Australiana, Vol 45 no 3, August 2023

Antique jewellery dealer Anne Schofield recently exhibited a collection of rare Aboriginal shell necklaces from Tasmania, which were on show in June at her Woollahra gallery... Tasmanian Aboriginal shell work is unique, the patterns and shell types indicate the maker and also reflecta place or places, the seashores from whence they came, and the knowledge of collecting and making.

As announced in the May issue, the 2024 National Tour will be held in and around Adelaide, South Australia. The organising committee has already secured visits to several private collections belonging to South Australian members and these will be combined with enhanced viewing of some significant institutional collections, some not well known.

Bob Fredman highlights an interesting discovery, English cabinetmakers using Australian rose mahogany as an exotic furniture timber in the early 19th-century. He suggests that, in the dearth of mentions of rose mahogany in early Australian furniture, there may be a major void in our knowledge and in our collections, and that this timber may have not been identified.

Curator and historian Tim Roberts previews a new exhibition on the English ceramics firm Wedgwood, founded by Josiah Wedgwood in 1759, and linked with the British colonisation of Australia through its design and manufacture of the ‘Sydney Cove Medallions’ in 1789. These were made from Sydney clay sent back to Staffordshire, the first known attempt to exploit Australia’s economic resources by a colonial power.

Robert Griffin makes the case for the introduction of the squatter’s chair – a robust easy chair with swing-out leg rests – as an idea imported from India in the early 19th century. These chairs found a home on the shady verandahs of homesteads, particularly in Queensland and NSW, where the landowner could relax and survey his (and occasionally her) land and animals, hence the name.

Two early arks held in the museum collection of The Great Synagogue in Elizabeth Street, Sydney are impressive examples of Australian furniture. Their distinct Egyptian style could have been a source of inspiration for the architectural style of the York Street Synagogue (1844). In her search for the arks’ provenance, curator Dr Jana Vytrhlik came up with an ingenious argument to tackle the question. Looking at the emerging theatre scene in Sydney in the 1830s, she makes the case for Barnet Aaron Phillips – theatre stage ‘machinist’, cabinet maker and member of the Synagogue Committee – as the probable designer and maker.

Zealous colonists wanted those ‘at home’ to know how economically successful the British colonies in Australia had become. When gold was found in 1851, the Governor of New South Wales sent specimens of the first gold, in boxes made using selected colonial timbers by Irish-born cabinetmaker Andrew Lenehan, to their young Queen. The gifts arrived soon after the close of Prince Albert’s enormously successful ‘Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations.’ Queen Victoria accepted the gifts which found their way to Osborne, the Queen’s summer house on the Isle of Wight. There they languished, the gold vanished, and their significance in the discovery of gold in Australia was apparently forgotten – until now.

Leading colonial artist? Or leading early 19th-century British artist working in the colony of Van Diemen’s Land? Clearly the latter. Ron Radford, John Glover, Patterdale Farm and the Revelation of the Australian Landscape reveals how John Glover (1767–1849), a leading artist in the British watercolour movement of the 1790s – c 1815, relocated to the Antipodes aged 64 in 1831 and found a new vision, provoked by the piercing Tasmanian light, the Tasmanian landscape and charismatic subject matter.