Australiana, Vol 48 no 3, August 2026

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 journal. He also previews the 2027 national tour of Brisbane and Queensland (19-24 May), the Victorian branch's Western Districts tour and the Tasmanian East Coast tour, and notes positive feedback on the new method of journal distribution.

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, give greater prominence to the role of women than you find in written history, as Dorothy demonstrates.

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 Egyptian style. Hume was responsible for designing the Synagogue's architecture and fittings, including the Ark of red cedar. While reinstating Hume's under-appreciated career and legacy, Yvonne Barber looks at the evidence for who might have been the cabinet-maker responsible for making the Ark.

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 his bitter feud with the neighbouring jeweller James Haldane Watt, who was convicted of assaulting him in 1839; the chain migration of the Templeton brothers on the Spartan in 1838; Lenehan's double Roman Catholic and Church of England marriage to Susan Templeton in 1840; and his 1841 acquisition of Templeton's business, which left him well placed to tender for work such as the York Street Synagogue interior.

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 embodies.

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 start by identifying pieces with Tasmanian maker's marks and extrapolate, but these are rare. Analysing specific pieces of furniture, admittedly of unproven origin, he hypothesises that several stylistic elements are typically Tasmanian. To test his theory, we encourage readers to submit evidence of marked pieces sharing these features, which may help us recognise furniture of Tasmanian manufacture (or not).

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 of the Imperial weights likely to have been manufactured in Australia, both before and after Federation. He also explains the verification marking of British weights in Australia.

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 worked for the Newcastle master engraver in the 1790s under the pseudonym William Fittler. He is critical of the book's account of Slager's convict experience, correcting the claim that he was sentenced to death and reprieved rather than given seven years' transportation, and challenging its uncritical acceptance of Roger Butler's speculative dating of Slager's earliest colonial engravings.

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 rigour of entries giving birth and death dates, personal and professional history, major projects and references, and notes the value to collectors of the listed cabinetmakers and sawmill proprietors and of interiors showing furniture and artworks.