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Exactly 250 years ago, HMB Endeavour commanded by Lt James Cook was the first British ship to sight the east coast of Australia, then known as the Great South Land or Terra Australis Incognita. As one of the most important exploration milestones in Australia’s history, it now seems to be passing largely unnoticed, a casualty of the present pandemic.
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.
Colin Thomas, Australiana Society Tasmanian Branch Chair, has assembled a scrimshaw collection with the scope and quality of institutional collections in the former whaling centres of New Bedford in Massachusetts1 and Hull in Yorkshire.2 Thomas’s collection encompasses the breadth of scrimshaw from tools to maintain the majestic rigging of the whaling ships to sailors’ gifts to their sweethearts. An earlier article focused on how his collection tells the story of whaling in Tasmania.3 This second article looks at scrimshaw made for presentation.
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).
A gold mourning brooch to commemorate the passing of John Hillas in 1847 at Bannaby (or Bunnaby) near Taralga in southern tablelands of NSW is typical of the early Victorian era and many similar pieces come up for sale today (plates 1-2)1. Black enamel surrounds a central glass-covered locket that most likely would have originally contained a lock of hair from the deceased. This is one of the earliest dated examples of jewellery worn in Australia. John Hillas was a farmer and grazier who died, aged 50, on 21 January 1847.
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.
Una Deerbon was a well-known maker of hand-built pottery, often with applied moulded decoration. When in her late 40s, she began making pottery in 1930. Just three years later she held three solo commercial exhibitions in Sydney and Melbourne, launching her on a successful career as a potter which lasted until 1964. Now her grandsons have dutifully documented her life and her art in a new book.
