Alexander Sutherland

Alexander Sutherland (26 March 1852 – 9 August 1902) was a Scottish-Australian educator, writer and philosopher. Early life and education Sutherland was born at Glasgow, both parents were Scottish, his father, George Sutherland, a carver of ship's figureheads, married Jane Smith, a woman of character and education. The family came to Australia in 1864 on account of the father's health, and Alexander at 14 years of age became a pupil-teacher with the education department at Sydney. Career Coming to Melbourne in 1870, he first taught at John Meeson's Hawthorn Grammar School, then entered on the arts course at the University, largely supported by scholarships, and graduated with honours in 1874. For two years he was a mathematics master at Scotch College, Melbourne, and in 1877 succeeded George Henry Neighbour as proprietor and principal of Carlton College. The school was so successful that 15 years later he was able to retire and devote himself to literature. He was responsible for the first volume of Victoria and its Metropolis (1888), a history of the first 50 years of the state of Victoria. In 1890 he published Thirty Short Poems, the cultured verse of an experienced literary man. The Australian banking crisis of 1893 however, affected his financial position, and he was obliged to take up journalism for the Argus and The Australasian. But his The Origin and Growth of the Moral Instinct, appeared in 1898 in two volumes. Sutherland had long brooded over this work and was greatly pleased at receiving the commendation of some of the leaders of philosophic thought in England. Generally the book was well received both in Europe and the United States. With his brother, George Sutherland, he wrote a short History of Australia, selling 120,000 copies, and he collaborated with Henry Gyles Turner in a useful volume, The Development of Australian Literature (1898). His undoubted powers as a teacher gave value to his text book, A New Geography, and other works of that kind. He contributed on scientific subjects to the nineteenth century, and did a large amount of lecturing on literature and science in Melbourne.