David Bedford

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. Dr David Bedford explores what they reveal of the use of cabinet timbers in Queensland and his parquetry veneering designs. He explores the challenges in translating the common names used for timbers in the 1870s to the current common and botanical names of those timbers.

Thomas Griffiths (1856–1943), a Welsh blacksmith and wheelwright, emigrated to Queensland to start a new life as a ‘skilled migrant’, at first clinging to his old profession in the Ipswich area. When the Queensland railway network was expanding, he saw a new business opportunity and opened a sawmill at Wyandra to supply wooden sleepers to lay the tracks from Charleville to Cunnamulla, then became a contractor, and in 1899 built a new sawmill in Cairns. He overcame insolvency in 1909 when Cairns Timber Limited acquired the premises, machinery, plant and other assets of his sawmill.1 Thomas and his sons remained associated with the mill; when he and his wife left Cairns in 1912 for a ten-month, round-the-world trip, 80 sawmill employees presented the couple with a purse of sovereigns and an address. 2 Retiring in his mid-60s, about 1920 he embraced woodwork as a hobby, exploiting Queensland’s forest resources. He crafted a wide variety of inlaid articles in various decorative Queensland native timbers, first in Brisbane from about 1920 to 1927, then in the tourist village of North Tamborine, from 1927 until his death in 1943 at the age of 84. Book boxes, used for holding playing cards or as jewel boxes, were his speciality and he probably made hundreds. Examples of these were presented to King George V and Queen Mary after being exhibited in 1925 at the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley.

There are sound reasons why you should have good photographs of items in your collection, whether as a record, for research, for publication, for sale and for insurance.

Decorative timber inlay work became popular in British and European furniture and other wooden items in the 18th century. European exploration of the so-called New World tropics and subsequent colonisation gave access to a greatly increased range of superb cabinet timbers. Cabinetmakers initially concentrated on the richly coloured mahoganies, but the discovery of multi-coloured timbers that incorporate stable colour variations sparked a new fashion for ornate inlays, marquetry, and parquetry.

Both plain and novelty cribbage boards have been produced around the world for about 400 years. Australian-made cribbage boards can only be post–1788 and at this stage I know of no boards dating before the early 1800s, though very plain boards are difficult to date accurately. By the mid-19th century, many novelty forms of boards existed and had become collectable.

One of the most distinctive timbers in Australia comes from trees known by their common name as casuarinas. In botanical taxonomic terms, there are actually two main genera growing in Australia: Allocasuarina and Casuarina. A third genus, Gymnostoma, is restricted to far north Queensland. The timber characteristics are very similar for both genera, except for one species, C. cristata, noted below.

German settlers in South Australia, notably in the Barossa and to a lesser extent in other parts of Australia, introduced a furniture style based on the rural carpentry traditions of their native lands, rather than the more common styles seen in Australia derived from British cabinetmaking. David Bedford and Richard Phillips review the common use of the term ‘Biedermeier’ to describe this style, and publish some examples attributed to the furniture workshop of the idiosyncratic cabinetmaker Carl Ewald ‘Gluepot’ Graetz (1865–1937) of Keyneton, South Australia.

Communicating with members is a vital activity of any society. We also aim to share knowledge, mainly through our scholarly magazine Australiana. Another channel of communication is through the internet, which has been used for the last few years by the South Australian Study Group, with its monthly “Show and Tell” bulletins.

David Bedford has researched the life and work of Tasmanian cabinetmaker Richard Dowling (c 1820/1822–1867), little documented till now. He presents new discoveries about Dowling’s life and suggests why Dowling’s story has been so elusive. Evidence has emerged, and examples of his work found, which show that Dowling, previously known only for parquetry writing slopes bearing his label, also made furniture. Dr Bedford provides technical descriptions of Dowling’s workmanship and identifies most of the timbers that Dowling used. By examining labelled examples, he identifies the characteristics of Dowling’s style, showing how these stylistic characteristics can be used to assess if unlabelled pieces can be credibly attributed to Dowling or not.

David Bedford and Jennifer Stuerzl reflect on the pleasures of 40 years of collecting Australiana. Jennifer is a practising artist, painter, print and artist’s book maker and curates international print shows. David was trained as a botanist and became Director of the Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens before transferring to the private sector and managing a family-owned business. Now retired, David and Jennifer work collaboratively for the Australiana Society in Queensland and on art-science collaborations, while David writes articles for Australiana as well as doing wood-turning and cabinet-making as a hobby.

This two-height cabinet (plate 1) has a capped, ogee-shaped cornice above, two glazed, veneer-bordered upper doors and two veneered panel doors below flanked by columns (plate 2), standing on a plinth. Its known provenance, as reported to me, is that it was found in Strathfield, Sydney, in the 1970s. Antique dealer David Cloonan bought it, believing it was Huon Pine and sent it to a Hobart dealer, David Pryor, where keen collector John Avery purchased it. The current owners bought it in 1984 and returned it to Sydney. The display case was one factor that changed the course of the owners’ collecting, but that is a story for another time.

Australian colonial artists sought to use local materials and to appropriate local motifs in their artworks for several reasons: to reflect the Australian origin of their work, to distinguish it from the art of other nations, and to foster a stronger sense of connection with the country. Moreton Bay pearls are one of the new, local materials used in jewellery in the 1850s and 1860s, but the study of their use has been neglected up till now. David Bedford looks into the history of the use of Queensland’s Moreton Bay pearls and discusses examples used in jewellery made by leading Sydney and Brisbane jewellers.

David Bedford cautions against using modern glues for antique furniture restoration, recommending instead that you stick with old-fashioned animal glues.