Eben Gowrie Waterhouse

Eben Gowrie Waterhouse OBE CMG (1881–1977) was an Australian who had three distinguished careers. Starting out as an innovative teacher of languages, he became one of Australia's most prominent Germanists when classical German culture still commanded worldwide respect. Between the Wars in Sydney he was a leading arbiter of taste in house-and-garden living, fostering a conception of garden design which still dominates much of the Sydney North Shore and parts of Melbourne. Finally, in his long retirement he brought about, as scholar and plant-breeder, a revival of international interest in the genus Camellia.

Eben Gowrie Waterhouse (Gowrie to his intimates) was born in Sydney on 29 April 1881. He was the second of the three boys of Gustavus John Waterhouse and his wife Mary Jane Vickery, both native-born. His two grandfathers were English, one grandmother Scottish, one German. To his German grandmother he attributed his lifelong love of the German language. His older brother, Gustavus Athol (known as Athol; 1877–1950) became a noted entomologist and published the first comprehensive catalogue of Australian butterflies. His younger brother, Leslie Vickery (Les) Waterhouse (1886–1945) was an influential mining engineer. Gowrie came to love plants, especially native plants, as a young bushwalker.

With his brothers, Waterhouse was educated at Sydney Grammar School and the University of Sydney (B.A. with first class honours in French, German and Italian 1900–1903; MacCallum Prize for English 1901; M.A. 1919).

After four years teaching at the King's School Parramatta, and two years studying languages and phonetics at Leipzig, Waterhouse returned as master of foreign languages at Sydney Grammar with his "direct method" of teaching foreign languages. The method was to begin using the language in conversation getting the sounds right; underlying grammatical structure came later. It was so successful he was quickly taken on to the faculty of the Sydney Teachers' Training College. His pupils there disseminated the method in New South Wales schools. He became Associate Professor of German at the University of Sydney in 1926; professor of German and Comparative Literature from 1938 to 1946. He was also prominent from the 1920s in the Goethe Society, the Alliance Française and the Dante Alighieri Art and Literary Society. Waterhouse relinquished his university chair in 1946, but remained honorary curator of the university grounds till 1949.

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