Search results for 'Eve Stenning'

President’s update

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...

Sydney Technical College and Australian Flora in Art

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...

A Treasure Chest?

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 ...

Twin Chests of Drawers for Government House, Hobart

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...

The face in the footstool: James Barclay’s rare clocks

Recycling ain’t what it used to be. Launceston clock and watch experts Graham and Sallie Mulligan came across a tapestry
footstool which their sharp eyes recognised as comprising re-used parts of an old clock. Further investigation revealed that the
parts came from a sign...

Annual Report of the Australiana Society 2023

... 







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...

The Lahey Project: recording the oeuvre of a prominent Queensland artist

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...

Henry F Hutton and the Hutton family, Victorian jewellers

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...

President’s Update

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...

Book Review: Ron Radford, John Glover. Patterdale Farm and the Revelation of the Australian Landscape

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...

President’s Update

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...

Scrimshaw – real or fake?

Scrimshaw, the ancient art of the mariner is a most important part of our heritage which is very collectable. At times, scrimshaw achieves very high prices at auction in Australia and internationally. This article relates solely to Australian scrimshaw which is different in many ways to American or in...

Exhibition: Charles Rodius, State Library of NSW

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 workshop of Sydney silversmith William Kerr

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...

Australiana: Designing a Nation, Bendigo Art Gallery 18 March to 25 June 2023

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...

Australiana Society Tour of Bendigo and Castlemaine

Victorian chairman Robert Stevens reports on a November 2022 tour to the Central Goldfields region.

The 2022 Peter Walker Fine Arts Writing Award

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 th...

Peter Harley: Queensland Folk Wood Carver

A quite remarkable amount of wood-carving was produced in Australia, in the framework of the Arts and Crafts movement, at the beginning of the 20th century which is, and remains, unidentified. If we don’t have a provenance we can look at stylistically similar works, such as Queensland’s Harvey School,...

Spanish Craftsmen at New Norcia Abbey in Western Australia part 2: John Casellas

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...

Kitchen inspirations: the recipe books of a Queensland flour manufacturer

As far as eating paraphernalia goes, Australiana has previously covered dining tables and chairs, sideboards, ceramic plates, silver table ornaments, Splayds and even tea towels. Megan Martin demonstrates that it is about time we looked at recipe books, particularly as these Queensland examples ...

Unlocking the Story of Doulton’s ‘Australia 1886’ Vase

Queensland collectors Jon and Yvonne Douglas explain how their collecting of Doulton ceramics developed and how, as they read more and more about their passion, their interests deepened. Here they present their research into one particular example with Australian connections, a vase made in 1886 for the Colonia...

President’s Update

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: Art Collector and Patron

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...

H.A. Nielsen, Art Cabinet Maker, of Port Douglas, North Queensland

Many colonial woodworkers, often trained in Britain or Europe, came to Australia and discovered the vast variety of native timbers suitable for carving or for making furniture and timber articles. Jewellery ‘book boxes’ made from several contrasting North Queensland timbers and bearing the stamp of ‘H.A. ...

Mary Jones: a Mysterious Artist in Queensland

Brisbane painter and art teacher Mary E. Jones has escaped recognition for 130 years. She would not be alone in that fate: over time, many aspiring painters and their works disappear from history. Timothy Roberts reveals some details about Miss Jones’s career and her impact as a woman artist in Brisbane betwe...

H C Simpson and his popular art

While the artist H. C. Simpson (1879–1966) depicted subjects such as Mount Warning in northern NSW, his output is emphatically linked with the early years of the ‘Gold Coast’ and specifically the resort towns of Coolangatta, Currumbin and Tweed Heads. Although his work is not held in particularl...

Designs by Murdoch at the House of Georges

Fashion designer Margaret Murdoch (1912–1999) has been eclipsed by other members of the Murdoch family. In 1938 she went to London to gain experience in fashion design. Her move to the fashion capital of Paris on the eve of World War II led to disruption of her career path, with two stints of internment ...

Splayds – ‘the runcible spoon that captivated the world’

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...

Madame Henry, Juliette Lebeau-Lopes-Rastoul-Henry

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...

Saving Currajong

Many buildings in Australia have been recognised for their architectural or historical significance, or their association with important individuals. Some have been preserved, and some have not. Jillian Dwyer relates the story of Currajong in Melbourne’s east, the Italianate villa built by the prominent colon...

Indigenous motifs on a silver brooch

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...

A presentation casket with carving by John K. Blogg, 1915

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...

Contributing to Australiana

The Australiana Society aims to support ‘researching, preserving and collecting Australia’s heritage’. As our readers have a range of interests and live in different states, so we try to cater to all interests and regions. However, we rely on what you submit. Everyone is welcome to submit articles for con...

President’s update

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. ...

The tomb of Father Receveur and the La Pérouse Monument at Botany Bay

Two paintings of the Tomb of Father Receveur and the La Perouse Monument at Botany Bay by F. C. Terry mark the end of a significant episode in the exploration and scientific research of the Pacific in the late 18th century, extending from the arrival of the First Fleet at Botany Bay in January 1788 to the great...

Spanish Craftsmen for the New Norcia Abbey in Western Australia. Part 1, Isidro Oriol

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 ...

Trevor John Kennedy AM 24.6.1942 – 28.11.2021

Lesley Garrett, a long-standing family friend, fondly recalls Trevor Kennedy's life and passion for collecting, amassing the most important collection of Australian decorative arts ever assembled... Anne Schofield, the source of much of the spectacular jewellery acquired for his collection, has her own distinct...

Rosa Fiveash’s Quarantine Camp 1919: a not so new ‘normal’

A small watercolour painting reveals remarkable similarities between the 1919 pandemic and that of our times.

Henning Rathjen: Victorian art potter 1948–1968

In the aftermath of World War II, many commercial potteries were established in Australia to satisfy the market disrupted by hostilities, particularly for Japanese and European imports. While some of these new commercial potteries were established by immigrants from war-ravaged Europe, Henning Alfred Rathjen (1...

John Glover through the Claude Glass

English painter John Glover once owned two Italian landscapes by the French painter known as Claude Lorrain. Claude's work prompted artists and tourists to view landscape in terms of art, so they would often look at 'Picturesque' scenery reflected in a tinted convex mirror known as a ‘Claude glass’, simulat...

Peter Walker Fine Art Writing Award 2021

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 Austra...

President’s Update

I trust all members had an enjoyable festive season with the family and friends they were fortunate enough to be able to see. As I have stated all too often, COVID never ceases to amaze with the number of twists and turns it continues to deliver. Who would have ever thought that, with the vaccination levels mos...

Australiana Society tours 2021: Ballarat and Camperdown Tour

Australiana Society members visited the Ballarat region of Victoria in May, as part of a tour carefully planned by Victorian branch chair Robert Stevens. Luckily, it fell into a gap between COVID lockdowns, and gave members from several states a chance to get out, mingle and enjoy what the Victorian Central Gol...

Australiana Society tours 2021: Bathurst Heritage Weekend

Postponed several times due to Covid-19 restrictions, our plans for a visit to Bathurst in the NSW Central Tablelands, lands of the Wiradyuri Nation, finally came to fruition from 30 April to 2 May 2021, with the maximum
50 participants from five states taking part. Others were unable to attend for fear of not...

‘Royal memories of Canberra’; repatriating the Duke of Gloucester’s 1946 collection Scenes of Canberra by John Eldershaw

John Roy Eldershaw (1892–1973) was a landscape artist who worked primarily in watercolours. During his lifetime, he
was proclaimed to be ‘destined to leave unmistakable footprints in the sands of time’. In 1973 Sir Erik Langker, the arts administrator and influential member of
the Sydney arts establishm...

Meshach Stevens, artist, painter and tradesman

Between arriving in Hobart Town as a convict on 3 August 1831 and the last evidence of his residing in Van Diemen’s Land in 1847, Meshach Stevens painted a very competent copy of a famous print after William John Huggins titled Northern Whale Fishery, published in London in 1829 (plate 1).1 For almost ...

Allen Duckworth, woodworker and native timbers crusader

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...

Victoria’s earliest potteries

Greg Hill’s new research, using contemporary newspapers and other resources now easily available on Trove, has found a raft of previously unknown potteries operating in Victoria in the 19th century. These push back the dates of Victorian pottery manufacture into the 1840s. Many examples of these wares however...

‘Angels in the Studio’ in Western Australia part 3: Passing through

Continuing our story of the women artists working in Western Australia before World War I, we will now turn to three ‘Angels’ who came, saw and conquered, but did not stay. They were all single, peripatetic, somewhat bohemian and left their mark in several societies. Marie Anne Tuck (1866–1947); Florence ...

Feedback

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...