Megan Martin

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 from the mix of short and long articles as it does from the longer pieces. Often the short items add detail or fill gaps in existing scholarship about well-known makers, or form part of an exchange between collectors and scholars.

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 Government. Some familiar initials suggested its maker was the famous Queensland craftsman and teacher, L.J. Harvey.

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.

I began last year’s judge’s report with the observation that the annual Peter Walker Fine Art Writing Award, established in 1999 to encourage authors to write for Australiana, had achieved its objectives. The four issues of Australiana published in 2022 confirm that judgement and show that the scope of the magazine continues to evolve. Contributors are writing about new things and exploring new aspects of old things. And re-reading all four issues for the award has highlighted the diversity of subjects covered in the magazine in 2022.

Peter Walker Fine Art established our annual Writing Award in 1999 to encourage writing for Australiana. At that time Australiana was a 32-page magazine, stapled, with three to five articles and a few black-and-white illustrations per issue. Twenty-two years on, the award has achieved its objectives. The Australiana Society now boasts a 60-page magazine, perfect bound, usually with a minimum of six articles per issue, all lavishly illustrated in colour. The articles are diverse in subject, length and authorship.

The annual Peter Walker Fine Art Writing Award, established to encourage authors to write for Australiana, has now operated for more than 20 years. As readers and researchers, we all benefit from Peter Walker’s continuing interest and support but, as the 2020 judge for the award, it seems to me that the task of the judge only gets more difficult. As I sat down to re-read my way through the four fat issues of Australiana published in 2020, I got the wobbles. There were so many articles worthy of notice.

Megan Martin researches the historical background of an 1833 convict love taken, a rare example made for a female convict, and reveals a sad tale of migration and family separation that resonates today.

Vaucluse House has been in public ownership since 1910, initially managed by a government-appointed board of trustees as a public park and historical museum, and latterly managed as a house museum under the control of the Historic Houses Trust of NSW (now known as Sydney Living Museums). Megan Martin looks at the work of the early Vaucluse Park trustees, their approach to the house and its grounds, and their legacy of substantial acquisitions which survive today in the collection at Vaucluse House.

In 2012, the very substantial archive of the late Leslie Nicholl Walford AM (1927–2012) was acquired by the Caroline Simpson Library & Research Collection. Walford was one of the most influential interior designers in Australia, especially in society circles in Sydney. He was widely known through his weekly newspaper columns for the Sun-Herald, the Sydney Morning Herald and the Sunday Telegraph, running from 1967 to 1984.

This soft-paste porcelain mug, 8.7 cm high and 9 cm diameter, is painted in overglaze enamels on a Wedgwood “Barlaston” blank dated 1947. Feint’s choice of this Wedgwood form, together with the incorporation of the date 1947 and the letters J F as key elements in the design, suggests an awareness of the notable commemorative and other mugs that English artist Eric Ravilious (1903–42) designed for Wedgwood in the late 1930s.1

Colouring photographs by hand added to the attraction of black and white photographs in the 19th century. An 1870s view of Government House from across Farm Cove in Sydney Harbour not only has been coloured, but the artist has added some extra touches, including a gondola cruising off the Governor’s residence.