Geoff and Kerrie Ford from the National Museum of Australian Pottery in
Holbrook had ‘a bit of an anxious month’ in the build-up to acquiring at
auction in Sydney recently, what they believe is the most important piece of
early Australian convict pottery stamped ‘J ....
Geoffrey Edwards encapsulates some of the spectacular achievements of his friend
and colleague Terry Lane, a former Senior Curator at the National Gallery of Victoria.
Terry was one of the greatest and most influential collectors, researchers and
exhibition curators of Australia...
We can often recognise items as being Australian because of their subject matter (such as kangaroos) or raw materials (such
as red cedar). Even regional variations in subject matter or raw materials across the continent can lead to distinctive products
or artworks t...
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...
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...
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...
...
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...
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...
BOOK REVIEW BY MICHAEL LECHRuth Lane Poole: a woman of influence. Canberra Museum and Gallery, 2021, 58 pages. BOOK REVIEW BY ANNE-MARIE VAN DE VENChristine Stewart,
Collits’ Inn: Uncovering the Past, Tellwell, Australia 2021 ISBN 978-0-2288-3720-6
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Following our calling for expressions of interest and personal approaches, the Board recently endorsed Robert Hannan, Peter Crawshaw, Gail Darby and Phillip Black as the NSW Branch Committee. At the Committee’s first meeting Robert Hannan was elected Chair and Peter Crawshaw Secretary. These individuals posse...
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...
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...
Una Deerbon was a well-known maker of hand-built pottery, often with applied moulded decoration. When in her late 40s, she began making pottery in 1930. Just three years later she held three solo commercial exhibitions in Sydney and Melbourne, launching her on a successful career as a potter which lasted until ...
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 ...
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...
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 ...
One of the first events organised by the Australiana Society’s Queensland Chapter was a visit to Miegunyah, the historic house museum owned and operated by the Queensland Women’s Historical Association in Bowen Hills, Brisbane for the past 50 years. For the visit in June 2018, local member Judith McKay acte...
In the 19th century, many artists trained in Europe came to Australia, where the strange new land often impacted on how they saw the world and what they depicted. French china painter Madame Bourdic did not succumb to the Australian environment. She continued to paint china in the academic tradition she had lea...
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 ...
Edmund Edgar Bult (alias Edmund Edgar, c 1804–after 1852), a talented and respectable young London engraver cum cat burglar, ransacked the house of a young lady, only to be apprehended by a police constable while making his getaway. HRH Frederick Duke of York was among those who supported a plea for clemency,...
The design and manufacture of a writing desk for the Bank of New Zealand, Dunedin (1879–83). We are familiar with immigrants trained in Britain or Europe coming to Australia and continuing their craft, or with Australian artists travelling to Europe to learn and expand their skills and ideas. Rarely have we l...
“Bring forty members to Tasmania to celebrate the Australiana Society’s 40th anniversary” was president Jim Bertouch’s brief. The new Tasmanian Chapter of the Australiana Society accordingly set to work under the leadership of chairman Colin Thomas to emulate the success of the Society’s 2015 Tasmania...
If you think that a history of the numismatic collection held by the Art Gallery of South Australia would be a dry read of limited appeal, you are certainly in for a pleasant surprise with Peter Lane’s new book. It is a good read, full of life and interest.
In October this year, the Australiana Society will turn 40, and I am very pleased to announce that we will be recognising this important milestone in a number of different ways. However it is worthwhile remembering that when the Society was founded in 1978 there was very limited interest in Australian decorativ...
Coursing has a history of over 150 years in Australia. In its heyday in Britain, the sport attracted the aristocracy and even royalty such as Prince Albert. In Australia, wealthy gentlemen bred, owned, traded and gambled on greyhounds. The most famous dogs were expensive, revered and the subject of portraits by...
Years ago I bought a brass tray with gum leaves on it. I turned it over and saw that the maker had incised on the back “Hand Made R. Head Cremorne”. At the time, the name meant nothing to me. Then I found another one, without a maker’s name, but in the Arts & Crafts style and with similar features: the sa...
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...
Over the last 12 months the Society has continued to grow and flourish in more ways than one. I am very pleased to report that the Tasmanian Chapter of the Society is now off and running, having had a very successful opening at Runnymede, in Hobart, last November. Tasmanian Chair Colin Thomas had invited the Ho...
It is timely to showcase the lively drawings of an Australian on the Western Front in the Great War 100 years ago. Although the young man fought in those terrible trenches, most of his images have a quiet dignity. Only in the heat of a battle in which he was wounded, do you feel the horror of it all; his franti...
Those familiar with the capital of New South Wales will know George Street, Sydney Cove and The Rocks. Karen Eaton deconstructs John Carmichael’s engraving George Street from the Wharf and explores in detail its five main elements – George Street, the King’s Wharf, the Commissariat Stores, Kemp & Dobson...
The idea of an annual series of lectures named after Kevin Fahy came from our secretary, Michael Lech. The obvious subject for the first, held in Sydney on 12 March, was Kevin himself. Australiana editor and foundation member John Wade chose to talk about him as a friend, patriarch, storyteller and scholar, to ...
George Richard Addis (1864–1937) is best known as one of Western Australia’s leading late 19th- and early 20th-century goldfields jewellers, whose Western Australian work has been documented by Dorothy Erickson.1 Many jewellers however worked in different colonies, and here Michel Reymond records for the fi...
The National Gallery of Australia holds a three-piece silver buckle that originally formed the central element of a Champion’s Boxing Belt presented to prize-fighter Isaac Reid in 1847 (plate 1). This remarkable belt was made by Sydney silversmiths J.J. Cohen & Son1 and engraved by John Carmichael. Until rece...
Edinburgh-born John Carmichael arrived in Sydney in 1825, living and working there for over 30 years producing landscapes, portraits, maps, billheads, musical scores, illustrations and some of Australia’s first postage stamps. His works provide a revealing and valuable record of life and times in colonial Syd...
Hordern House continues their excellent service in the publication of early colonial history by releasing Robert Purdie’s Narrative of the Wreck of HMS Porpoise hot on the heels of Elizabeth Ellis’s book on The Sydney Punchbowl in the Mitchell Library. Here the subject is a first-hand description of the fou...
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...
Australiana magazine has been presenting important information and original research about Australian decorative arts and heritage for 36 years, and is now the leading publication in the field. While we promised a bumper issue in November, I can now announce an even better alternative – our first monograph, t...
Another of the talented women artists who came to the colony of Western Australia was Annie Purnell. She was not a professional artist, but the “Angel in the House” for her bachelor brother, the Anglican minister the Reverend Robert Purnell. As was typical of gentlewomen of the time, she would have been tra...
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...
Hilda Rix Nicholas was one of Australia’s most successful international artists. When she returned to Australia in 1918, she brought her magnificent paintings infused with post- impressionist light and colour to a generation of young Australian artists, yet her triumphant homecoming had been marred by the los...
In masterminding and producing this fine book, Tony Kanellos, Cultural Collections Manager and Curator of the Santos Museum of Economic Botany located in the Adelaide Botanic Garden, has provided both reader and book collector with a gem. It clearly demonstrates his care of and expertise in the safekeeping of t...