Seldom do prisoner of war trench art objects indicate where they were made. One that does is carved from wood in the shape of continental Australia, with the words and date “Murchison den [the] 24.8.1941” together with a stylised Australian coat of arms.
During the second decade of the new millennium, many pioneers of the crafts movement in Australia, which began to flourish in the 1970s, will celebrate four decades of working in studio practices with their chosen materials.
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...
The National Gallery of Australia holds a three-piece silver buckle that originally formed the central element of a Champion’s Boxing Belt presented to prize-fighter Isaac Reid in 1847 (plate 1). This remarkable belt was made by Sydney silversmiths J.J. Cohen & Son1 and engraved by John Carmichael. Until rece...
Dr Annette Gero’s article “Wartime quilts” in the May 2015 Australiana stimulated Peter Lane to contact her about an Anglo-Boer War keepsake. Trooper Ernest Worrall of South Australia had drawn images and words on this rather small scrap of khaki fabric in 1902. Mementoes of that war are rare and Dr Gero ...
Samuel Thomas Gill died melodramatically, aged 62, on the steps on the Melbourne Post Office at half past four on Wednesday 27 October 1880. A policeman recorded that he “was in a most filthy state and covered with vermin” while a search of the pockets found pills which identified him. An autopsy revealed t...
Edinburgh-born John Carmichael arrived in Sydney in 1825, living and working there for over 30 years producing landscapes, portraits, maps, billheads, musical scores, illustrations and some of Australia’s first postage stamps. His works provide a revealing and valuable record of life and times in colonial Syd...
The extended title for this splendid visual feast is a catalogue to accompany the exhibition Postcards from the Edge of the City at the Santos Museum of Economic Botany, 9 December 2014 to 26 April 2015. As a catalogue this book contains the front and back sides of 300 postcards published between 1900 and 1917.
Museums tend to lift items out of the ordinary world into the refined orbit of curators. In detailing the history of a collection of Krimper furniture bought by a Sydney family, Catriona Quinn shows the importance of knowing the history of an object, its owners and context – its provenance – and argues that...
Australiana Society members were privileged to see, touch and experience many and varied treasures on our Tasmanian tour. Here we showcase the welcome and rare opportunities extended to those who participated, and encourage other members to consider creating a future tour showcasing your state or region, offeri...
Published as the first of two hardcover volumes (the second will cover the period from 1950 to now), this is Dr Dorothy Erickson’s most ambitious publishing venture. Exploring the work of designers and makers in Western Australia since the founding of the Swan River Colony in 1829 until 1969, it is her most s...
Over the last 20 years or so interest in convict artist Joseph Lycett (1775–1828) has steadily quickened and heightened in Australian popular culture through the influence of various published works and exhibitions. He is now held in high regard by art and cultural historians.
R.B. Smith made his model of the Strasburg Clock to celebrate the centenary of British settlement. It was hailed as a “scientific triumph of Australian workmanship”. At first, Smith exhibited it privately “like a fat woman in a country fair”1 until it found a home in Sydney’s Technological Museum. The...
Cricket is in the news with the Ashes being played in England. Sir Donald Bradman (1908–2001) is respected as the world’s best and most famous cricketer, both in Australia and the United Kingdom. His grandfather, Charles Bradman, lived in the small Suffolk village of Withersfield until he emigrated to Austr...
In the 19th century, an appropriately draped “chair of state” under a canopy was deployed on formal occasions when the monarch or her vice-regal representative was present. These chairs were conspicuously larger than any surrounding chairs, acknowledging the status of the occupant. Dr La Nauze traces the hi...
Hordern House continues their excellent service in the publication of early colonial history by releasing Robert Purdie’s Narrative of the Wreck of HMS Porpoise hot on the heels of Elizabeth Ellis’s book on The Sydney Punchbowl in the Mitchell Library. Here the subject is a first-hand description of the fou...
David Kelly sets out in this book to chart the history of 100 or so master cabinet-makers working in New South Wales up to 1850. His introduction discusses that bland sentence in some detail, meticulously defining those terms and the parameters of his research. Then Kelly outlines the structure of the book, sou...
A collection of flower paintings by Adrian Feint, belonging to his friend and fishing companion Les Godden, came to light last year when they were sold at auction. Catriona Quinn researches the background of this collection, the work of Adrian Feint and his artistic friendships.
Colonial Australian jewellery is rarely marked with the name of its maker or retailer. Perth jewellery dealer Trevor Hancock sticks his neck out and attributes several pieces to the German-born Adelaide jeweller C. E. Firnhaber, based on stylistic similarities of the works. All of them are illustrated here.
The Art Gallery of South Australia is showcasing for the first time over 50 examples of Australian decorative arts given to the Gallery by Adelaide psychiatrist Dr Robert Lyons, who had assembled one of the finest private collections of South Australian decorative arts.
The first update to my book Convict and Free: the Master Furniture-makers of NSW 1788–1851 will be available on CD in December, with at least two new chapters, on Thomas Mercer Booth and John McMahon. However, Australiana members may be interested to learn now that a reader from Ireland has provided me with d...
The practice of presenting diplomatic gifts to dignitaries goes back to antiquity. As the much-admired wife of the governor of the colonies of Queensland, New Zealand and Victoria, Diamantina, Lady Bowen received some significant pieces of jewellery and metalwork. These gifts were frequently, and often fulsomel...
This soft-paste porcelain mug, 8.7 cm high and 9 cm diameter, is painted in overglaze enamels on a Wedgwood “Barlaston” blank dated 1947. Feint’s choice of this Wedgwood form, together with the incorporation of the date 1947 and the letters J F as key elements in the design, suggests an awareness of the n...
World War I began 101 years ago. Galleries all around the world, including many in Australia, are having exhibitions with memories of this war. The Gallipoli campaign is particularly significant to Australians and New Zealanders this year, with the centenary on the first landing on 25 April 1915, and the withdr...
On 1 January 2014, the University of Ballarat and the Gippsland campus of Monash University amalgamated to form Federation University Australia. The ceremonial mace formerly used at the University of Ballarat is currently in use as the ceremonial mace for the new university... It was not John [Joseph] Thomas Ha...
The Ashes! Is it a bail, or a veil? Tom Thompson looks at a hidden treasure from Australia’s sporting history.
The centenary of the First World War has Lesley Garrett bringing out her family’s mementoes of “the war to end all wars” – and regretting the loss of their context.
Some people are or have been particularly influential in the development of appreciation and understanding of our heritage in Australia. Here we pay tribute to three individuals who contributed significantly, each of them in different ways, and who will be sadly missed both personally and professionally.
The Fereday service is a rare example of armorial porcelain tableware relating to colonial Australia, bearing the name, position and crest of the owner Dudley Fereday, first Sheriff of Van Diemen’s Land (1823–33) (plate 1). Although none of the surviving pieces bears a mark identifying the manufacturer, the...
After a short career in the British army, John Jardine, the youngest brother of the eminent Scottish ornithologist Sir William Jardine, in 1839 decided to emigrate to Australia. In 1861, he served as a police magistrate and gold commissioner at Rockhampton, then became a pioneer settler at Somerset on Cape York...
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...
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...
Australiana magazine has been presenting important information and original research about Australian decorative arts and heritage for 36 years, and is now the leading publication in the field. While we promised a bumper issue in November, I can now announce an even better alternative – our first monograph, t...
Jewellers William Lamborn, Leopold Wagner and Samuel Woollett all arrived at Melbourne in the first few years after the discovery of gold in Victoria in 1851. Recent research has uncovered new information on these jewellers and their firms – Wagner & Woollett, Lamborn & Wagner and Woollett & Hewitt. The new i...
Another of the talented women artists who came to the colony of Western Australia was Annie Purnell. She was not a professional artist, but the “Angel in the House” for her bachelor brother, the Anglican minister the Reverend Robert Purnell. As was typical of gentlewomen of the time, she would have been tra...
In the 18th century, a time keeper that would keep accurate time at sea was essential to find longitude. Britain’s Board of Longitude offered a massive prize of £20,000 for the inventor of such a device, contributing to major advances in timekeeping. John Hawkins argues that a time keeper by London watchmake...
This spectacular exhibition of jewellery spanning cultures and millennia is billed as the most ambitious jewellery exhibition the Powerhouse Museum (part of the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences) has ever staged. With 700 exhibits drawn from public and private collections across Australia, it takes several vi...
tracing the provenance of a Berlin woolwork picture now held in the Powerhouse Museum led to information about the involvement of the Agricultural society of New south Wales in setting up the 1870 Exhibition in sydney, a bronze medal awarded at that event, the winner of the medal and maker of this extraordinary...
A beautiful late summer’s evening greeted guests to the 2014 Annual Australiana Dinner held this year in the junior common room of Edmund Blacket’s splendid mid-1850s neo-gothic building, St Paul’s College, at the University of Sydney. One of the first university colleges to be built in Australia, the san...
Tea drinking, that very British and colonial habit, is ingrained in our Australian culture and regarded by many as an essential daily ritual. tea is cheap and plentiful today, but this was not always the case.
dorothy erickson’s research for her new book Inspired by Light and Land: Designers and Makers in Western Australia 1829–1969 has uncovered more information about objects made in Western Australia and their makers. Her previous articles published in Australiana on Amy Harvey, William Howitt, Charles May and ...
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...
A lengthy title, but for a magnificently appointed book. It not only provides a translation of Péron’s memoir for the first time, but insightfully explores every relevant nook and cranny of colonial history of the period. The book is considerably enhanced by art works and contemporary maps, particularly thos...
There are many fine artists who barely rate a mention in the history of Australian art, so it was gratifying to read a long overdue biography of Charles Lloyd Jones (1878–1958). Jones is best known today as the Managing Director of David Jones department store during its boom times in the first half of the la...
Produced from its premises in Launceston, Tasmania, Campbell’s pottery products were shipped to shops and agents in Tasmania, mainland Australia, New Zealand and as far as India and the USA. Examples can be found regularly at antique shops and auction rooms throughout Australia. The vast majority of pieces av...