Meshach Stevens (1811–1885), Northern Whale Fishery, 1830s–1840s, oil on canvas, 72 x 98 cm, detail. Inscription verso likely in artist’s hand: ‘A view of Wale Fishing at Greenland and Davis Straits the Mode of Taking and Killing Sperm Wale Seal etc / Painted by M Stevens / Hobartown Vandiemens Land [sic].’ Collection: Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, QVM:1927:FP:0840, purchased by Launceston City Council (Beattie Collection), 1927.
Buy a PDF or print copy of Australiana for $40, including postage. Print issues are subject to availability. Issues older than 5 years are available to download for free.
Become a member of the
You will automatically become a subscriber to the Australiana journal, and receive four issues every year, as well as exclusive access to events and benefits.
Glen went on to tell us, in a joking manner, that he had made these fake 1859 Secession Medals in 1977 for fun in the hope of making some money while he was a student working in the Visual Arts department at the Darling Downs Institute of Advanced Education in Toowoomba (now the University of Southern Queensland). He had fired his medals in its pottery kilns.
Between arriving in Hobart Town as a convict on 3 August 1831 and the last evidence of his residing in Van Diemen’s Land in 1847, Meshach Stevens painted a very competent copy of a famous print after William John Huggins titled Northern Whale Fishery, published in London in 1829 (plate 1).1 For almost a century, Stevens’ painting has been in the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery in Launceston, acquired in 1927 from the collection of photographer John Watt Beattie (1859–1930).
Decorative timber inlay work became popular in British and European furniture and other wooden items in the 18th century. European exploration of the so-called New World tropics and subsequent colonisation gave access to a greatly increased range of superb cabinet timbers. Cabinetmakers initially concentrated on the richly coloured mahoganies, but the discovery of multi-coloured timbers that incorporate stable colour variations sparked a new fashion for ornate inlays, marquetry, and parquetry.
The late Professor Kenneth Cavill’s article published in Australiana1 identified about 50 spoons of Australian and British manufacture, marking royal and other occasions, with heraldic motifs, maps of Australia or Tasmania and flora and fauna, made either in factories or in craft workshops. Overlapping almost half the years in Cavill’s survey, this article looks at the last 50 years of silver spoon making in Australia, especially decoration using Australian flora and fauna. Silver commemorative spoons and silver plated (EPNS) spoons are omitted.
John Roy Eldershaw (1892–1973) was a landscape artist who worked primarily in watercolours. During his lifetime, he was proclaimed to be ‘destined to leave unmistakable footprints in the sands of time’. In 1973 Sir Erik Langker, the arts administrator and influential member of the Sydney arts establishment, believed Eldershaw posthumously ‘would be remembered as one of Australia’s most outstanding painters’.
Petra ten-Doesschate Chu and Max Donnelly with Andrew Montana and Suzanne Veldink, Daniel Cottier: Designer, Decorator, Dealer.
Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, Yale University Press, New Haven CT 2021. Hard cover, 256 pp, 200 illustrations, Booktopia price $59 plus postage.
Philip Jones,Illustrating the Antipodes: George French Angas in Australia & New Zealand 1844–45,
NLA Publishing & South Australian Museum 2021, $65
Postponed several times due to Covid-19 restrictions, our plans for a visit to Bathurst in the NSW Central Tablelands, lands of the Wiradyuri Nation, finally came to fruition from 30 April to 2 May 2021, with the maximum 50 participants from five states taking part. Others were unable to attend for fear of not getting home again.
Australiana Society members visited the Ballarat region of Victoria in May, as part of a tour carefully planned by Victorian branch chair Robert Stevens. Luckily, it fell into a gap between COVID lockdowns, and gave members from several states a chance to get out, mingle and enjoy what the Victorian Central Goldfields region has to offer. Robert Stevens shares the experience with those who could not attend this time, and promises to continue to plan other tours in better times.
