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The Peter Walker Fine Art Writing Award 2015 Judge's Report

THE KEVIN FAHY INAUGURAL ANNUAL LECTURE 2016: ‘Kevin Fahy (1932-2007). Friend, patriarch, storyteller, scholar'

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 ...

Book review: Denis Lake, ‘The Men Who Made The Celebrated Chairs‘

The Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery in Launceston claims that Peddle chairs are “Tasmania’s best known antique”, so that probably justifies a book about them. And who better to compile it than Denis Lake, a Launceston furniture restorer, who can combine research with his detailed practical knowledge...

The Olley project and the problems of identification

The much-loved artist Margaret Olley is commemorated in the Tweed Regional Art Gallery at Murwillumbah, which established the Margaret Olley Art Centre and displays some of her paintings and her re-created studio. Glenn Cooke is adding his personal tribute to Olley, in the form of an illustrated database of Oll...

Bling: 19th century goldfields jewellery

Jewellery dealer Anne Schofield, who performed the official opening of the exhibition Bling: 19th century goldfields jewellery at the Museum of Australian Democracy at Ballarat on 16 April, kindly let us publish her address.

Edwin Foss Duffield: a colonial-born craftsman

Trove and family histories have recently revealed information about Edwin Foss Duffield (1846–1922), a colonial-born craftsman of distinction in Western Australia. He commenced working in Fremantle in the late 1860s as a cabinet maker and undertaker, and a number of pieces of furniture from his workshop survi...

George Richard Addis, watchmaker and jeweller: his Victorian and Tasmanian years

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...

Queensland welcomes a portrait of Lord Lamington

The John Oxley Library at the State Library of Queensland has added a portrait of Lord Lamington, Queensland’s eighth governor, to its collection of historical works of art.

An early Australian silver gift - its authenticity and content

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.

The legend of Australian cedar furniture

Since opening an art gallery last year that includes a display of early cedar furniture, Bob Fredman has been fascinated to see that the furniture strikes a strong chord with nearly all visitors. They unfailingly comment on it being beautiful, and especially take an interest when they find out it is all Austral...

Lady Bowen's Irish harp brooch - a Queensland colonial treasure rediscovered

In our May 2015 issue, Dianne Byrne identified a brooch presented in 1867 to Lady Bowen, wife of Queensland’s first Governor, in a photograph held in the National Library. Further detective work has revealed that the brooch is still held by Lady Bowen’s descendants in England. We illustrate it now for the f...

Mattie Furphy - dainty but determined

Dorothy Erickson documents the life and work of Mattie Furphy (1878–1948), a Victorian who moved to Perth in 1902 to become a prominent Western Australian artist and designer.

German trench art from Victoria

Seldom do prisoner of war trench art objects indicate where they were made. One that does is carved from wood in the shape of continental Australia, with the words and date “Murchison den [the] 24.8.1941” together with a stylised Australian coat of arms.

The cabinet maker and the carver: George Thwaites and Daniel Livingstone

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 Champion's Belt of Isaac Reid, heavyweight prize-fighter

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...

Ernest Worrall and his Anglo-Boer War khaki keepsake

Dr Annette Gero’s article “Wartime quilts” in the May 2015 Australiana stimulated Peter Lane to contact her about an Anglo-Boer War keepsake. Trooper Ernest Worrall of South Australia had drawn images and words on this rather small scrap of khaki fabric in 1902. Mementoes of that war are rare and Dr Gero ...

Book review: Sasha Grishin, ‘S T Gill and his audiences‘

Samuel Thomas Gill died melodramatically, aged 62, on the steps on the Melbourne Post Office at half past four on Wednesday 27 October 1880. A policeman recorded that he “was in a most filthy state and covered with vermin” while a search of the pockets found pills which identified him. An autopsy revealed t...

Book review: Eva Czernis-Ryl, ‘Hendrik Forster Silversmith Designer Maker’

During the second decade of the new millennium, many pioneers of the crafts movement in Australia, which began to flourish in the 1970s, will celebrate four decades of working in studio practices with their chosen materials.

Peter Walker Fine Art Writing Award winners

John Black Carmichael (1803-1857), artist and engraver

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...

Book review: Tony Kanellos (editor), ‘Out of the Past: views of the Adelaide Botanic Garden - a series of Edwardian Era Postcards'

The extended title for this splendid visual feast is a catalogue to accompany the exhibition Postcards from the Edge of the City at the Santos Museum of Economic Botany, 9 December 2014 to 26 April 2015. As a catalogue this book contains the front and back sides of 300 postcards published between 1900 and 1917.

The prism of provenance: the Landau collection of Krimper furniture

Museums tend to lift items out of the ordinary world into the refined orbit of curators. In detailing the history of a collection of Krimper furniture bought by a Sydney family, Catriona Quinn shows the importance of knowing the history of an object, its owners and context – its provenance – and argues that...

The Australiana Society's Tasmanian tour 2015

Australiana Society members were privileged to see, touch and experience many and varied treasures on our Tasmanian tour. Here we showcase the welcome and rare opportunities extended to those who participated, and encourage other members to consider creating a future tour showcasing your state or region, offeri...

Book Review: Dorothy Erickson, ‘Inspired by Light’

Published as the first of two hardcover volumes (the second will cover the period from 1950 to now), this is Dr Dorothy Erickson’s most ambitious publishing venture. Exploring the work of designers and makers in Western Australia since the founding of the Swan River Colony in 1829 until 1969, it is her most s...

Book Review: John Maynard, ‘True Light and Shade’

Over the last 20 years or so interest in convict artist Joseph Lycett (1775–1828) has steadily quickened and heightened in Australian popular culture through the influence of various published works and exhibitions. He is now held in high regard by art and cultural historians.

Richard Batholomew Smith's Wunderkammer

R.B. Smith made his model of the Strasburg Clock to celebrate the centenary of British settlement. It was hailed as a “scientific triumph of Australian workmanship”. At first, Smith exhibited it privately “like a fat woman in a country fair”1 until it found a home in Sydney’s Technological Museum. The...

Sir Donald Bradman and Withersfield

Cricket is in the news with the Ashes being played in England. Sir Donald Bradman (1908–2001) is respected as the world’s best and most famous cricketer, both in Australia and the United Kingdom. His grandfather, Charles Bradman, lived in the small Suffolk village of Withersfield until he emigrated to Austr...

President's Report

Treasurer's Report

The Peter Walker Fine Art Writing Award 2014 Judge's Report

Eureka and Victoria's chair of state

In the 19th century, an appropriately draped “chair of state” under a canopy was deployed on formal occasions when the monarch or her vice-regal representative was present. These chairs were conspicuously larger than any surrounding chairs, acknowledging the status of the occupant. Dr La Nauze traces the hi...

Book Review: Robert Purdie, ‘Narrative of the Wreck of HMS Porpoise’

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...

Book Review: David Kelly, ‘Convict and Free’

David Kelly sets out in this book to chart the history of 100 or so master cabinet-makers working in New South Wales up to 1850. His introduction discusses that bland sentence in some detail, meticulously defining those terms and the parameters of his research. Then Kelly outlines the structure of the book, sou...

From the editor

Adrian Feint's flowers and fishermen: the Lesley Godden collection

A collection of flower paintings by Adrian Feint, belonging to his friend and fishing companion Les Godden, came to light last year when they were sold at auction. Catriona Quinn researches the background of this collection, the work of Adrian Feint and his artistic friendships.

Finding Firnhaber treasures

Colonial Australian jewellery is rarely marked with the name of its maker or retailer. Perth jewellery dealer Trevor Hancock sticks his neck out and attributes several pieces to the German-born Adelaide jeweller C. E. Firnhaber, based on stylistic similarities of the works. All of them are illustrated here.

Backchat

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...

Lady Bowen's Irish harp brooch - a missing piece of Queensland colonial jewellery

The practice of presenting diplomatic gifts to dignitaries goes back to antiquity. As the much-admired wife of the governor of the colonies of Queensland, New Zealand and Victoria, Diamantina, Lady Bowen received some significant pieces of jewellery and metalwork. These gifts were frequently, and often fulsomel...

A rare Feint format: "Shells" designed and painted 1947 for "Jo" Fakhry

This soft-paste porcelain mug, 8.7 cm high and 9 cm diameter, is painted in overglaze enamels on a Wedgwood “Barlaston” blank dated 1947. Feint’s choice of this Wedgwood form, together with the incorporation of the date 1947 and the letters J F as key elements in the design, suggests an awareness of the n...

A chance beginning: the Lyons collection of decorative art

The Art Gallery of South Australia is showcasing for the first time over 50 examples of Australian decorative arts given to the Gallery by Adelaide psychiatrist Dr Robert Lyons, who had assembled one of the finest private collections of South Australian decorative arts.

Wartime quilts

World War I began 101 years ago. Galleries all around the world, including many in Australia, are having exhibitions with memories of this war. The Gallipoli campaign is particularly significant to Australians and New Zealanders this year, with the centenary on the first landing on 25 April 1915, and the withdr...

Backchat

On 1 January 2014, the University of Ballarat and the Gippsland campus of Monash University amalgamated to form Federation University Australia. The ceremonial mace formerly used at the University of Ballarat is currently in use as the ceremonial mace for the new university... It was not John [Joseph] Thomas Ha...

The Ashes bail

The Ashes! Is it a bail, or a veil? Tom Thompson looks at a hidden treasure from Australia’s sporting history.

Reminders of the Great War

The centenary of the First World War has Lesley Garrett bringing out her family’s mementoes of “the war to end all wars” – and regretting the loss of their context.

The Fereday service

The Fereday service is a rare example of armorial porcelain tableware relating to colonial Australia, bearing the name, position and crest of the owner Dudley Fereday, first Sheriff of Van Diemen’s Land (1823–33) (plate 1). Although none of the surviving pieces bears a mark identifying the manufacturer, the...

John Jardine in Australia

After a short career in the British army, John Jardine, the youngest brother of the eminent Scottish ornithologist Sir William Jardine, in 1839 decided to emigrate to Australia. In 1861, he served as a police magistrate and gold commissioner at Rockhampton, then became a pioneer settler at Somerset on Cape York...

James Semple Kerr, Miriam Hamilton and David Ell

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.

Book Review: Blamire Young

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...