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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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.
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...
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...
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...
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.
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...
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...
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 ...
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 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...
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 ...
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...
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...
Frequent contributor to Australiana and former curator at the Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA),
Glenn R Cooke, died in January. Australiana editor John Wade encapsulates Glenn’s immense influence, drawing on the
orations at his memorial in Brisban...
Once again, the task of judging
the Peter Walker Fine Arts Writing
Award has proved challenging. The
challenge comes from the diversity of
well-researched, well-illustrated articles.
Inevitably the short list for the Award
will come from the longer articles but the
interest of the magazine comes as much
...
The fashion for emu eggs for decorative purposes gained momentum through the latter part of the 19th century as Australia
approached Federation. As aligned to Australian identity as the emu is, it may come as a surprise to discover that emu
eggs attracted Japanese artisans who expressed their artistry in inno...
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 ...
Some hold the view that, except for Conrad Martens and Isaac Walter Jenner, no accomplished artists found anything to interest them in the wilder regions of colonial Queensland. Where are the grand landscape paintings to rival those of John Glover or Eugene von Guérard? In fact, several accomplished but n...
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...
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...
Curators know that the best place to find good artefacts is in the neglected corners of a museum store. Megan Martin found an interesting cast-iron historical plaque, an item from a radical time when a commitment to state-owned enterprises was a central plank of the policy platform of Queensland’s Labor Gover...
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...
Australiana Society Inc ABN 13 402 033 474. PROFIT & LOSS STATEMENT For the year ended 30 June 2024
The 2024 Financial Year has again
proven to be a great year of activities
and development for the Society!
My highlight was the March tour of Adelaide and its environs. I would
remind members this was the first
occasion the Society had conducted a
...
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. ...
Geoff and Kerrie Ford from the National Museum of Australian Pottery in
Holbrook had ‘a bit of an anxious month’ in the build-up to acquiring at
auction in Sydney recently, what they believe is the most important piece of
early Australian convict pottery stamped ‘J ....
We can often recognise items as being Australian because of their subject matter (such as kangaroos) or raw materials (such
as red cedar). Even regional variations in subject matter or raw materials across the continent can lead to distinctive products
or artworks t...
While David Bedford has analysed two extant examples of veneered Queensland desks made by J W Carey, Yvonne Barber
provides biographical information about this man devoted to the Queensland timber industry, who remarked that ‘taking a
man like him from his business was li...
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....
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.