Gregory Hill

European immigrant William Milner was a little-known entrepreneur who established a porcelain manufacturing business after arriving in Melbourne in 1911. The porcelain industry was largely driven by a massive need for electrical insulators, and, as COVID-19 has demonstrated today, a local industry was essential to guarantee supply. Milner expanded into table wares, decorative items and sculpture, establishing substantial ceramic workshops in Victoria and later Queensland, which continued to be managed by family members after his death in Ipswich in 1942. Some of Victoria’s best known art potters such as Merric Boyd, Hatton Beck and William Ricketts experimented with porcelain. This story is abridged from a chapter of Greg Hill’s new book presenting his detailed research into Australian porcelain and its makers.

Greg Hill’s new research, using contemporary newspapers and other resources now easily available on Trove, has found a raft of previously unknown potteries operating in Victoria in the 19th century. These push back the dates of Victorian pottery manufacture into the 1840s. Many examples of these wares however were overlooked and unrecognised, because the names of their potteries suggested a British origin. Until now, the earliest date for pottery manufacture in Victoria was thought to be in the 1860s, with a few potteries operating long and successfully into the 20th century. Most potteries were small operations run by people from diverse backgrounds, producing different types of ceramic goods, augmenting and often pre-dating the bigger, well-known potteries.

Brothers Graham and William Ferry both trained as potters in Yorkshire, emigrated to Victoria and set up their own potteries in Melbourne’s Brunswick in the last two decades of the 19th century. Noted for their sculptural domestic wares and colourful majolica wares, here Greg Hill makes the case for recognising them as Australia’s first art potters.