Book review byDr David Bedford of David J Mabberley, The Peter Crossing Collection, an illustrated catalogue, Peter Crossing AM, Sydney, 2022. $95 plus pack and post; Book Review by Meredith Hinchliffe AM of Christine Erratt Ceremonial maces ofAustr...
The family of the late Rabbi Leib Aisack Falk (1889–1957) is preparing a comprehensive book about him. Rabbi Falk was born in what is now Latvia, moving to Scotland in 1911, next going to Plymouth, then becoming a British Army chaplain in Egypt and Palestine 1918–1921. He came with his wife and c...
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...
BOOK REVIEW BY WARWICK OAKMAN
Mark R. Cabouret, Out From The Shadows
John Mitchell Cantle 1849 – 1919 Australia’s First Native Born Ornithological Draughtsman.
The Australiana Society Inc, Bondi Junction, NSW, 2023. Soft cover,
175 pages, 683 colour & sepi...
Chests of drawers come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, and are easy to describe using some basic elements such as dimensions and number of drawers, types of timber, feet, knobs etc. For scholars of early furniture many more parameters come into play, not the least being an assessment of whether all its ...
Born in Portugal and trained in Europe, Artur Loureiro (1853–1932) settled in Melbourne where he painted and taught art for a living between 1884 and 1904. Painting various subjects in a wide range of styles, he associated with all the leading Melbourne artists of the time – Streeton, Conder, McC...
An exploration into the construction and history of an early, distinctively veneered chest of drawers from Tasmania reveals that it has a twin. E.J. Bateman presents the evidence of the two chests' provenance, noting the 'broad arrow' Government inventory marks, and suggests that they were made by convict cabin...
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...
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...
The earliest known free-standing, full-length sculpture created in Australia is a highly detailed sandstone statue of a well-dressed
colonial gentleman, urinating. Functionally plumbed, this statue is as extraordinary as it is enigmatic. Chris Tassell speculates on
who might have...
Two early arks held in the museum collection of The Great Synagogue in Elizabeth Street, Sydney are impressive examples of Australian furniture. Their distinct Egyptian style could have been a source of inspiration for the architectural style of the York Street Synagogue (1844). In her search for the...
Zealous colonists wanted those ‘at home’ to know how economically successful the British colonies in Australia had become. When gold was found in 1851, the Governor of New South Wales sent specimens of the first gold, in boxes made using selected colonial timbers by Irish-born cabinetmaker Andrew...
The first retrospective of ‘19th-century Australia’s best unknown artist’, Charles Rodius (1802–1860), bringing together 92 original watercolours, drawings and prints, will be shown at the State Library of NSW. While the host library holds the largest collection, other notable examples are held in the N...
The subject of this book is coins
that have had their surfaces engraved, repurposed to communicate private and public messages. It covers the whole spectrum of engraved coins created
in Great Britain and forms a cultural backdrop of Australian culture, which pre-gold-rush era was predominantly
a ...
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...
Spanish monks established the Benedictine mission at New Norcia in Western Australia in 1846. Following on from her article last year on Isidro Oriol,1 Dr Dorothy Erickson concludes her series on the Spanish craftsmen who worked on buildings and furniture for the monastic community. Here she examines...
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 ...
Artists draw inspiration from many sources. Glenn Cooke examines at how a 20th-century Queensland wood carver took his design inspiration from an historical French pottery plaque some 400 years old, finding what seems to be the exact example he used.
In America as in England, tea drinking became highly fashionable in the 18th century. The duty imposed on tea imported into Britain’s North American colonies became a catalyst for revolution, highlighted by the Boston Tea Partyin 1773. Many discrete meetings of revolutionaries were fuelled by nothing more inc...
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...
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 Wy...
When furniture or crib board collecting becomes too hard, because of either their cost or scarcity or both, the average Australiana collector can turn to drinks trays. They can turn to drinks too, but this article is just about the trays.
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...
Most craftsmen who emigrated to colonial Australia were trained in the English, Scottish, Irish or German traditions. In Western Australia, several Spanish craftsmen were attracted by the monastery established by their compatriot Bendictine monks at New Norcia. Western Australian craftsmen, mostly using jarrah ...
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...
Objects and art shown at international exhibitions always attract a premium. Often, they really were ‘showpieces’, specially made to demonstrate the maker’s skills, ability and cutting-edge design. Three room suites of W. H. Rocke’s furniture displayed at the prestigious Melbourne International Exhibiti...
Petra ten-Doesschate Chu and Max Donnelly with Andrew Montana and Suzanne Veldink, Daniel Cottier: Designer, Decorator, Dealer.
Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, Yale University Press, New Haven CT 2021. Hard cover,
256 pp, 200 illustrations, Booktopia price $59 plus postage.
Philip...
Dr Erickson concludes her story of the professional women artists who commenced working in Western Australia before World War I. All were born in South Australia or England, coming to Western Australia later, most as young adults and often with other family members. Their careers began in the heady years of the...
Robert Stevens, in ‘William Paul Dowling: artist, artist-photographer and photographer’ in our November 2020 issue, and using information provided by Irish genealogist Dr Paul MacCotter, suggested that Dowling may have possibly been the ‘William Dowling’ baptised 26 December 1822 at St Mary’s Roman Ca...
The cabinet maker James Whitesides (c 1803–1890) arrived in Hobart from Ireland in 1832. He came to the colony with established woodworking skills and in the company of fellow artisans William Hamilton and John McLoughlin. The three opened business premises as Hamilton & Co in Argyle Street, but in Octobe...
This darling little painting came into the possession of a friend – a friend with a very good eye. It came with no provenance, but it has since revealed a South Australian story. This is a tale of changing fortunes, one that spans the scope of Victorian society from servant, Cambridge scholar, muleteer, garde...
In 1832, John Gould produced A Century of birds from the Himalaya Mountains, the plates ‘drawn from nature and on stone by E. Gould’, and five years later, five volumes on the birds of Europe with 448 lithographic plates, most by Elizabeth Gould with 68 by Edward Lear. The bird specimens his brothers- in-la...
Many people help create each issue of Australiana: authors, editor, photographers, owners of items, designer, expert readers, proof-readers and other talented individuals and institutions. Once we publish, each story is pretty much set in stone, so we try to check our research, facts and conclusions first. We c...
It was an absolute privilege at the recent Annual General Meeting (AGM) to be elected President of the Society. I am very humbled by the fact that the outgoing President Dr Jim Bertouch and Vice President Tim Cha nominated me for the role with the unanimous support of the outgoing Committee and State Chairs.
Lieutenant James Cook took various gifts on his voyages of discovery, to distribute to Indigenous people whom he might encounter. Peter Lane draws attention to the only example of one of Cook’s medals found in Australia, a memento of friendly contact between the European explorers and Indigenous Tasmanians in...
Many collectors keep up their obsession for decades, but they don’t always begin as children. Luke Jones recounts his passion for collecting Australian toys over nearly 40 years, and how he turned that into a useful and well-illustrated reference book for other collectors.
Dublin-born William Paul Dowling (c 1822–1877) worked in London as a draftsman and artist before his Irish Nationalist political activities led to his being transported to Van Diemen’s Land for sedition. Here, the Irish Catholic convict established a reputation as a portrait artist, gradually adapting to th...
Thank you for attending the 2020 AGM and it is a pleasure to present, albeit sadly ... for me at least ... my last report. 40th Anniversary Symposium Well I can say that we really started the year with a bang with the highly successful Australiana Symposium at the State Library in October 2019, which was well s...
Dr Dorothy Erickson begins a new series of articles on Western Australian art, exploring the production and themes adopted by women artists in the 19th century, and putting their work into its social and artistic context.
In 2018, Dr Andrew Montana restored William Joseph Williams (1851–1918) as the artist responsible for the late 19th-century painted decoration in South Australia at Ayers House, the Museum of Economic Botany, Rigby’s bookshop, Trew’s South Australian Club Hotel and probably Para Para.1 Now the artist’s ...
On a beautiful summer’s afternoon, 85 members from Brisbane, Melbourne, Sydney, Hobart and northern Tasmania attended the Tasmanian Branch’s 2020 opening event, an ‘At Home’ at Clairville (plate 1) near Evandale, courtesy of the owners, Michael McWilliams and Robert Henley (plates 2-3). The event on 22 ...
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...
Charles Rodius began his prolific art career in Paris and London. Convicted of thefts in 1829, he was transported to Sydney, where the convict artist produced landscapes, portraits of leading Sydney settlers as well as notable portraits of Aboriginal people, many translated into lithographs. Rodius had a good s...
Dr Gary Morgan’s research into a recently re-discovered Tasmanian miniature, reported here for the first time, identifies – partly by using new facial recognition technology – that it is a memento of a Tasmanian colonial family, as well as shedding new light on the technique of the artist, Ludwig Becker.
Gold Rush craftsmen and artists brought their European traditions with them in the mid-19th century, just as George de Nemes (György Nemes) brought his techniques, Hungarian folk art tradition, conceptions of what art should be, fantasies and recollections of totalitarian regimes under the Fascists and Communi...
Sydney stained glass artists Lyon Cottier & Co. carried out many commissions in public, private and religious buildings in their 50 years of activity from 1873 to 1924. Prominent architects chose their work for Sydney’s GPO, Government House and Parliament House. Religious services were an important and frequ...
The November 2018 issue featured the carved furniture of a young woman, Alice Maud Golley (1884–1961) who lived an isolated life with her immediate family on remote Wedge Island in the Spencer Gulf of South Australia. Golley’s furniture is a virtuoso display of skill and grace, yet she was untrained. Among ...