Australiana, Vol 39 no 3, August 2017

Beleura, the house and garden on the Mornington Peninsula on the southern shore of Port Phillip Bay, is an estate left to the people of Victoria by John ‘Jack’ Morton Tallis (1911–1996), the youngest son of Sir George Tallis of J C Williamson theatres fame... Here was a mystery: how did John Tallis know Klytie Pate and why did he buy her studio pottery? It is a complicated tale and involves many players. The five found objects led to a much greater story that deserved to be told: how Klytie Pate and John Tallis, two very young, impressionable people, were brought together through an unlikely shipboard friendship and a clash with the worlds of Christian and Napier Waller, two sophisticated artists, storytellers and educators.

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.

Over the last 12 months the Society has continued to grow and flourish in more ways than one. I am very pleased to report that the Tasmanian Chapter of the Society is now off and running, having had a very successful opening at Runnymede, in Hobart, last November. Tasmanian Chair Colin Thomas had invited the Honourable Vanessa Goodwin MLC, Tasmanian Minister for the Arts, to launch proceedings and, as Warwick Oakman wrote in the February issue of Australiana, she made an excellent and enthusiastic speech, which really set the tone for the evening. More than 30 people came along and were entertained with excellent Tasmanian produce and wine in the grounds of Runnymede.