author
E. (Edward) Hulme
1818–1904
Best known as an artist, lithographer, and memoirist of colonial Australia, he turned the upheavals of migration, gold-rush life, and farming into vivid first-hand writing. His work offers a practical, personal window into nineteenth-century Victoria.
1 Audiobook
A Settler's 35 Years' Experience in Victoria, Australia And how £6 8s. became £8,000
by E. (Edward) Hulme
About the author
Born in England in 1818, Edward Hulme trained as an artist and later emigrated to Victoria, Australia, with his wife and children in 1856. Reference sources on Australian art history describe him not only as a painter and lithographer, but also as an art teacher, gold-miner, and farmer—an unusually varied life that helps explain the grounded, experience-based tone of his writing.
After arriving in Melbourne, he was employed on decorative work connected with the Legislative Chambers in Parliament House, and he also exhibited his art in Australia. His pictures and lithographs are remembered for recording colonial landscapes and settlements, while his later memoir writing drew on decades of hard-earned experience in rural Victoria.
Readers are most likely to know him for A Settler's 35 Years' Experience in Victoria, Australia, a memoir that looks back on emigration, survival, work, and opportunity in the colony. He died in 1904.