Suzanne Forsyth (b 1948), Dame Edna teapot 1982, earthenware, diamantés, (a-b) 31.8 × 26.4 × 26.7 cm (overall), painted in brown on base u.c.l.: S. Forsyth. / no. 9, painted in brown on base u.c.r.: 27/10/82. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, gift of Athol Hawke and Eric Harding through the Australian Government's Cultural Gifts Program, 2013. © Suzanne Forsyth Hatch, photo: Christian Markel/NGV.
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The year is off to a great start. The National Tour conducted in the ACT was fully subscribed with the maximum 40 members and state events have already been held in Tasmania and Victoria. Part of the Victorian event was a curator-led presentation by Emma Busowsky prior to viewing the Bendigo Art Gallery’s exhibition, Australiana: Designing a Nation.
The first retrospective of ‘19th-century Australia’s best unknown artist’, Charles Rodius (1802–1860), bringing together 92 original watercolours, drawings and prints, will be shown at the State Library of NSW. While the host library holds the largest collection, other notable examples are held in the National Library of Australia, the British Museum and other public and private collections, many never shown before.
Scrimshaw, the ancient art of the mariner is a most important part of our heritage which is very collectable. At times, scrimshaw achieves very high prices at auction in Australia and internationally. This article relates solely to Australian scrimshaw which is different in many ways to American or in some instances British scrimshaw.
Bendigo Art Gallery has drawn on its collections, the Australiana Fund, other collections and especially the National Gallery of Victoria to mount a new survey of Australiana from British settlement to today. Obviously it cannot cover every aspect of Australiana, nor every way artists and craftspeople have used Australian raw materials or adapted Australian motifs into the European art and design tradition, but the show will start a new conversation. We congratulate the National Gallery of Victoria for sharing its collection with Bendigo Art Gallery and the curator, Emma Busowsky, on undertaking the daunting task, as well as bringing a new perspective to the subject. Cleverly displaying recent material adds a fun, nostalgic element to the show for many visitors.
Four early Australian silver flatware items – two spoons and two forks – engraved with the three initials ‘WEB’ present a challenge warranting research. Whose engraved initials (WEB) are they and when were the items made and engraved? Christine Erratt offers an answer. Four flatware1items with the owners’ initials WEB, held in two private collections (plates 1–6), bear the punch marks of Sydney silversmith Alexander Dick (1799-1843), whose shop operated in Sydney from soon after his arrival in 1824 until 1846. His widow Charlotte closed the business in 1846, with Samuel Lyons auctioning the remaining stockon 20–21 April; on 12 December she married music shop owner Francis Ellard.
A descendant of his sister Rebecca wrote about William Kerr in Australiana over 20 years ago, presenting new material obtained from family sources.1 With the help of other descendants, Yvonne Barber expands on this earlier work, beginning with the apprenticeship of William Kerr. She provides details of additional works, only some of which have survived in collections or museums; and records several more items described in contemporary newspapers, many produced in the ‘W. Kerr’ workshop after William’s death in 1896.
At dawn on Sunday, 3 December 1854, a momentous event occurred in Australian history, the battle of Eureka Stockade at Ballarat. It would turn out to be pivotal in our political journey as a nation.On that fateful morning, a contingent of the British 40th Somersetshire Regiment of Foot, supported by a section of the 12th Regiment of Foot and local troopers, attacked a stockade that was being held by a group of disaffected gold miners. These miners were a significant portion of a larger group who felt disenfranchised bythe relatively new Victorian colonial government of the day under Sir Charles Hotham. The miners had a list of grievances that were loosely based upon the charter of the UK Chartists movement. Three of their main issues were, ‘taxation without representation’, ‘universal suffrage’ (the right for all adults to vote), and the policing of gold licences, especially the corruption, cost, and method.
Bob Fredman suggests old picture frames as another area of affordable and rewarding collecting. As well as being potentially useful, these nostalgic items often have an interesting story to tell, as Bob demonstrates with these examples, all found in Queensland.
The March 2023 Australiana Society National Tour of Canberra and regions was a great success. Forty people from NSW, Victoria, Tasmania and Queensland enjoyed three days visiting diverse collections and houses. Each venue gave us a different perspective and appreciation of Australiana, in decorative arts, art, architecture and furniture from First Nations to contemporary. We had hot weather but quickly settled in as a cohesive group, renewing friendships and welcoming new members.
The subject of this book is coins
that have had their surfaces engraved, repurposed to communicate private and public messages. It covers the whole spectrum of engraved coins created
in Great Britain and forms a cultural backdrop of Australian culture, which pre-gold-rush era was predominantly
a British outpost. This book offers a means of decoding their stories.
