Judging the annual Peter Walker Fine Art Writing Award, established in 1999 to encourage authors to write for Australiana, has proved especially challenging this year, with so many well-researched contributions.
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...
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...
Four early Australian silver flatware items – two spoons and two forks – engraved with the three initials ‘WEB’ present a challenge warranting research. Whose engraved initials (WEB) are they and when were the items made and engraved? Christine Erratt offers an answer. Four flatware1items with...
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 ...
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...
I trust all members enjoyed a wonderful festive season and new year with family and friends. Who would have thought at this time last year that 2020 would present us with the challenges that it did? Hopefully 2021 will prove to be more the ‘norm’. As I write this, regional COVID outbreaks appear to have bee...
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...
Sometimes it is easy to find information about an artist in reference works. Sometimes information can be readily found through internet resources. Stephen Marshall, looking at wider issues of art appreciation, chose as an example William Young, who painted many watercolours around Sydney and NSW from the 1920s...
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...
What better way to celebrate a golden wedding than with a golden gift that symbolises affection for the recipients, their intimate connection over 50 years and carries their monograms? Dianne Byrne explores the background to a pair of gold napkin rings presented to James and Charlotte Cowlishaw in Brisbane in 1...
Exactly 250 years ago, HMB Endeavour commanded by Lt James Cook was the first British ship to sight the east coast of Australia, then known as the Great South Land or Terra Australis Incognita. As one of the most important exploration milestones in Australia’s history, it now seems to be passing largely unnot...
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...
When you are dealing with precious metals, you want to know that what you have is what it is claimed to be. European countries instituted hallmarking systems to verify this, some of them operating for over 700 years. Silver expert Jolyon Warwick James discusses how Australia had its own hallmarking system, but ...
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 ...
At a heritage conference in Adelaide in 2015, Dr Donald Ellsmore attributed the superb interior decoration at Adelaide’s Ayers House and Gawler’s Para Para in South Australia to the Sydney decorating firm of Lyon, Cottier & Co. and their employee Charles Gow, purely on speculation. Till now, his opinion has...
Lieutenant James Cook RN, commanding officer of HMB Endeavour, the renamed collier Earl of Pembroke, sailed on 26 August 1768 from England on a naval and scientific voyage to observe the Transit of Venus, collect natural history specimens and explore the east coast of New Holland. The 250th anniversary of the v...
London jeweller's apprentice James Walsh, convicted of theft and forgery, drew on the walls of Fremantle Gaol images of European art, perhaps taken from his own treasured artist's sketchbook. After his release from gaol, his later subjects were taken from his surroundings: landscapes and the fringe-dwelling Ind...
From Clive Lucas OBE: I very much enjoyed Robert Stevens’s article on Elizabeth Hudspeth, and would like to draw attention to her involvement with Australia’s first picturesque “Italian” villa at Rosedale near Campbell Town. Miss Hudspeth visited the house soon after its completion in the 1840s to the d...
Jolyon Warwick James traces the story of an Australian colonial silver spoon with a name engraved on the stem, and finds a link with a banker who lived and died at Bronte House overlooking one of Sydney’s famous beaches.
Prestigious Melbourne cabinet maker Geo. Thwaites & Son operated from 1842 to 1889, providing high-class furniture for Victoria’s mansions, homesteads and prominent institutional and public buildings. Today the firm is best remembered for its contracts to furnish Government House in 1854 and again in 1875 and...
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.
Author Stephen Marshall is to be congratulated on writing this carefully compiled compendium of (William) Blamire Young’s watercolours, for while in his own words he is a passionate art lover, he modestly refutes being an expert on art history. Nevertheless, over 650 pages he has assembled an impressive catal...
In 1970, Anne Schofield opened the first shop in Australia dealing exclusively in antique jewellery (in Queen Street, Woollahra, hence the book title) and has been dealing from there ever since. She is well-known from her appearances at fairs and in the media, for her support foreword which introduces the reade...
John Locksley Kemp, a descendant of Richard Kemp, gave a silver medal, passed down through the Kemp family, to the Powerhouse Museum in 1984. Very little was known about the medal’s history until Karen Eaton came across it by chance while viewing the Museum’s on-line collection database. Also a descendant o...
The Wallis album is closely linked to the two chests through Captain James Wallis (1785?–1858). Wallis, appointed commandant of the Newcastle penal settlement by Macquarie in 1816, had the Macquarie chest made as a parting gift for Governor Macquarie around 1818. It is possible that Wallis, who retired from t...
The construction of the complex and difficult-to-make oval cedar case for the Woodstock Challenge Cup (plate 1) illustrated in my article “Essie Jenyns and her Australian Terriers” has prompted me to wonder how and why it came into being. Recently I purchased for my reference library a complete set of the B...
