Furnishing progressive settlers: Natasha Wilcockson, ‘Morris & Co., Settler Nation-Building, and the “Imperial Anthropocene”: The Floral Furnishings of Torrens Park, South Australia, 1880-1900’, Art History, 2025 | settler colonial studies blog

Furnishing progressive settlers: Natasha Wilcockson, ‘Morris & Co., Settler Nation-Building, and the “Imperial Anthropocene”: The Floral Furnishings of Torrens Park, South Australia, 1880-1900’, Art History, 2025

21Jun25

Abstract: Faced with the impacts of climate change and colonialism, historians have been quick to celebrate Victorian Arts and Crafts designer William Morris as an important early green voice. Morris produced hand-crafted furnishings inspired by the British countryside to induce respect for nature and resist the nefarious consequences of capitalism. Yet celebratory histories of this enterprise overlook the ramifications of Morris’s nature-oriented designs when they were exported into entirely contrasting environmental contexts, such as colonial South Australia. This essay explores the significance of Morris’s interiors in the homes of the influential Barr Smith family in Adelaide. It investigates the relationship between Morris’s furnishings, the process of settler nation building, and the repression of Aboriginal peoples and lands: lines of enquiry that reveal some of the contradictions within the designer’s principles, in theory and in practice.

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