Ambrose Pratt

Ambrose Goddard Hesketh Pratt (born August 31, 1874 in Forbes , New South Wales , Australia , † April 13, 1944 in Australia) was an Australian author and journalist .

Life

Pratt was the third of seven children and grew up in a middle-class household in the care of a Chinese customer nurse (Amah). His grandfather, the physician Henry Pratt, was already fascinated by the Indian and Tibetan religions in his later life . Eustace Pratt, his father, was also a doctor and had spent some of his life in India and China. Ambrose attended the Jesuit school St. Ignatius' College in Riverside (New South Wales) and the Sydney Grammar School . In private lessons he learned French and German and did sports such as boxing, horse riding, fencing and shooting.

Pratt dropped out of medical school and went on to study law. During this time he began writing for the Australian Workers' Union newspaper, but at the same time turned against immigration from Asia . In 1897 he was admitted to the New South Wales Supreme Court. His work as a lawyer did not satisfy him, however, and so he worked for a while as a carriage driver in Queensland and on a ship in the trampoline trip in the South Pacific before he went to England . There he began writing novels and short stories, including for magazines such as The Bulletin and The Lone Hand . At the same time he started working as a journalist for the Daily Mail , which sent him to Australia in 1905.

In the same year Pratt moved to The Age , where he was sponsored by David Syme and gained influence. He traveled to Pretoria with Australian Prime Minister Andrew Fisher in 1912 to attend the opening of parliament for the newly formed Union of South Africa . After the First World War he was an important advocate of protectionism in the emerging tariff debate. He founded and was a partner in the Australian Industrial and Mining Standard until 1927 and was involved in tin mines in Malaya and Siam himself in the 1920s .

Pratt was President of the Royal Zoological and Acclimatization Society of Victoria from 1921 to 1936 . After his retirement from journalism, he dealt more intensively with the preservation of the fauna of Australia, around the zoo in Melbourne , Victoria and founded the zoological research institute in Healesville just outside the city . Since 1925 he has been promoting the Kapspur railway line from Melbourne to Alice Springs . He was the guest of honor on the train's first run, The Ghan . Since the Australian Labor Party split in 1916, his views have become more conservative. In 1931 he even wrote the resignation letter from the politician and later Prime Minister Joseph Lyons .

In later years, Pratt turned against the White Australia Policy and xenophobia in Australia in the late 1930s and early 1940s.

honors and awards

• Part of the Melbourne Zoo was named after Ambrose Pratt.

Publications

Pratt wrote about 30 novels, including z. B.

• Kings of the Rocks . Hutchinson, London 1900.
• The Great “Push” Experiment , Grant Richards, London 1902.
• The Counterstroke , Ward, Lock & Co., London 1906.
• The Leather Mask . 1907

he also published, for example

• David Syme: The Father of Protection in Australia . Ward Lock & Co., London 1908.
• The Real South Africa, with an introduction by Andrew Fisher , Prime Minister of the Commonwealth of Australia . The Bobbs-Merill Company, Indianapolis, Indiana, USA 1912.
• The Lore of the Lyrebird . The Endeavor Press, 1933. (Reprints: Robertson & Mullens, Melbourne 1938 and 1940).
  • Menura: Magnificent bird lyre-tail. Translated from English and edited by Rainer G. Schmidt. Friedenauer Presse, Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-932109-69-0 .
• Centenary History of Victoria . Robertson & Mullens, Melbourne 1934.
• The Call of the Koala . Robertson & Mullens, Melbourne 1937.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ A talented bird. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung . November 20, 2011, p. 60.