Australiana, Vol 36 no 1, February 2014

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.

We all relish finding an unrecognised treasure in an out-of-the-way place. John Watkins discusses a chair bought at a country auction, and suggests that, during its 185 years, it may have travelled all the way from Woolley’s workshop in Hobart to the little village of Wooli in northern NSW.

For centuries, coins and medals have depicted maps of Australia, although rarely if at all have they been studied by scholars. Perhaps this is because of their limited contribution to cartography, as they were used mainly in a political sense. Perhaps collectors and academics are simply unaware of their existence. All these pieces are scarce and some very rare.

Colouring photographs by hand added to the attraction of black and white photographs in the 19th century. An 1870s view of Government House from across Farm Cove in Sydney Harbour not only has been coloured, but the artist has added some extra touches, including a gondola cruising off the Governor’s residence.

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.

Hordern House commissioned Elizabeth Ellis OAM, the Emeritus Mitchell Librarian, to research the background to the Chinese export porcelain punchbowl in the Mitchell Library showing scenes of the colony about 1814.

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 the Heinrich Arnoldi collection of fruit and fungi models held by the SMEB (one of the three largest collections of them in the world) since their acquisition by Dr Richard Schomburgk, Director of the fledgling Adelaide Botanic Garden, shortly after taking up that post in 1866. With his own leading essay Tony Kanellos clearly demonstrates his knowledge and ability to write and write well.