Most collectors of anything have a small table or two, useful to hold your tea, coffee or wine within reach while you relax in an old-fashioned easy chair. Avid collector Bob Fredman takes us through the several different styles made in Australia over a hundred years, and highlights the importance of the technical innovations and changes in materials in the 1930s.
Well-researched histories exist on 19th-century Australian furniture, silver and ceramics. Most of them are reliable sources of information, although possibly outdated, especially since the advent of Trove. Other areas have not yet been researched or have little information available. Avid Queensland collector Bob Fredman has long had an interest in Australian timber products, and here he provides an introduction to items made from timber, generically known as treen, illuminating their history and a few of their makers. These items are generally inexpensive, but researching their history is often ignored or put in the ‘too hard’ basket. Dig a little deeper and you can discover the story behind many of these artefacts, enhancing our understanding.
Those of us with collections of brown furniture sometimes brighten up our display space with art, pottery or ceramics. Bob Fredman takes us through another option, decorative kerosene lamps, some of which were made in Australia. They are very interesting in their own right and when hung or placed in the right situation they can add some colour and character to a room.
Acanthus leaves have been used as decoration in buildings, furniture and pottery since the birth of western architecture. They were often a decorative feature on Australia’s early Neo-Classical furniture until the advent of Australian themes towards the end of the 19th century. Bob Fredman discusses the use of acanthus motifs by Australian artisans and concludes with some information about an interesting piece of pottery.
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.
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 Government. Some familiar initials suggested its maker was the famous Queensland craftsman and teacher, L.J. Harvey.
Many items of Australiana are distinguished by their use of Australian materials or their use of Australian motifs. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, several English ceramic factories made wares specifically for the Australian market. The scanty records of the Sydney Technological Museum noted that the person who, between about 1900 and 1910, provided designs of Australian flora as templates for Doulton artists in England to decorate their art ceramics was a ‘Miss Rutherford’. Trove enabled us recently to identify her as Miss Geraldine Rutherford (1869–1952), from a 1910 Bathurst newspaper report. Yvonne Barber looks into Geraldine Rutherford and her family, comprising several amateur lady artists, and their milieu, to illuminate some of the sources of Australian flora designs.
From either ends of the globe, Portière 1901 has been rediscovered. Over 120 years ago, it was created to commemorate the colony of South Australia joining the Federation of Australia. The Portière was commissioned and made by the first women in the world to gain both the right to vote and to stand for parliament. The impressive 233.0 x 178.0 cm embroidered silk object represents the pinnacle of a golden age of Art Needlework embroidery. However, questions surround it. Just seven years after their enfranchisement, why did South Australian women give members of the British royal family an object that was ostensibly a domestic curtain? Even more intriguing, how did it fall so far into obscurity within the Royal Collection itself that when enquiries were made in 2023, it could no longer be located? This article tells the forgotten story of its origins and in doing so, places it back into the colonial history of the Australian Arts & Crafts Movement.
Bob Fredman brings some country humour to discussing the design inspiration of a chair discovered in Brisbane, made of Queensland timbers, which also displays Egyptian design elements. He suggest it was probably made in Queensland and inspired by the finding of Tutankhamun’s tomb at Luxor in 1922.
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, French-born artist and teacher Lucien Henry was a leading proponent of employing Australian motifs, his ideas permeating the Sydney Technical College, where he taught art and design. Some of Henry’s colleagues and students pursued his ideas, which were taken up by craftspeople working in the Arts and Crafts tradition, and by other technical colleges in the late 19th and early 20th century. Sydney’s Technological Museum acquired some of their works early on; Yvonne Barber reveals some of these people.
Leo Schofield describes his first (and last!) gig as chair of the curatorium which devised the current exhibition at the Powerhouse Museum in Ultimo in Sydney, the first major and kaleidoscopic show of objects from the Museum’s holdings since 1988. It has proved exceptionally popular. Here he chronicles how it evolved.
Curator and historian Tim Roberts previews a new exhibition on the English ceramics firm Wedgwood, founded by Josiah Wedgwood in 1759, and linked with the British colonisation of Australia through its design and manufacture of the ‘Sydney Cove Medallions’ in 1789. These were made from Sydney clay sent back to Staffordshire, the first known attempt to exploit Australia’s economic resources by a colonial power.
Robert Griffin makes the case for the introduction of the squatter’s chair – a robust easy chair with swing-out leg rests – as an idea imported from India in the early 19th century. These chairs found a home on the shady verandahs of homesteads, particularly in Queensland and NSW, where the landowner could relax and survey his (and occasionally her) land and animals, hence the name.
Bendigo Art Gallery has drawn on its collections, the Australiana Fund, other collections and especially the National Gallery of Victoria to mount a new survey of Australiana from British settlement to today. Obviously it cannot cover every aspect of Australiana, nor every way artists and craftspeople have used Australian raw materials or adapted Australian motifs into the European art and design tradition, but the show will start a new conversation. We congratulate the National Gallery of Victoria for sharing its collection with Bendigo Art Gallery and the curator, Emma Busowsky, on undertaking the daunting task, as well as bringing a new perspective to the subject. Cleverly displaying recent material adds a fun, nostalgic element to the show for many visitors.
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.
Queensland collectors Jon and Yvonne Douglas explain how their collecting of Doulton ceramics developed and how, as they read more and more about their passion, their interests deepened. Here they present their research into one particular example with Australian connections, a vase made in 1886 for the Colonial and Indian Exhibition held in London.
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.
