One Hundred Years - Treasured Objects of History West, the Royal Western Australian Historical Society, part 3: Colonial Keepsakes

Dr Dorothy Erickson continues her account of the past 100 years of History West, demonstrating how the Society's art and artefact collections illustrate the history of Western Australia through its people, politics, agriculture and industries. Collections such as theirs, and their female volunteer supporters, g...

President's update

The President reports a successful 2026 financial year ahead of the AGM in Sydney on 19 September. He outlines the Society's IT programme: a Wild Apricot membership portal allowing members to manage their own details, a dedicated ITHelp address, and a second phase enabling searches across nearly 50 years of the...

James Hume: Architect, Surveyor, Builder

James Hume worked in the building trade from his arrival in Sydney from Scotland in 1835 to the year before his death in 1868. As an architect, he designed many residences, commercial and religious buildings, of which perhaps the most unusual edifice was the York Street Synagogue in Sydney, built in the rare Eg...

Book review: Queensland Architects 1823-1895. A Biographical Dictionary

A review of the expanded second edition of Donald Watson and Judith McKay's biographical dictionary, updated with digitised sources such as Trove and now covering more than 800 architects along with builders, surveyors and engineers, from first British settlement to the depression of the 1890s. Wade praises the...

Book review: From Thomas Bewick to Botany Bay, the Wayward Career of Philip Slager, Convict Engraver

A review of Nigel Tattersfield's monograph on Philip Louden Slager, the Hessian-born engraver transported to NSW in 1807 who produced the first views published in the colony, issued by the emancipist Absalom West. Sturgess welcomes Tattersfield's discovery, made in Thomas Bewick's account books, that Slager wor...

The Surprising Scarcity of Imperial Weights made in Australia

Imperial weights in pounds, ounces and other units were essential for commerce and were used throughout Australia until the 1970s, when the more rational international metric system displaced them. Fifty years on, Australian-made imperial weights are now rare. Rick Willis has tracked down and illustrated some o...

State of Origin

In several Australiana articles John Hawkins identified the influence of traditional regional British styles in Australian colonial furniture. Germanic traditions in some South Australian and Queensland furniture are well known. Now Bob Fredman explores how we can identify Tasmanian furniture. Ideally, we would...

The joy of freedom and the sorrow of grief in an Australian opal brooch

Many of us like to collect objects which are beautiful and which can often be the inspired product of a talented designer and maker. Here Dr Tehmina Goskar discusses an Australian opal brooch, and the momentous events of world history, a nascent industry, creativity and the lived personal experiences that it em...

Andrew Lenehan and his family

A short study tying up loose ends in the biography of the Sydney cabinet-maker Andrew Lenehan (c 1814-1886) and his brother-in-law James Templeton (1807-1862), both from Dublin, who arrived together on the Jane Goudie in 1835. It covers Templeton's cabinet-making business in George and Castlereagh Streets and h...

President’s update

Board Director, Professor David Johnstone recommended to the Board that the Society consider establishing an annual scholarship grant for research into a specific topic of Australiana... The Board agreed to pursue potential partners and provide a maximum grant of $10,000 per annum to one or more recip...

One Hundred Years – Some Treasured Objects of History West, the Royal Western Australian Historical Society, part 2

Dr Dorothy Erickson continues the evolving story of the Royal Western Australian Historical Society, now known as History West. She reveals more of its collection of treasured objects documenting the history of British settlement in Western Australia, explaining their tangible connections to Western Australia�...

The Peter Walker Fine Art Writing Award 2025

All are worthy contenders but this year The Peter Walker Fine Art Writing Award is presented, for the first time, to joint winners – siblings Dr Jennifer Harris and Lindsay Harris, who collaborated but published

Discovery of the earliest dated depiction of Australia’s Regent bowerbird

The Regent bowerbird (Sericulus chrysocephalus) is the type species of the genus Sericulus established by William John Swainson in 1825, one of eight genera constituting the Australo-Papuan bowerbirds together forming the family of Ptilonorhynchidæ.. Altho...

There’s a Killer in the room

Most collectors of anything have a small table or two, useful to hold your tea, coffee or wine within reach while you relax in an old-fashioned easy chair. Avid collector Bob Fredman takes us through the several different styles made in Australia over a hundred years, and highlights the importance of the t...

Queensland dairy farmer artist Wyclif Huston – an artistic casualty of World War II?

Always on the lookout for those rare early paintings of Brisbane, Kevin Lambkin located a highly accomplished oil of a Brisbane River scene at auction in Sydney in 2024. The painting was simply signed ‘Huston’, a name unknown to Kevin and to the painting’s Sydney auction cataloguer who suggested a New Zea...

Book review: A Survey of the Bateman Collection

William Petsalis and JamesBateman’s A Survey of the Bateman Collection is a most welcome survey of more than 200 pieces from one of the most impressive collections of Australian colonial furniture and folk art ever assembled, the successor to the dispersed col...

Australiana Society national tour to Tasmania, March 2026

The Australiana Society’s 2026 national tour, from 24–31 March, commenced in Launceston and travelled south via the Fingal Valley and Tasmania’s east coast, concluding in Hobart. The tour focused on historic properties and collections in private ownership not generally open to the public. ...

Jessie’s gold Kalgoorlie windlass brooch

In the 19th century, jewellery was the go-to gift for men to show their affection for a wife, fiancée or sweetheart. A century later, rarely do we know who gave what to whom, or when. Often the link has been lost, or the design has fallen out of favour, and the gift becomes neglected. Worse, it might have been...

President’s update

With 2026 upon us, we are only two years from our 50th Anniversary. As members should be aware, the Board committed to producing a major publication to celebrate this milestone...

George W. Goyder, South Australia’s Surveyor-General

After seeing three paintings of great historical significance, following a random but serendipitous encounter, severalSouth Australian collectors arranged for the items to be deposited in the State Library of South Australia where they canbe catalogued, preserved, and made digitally and physically accessible to...

One Hundred Years – Some Treasured Objects of History West, the Royal Western Australian Historical Society, part 1

The Royal Western Australian Historical Society celebrates its centenary in 2026, with a new name History West, and a new home for members’ activities having display and storage areas for the books, archives, photographic collection and the considerable art and objects held in the art, costume and museum coll...

A Hopeful Beginning, a Tragic End: Artist Frederick William Whitehouse in Queensland

Early Queensland artworks have interested Dr Kevin Lambkin over many years. He would occasionally see at auctions and antique shops attractive watercolours of unidentified rural homesteads signed ‘F Whitehouse’. Whitehouse was one of those obscure artists about whom very little was recorded, although the St...

Our Treenage Years

Well-researched histories exist on 19th-century Australian furniture, silver and ceramics. Most of them are reliable sources of information, although possibly outdated, especially since the advent of Trove. Other areas have not yet been researched or have little information available. Avid Queensland collector ...

Arthur Fleischmann and his ‘lost’ DNA sculpture

In the last years of the 19th century, Arthur Fleischmann was born into a Jewish family living under the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which Emperor Franz-Josef had already ruled for 48 years. In the new century, Fleischmann studied medicine, then switched to sculpture. He fled the rising Nazi tide in Europe, settli...

Woollies – maritime folk art

Nicola Kissane presents some maritime folk art in the form of ‘woollies’, images of ships made of coloured woollen yarn, each with an Australian connection. The maker, date, origin, subject and other data relating to folk art is often difficult to pin down. As records are generally lacking, these objects of...

Annual Financial Report

Honorary Life Membership Award to Annette Blinco

At the AGM, Annette Blinco becameour fifth Honorary Life Member, and the first woman to be honoured in this way. Annette Blinco has been involved with arts and cultural organisations for over 50 years.

The Wait Pays Off

In the August 2020 issue of Australiana, we wrote an article on the amateur watercolourist, James Coutts Crawford (1817–1889), an Englishman who visited Australia in 1845–46 and rented ‘ForestLodge’, an early colonial house in Glebe ... Later he moved to New Zealand, w...

Fashioning Empire in Adelaide. The J. Miller Anderson Wedding Gown of 1881: Fashion, Labour, and Aspiration in Colonial South Australia

Described at the time as ‘the first of its kind produced in these colonies’, the wedding gown examined in this article embodies significance beyond its sartorial form; it constitutes a multi-faceted historical artefact positioned at the nexus of design, commerce, technology, identity and social history. Pet...

Jonoski Takuma, Cameo Carver of Emu Eggs: addendum

In our May and August issues of 2025, siblings Jennifer and Lindsey Harris explored the cross-cultural influence ofJapanese craftsman Jonoski Takuma in his carving of Australian scenes on emu eggs around the time of Federation.Their articles led ornithologist and collector Dr Mark Cabouret to look very carefull...

Matchstick Craft at Ipswich Art Gallery

Glenn R Cooke (1946–2025) was a generous donor to the Ipswich Art Gallery, which wanted to pay homage to his generosity, idiosyncratic collecting and endless curiosity and humour. The Gallery’s response was a display showcasing a selection of donated objects fashioned out of matchsticks.

A Visit to the Cowpastures

Fifty-five society members enjoyed an excellent day visiting three historical properties in the Cobbitty area, on Sydney’s semi-rural western fringe, onSunday 12 October 2025. Once known as the Cowpastures on the colonial frontier of British settlement, the area was probably best known for ‘Camden...

Let there be Lights

Those of us with collections of brown furniture sometimes brighten up our display space with art, pottery or ceramics. Bob Fredman takes us through another option, decorative kerosene lamps, some of which were made in Australia. They are very interesting in their own right and when hung or placed in the ri...

John Doody, Captain Paterson’s Convict Artist

The young convict John Doody was an accomplished botanical artist whose fine watercolours, combined with Captain William Paterson’s annotations, were the first attempt to catalogue the flora of Norfolk Island. Though the drawings are unsigned, in a 1794 letter Paterson (plate 1) identified t...

Goldfinders’ Home Inn, Kurrajong and Australia’s early timber houses

The purchase of the former Goldfinders’ Home Inn at Kurrajong led owners Chris and Deborah Hallam to research their property, discovering that European habitation on the site began much earlier than initially believed. This inspired them to locate and document 160 early timber houses across the nation. The co...

President’s 2025 Annual Report to Members

Going Potty

Collector Bob Fredman relates a recent project – identifying, cleaning and restoring a nondescript terracotta garden urn,covered in house paint, with links to Brisbane and the early European settlers of the Sunshine Coast hinterland.

President’s update

Thank you to members who provided feedback on the proposed changes toour national tour registration procedures, detailed in May Australiana. Many members advised that they understood the constraints of having limited places on these much sought-after tours, mostly of private h...

Ada Whiting miniatures

Unusually for an artist, Ada Whitingnee Cherry (1859 –1953) was a celebrated success in her lifetime.1In 1900, the first time she submitted a portrait miniature to the Royal Academy in London, it was hung ‘onthe line’ – a small work needs to be exhibited at eye level. Remarkable for a‘colonial’, a f...

Book Review: Ken Orchard, James Ashton

Ken Orchard, James Ashton,Artist of the Fleurieu Coast.Royal South Australian Society ofArts, Adelaide 2025. Soft cover,95 pages 29 x 21 cm. Exhibitioncatalogue, all paintings and objectsillustrated, chronology, bibliography.$30, available only at the RSASA,Institute...

A Japanese artist in Australia: Jonoski Takuma and his family

Jonoski Takuma, a young, missionary-educated Japanese man, arrived in Australia in 1888 and within a few years began engraving emu eggs depicting Australian scenes. Reflecting his Japanese cultural heritage, these delicately carved eggs,along with postcards and a children’s book, embody a fusion of Japanese a...

Ernest Jardine Thwaites: pioneer cinematographer and inventor

Rob La Nauze highlights his research into the cinematic achievements of Ernest Jardine Thwaites (1873–1933) that identified 16 short films Thwaites made, 18 films attributed to Thwaites, and seven other films that Thwaites possibly made in Victoria.Yet his notable pioneering achievements in film spanned only ...

The ‘Meat in The Sandwich’ between Boom and Bust: James Clarke Waite’s 'The Saltwater River', 1896

A chance online encounter with an arresting 19th-century oil painting depicting a scene of forlorn industry on the banks of the Saltwater River, executed by one of Australia’s foremost portrait painters of the Victorian period, and its offering in a Hobart auction may have misled some to assume it depicted a ...

The Orrong Pottery and Journeyman Potters

The Orrong Pottery operated for just four years, from 1880 to 1884, in Melbourne’s eastern suburb of Prahran, and under several names. It produced bricks and sewer pipes, as well as employing several prominent, Staffordshire-trained journeyman potters to introduce a range of domestic pottery to compete with w...

Thomas Rice’s Sampler, Lyndoch Valley, South Australia

Embroidered samplers worked in various stitches by girls or young women to demonstrate their needlework skills. Typically, samplers include the alphabet, some mottoes, and simple pictures and patterns, often with the maker’s name and the date.This mid-Victorian sampler is a tribute to Thomas Rice (1808–1887...

Phyllis Murphy 1924–2025

Dr Phyllis Murphy AM, a long-time member of the Australiana Society, died in May, just a few weeks short of her 101st birthday. Born Phyllis Slater in Melbourne in 1924,Phyllis developed a strong interest in buildings and design from an early age. Her son Jock Murphy records her architectural work and her ...

President’s update

What an outstanding success the 2024
national tour of Victoria was!
Victorian branch chair Robert Stevens
and his team did an absolutely fantastic
job in every regard. From venue selection,
menu selection, to negotiating the best
possible deal with all providers, nothing
more could possibly have been wis...

In the detail: the collaborative Arts and Crafts of Mabel and William Blamire Young

William and Mabel Blamire Young collaborated in many of their artistic and other endeavours, yet she was overshadowed
and her work has been largely unrecognised. Dr Andrew Montana investigates her contribution, especially to the Arts and
Crafts Movement in Victoria, with the help of their descendants.

Now in Australia: proof engravings prepared for Sir Joseph Banks from plant drawings made by Sydney Parkinson on James Cook’s Endeavour voyage

The Peter Crossing Collection in Sydney recently acquired a set of engravings now identified as very early proof pulls made
in London for Joseph Banks’s unpublished Plantarum omnium detectarum Terrarum maris au∫tralis de∫criptiones & figurae
(Descriptions & illustrat...