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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...