Search results for 'Christian Da Silva'

The 2024 National tour to Adelaide
and its environs proved, from all
reports, to be another outstanding
success. It is difficult to believe that
this was the first tour to Adelaide in
the Society’s 46-year history. It was
fantastic to provide the opportunity f...

The David Roche Foundation, Adelaide will show highlights from the Luke Jones toy collection this winter.

The inaugural Australiana Society Tour of South Australia was held from Thursday 21 March to Monday 26 March 2024 and took in a variety of museums, public and private collections.

Knud Bull was born in Norway. He trained as an artist and painted in Norway, Dresden, Copenhagen and Stockholm before moving to London in 1845, where he was arrested for counterfeiting and sentenced to 14 years transportation in Australia. Arriving at Norfolk Island, after nine months he was transferred t...

I trust all members had an enjoyable festive season with family and friends, and took the opportunity to relax. During this period of relaxation, you may well have spent some time reading Australiana and the book so generously donated regarding John Mitchell Cantle, Australia’s first native-born orn...

For 65,000 years, Indigenous Australians have incorporated Australian materials into their art, objects, weapons and tools. From the first year of British colonisation, settlers tried to adapt Australian materials and later, Australian motifs, into their art, manufactures and tools. A century later, Frenc...

Members of the Australiana Society have many distinctions. Our president Colin Thomas has already praised the work of Di Dorothy Erickson AM on receiving her Member of the Order of Australia award, but at least two more Australiana Society members were honoured. Julian Bickersteth AO and Dr Judith McK...

Thank you to members who attended
the 2023 AGM in person and via Zoom.
From my perspective it was great to
catch up with members and present the
45th AGM of our wonderful Society. A copy of my President’s Report is
included in this magazine as is the
Financial...

... 







The 2023 financial year has proven to be another great year for the Society.
With the disaster that was COVID-

19 behind us, your board got to work at a national and state level to deliver
enhanced opportunities to benefit
me...

Vida Lahey is a well-regarded Queensland artist who exhibited in 33 solo exhibitions beginning in 1902. More recent interest in
women artists rekindled interest in her works. Glenn Cooke reveals a project to document Lahey’s output and seeks the help of
collectors in this...

Jewellers in colonial Australia, often lured by the gold rushes, came from various parts of Britain and Europe, arriving already
having served their apprenticeships. Teaghan Hall tells the story of several members of the Hutton family, who initially came to
the colonial Victorian...

European immigrant William Milner was a little-known entrepreneur who established a porcelain manufacturing business after
arriving in Melbourne in 1911. The porcelain industry was largely driven by a massive need for electrical insulators, and, as
COVID-19 has demons...

As announced in the May issue, the 2024 National Tour will be held in and around Adelaide, South Australia. The organising committee has already secured visits to several private collections belonging to South Australian members and these will be combined with enhanced viewing of some sig...

Curator and historian Tim Roberts previews a new exhibition on the English ceramics firm Wedgwood, founded by Josiah Wedgwood in 1759, and linked with the British colonisation of Australia through its design and manufacture of the ‘Sydney Cove Medallions’ in 1789. These were made from Sydney clay sent...

Robert Griffin makes the case for the introduction of the squatter’s chair – a robust easy chair with swing-out leg rests – as an idea imported from India in the early 19th century. These chairs found a home on the shady verandahs of homesteads, particularly in Queensland and NSW, where the lan...

Leading colonial artist? Or leading early 19th-century British artist working in the colony of Van Diemen’s Land? Clearly the latter. Ron Radford, John Glover, Patterdale Farm and the Revelation of the Australian Landscape reveals how John Glover (1767–1849), a leading artist...

The year is off to a great start. The National Tour conducted in the ACT was fully subscribed with the maximum 40 members and state events have already been held in Tasmania and Victoria. Part of the Victorian event was a curator-led presentation by Emma Busowsky prior to viewing the Bendigo Art Gall...

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 d...

Bob Fredman suggests old picture frames as another area of affordable and rewarding collecting. As well as being potentially useful, these nostalgic items often have an interesting story to tell, as Bob demonstrates with these examples, all found in Queensland.

A descendant of his sister Rebecca wrote about William Kerr in Australiana over 20 years ago, presenting new material obtained from family sources.1 With the help of other descendants, Yvonne Barber expands on this earlier work, beginning with the apprenticeship of William Kerr. She provides det...

Bendigo Art Gallery has drawn on its collections, the Australiana Fund, other collections and especially the National Gallery of Victoria to mount a new survey of Australiana from British settlement to today. Obviously it cannot cover every aspect of Australiana, nor every way artists and crafts...

Your Board trusts that you have enjoyed exploring our new website, taken the opportunity to review it in detail and researched past articles. Members’ feedback has been most encouraging! As with any change, there is always the odd issue; we are doing our best to fix them and will further enhance the site base...

Thank you to the members who attended the 2022 Annual General Meeting in person or via zoom. Thank you also for the show of support to me as President and to the other Directors who were elected.

I particularly thank Peter Crawshaw for his nomination and subsequent election to the Secretary’s position. Ly...

William Knox D’Arcy (1849–1917) is remembered today as an indefatigable adventurer, who through financial daring and
extraordinary good fortune, became the ‘founder’ of the modern oil industry in the Middle East. However, there is another
facet to his life, as the ex-Rockhampton solicitor who became a...

From the foundation of the colonies, local cabinetmakers experimented with using the wide range of native timbers. Bob Fredman discusses a chest of drawers, most likely made about 1900 in Bundaberg, Queensland and probably by a local cabinet maker of Germanic heritage, who liked to use contrasting timbers with ...

Prodigious Australiana contributor Glenn R. Cooke is well known through his professional interests in Queensland art, decorative arts and social history. But that does not define Glenn; he loves ballroom dancing and gardens, as well as pursuing a sideline in collecting artefacts relating to his home stat...

It is indeed pleasing to see members honoured for their services to the community. In the 2022 Queen’s Birthday Honours, Mrs Phyllis Murphy of Melbourne and Mr Alan Landis of Sydney were recognised with Member of the Order of Australia (AM) and Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) respectively. Both richly d...

As part of their education in useful arts, schoolgirls sewed their own individual samplers, which are also important indicators of progress in educational methods and reach. The format is fairly standard, with the letters of the alphabet in either or both lower and upper case and basic numbers, plus the gi...

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...

Invented in 1948 and manufactured 'from the early 1950s, Splades or Splayds were a favourite gift for shower teas, weddings and Mothers’ Day in 1960s and 1970s Australia. We were vaguely aware that they might be an Australian innovation, but that wasn’t part of their advertising – they were prom...

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...

Visions of a Republic. The work of Lucien Henry, the lavishly illustrated 2001 book produced for an exhibition on the designs and art of Lucien Henry (1850–1896), devotes more words to describing a photograph of the couple’s apartment in Darlinghurst (plate 1) than it does to describing his wife Juliette. Y...

We often recognise Australiana by the presence of motifs depicting Australia’s unique flora and fauna and, especially in the 19th century, representations of Indigenous figures. Anthropologists studied Indigenous people, while the things they made – much of it, what we would describe today as art – were r...

After Albert I King of the Belgians refused safe passage to Kaiser Wilhelm’s troops to attack France, Germany invaded neutral Belgium on 4 August 1914. Britain, bound by an 1839 treaty to support Belgium’s neutrality, declared war on Germany the same day. Australian Prime Minister Joseph Cook offered his go...

The box seen here shows the superb carving of John Kendrick Blogg, a successful and entrepreneurial industrial chemist who was born in 1851 in Canada, settled in the Surrey Hills region of Victoria in 1877 and died in 1936. His day job involved making perfumes and extracting essential oils. Family legend has it...

Wet conditions in humid climates, and especially with the recent floods in eastern Australia, exacerbate the problem of household damp and mould. For collectors, this is likely to affect sensitive items, such as furniture and works of art on paper. So remember to check your collection regularly, and follow some...

What an outstanding event the Sydney Basin Tour proved to be! While I have detailed this verbally and via personal email, it would be completely remiss of me not to publicly thank Robert Hannan, Peter Crawshaw, Andy Simpson and Tim Cha for their outstanding efforts in planning and delivering a wonderful event. ...

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.

Paintings on gum leaves are a unique Australian tradition, which began in the 1850s or 1860s and still continues today. The earliest practitioner recorded is Arthur William Eustace (1820–1907), who was born in England and arrived in Victoria with his family in 1851. He found work as a shepherd near Chiltern i...

JOURNAL REVIEW BY DR ROSS JOHNSTON, Queensland History Journal, vol. 24, no. 11, November 2021, (Journal of The Royal Historical Society of Queensland); BOOK REVIEW BY DR LINDA YOUNG, Fringe, Frog & Tassel: The Arts of the Trimmings-Maker in Interior Decoration. By Annabel Westman; BOOK REVIEW BY DR DAVID BEDF...