Doubts and Certainties
A life of Alexander Leeper
by John Poynter
Alexander Leeper, who first arrived in Melbourne in 1869 and died there in 1935, was one of a group of Irishman – Protestants, graduates of Trinity College, Dublin – who were very influential in Australia between those years.
One of Australia’s great controversialists, Leeper was most widely known for the issues he fought, in the Press and on platforms: against Home Rule for Ireland, and for conscription to fight for the Empire in World War 1, in conflict with Archbishop Mannix; within the University of Melbourne, to prevent the re-appointment of the ‘immoralist’ Marshall-Hall as Professor of Music, and of German members of staff in 1914; within the Anglican Church, as a leading layman, against a succession of archbishops and what he saw as a High Church cabal; and in the community generally, above all to preserve classical scholarship, of which he was a brilliant exemplar. Even his greatest achievement, the establishment of Trinity College, was marred by rebellion in 1890, when most of the students burnt him in effigy and quit in a procession of hansom cabs. His pioneering creation of university residence for women led to sharp conflict with leading ladies of the colony; and his presidency of the National Gallery was harassed by criticism off its acquisitions.
Leeper was certainly combatative, but not simply so. He was warm and charming, and intense and complex personality, torn by an obsessive conscience and impeded by a massive hypochondria, fully set out in the extraordinary diaries and letters he preserved: ‘What a strange complex love story we have has’, his first wife Adeline wrote on her deathbed, after ten years of wooing and fourteen of marriage. His correspondence with his brilliant sons in the Foreign Office in London constitutes a remarkable family chronicle, to which his gritty sisters in Ireland provided an appropriately classical chorus of unsought advice.
Professor John Poynter
Professor John Poynter was a student of Trinity College (where he twice won the Leeper Prize for Oratory) in 1948-50. Victorian Rhodes Scholar for 1951, he returned from Oxford to be Dean of the College (1953-64) and Joint Acting Warden (1964-65). Appointed Ernest Scott Professor of History in the University of Melbourne in 1966, and a Deputy Vice-Chancellor in 1975, he is now, in retirement, a Professor Associate in the Australian Centre. Melbourne University Press has published his Russell Grimwade (1967), Society and Pauperism (1969) and A Place Apart (with Carol Rasmussen, 1996)