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...
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...
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
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...
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...
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...
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...
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. ...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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.
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...
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...
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.
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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.
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...
The Australiana Society’s first national
tour of Victoria from 20 to 24 March
was a huge success. The tour got off to
an unusual start at Gary and Genevieve
Morgan’s Gallery, with our host Gary
Morgan addressing us on a large screen
from his hospital bed...
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
...
Frederick II of Sicily made contact with the Kurdish al-Malik Muhammad al-Kamil in 1217, a year before he became Sultan
of Egypt. Over the next 20 years, the two rulers communicated regularly, exchanging letters, books and rare and exotic
animals. One exotic gift the Sultan sent Frederick was a Sulphur-creste...
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...
Acanthus leaves have been used as decoration in buildings, furniture and pottery since the birth of western architecture.
They were often a decorative feature on Australia’s early Neo-Classical furniture until the advent of Australian themes
towards the end of the 19th century. Bob Fredman discusses the use...
Two gold sculptures featuring Australian animals expertly cast in Sydney bySimon Adrien Schagen (1923–2013)were offered by West Sussex auctioneersToovey’s on 8 August 2024.
Ginni Woof reports on the Australiana Society visit to Fairfield at Cressy in north-east Tasmania, about 30 km south of Launceston, in December.
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 ...