Art

Dr Dorothy Erickson continues the evolving story of the Royal Western Australian Historical Society, now known as History West. She reveals more of its collection of treasured objects documenting the history of British settlement in Western Australia, explaining their tangible connections to Western Australia’s historical figures, communities and past ways of life. She shows too how the means and direction of collecting over 100 years have changed and developed, partly influenced by the personalities involved.

Always on the lookout for those rare early paintings of Brisbane, Kevin Lambkin located a highly accomplished oil of a Brisbane River scene at auction in Sydney in 2024. The painting was simply signed ‘Huston’, a name unknown to Kevin and to the painting’s Sydney auction cataloguer who suggested a New Zealand artist. The 1930s style of the painting’s original frame was a starting point for an intensive search of Trove. ‘Huston’ was Wyclif Emmanuel Huston, a highly talented youth from a dairy farm on Queensland’s Darling Downs whose art was much acclaimed in Queensland in the 1930s. His promising future, however, was interrupted by the war and after army service and moving to Melbourne his name virtually disappears from the record of Australian artists. Was he, as art historian the late Glenn Cooke suggested, yet another artistic casualty of World War II?

Early Queensland artworks have interested Dr Kevin Lambkin over many years. He would occasionally see at auctions and antique shops attractive watercolours of unidentified rural homesteads signed ‘F Whitehouse’. Whitehouse was one of those obscure artists about whom very little was recorded, although the State Library of Queensland held his intriguing portrait of a First Nations Australian man from Booubyjan Station in south-east Queensland. The question of who he was and his work as an artist in Queensland, however, came to the fore in February 2025, when Kevin located a large oil painting of the BrisbaneRiver valley town of Esk, signed by Whitehouse and dated 1927. The size and ambition of the painting of the township, and the perceptiveness of the painting of the Booubyjan man, encouraged him to explore and tell Whitehouse’s story.

The Royal Western Australian Historical Society celebrates its centenary in 2026, with a new name History West, and a new home for members’ activities having display and storage areas for the books, archives, photographic collection and the considerable art and objects held in the art, costume and museum collections (plate 1). The RWAHS has played a pioneering role in the conservation and interpretation of Western Australia’s social history and now has at least 78 affiliated societies.The many treasured possessions associated with Western Australia and Western Australians that the Society owns can now be more easily accessed for research and presentation to the public in lectures, papers, the monthly newsletter History West, the annual journal Early Days and in exhibitions held at the new headquarters and elsewhere. Dr Dorothy Erickson shares information on a few objects as well as the Society’s history.

In the last years of the 19th century, Arthur Fleischmann was born into a Jewish family living under the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which Emperor Franz-Josef had already ruled for 48 years. In the new century, Fleischmann studied medicine, then switched to sculpture. He fled the rising Nazi tide in Europe, settling in Sydney from 1939, where he was absorbed into the vibrant local artistic society. Relocating to London in 1948, he maintained his Australian links, producing works on commission. Fleischmann enthusiastically pioneered the use of Perspex, a plastic invented in the 1930s, to create innovative kinetic sculptures, as well as static works using traditional techniques. Dr Jim Bertouch goes hunting for one of Fleischmann’s kineticPerspex works, installed in Sydney in 1990 just months after he had died, but which had disappeared from public sight.

In the August 2020 issue of Australiana, we wrote an article on the amateur watercolourist, James Coutts Crawford (1817–1889), an Englishman who visited Australia in 1845–46 and rented ‘ForestLodge’, an early colonial house in Glebe... Later he moved to New Zealand, where he became sheriff of Wellington, dying in London on a visit ‘home’. In Glebe, he painted several local landscape scenes that included some early identifiable buildings as well as some in the country areas he visited. While these watercolours are not of great artistic merit, Coutts Crawford’s views and panoramas record and complement the early colonial history of one of Sydney’s oldest suburbs. In June this year we alerted that more of his watercolours were in an upcoming Melbourne auction sale.

In our May and August issues of 2025, siblings Jennifer and Lindsey Harris explored the cross-cultural influence ofJapanese craftsman Jonoski Takuma in his carving of Australian scenes on emu eggs around the time of Federation.Their articles led ornithologist and collector Dr Mark Cabouret to look very carefully at two emu eggs he located,where he discovered Takuma’s minute signatures.

Unusually for an artist, Ada Whitingnee Cherry (1859 –1953) was a celebrated success in her lifetime.1In 1900, the first time she submitted a portrait miniature to the Royal Academy in London, it was hung ‘onthe line’ – a small work needs to be exhibited at eye level. Remarkable for a‘colonial’, a female, a first submission, and the first Tasmanian-born artist tobe exhibited at the RA! The same year, Ada exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy, the Hibernian and the Paris Salon to considerable acclaim.

Jonoski Takuma, a young, missionary-educated Japanese man, arrived in Australia in 1888 and within a few years began engraving emu eggs depicting Australian scenes. Reflecting his Japanese cultural heritage, these delicately carved eggs,along with postcards and a children’s book, embody a fusion of Japanese art with Australian themes that appealed, withthe advent of Federation, to a growing nationalism. Jonoski became entangled in a notorious stamp forgery case that fundamentally impacted upon his Australian-born family. Eventually Jonoski and his daughter left Australia and moved between the United Kingdom and Japan in an involved series of relocations marked by divorce, desertion, suicide and war. This article seeks to illuminate, within the constraints of available records, the experiences of Jonoski, his children and grandchildren and the interplay of culture, trade, race and war on this Japanese-Australian family, adding biographical information to Dr Jennifer Harris' article on emu eggs in our May issue.

Ken Orchard, James Ashton, Artist of the Fleurieu Coast. Royal South Australian Society ofArts, Adelaide 2025. Soft cover,95 pages 29 x 21 cm. Exhibitioncatalogue, all paintings and objectsillustrated, chronology, bibliography.$30, available only at the RSASA,Institute Building,North Terrace, Adelaide.

William and Mabel Blamire Young collaborated in many of their artistic and other endeavours, yet she was overshadowed and her work has been largely unrecognised. Dr Andrew Montana investigates her contribution, especially to the Arts and Crafts Movement in Victoria, with the help of their descendants.

The earliest known free-standing, full-length sculpture created in Australia is a highly detailed sandstone statue of a well-dressed colonial gentleman, urinating. Functionally plumbed, this statue is as extraordinary as it is enigmatic. Chris Tassell speculates on who might have commissioned it, who made it, when it was made, who it represents, and why it was made.

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 task.

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 in the British watercolour movement of the 1790s – c 1815, relocated to the Antipodes aged 64 in 1831 and found a new vision, provoked by the piercing Tasmanian light, the Tasmanian landscape and charismatic subject matter.

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 National Library of Australia, the British Museum and other public and private collections, many never shown before.

Bob Fredman suggests old picture frames as another area of affordable and rewarding collecting. As well as being potentially useful, these nostalgic items often have an interesting story to tell, as Bob demonstrates with these examples, all found in Queensland.

Artists draw inspiration from many sources. Glenn Cooke examines at how a 20th-century Queensland wood carver took his design inspiration from an historical French pottery plaque some 400 years old, finding what seems to be the exact example he used.

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 between 1887 and 1891, as well as her major career achievement – organising the first exhibition of works by women artists in Queensland.

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. Yet Madame Henry (1839-1898) was accomplished, respected and admired in her own right, as we can now more easily discover using Trove. While Lucien Henry was a visionary French-born artist who adapted Australian flora and fauna motifs to designs in architecture and the decorative arts, mostly unrealised, Juliette spread the knowledge of French language, literature and culture among Australians. Yvonne Barber reveals the person sometimes hidden by the shadow of her three husbands.

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’, simulating the golden hue of old varnish. Glover used such a tool and owned two paintings by Claude, which influenced the way he painted; they are now in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City. Glynnis Stevenson looks at the two Claude paintings that Glover owned in England, comparing the Claudes with several copies of them Glover executed in England and later in Tasmania.

Artists in early Australia were usually trained in Britain and Europe in the Classical tradition going back to ancient Greece and Rome. David Hansen explores the possibility that, in the composition of his paintings created in Van Diemen’s Land, Benjamin Duterrau was influenced by Renaissance and Classical models he had seen in London.

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 the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno in Florence, the Accademia di San Luca in Rome, and in Jean-Baptiste Colbert’s program at the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture in Paris.

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 a century, Stevens’ painting has been in the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery in Launceston, acquired in 1927 from the collection of photographer John Watt Beattie (1859–1930).

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 establishment, believed Eldershaw posthumously ‘would be remembered as one of Australia’s most outstanding painters’.

Thomas Griffiths Wainewright (1794–1847) was early colonial Australia’s most sophisticated and glamourising portraitist. The current exhibition, Paradise Lost – Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG) features 40 works by Wainewright together with contextual works by Blake, Fuseli, von Holst and a raft of Old Master prints known to have been in Wainewright’s collection.

Dr Erickson concludes her story of the professional women artists who commenced working in Western Australia before World War I. All were born in South Australia or England, coming to Western Australia later, most as young adults and often with other family members. Their careers began in the heady years of the women’s movement, when women won the right to vote, and middle-class women began to take their place working in professions other than homemaking. Some continued working well into the 20th century.

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 Ada Fuller (1867–1946); Artist-painter-decorator Kathleen Laetitia O’Connor, known as Kate, was born in 1876 at Hokitika in New Zealand to engineer Charles Yelverton O’Connorand his wife Susan Laetitia; Daisy Walder.

A friend of mine wanted to see a mosaic mural in the Crypt at Anzac Square in Brisbane (now operated by the State Library of Queensland). For most of the year it is protected by an information panel, but the mural is on view for just two weeks in January ― the month when the artist and craft worker Don Ross (1917–2015) was born (and died, aged 98). Her interest ― her niece is married to William Dickson (the grand-nephew of Don’s wife Joy, known as Dicki), who joined our pilgrimage to view the mural. I was able to provide them with some personal details of his life as, when I came to Brisbane from Blackall in the late 1960s, I joined the Contemporary Art Society of Australia (Queensland Branch) where Don Ross was an exhibiting member.

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 important illustrator, one closely linked to Australia through her work with her husband John, as well as through her family. David Hansen tells the story of the artist and the work.

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-law in NSW sent to him formed the core of a publication on Australian birds he began to issue in 1837–38, with plates by his wife, but discontinued when he resolved that their next project should be to produce a magnum opus on The Birds of Australia. The couple decided to undertake a voyage to Australia.

Mostly out of self-interest, we love to help people enhance their research skills, and thus advance knowledge of Australiana. Almost everyone will recognise themselves in this story. Art historian Stephen Scheding had lots of information on artists but needed to organise it, so he created an archive. Then he made his research material available to others via a free searchable archive on the internet at 'artresearch.com.au' Here’s how he did it, and how you can contribute.

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 to 1940s in a conservative style. He found that researching Young was not easy, and although Stephen discovered some biographical data about him, Young remains elusive as a person.

Continuing our story of the women artists who worked in Western Australia,1 we examine the careers of those who exhibited in the Paris and Glasgow international exhibitions at the turn of the century – when Western Australia was in the midst of a Gold Rush. While Lady Forrest’s work was exhibited in a separate space, others who exhibited there together were Mrs J. S. Anderson, Dircksey Cowan, May Creeth, Annie Dorrington, Etta Finnerty, Gertrude E. Ford, May Gibbs, Mrs E. Hardey of Geraldton and Mr W. C. Thomas of Albany (plate 1). May Creeth and her sister Helen have already been covered in earlier articles2 so we will briefly mention her and concentrate on what we know of the other women who exhibited in Paris and Glasgow.

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 either 1773 or 1777.

Dublin-born William Paul Dowling (c 1822–1877) worked in London as a draftsman and artist before his Irish Nationalist political activities led to his being transported to Van Diemen’s Land for sedition. Here, the Irish Catholic convict established a reputation as a portrait artist, gradually adapting to the new technology of photography. For the first time, Robert Stevens combines a look at his life, well documented through the many letters he wrote home, with an analysis of his art and photography, to reveal the story of this talented Irish patriot who made a new life in Tasmania.

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 retains the picturesque water views that attracted Crawford the artist.

Dr Dorothy Erickson begins a new series of articles on Western Australian art, exploring the production and themes adopted by women artists in the 19th century, and putting their work into its social and artistic context.

Historian and biographer John Ramsland surveys the permanent World War I memorials designed by Manx-born sculptor Rayner Hoff (1894–1937), constructed in Dubbo (1925), Adelaide (1927–30) and culminating in his work with architect Bruce Dellit in the Anzac Memorial in Hyde Park, Sydney (1931–34).

In 2018, Dr Andrew Montana restored William Joseph Williams (1851–1918) as the artist responsible for the late 19th-century painted decoration in South Australia at Ayers House, the Museum of Economic Botany, Rigby’s bookshop, Trew’s South Australian Club Hotel and probably Para Para.1 Now the artist’s grandson Graham Williams adds a new and personal perspective, based on his family’s recollections of W. J. Williams. He illustrates some of his “lost” paintings, after the family serendipitously re-discovered a stash of them in a wardrobe put up for auction.

Among many contributions to the first "Virtual Show and Tell" was a portrait of a young boy. The owner asked who the artist might be, so the compilers flicked it to me to ask whom we should consult. It turned out to be a fascinating research project, and I want to share the process with readers.

Victorian collector and president of the Victorian branch Robert Stevens distils his passion for the works of convict artists in Australia, many of whom were transported for adapting their skills to forgery. A wide variety of works from public and private collections illustrate the range of their interests.

The Harry Gentle Resource Centre, Griffith University has welcomed specialist in Australian art heritage, decorative arts and material culture to 1945 and contributor to Australiana Timothy Roberts as the centre’s 2019 Visiting Fellow. The centre was established by Griffith University in 2016 following a generous legacy left by Robert (Harry) Gentle, a signal master during the Second World War, public servant and, in his retirement, graduate of the University in 1984. The centre aims to facilitate access to published and unpublished information for the period up to the 1850s, and to collate an inventory of the diversity and claims on country that made up the early colonial period. Tim’s project, Picturing the North: Representing Queensland before 1859, is the first major exploration of the art and artists of pre-separation Queensland.

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 singing voice. From 1839, aged about 37, he began to suffer a series of strokes that severely affected his ability to draw. To compete with the new technique of popular, cheap but generally unsympathetic photographic portraits, in 1850 he travelled through NSW and Victoria offering his emotive hand-drawn portraits. Robert Stevens analyses his career in more detail than previously, alongside a selection of images from his large output.

Previously thought lost, this iconic Australian image – a large double-sided painted timber carving of a buck jumper made in 1893/4 by renowned Queensland sculptor Harold Parker – was made as an advertising sign for the Brisbane saddlery of R.E. Jarman. After it re-emerged in 2011 at a Sydney auction, Adam Free’s research has revealed an intriguing background story.

Dr Gary Morgan’s research into a recently re-discovered Tasmanian miniature, reported here for the first time, identifies – partly by using new facial recognition technology – that it is a memento of a Tasmanian colonial family, as well as shedding new light on the technique of the artist, Ludwig Becker.

Gold Rush craftsmen and artists brought their European traditions with them in the mid-19th century, just as George de Nemes (György Nemes) brought his techniques, Hungarian folk art tradition, conceptions of what art should be, fantasies and recollections of totalitarian regimes under the Fascists and Communists in the mid- 20th century. Here he was accepted by artists in Melbourne, where he developed his own style of flamboyant, primitive art that drew on his international experiences, as well as making pottery. Rob La Nauze gives us the first account of his struggle to be an artist and outlines his contribution to Australian art.

Recently rediscovered information pertaining to the life of Australian painter and art teacher Rose Blakemore has enriched our understanding of four portrait miniatures in the Queensland Art Gallery’s collection.

In 2002, Therese Mulford and Robyn Lake co-authored an article on the shadowy painter Frederick Strange (c 1807-1873),1 best known as a painter of landscapes and portraits in Tasmania.2 Some of his works were recently showcased in an exhibition, The Enigmatic Mr Strange, at the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery;3 his 1859 view of Launceston is a typical detailed topographical study (plate 1). This sequel provides poignant new information about his life in Tasmania, which deepens the mystery as to his origins.

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 gone unchallenged. By looking at the surviving artworks and researching contemporary journals, catalogues, directories and newspapers, Dr Andrew Montana refutes this attribution and restores William Joseph Williams and his workmen as the artists responsible. He shows that South Australia had its own pool of talented decorators and did not need to rely on importing skilled workmen from Sydney or Melbourne.

In her postgraduate research into South Australian wood carvers centred on the Adelaide School of Design, Jodie Vandepeer came upon the strange story of Maud Golley (later known by her married name, Maud Baillie), a self-taught carver from remote Wedge Island, with no connection to the School. Her works exist only in private collections, yet a powerful mythology has built up around her, fuelled by a series of newspaper articles and biographies in recent publications regurgitating a few snippets – her isolated early life on Wedge Island, her self-taught carving ability, her perseverance under difficult conditions and her vice- regal patronage. Jodie explores Golley’s history and creations.

John White was born at Drumaran, County Fermanagh in north-western Ireland about 1756 – not England as is sometimes claimed.1 He entered the Royal Navy as a surgeon’s mate in 1778 and rose to naval surgeon; in this capacity he was appointed to serve as surgeon on the transport Charlotte in the First Fleet, which left Portsmouth for New South Wales in 1787.

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, and his death sentence was commuted to transportation for life. On arrival in Sydney he was immediately employed as an engraver by the artist Augustus Earle, then by the engraver John Carmichael. He became an art teacher and accomplished portrait painter.

Wood and stone carver Lewis John Godfrey contributed to the high end of the artistic spectrum displayed at the International and Intercolonial Exhibitions from the 1850s into the 20th century, and his stone carvings still grace many buildings in Dunedin, New Zealand. Immediately after finishing his London apprenticeship, Godfrey sailed to Australia in 1852, soon finding employment with Launceston cabinet maker John Brown. His carvings were of such quality that four were sent to the 1855 Universal Exhibition in Paris. Rob La Nauze fills in this previously unrecorded gap in his life and corrects some details.

A Rats of Tobruk wood panel falls under the category of “trench art”: decorative objects made by soldiers, prisoners of war, or civilians that are directly linked to armed conflict or its consequences. This term is a misnomer as these objects were rarely, if ever made in the trenches. Many were made from scrap metal like shell casings or in the case of the Napoleonic Wars, POWs used discarded animal bones. During and after the First and Second World Wars, it was profitable to make mementoes on a large scale due to huge quantities of material available, but Peter Lane argues that this is a personal memento.

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 Australia’s leading sporting artists. John Hawkins reveals the golden days of coursing, and illustrates two of the finest portraits, by the little known artist- photographer Henry Hainsselin.

Miguel Mackinlay (1894–1959) arrived in Western Australia as a child in 1906 and trained as an artist. He sailed for London in 1914 and was caught up fighting and sketching in the Great War. Dorothy Erickson concludes her three-part series on the painter who settled in England after the war and never returned to Australia.

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 Indigenous people of Western Australia.

For a brief period in the late 1880s, Robert Ferry Thwaites (1833–1917) exhibited and sold paintings in Melbourne alongside such artists as Frederick McCubbin, Eugene von Guérard, Tom Roberts and Minnie Boyd. Thwaites had led an adventurous life before taking up painting in his fifties, but since his death has faded from view.

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 design of architect James Blackburn. The sketch she did is illustrated in Clifford Craig’s Old Tasmanian Prints published in 1964.

The artist Miguel Mackinlay/McKinlay has been variously described as Spanish, Scottish and Australian and all three descriptions are partially correct. Born in the province of Guadalajara in Spain to a Spanish mother and Scottish father, he arrived in Western Australia as a ten year old and undertook his major art training there. On moving to London to further his career, he mixed and exhibited with Australians in his early years. However, marrying a Londoner, he stayed and enjoyed considerable success as an artist and illustrator. Most of his family remained in Western Australia and we still like to think of him as West Australian.

For someone who worked in Tasmania, Victoria, Queensland, NSW and Western Australia between the late 1870s and his death, the prolific scene painter and artist John Campbell (1855–1924) deserves to be better known. Dianne Byrne reveals a number of impressive watercolours which are mostly portraits of the houses of prominent Queenslanders, painted during his brief residence in Brisbane c 1887–1890.

The works of Elizabeth Hudspeth are largely unknown, like those of many early Australian women artists. Robert Stevens remedies this, and illustrates some of her works which have been rarely or never published nor seen. Her sketches of some early Tasmanian buildings, which have since been destroyed, may be the only record of them.

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 frantic charcoal marks leave an indelible impression of conflict. Miguel Mackinlay went on to become the ‘talk of the town’ being ‘hung on the line’ at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibitions in the competitive art world of early 1930s London. He never returned to Australia.

The English sculptor Thomas Woolner sailed out to Victoria in 1852 to search for gold. Like many others who failed to strike it rich, he returned to his earlier profession. Woolner created a series of portraits of prominent colonials in Melbourne and Sydney before returning to England in 1854; most are well known, but some are yet to be identified.

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 Olley’s art.

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.

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 that he had died of heart disease, and noted that he “was in the habit of drinking to excess”. No-one wrote an obituary. Professor Grishin believes that “STG” was neglected partly because of his perceived alcoholism, and here aims to rehabilitate the reputation of the artist whose output exceeds 2,700 recorded items.

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 Sydney. Until now, the published details of Carmichael’s life have been fragmentary. Confusion surrounds his name, his age and education, whether he came free or as a convict, if he was deaf, how many times he married, the number of his children and the distressing circumstances of the last months of his life. This new account of Carmichael’s life illustrates a few of his many works, which can be found in the National Gallery of Australia, National Library of Australia, State Library of NSW, State Library of Victoria, the National Library of New Zealand and private collections. In 2011, the British Library reproduced Select views of Sydney, New South Wales. Drawn and engraved by John Carmichael.1

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.

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 notable commemorative and other mugs that English artist Eric Ravilious (1903–42) designed for Wedgwood in the late 1930s.1

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 catalogue of Young’s known paintings together with their provenance where known, details of the collections in which they are held and where they were originally put up for sale – a useful addition as many of Young’s paintings, as the author notes, are undated.

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 trained in the gentle arts of watercolour and embroidery. Unlike some other unmarried gentlewomen she had no need to become a governess to pass on the skills she would have learnt from her own governess. This is the story of a work of hers now in Government House in Western Australia.

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 last century. While his leadership of DJ’s is certainly of interest, it is his close involvement with the visual arts that deserves to be better known.

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 loss of her sister, mother and husband. Here, Julie Petersen focuses on her period of recuperation, while living in Sydney’s leafy Mosman.

Gary Morgan’s research into this recently rediscovered colonial wax relief, reported here for the first time reveals it to be an important relic and memento of the early exploration of South Australia.

Former Prime Minister Julia Gillard, in her misogyny speech on 9 October 2012, was not the first to react to men allegedly putting down women’s activities. A century ago, English designer and artist C R Ashbee – his business damaged by low-priced competition from amateur women artists – condescendingly referred to them as “dear Emily”. Here Dr Dorothy Erickson examines the work of Western Australian women artists and shows that they were far from incompetent.

Two years ago, we published a watercolour by John Rider Roberts that is especially important as a visual record of Robert Fowler’s industrial pottery, bottle and pipe works at Camperdown in Sydney’s inner west. As manufacturing in Australia is replaced by service industries, such manufacturing sites are being obliterated and redeveloped for housing, just as this one has recently been. Michel Reymond follows up with a look at some of the other works by this surveyor-artist, who recorded landscapes that have now disappeared, and was well regarded in his time.

Scottish immigrant David Reid was a plumber and gasfitter who worked in Sydney’s inner western suburb of Newtown. He enriched his life by taking up painting and etching, mostly of pastoral scenes, and by participating in the life of the artistic community.