Visual Arts Practice
nichol arts
nichol arts
Visual Arts Practice
nichol arts
Visual Arts Practice
Visual Arts Practice
local Photo Prints
Arthur J. NICHOL
Arthur J. NICHOL
Collected Yarns & Peer Reviews
Collected Yarns & Peer Reviews
Diana Nichol
All-round Arts Worker,
Maker of Things,
Writer of Lists
Founded in the late 1890s by writer and publisher Randolph Bedford and the Lindsay and Dyson brothers, the Ishmael Club brought together a group of artists and writers who proudly saw themselves as outsiders. Naming themselves after the outcast son of Abraham, the Ishmael members gathered together at Fasoli's Italian Restaurant in Lonsdale Street Melbourne, to write and perform poems, songs, debates and plays, and to mock the establishment. They began each meeting with rituals around Joss, an idol created by Norman Lindsay and inspired by Richard Marsh’s popular supernatural novel "The Joss: a reversion" (1900).

Fasoli's Italian Restaurant 1898
Members of the Ishmael Club, c.1900
Left to right, back row to front row: Percy Lindsay, Will Dyson, Norman Lindsay, Lionel Lindsay, Ray Parkinson; Godfrey Elkington, John Elkington, Randolph Bedford, Edward Dyson; John Tremerne, 'Joss', Herman Kühr.

The Ishmael Club.
"Never was a continent naturally so clean, and made so dirty, as Australia. There was not an animal pest, scarcely a vegetable pest; fools and the old world supplied them all."
~ Randolph Bedford
