List of Articles in Issue Vol 47 no 1, February 2025

President’s update

I trust all members had a most enjoyable festive season with family and friends. 2025 is well and truly upon us with significant events planned for the calendar year.It was most pleasing to finish 2024 with 556 members. This is a record for the society and demonstrates the value which members perceive they are ...

Gold Australian animal sculptures

Two gold sculptures featuring Australian animals expertly cast in Sydney bySimon Adrien Schagen (1923–2013)were offered by West Sussex auctioneersToovey’s on 8 August 2024.

George Hart-Taylor: rediscovering an important Queensland landscape painter

Some hold the view that, except for Conrad Martens and Isaac Walter Jenner, no accomplished artists found anything to interest them in the wilder regions of colonial Queensland. Where are the grand landscape paintings to rival those of John Glover or Eugene von Guérard? In fact, several accomplished but n...

Cootch and Kitty: two studio potters and the modern kitchen

Joseph Forrester’s silver marks

London silver dealer Wynyard Wilkinson suggests an explanation and chronology for the punches used on silver created by the convict silversmith Joseph Forrester, who worked in Tasmania and later Victoria. In the absence of a formal hallmarking system in Australia, he postulates that some Scottish-trained silver...

Australiana Society visit to Fairfield Tasmania

Ginni Woof reports on the Australiana Society visit to Fairfield at Cressy in north-east Tasmania, about 30 km south of Launceston, in December.

An industrial souvenir rediscovered

Curators know that the best place to find good artefacts is in the neglected corners of a museum store. Megan Martin found an interesting cast-iron historical plaque, an item from a radical time when a commitment to state-owned enterprises was a central plank of the policy platform of Queensland’s Labor Gover...

Ian Stephenson 1 December 1955 – 20 October 2024

When we eventually and inevitably lose some of our friends and colleagues, we have a duty to encapsulate their contributions to the heritage movement generally. Ian Stephenson was such a person, an active member of the Australiana Society and many other organisations. Starting his working life at the Tax Office...

The 1889 Queensland Deposit Bank and Building Society silver trowel

A new bank in 1880s Brisbane needed a solid, impressive building and a ‘pleasing and interesting’ event to lay its cornerstone. The Queensland Deposit Bank arranged a formal ceremony, with a silver trowel to symbolically ‘well and truly lay’ the corner stone, under which were placed current newspapers a...

The Thallon Memorial Medal – a gold prize for the children of Queensland railway workers

Over a period of nearly 60 years from 1913 to 1970, about 200 outstanding Queensland school students, sons and daughters of employees of the Queensland Railways, were awarded gold medals valued at £3/10/, or the equivalent in scholastic books, in memory of Railway Commissioner J F Thallon (1847–191...