Search results for 'David Bedford'

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

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...

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.

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...

In the Middle Ages and Renaissance, workshop and guild traditions were based on the principle of emulation, with apprentices learning by copying the works of their masters. In painting, the practice was gradually regularised and systematised in the curricula of emergent national academies of art, beginning at t...

Artists in early Australia were usually trained in Britain and Europe in the Classical tradition going back to ancient Greece and Rome. David Hansen explores the possibility that, in the composition of his paintings created in Van Diemen’s Land, Benjamin Duterrau was influenced by Renaissance and Classical mo...

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 o...

In the preceding article, David Bedford identified four Australian manufacturers of cribbage boards: Grose Manufacturing Co of Brisbane; Clipsal, a brand name of Gerard Industries in Adelaide; John Sands & Co, founded in Sydney as Sands & Kenny in 1851; and Crown Mulga made by A.W.G. Davey & Sons Lt...

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 no...

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 characteris...

The State Library of New South Wales recently purchased a rare original ornithological watercolour by Elizabeth Gould (1804–1841), formerly in the collection of the late James Fairfax AC. This adds to the collection of manuscript letters and other original materials the Library has acquired relating to this i...

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 Ri...

Colin Thomas, Australiana Society Tasmanian Branch Chair, has assembled a scrimshaw collection with the scope and quality of institutional collections in the former whaling centres of New Bedford in Massachusetts1 and Hull in Yorkshire.2 Thomas’s collection encompasses the breadth of scrimshaw from tools to m...

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...

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 t...

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 ...

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 de...

Furniture restorer Paul Gregson follows up Dr David Bedford’s article on “hide glue” in Australiana for November 2018 with some practical advice, although he suggests that a demonstration is more informative to understand the process.

David Scott Mitchell (1836 –1907) had a private income which allowed him to pursue his collecting and become the greatest Australiana collector. About a century after British settlement, Mitchell identified the need to collect Australiana that was, at the time, rapidly disappearing. His collection of somewher...

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

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 ...

David Kelly sets out in this book to chart the history of 100 or so master cabinet-makers working in New South Wales up to 1850. His introduction discusses that bland sentence in some detail, meticulously defining those terms and the parameters of his research. Then Kelly outlines the structure of the book, sou...

The first update to my book Convict and Free: the Master Furniture-makers of NSW 1788–1851 will be available on CD in December, with at least two new chapters, on Thomas Mercer Booth and John McMahon. However, Australiana members may be interested to learn now that a reader from Ireland has provided me with d...

Some people are or have been particularly influential in the development of appreciation and understanding of our heritage in Australia. Here we pay tribute to three individuals who contributed significantly, each of them in different ways, and who will be sadly missed both personally and professionally.

There are many fine artists who barely rate a mention in the history of Australian art, so it was gratifying to read a long overdue biography of Charles Lloyd Jones (1878–1958). Jones is best known today as the Managing Director of David Jones department store during its boom times in the first half of the la...

Gary Morgan’s research into this recently rediscovered colonial wax relief, reported here for the first time reveals it to be an important relic and memento of the early exploration of South Australia.

Scottish immigrant David Reid was a plumber and gasfitter who worked in Sydney’s inner western suburb of Newtown. He enriched his life by taking up painting and etching, mostly of pastoral scenes, and by participating in the life of the artistic community.

In his new book Convict and Free: The Master Furniture-makers of Early New South Wales, David Kelly presents well-researched biographies of dozens of previously little-known cabinetmakers. Tasmanian and NSW cabinet-maker, undertaker and upholsterer Joseph Baronet Bridekirk is just one of them. His story is docu...

At dawn on Sunday, 3 December 1854, a momentous event occurred in Australian history, the battle of Eureka Stockade at Ballarat. It would turn out to be pivotal in our political journey as a nation.On that fateful morning, a contingent of the British 40th Somersetshire Regiment of Foot, supported by a sect...