Australiana, Vol 45 no 1, February 2023

Your Board trusts that you have enjoyed exploring our new website, taken the opportunity to review it in detail and researched past articles. Members’ feedback has been most encouraging! As with any change, there is always the odd issue; we are doing our best to fix them and will further enhance the site based on your feedback. It is a living document.

I began last year’s judge’s report with the observation that the annual Peter Walker Fine Art Writing Award, established in 1999 to encourage authors to write for Australiana, had achieved its objectives. The four issues of Australiana published in 2022 confirm that judgement and show that the scope of the magazine continues to evolve. Contributors are writing about new things and exploring new aspects of old things. And re-reading all four issues for the award has highlighted the diversity of subjects covered in the magazine in 2022.

The National Museum of Australia in Canberra has purchased an Australian billiard table, carved in high relief with multiple panels of scenes of colonial life, and its matching marking board. Its price of $1,100,000 sets a new record for a piece of Australian furniture. The NMA is not known for collecting Australian furniture, apart for some well-known examples from the collection of the late Trevor Kennedy. John Wade looked into the history of Australian billiard tables, and specifically the history of this much-exhibited and much- travelled billiard table and its makers, to put it into a broader context.

Queensland collectors Jon and Yvonne Douglas explain how their collecting of Doulton ceramics developed and how, as they read more and more about their passion, their interests deepened. Here they present their research into one particular example with Australian connections, a vase made in 1886 for the Colonial and Indian Exhibition held in London.

Spanish monks established the Benedictine mission at New Norcia in Western Australia in 1846. Following on from her article last year on Isidro Oriol,1 Dr Dorothy Erickson concludes her series on the Spanish craftsmen who worked on buildings and furniture for the monastic community. Here she examines the surviving work of Juan (John) Casellas at New Norcia, which has since developed into a monastic retreat and tourist attraction.

Curator Judith McKay focuses on a unique house museum in the Northern Territory, originally planned in 1920 by the Rev. John Flynn of Flying Doctor fame as a model outback hospital. Its most remarkable feature was a passive ventilation system designed to cool the building on the Coolgardie safe principle.

A quite remarkable amount of wood-carving was produced in Australia, in the framework of the Arts and Crafts movement, at the beginning of the 20th century which is, and remains, unidentified. If we don’t have a provenance we can look at stylistically similar works, such as Queensland’s Harvey School, to provide a context. The Ipswich folk-carver Peter Harley (c 1873-1941), however, produced distinctive work over a significant period and his profile began to emerge from obscurity after Glenn Cooke presented his ‘Merry Christmas‘ box to the Ipswich Art Gallery in 2005.

Victorian chairman Robert Stevens reports on a November 2022 tour to the Central Goldfields region.

As far as eating paraphernalia goes, Australiana has previously covered dining tables and chairs, sideboards, ceramic plates, silver table ornaments, Splayds and even tea towels. Megan Martin demonstrates that it is about time we looked at recipe books, particularly as these Queensland examples are illustrated with colourful and appealing artwork.