Peter Crawshaw

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, where he became sheriff of Wellington, dying in London on a visit ‘home’. In Glebe, he painted several local landscape scenes that included some early identifiable buildings as well as some in the country areas he visited. While these watercolours are not of great artistic merit, Coutts Crawford’s views and panoramas record and complement the early colonial history of one of Sydney’s oldest suburbs. In June this year we alerted that more of his watercolours were in an upcoming Melbourne auction sale.

The March 2023 Australiana Society National Tour of Canberra and regions was a great success. Forty people from NSW, Victoria, Tasmania and Queensland enjoyed three days visiting diverse collections and houses. Each venue gave us a different perspective and appreciation of Australiana, in decorative arts, art, architecture and furniture from First Nations to contemporary. We had hot weather but quickly settled in as a cohesive group, renewing friendships and welcoming new members.

Numbers were limited on the NSW Branch’s recent successful tour of the Sydney Basin, so one of the organisers, Peter Crawshaw, reports on it for members who were not able to take part in person, especially those who live outside Sydney. Colonial furniture collector Bob Fredman was honoured to be asked to give the 2022 Kevin Fahy Annual Lecture during the tour, so he and his wife Debbie took a short break from their property inundated by the Queensland floods.

The authors are seeking to locate a number of watercolours painted by amateur artist James Coutts Crawford, who lived in Australia in the late 1830s and 1840s, especially his views of early settlement on the Glebe peninsula. Then an Arcadian rural retreat, Glebe is now a densely settled inner Sydney suburb, but retains the picturesque water views that attracted Crawford the artist.