Search results for 'Teaghan Hall'

President’s update

I trust all members had a most enjoyable festive season with family and friends. 2025 is well and truly upon us with significant events planned for the calendar year.It was most pleasing to finish 2024 with 556 members. This is a record for the society and demonstrates the value which members perceive they are ...

The Thallon Memorial Medal – a gold prize for the children of Queensland railway workers

Over a period of nearly 60 years from 1913 to 1970, about 200 outstanding Queensland school students, sons and daughters of employees of the Queensland Railways, were awarded gold medals valued at £3/10/, or the equivalent in scholastic books, in memory of Railway Commissioner J F Thallon (1847–191...

The 1889 Queensland Deposit Bank and Building Society silver trowel

A new bank in 1880s Brisbane needed a solid, impressive building and a ‘pleasing and interesting’ event to lay its cornerstone. The Queensland Deposit Bank arranged a formal ceremony, with a silver trowel to symbolically ‘well and truly lay’ the corner stone, under which were placed current newspapers a...

Joseph Forrester’s silver marks

London silver dealer Wynyard Wilkinson suggests an explanation and chronology for the punches used on silver created by the convict silversmith Joseph Forrester, who worked in Tasmania and later Victoria. In the absence of a formal hallmarking system in Australia, he postulates that some Scottish-trained silver...

John Wilson Carey and his ‘Queensland’ cabinet timbers

Scottish-born immigrant cabinetmaker John Wilson Carey (1829–1902) made two exceptional items of Queensland
cabinetwork in the 1870s which still exist today. His skilful use of many different Queensland timber veneers makes them
cabinetmaking tours de force. ...

A Silver Mug by Joseph Forrester

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....

The Peter Walker Fine Art Writing Award 2023

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. 

Henry F Hutton and the Hutton family, Victorian jewellers

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...

Early Sydney silver flatware

Four early Australian silver flatware items – two spoons and two forks – engraved with the three initials ‘WEB’ present a challenge warranting research. Whose engraved initials (WEB) are they and when were the items made and engraved? Christine Erratt offers an answer. Four flatware1items with...

Update from the President

I trust all members enjoyed a wonderful festive season and new year with family and friends. Who would have thought at this time last year that 2020 would present us with the challenges that it did? Hopefully 2021 will prove to be more the ‘norm’. As I write this, regional COVID outbreaks appear to have bee...

The Invisible Man

Sometimes it is easy to find information about an artist in reference works. Sometimes information can be readily found through internet resources. Stephen Marshall, looking at wider issues of art appreciation, chose as an example William Young, who painted many watercolours around Sydney and NSW from the 1920s...

Australian goldsmiths' marks: the records of the Australian Assay Office

When you are dealing with precious metals, you want to know that what you have is what it is claimed to be. European countries instituted hallmarking systems to verify this, some of them operating for over 700 years. Silver expert Jolyon Warwick James discusses how Australia had its own hallmarking system, but ...

W. J. Williams: art decorator of Ayers House, North Terrace, Adelaide

At a heritage conference in Adelaide in 2015, Dr Donald Ellsmore attributed the superb interior decoration at Adelaide’s Ayers House and Gawler’s Para Para in South Australia to the Sydney decorating firm of Lyon, Cottier & Co. and their employee Charles Gow, purely on speculation. Till now, his opinion has...

The cabinet maker and the carver: George Thwaites and Daniel Livingstone

Prestigious Melbourne cabinet maker Geo. Thwaites & Son operated from 1842 to 1889, providing high-class furniture for Victoria’s mansions, homesteads and prominent institutional and public buildings. Today the firm is best remembered for its contracts to furnish Government House in 1854 and again in 1875 and...

Book Review: Blamire Young

Author Stephen Marshall is to be congratulated on writing this carefully compiled compendium of (William) Blamire Young’s watercolours, for while in his own words he is a passionate art lover, he modestly refutes being an expert on art history. Nevertheless, over 650 pages he has assembled an impressive catal...

Book Review: Jewels on Queen

In 1970, Anne Schofield opened the first shop in Australia dealing exclusively in antique jewellery (in Queen Street, Woollahra, hence the book title) and has been dealing from there ever since. She is well-known from her appearances at fairs and in the media, for her support foreword which introduces the reade...

A.S. Trood, a silver medal and Belle Vue Hall School

John Locksley Kemp, a descendant of Richard Kemp, gave a silver medal, passed down through the Kemp family, to the Powerhouse Museum in 1984. Very little was known about the medal’s history until Karen Eaton came across it by chance while viewing the Museum’s on-line collection database. Also a descendant o...

John Wood, gentleman turner

The construction of the complex and difficult-to-make oval cedar case for the Woodstock Challenge Cup (plate 1) illustrated in my article “Essie Jenyns and her Australian Terriers” has prompted me to wonder how and why it came into being. Recently I purchased for my reference library a complete set of the B...

George's hall, Major Johnston's Bankstown estate

Inside the picture framing business ledgers of John Thallon, 19th century picture framer of Melbourne

Genesis of the Riverview Gold Challenge Cup

Genesis of the Riverview Gold Challenge Cup

Book review: A. Hall & Company, The Grandest Display of Household Furniture in the Colony, Sydney 1897, reprint

Book review: David Moore (with text by Rodney hall), 'Sydney Harbour’ 1994

Pseudo English Hallmarks on German Silver and an Australian Connection

A History of Music in Australia. Mrs Chester from Drury Lane - 1835

A History of Music in Australia. Early Period - New South Wales 1835-1836

A History of Music in Australia. Early Period - New South Wales 1834 - June 1835

A History of Musice in Australia - Early Period - New South Wales: 1827 - 1833

A History of Music in Australia - Early Period New South Wales 1818-1826

A History of Music in Australia, Early Period - New South Wales: 1788-1817

Exhibitions: 'Fitzroy Lost and Found. A History in Photographs. Fitzroy Town Hall’