Morris & Co., Settler Nation-Building, and the 'Imperial Anthropocene': The Floral Furnishings of Torrens Park, South Australia, 1880–1900.

This article examines the complex role of Morris & Co.’s floral domestic furnishings, designed by William Morris and imported into late nineteenth-century Adelaide, South Australia, within settler colonial society. Focusing on the Barr Smith family’s Torrens Park estate, it argues that these quintessentially British Arts and Crafts designs reinforced settler nation-building by symbolizing British civility, moral values, and regal authority over Indigenous land deemed “hostile” and “uncivilised.” The article highlights how the integration of Morris’s interior garden aesthetics with the physical importation of British flora contributed to settler discourses of landscape “improvement” and environmental control, while masking the dispossession of Aboriginal peoples and ecological destruction linked to colonial industrial capitalism. It further explores the contradictions between Morris’s anti-capitalist, proto-environmentalist ideals and the Barr Smiths’ industrial wealth and social practices, showing how the furnishings functioned as a social veneer that obscured settler colonial violence and reinforced hierarchical power structures.