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Australia’s first agricultural society was founded 195 years ago, to organise shows and encourage better farming practices. They are still going strong, and even today agricultural shows attract a lot of interest in the cities, with millions visiting across the nation. For those on the land, they are much more serious events, opportunities to showcase, see, compare and chat about machinery and stock.
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.
Religion was much more prominent and pervasive in 19th-century Australia than it is today, and South Australia was more tolerant of all sects than the other colonies. Peter Lane discusses the foundation scroll laid by Governor Gawler for Adelaide’s Wesleyan Methodist Chapel, constructed less than two years after the first colonists arrived, and the resources available in a new settlement.
I started at the Queensland Art Gallery as the first Curator of Decorative Arts in 1981 ‘wet behind my (curatorial) ears’. The first project I initiated, LJ Harvey & his School, opened in September 1983, following the relocation of the Gallery’s collection to its new building on the south bank of the Brisbane River in 1982. This was the first fully researched and published exhibition project ever undertaken by the Gallery.
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 Peter Walker Fine Art Writing Award is an annual award generously sponsored by Peter Walker Fine Art of Walkerville, South Australia. Peter Walker is a valued member and longstanding supporter of the Australiana Society. The Society is most grateful for his continued interest in its activities, and in the journal in particular. All articles published in Australiana in 2016 are eligible for the 2016 Award.
The Australiana Society is delighted to report that the new Tasmanian Chapter held its inaugural event on 11 November 2016. Since the foundation of the Australiana Society in 1978, members have believed that Tasmaniana was of sufficient importance, quality and difference to that of mainland Australia to warrant the formation of a Tasmanian Chapter. Part of this no doubt sprung from mysteries surrounding the sheer volume of decorative arts, diversity of timbers, architecture and design on the former island prison.
