A new high-speed rail line between London and Birmingham led to archaeological excavations at St James’s burial ground under Euston Station. In 2019, archaeologists uncovered a wooden coffin bearing an engraved plate identifying the remains as those of Captain Matthew Flinders (1774–1814); his to...
Book review byDr David Bedford of David J Mabberley, The Peter Crossing Collection, an illustrated catalogue, Peter Crossing AM, Sydney, 2022. $95 plus pack and post; Book Review by Meredith Hinchliffe AM of Christine Erratt Ceremonial maces ofAustr...
Peter Lane’s article, ‘Australian filet crochet, The Weekly Times Book of Patterns’ that appeared in May 2024 Australiana, included biographies of the crochet designers and judges of the newspaper’s crochet competition. But it did not record the journalist, who used t...
From either ends of the globe, Portière 1901 has been rediscovered. Over 120 years ago, it was created to commemorate the colony of South Australia joining the Federation of Australia. The Portière was commissioned and made by the first women in the world to gain both the right to vote and to st...
When a library was a necessity for a well-educated person, ownership of a book was indicated by the presence of a bookplate pasted into their books. While generic bookplates exist, book collectors often approached an artist to design an ex libris specifically for them,...
The David Roche Foundation, Adelaide will show highlights from the Luke Jones toy collection this winter.
Bill Lowe argues that a silver mug engraved with initials, probably as a christening present, and bearing pseudo-hallmarks and maker’s initials ‘JF’, was most probably made in Hobart by Scottish-born convict silversmith Joseph Forrester, when he was in business there on his own account in the early 1840s....
Knud Bull was born in Norway. He trained as an artist and painted in Norway, Dresden, Copenhagen and Stockholm before moving to London in 1845, where he was arrested for counterfeiting and sentenced to 14 years transportation in Australia. Arriving at Norfolk Island, after nine months he was transferred t...
I trust all members had an enjoyable festive season with family and friends, and took the opportunity to relax. During this period of relaxation, you may well have spent some time reading Australiana and the book so generously donated regarding John Mitchell Cantle, Australia’s first native-born orn...
The Duke and Duchess of York (later King George VI and Queen Elizabeth) visited Australia to open our new Commonwealth Parliament in Canberra in 1927. On their royal tour, the Duke and Duchess briefly stopped at Castlemaine station in April 1927, met by an enthusiastic crowd.
BOOK REVIEW BY WARWICK OAKMAN
Mark R. Cabouret, Out From The Shadows
John Mitchell Cantle 1849 – 1919 Australia’s First Native Born Ornithological Draughtsman.
The Australiana Society Inc, Bondi Junction, NSW, 2023. Soft cover,
175 pages, 683 colour & sepi...
For 65,000 years, Indigenous Australians have incorporated Australian materials into their art, objects, weapons and tools. From the first year of British colonisation, settlers tried to adapt Australian materials and later, Australian motifs, into their art, manufactures and tools. A century later, Frenc...
Born in Portugal and trained in Europe, Artur Loureiro (1853–1932) settled in Melbourne where he painted and taught art for a living between 1884 and 1904. Painting various subjects in a wide range of styles, he associated with all the leading Melbourne artists of the time – Streeton, Conder, McC...
Judging the annual Peter Walker Fine Art Writing Award, established in 1999 to encourage authors to write for Australiana, has proved especially challenging this year, with so many well-researched contributions.
An exploration into the construction and history of an early, distinctively veneered chest of drawers from Tasmania reveals that it has a twin. E.J. Bateman presents the evidence of the two chests' provenance, noting the 'broad arrow' Government inventory marks, and suggests that they were made by convict cabin...
Members of the Australiana Society have many distinctions. Our president Colin Thomas has already praised the work of Di Dorothy Erickson AM on receiving her Member of the Order of Australia award, but at least two more Australiana Society members were honoured. Julian Bickersteth AO and Dr Judith McK...
Recycling ain’t what it used to be. Launceston clock and watch experts Graham and Sallie Mulligan came across a tapestry
footstool which their sharp eyes recognised as comprising re-used parts of an old clock. Further investigation revealed that the
parts came from a sign...
...
The 2023 financial year has proven to be another great year for the Society.
With the disaster that was COVID-
19 behind us, your board got to work at a national and state level to deliver
enhanced opportunities to benefit
me...
Vida Lahey is a well-regarded Queensland artist who exhibited in 33 solo exhibitions beginning in 1902. More recent interest in
women artists rekindled interest in her works. Glenn Cooke reveals a project to document Lahey’s output and seeks the help of
collectors in this...
Jewellers in colonial Australia, often lured by the gold rushes, came from various parts of Britain and Europe, arriving already
having served their apprenticeships. Teaghan Hall tells the story of several members of the Hutton family, who initially came to
the colonial Victorian...
British artist Robert Ponsonby Staples was a casual visitor to Australia with his father Sir Nathaniel Staples, sailing on the first
voyage outwards of the SS Orient in November-December 1880. After a month in Sydney, the pair departed on SS Orient’s return
voyage i...
Leo Schofield describes his first (and last!) gig as chair of the curatorium which devised the current exhibition at the Powerhouse
Museum in Ultimo in Sydney, the first major and kaleidoscopic show of objects from the Museum’s holdings since 1988. It has
proved exception...
Antique jewellery dealer Anne Schofield recently exhibited a collection of rare Aboriginal shell necklaces from Tasmania, which were on show in June at her Woollahra gallery... Tasmanian Aboriginal shell work is unique, the patterns and shell types indicate the maker and also reflecta place or places, the ...
Curator and historian Tim Roberts previews a new exhibition on the English ceramics firm Wedgwood, founded by Josiah Wedgwood in 1759, and linked with the British colonisation of Australia through its design and manufacture of the ‘Sydney Cove Medallions’ in 1789. These were made from Sydney clay sent...
Bob Fredman highlights an interesting discovery, English cabinetmakers using Australian rose mahogany as an exotic furniture timber in the early 19th-century. He suggests that, in the dearth of mentions of rose mahogany in early Australian furniture, there may be a major void in our knowledge and in our collect...
Two early arks held in the museum collection of The Great Synagogue in Elizabeth Street, Sydney are impressive examples of Australian furniture. Their distinct Egyptian style could have been a source of inspiration for the architectural style of the York Street Synagogue (1844). In her search for the...
Robert Griffin makes the case for the introduction of the squatter’s chair – a robust easy chair with swing-out leg rests – as an idea imported from India in the early 19th century. These chairs found a home on the shady verandahs of homesteads, particularly in Queensland and NSW, where the lan...
Leading colonial artist? Or leading early 19th-century British artist working in the colony of Van Diemen’s Land? Clearly the latter. Ron Radford, John Glover, Patterdale Farm and the Revelation of the Australian Landscape reveals how John Glover (1767–1849), a leading artist...
The subject of this book is coins
that have had their surfaces engraved, repurposed to communicate private and public messages. It covers the whole spectrum of engraved coins created
in Great Britain and forms a cultural backdrop of Australian culture, which pre-gold-rush era was predominantly
a ...
The March 2023 Australiana Society National Tour of Canberra and regions was a great success. Forty people from NSW, Victoria, Tasmania and Queensland enjoyed three days visiting diverse collections and houses. Each venue gave us a different perspective and appreciation of Australiana, in d...
Bendigo Art Gallery has drawn on its collections, the Australiana Fund, other collections and especially the National Gallery of Victoria to mount a new survey of Australiana from British settlement to today. Obviously it cannot cover every aspect of Australiana, nor every way artists and crafts...
Victorian chairman Robert Stevens reports on a November 2022 tour to the Central Goldfields region.
Your Board trusts that you have enjoyed exploring our new website, taken the opportunity to review it in detail and researched past articles. Members’ feedback has been most encouraging! As with any change, there is always the odd issue; we are doing our best to fix them and will further enhance the site base...
I began last year’s judge’s report with the observation that the annual Peter Walker Fine Art Writing Award, established in 1999 to encourage authors to write for Australiana, had achieved its objectives. The four issues of Australiana published in 2022 confirm that judgement and show that th...
The National Museum of Australia in Canberra has purchased an Australian billiard table, carved in high relief with multiple panels of scenes of colonial life, and its matching marking board. Its price of $1,100,000 sets a new record for a piece of Australian furniture. The NMA is not known for collecting Austr...
Curator Judith McKay focuses on a unique house museum in the Northern Territory, originally planned in 1920 by the Rev. John Flynn of Flying Doctor fame as a model outback hospital. Its most remarkable feature was a passive ventilation system designed to cool the building on the Coolgardie safe princ...
Spanish monks established the Benedictine mission at New Norcia in Western Australia in 1846. Following on from her article last year on Isidro Oriol,1 Dr Dorothy Erickson concludes her series on the Spanish craftsmen who worked on buildings and furniture for the monastic community. Here she examines...
As far as eating paraphernalia goes, Australiana has previously covered dining tables and chairs, sideboards, ceramic plates, silver table ornaments, Splayds and even tea towels. Megan Martin demonstrates that it is about time we looked at recipe books, particularly as these Queensland examples ...
Queensland collectors Jon and Yvonne Douglas explain how their collecting of Doulton ceramics developed and how, as they read more and more about their passion, their interests deepened. Here they present their research into one particular example with Australian connections, a vase made in 1886 for the Colonia...
Thank you to the members who attended the 2022 Annual General Meeting in person or via zoom. Thank you also for the show of support to me as President and to the other Directors who were elected.
I particularly thank Peter Crawshaw for his nomination and subsequent election to the Secretary’s position. Ly...
William Knox D’Arcy (1849–1917) is remembered today as an indefatigable adventurer, who through financial daring and
extraordinary good fortune, became the ‘founder’ of the modern oil industry in the Middle East. However, there is another
facet to his life, as the ex-Rockhampton solicitor who became a...
November 2022 marks the centenary of the discovery of the virtually intact tomb of King Tutankhamun, who reigned from about 1332 to 1323 BC. The pharaoh’s burial goods created a worldwide sensation focussed on ancient Egypt, which has long fascinated Europeans, partly because of its Biblical connections and p...
Many colonial woodworkers, often trained in Britain or Europe, came to Australia and discovered the vast variety of native timbers suitable for carving or for making furniture and timber articles. Jewellery ‘book boxes’ made from several contrasting North Queensland timbers and bearing the stamp of ‘H.A. ...
Brisbane painter and art teacher Mary E. Jones has escaped recognition for 130 years. She would not be alone in that fate: over time, many aspiring painters and their works disappear from history. Timothy Roberts reveals some details about Miss Jones’s career and her impact as a woman artist in Brisbane betwe...
In America as in England, tea drinking became highly fashionable in the 18th century. The duty imposed on tea imported into Britain’s North American colonies became a catalyst for revolution, highlighted by the Boston Tea Partyin 1773. Many discrete meetings of revolutionaries were fuelled by nothing more inc...
While the artist H. C. Simpson (1879–1966) depicted subjects such as Mount Warning in northern NSW, his output is emphatically linked with the early years of the ‘Gold Coast’ and specifically the resort towns of Coolangatta, Currumbin and Tweed Heads. Although his work is not held in particularl...
Finding more examples of the silver brooch with Indigenous motifs that she discussed in our May issue, Christine Erratt delved further into their history. In the National Archives of Australia, Christine uncovered the 1954 design registration applications.
Six different designs, of which five were inspired b...
As part of their education in useful arts, schoolgirls sewed their own individual samplers, which are also important indicators of progress in educational methods and reach. The format is fairly standard, with the letters of the alphabet in either or both lower and upper case and basic numbers, plus the gi...
Thomas Griffiths (1856–1943), a Welsh blacksmith and wheelwright, emigrated to Queensland to start a new life as a ‘skilled migrant’, at first clinging to his old profession in the Ipswich area. When the Queensland railway network was expanding, he saw
a new business opportunity and opened a sawmill at...