambulating bureau of information on WA”. ‘TABLE TALK’ captures Hart at the peak of his powers, a 34-year old man with the gift of communication and the skills of a minstrel, a man whose tastes and proclivities are cosmopolitan, metropolitan and by imputation, unconventional.
Francis Hart’s extrovert personality and professional hyperactivity progressed in three periods in WA – as a young school master and budding journalist (1879-1883), newspaper editor and community livewire in Geraldton (1883-1888) and a self-promoter and patron of the arts in Perth (1888-1896). It is easy to contend that Hart became the ringleader of a group of talented people who dipped their not inconsiderable gifts into the fabulous trough of wealth and cultural activity generated by the Western Australian gold boom. In Hart’s case, money slipped through his fingers as fast as it could be appropriated and his business career was punctuated by debt and bankruptcy, even though there were great times of plenty.
In the midst, his publicity machine (he was his own press secretary) churned out tens of thousands of words in newspapers, journals and handbooks, praising friends and scarifying enemies, but always promoting the State of WA. Hart’s theatre reporting is extraordinarily long-winded and wide, and his own efforts composing and performing, producing and publicising, marked him as a formidable patron of the dramatic arts.
Francis Hart was an impresario who procured the energy and the money of a wide circle of WA men and women; friends, enemies, honest folk and spivs, the rich and powerful, racehorse owners, barmaids and milk men, the newspaper boy in the street. Slightly built and dapper, a less than dedicated Freemason (albeit his lodge’s best organist) Hart knew the benefits of sharing a crowd in common.
The evidence is that Hart, cited in ‘TABLE TALK’ as at one time the: “best hated man in the community", not only possessed a prodigious talent but also a forthright personality that bordered on the overly keen and cocky. His network of prominent Western Australian's included intimately bound personal relationships with Governor Sir William Robinson, a more than passing acquaintanceship with the Premier Sir John Forrest and a host of personalities.
Hart cultivated connections across government and administrative classes, in pursuit of his own agenda, while his political views and assertive opinions, could be as subtle as they were base. He became a self-possessed workaholic, by way of a freelance supplier of words hustling for income, or after securing good government contracts, sailing along on a vessel of his own design.
Francis Hart was a showman, publicist and opportunist, an advertising man whose star burned brightly and singed a few.
