Australiana, Vol 44 no 3, August 2022

It is indeed pleasing to see members honoured for their services to the community. In the 2022 Queen’s Birthday Honours, Mrs Phyllis Murphy of Melbourne and Mr Alan Landis of Sydney were recognised with Member of the Order of Australia (AM) and Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) respectively. Both richly deserved!

In America as in England, tea drinking became highly fashionable in the 18th century. The duty imposed on tea imported into Britain’s North American colonies became a catalyst for revolution, highlighted by the Boston Tea Partyin 1773. Many discrete meetings of revolutionaries were fuelled by nothing more incendiary than tea.

Fashion designer Margaret Murdoch (1912–1999) has been eclipsed by other members of the Murdoch family. In 1938 she went to London to gain experience in fashion design. Her move to the fashion capital of Paris on the eve of World War II led to disruption of her career path, with two stints of internment under the Nazis. Returning to Australia in 1945, Murdoch became fashion designer at Georges department store in Melbourne, wrote regular newspaper columns on women’s fashion and introduced Australian women to contemporary fashion trends in Paris.

Finding more examples of the silver brooch with Indigenous motifs that she discussed in our May issue, Christine Erratt delved further into their history. In the National Archives of Australia, Christine uncovered the 1954 design registration applications.
Six different designs, of which five were inspired by scenes illustrated in the 1952 edition of the Australian Museum publication Aboriginal Decorative Art, had been registered by Eugene John Adler, a post-war Hungarian immigrant and Sydney manufacturing jeweller. These brooches were part of a trend in the 1950s to create souvenirs and art inspired by distinctive Indigenous designs.

As part of their education in useful arts, schoolgirls sewed their own individual samplers, which are also important indicators of progress in educational methods and reach. The format is fairly standard, with the letters of the alphabet in either or both lower and upper case and basic numbers, plus the girl’s name, date and possibly institution or location. The girls had some scope for originality in colours, subjects and decorative motifs, so no two are the same. Religious motifs reflect not just a school environment but a different era. Because they were done by children, the work is usually quite primitive. This may be a naïve folk art, but early, documentary examples fetch high prices from avid collectors.

Thomas Griffiths (1856–1943), a Welsh blacksmith and wheelwright, emigrated to Queensland to start a new life as a ‘skilled migrant’, at first clinging to his old profession in the Ipswich area. When the Queensland railway network was expanding, he saw
a new business opportunity and opened a sawmill at Wyandra to supply wooden sleepers to lay the tracks from Charleville to Cunnamulla, then became a contractor, and in 1899 built a new sawmill in Cairns. He overcame insolvency in 1909 when Cairns Timber Limited acquired the premises, machinery, plant and other assets of his sawmill.1 Thomas and his sons remained associated with the mill; when he and his wife left Cairns in 1912 for a ten-month, round-the-world trip, 80 sawmill employees presented the couple with a purse of sovereigns and an address. 2
Retiring in his mid-60s, about 1920 he embraced woodwork as a hobby, exploiting Queensland’s forest resources. He crafted a wide variety of inlaid articles in various decorative Queensland native timbers, first in Brisbane from about 1920 to 1927, then in the tourist village of North Tamborine, from 1927 until his death in 1943 at the age of 84. Book boxes, used for holding playing cards
or as jewel boxes, were his speciality and he probably made hundreds. Examples of these were presented to King George V and Queen Mary after being exhibited in 1925 at the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley.

Thomas Griffiths (1856–1943), a Welsh blacksmith and wheelwright, emigrated to Queensland to start a new life as a ‘skilled migrant’, at first clinging to his old profession in the Ipswich area. When the Queensland railway network was expanding, he saw a new business opportunity and opened a sawmill at Wyandra to supply wooden sleepers to lay the tracks from Charleville to Cunnamulla, then became a contractor, and in 1899 built a new sawmill in Cairns. He overcame insolvency in 1909 when Cairns Timber Limited acquired the premises, machinery, plant and other assets of his sawmill. Thomas and his sons remained associated with the mill; when he and his wife left Cairns in 1912 for a ten-month, round-the-world trip, 80 sawmill employees presented the couple with a purse of sovereigns and an address.

Invented in 1948 and manufactured 'from the early 1950s, Splades or Splayds were a favourite gift for shower teas, weddings and Mothers’ Day in 1960s and 1970s Australia. We were vaguely aware that they might be an Australian innovation, but that wasn’t part of their advertising – they were promoted as a useful luxury item. When an English collector emailed us about them, we asked Yvonne Barber to dig deeper into the origin of the Splayd. A year’s research reveals their more than 70-year history, which touches many nostalgic aspects of our lives, especially if you have lived in Sydney.

While the artist H. C. Simpson (1879–1966) depicted subjects such as Mount Warning in northern NSW, his output is emphatically linked with the early years of the ‘Gold Coast’ and specifically the resort towns of Coolangatta, Currumbin and Tweed Heads. Although his work is not held in particularly high regard artistically, thousands of Queensland homes treasured his original landscape paintings of favourite, unblemished scenes that brought back happy memories. Some collect his works, but many are passed down through families as nostalgic links to previous generations, a reminder of a Queensland and the NSW Northern Rivers which has been swept away by (over-)development.

BOOK REVIEW BY MICHAEL LECH Ruth Lane Poole: a woman of influence. Canberra Museum and Gallery, 2021, 58 pages. BOOK REVIEW BY ANNE-MARIE VAN DE VEN Christine Stewart,
Collits’ Inn: Uncovering the Past, Tellwell, Australia 2021 ISBN 978-0-2288-3720-6