Australiana, Vol 47 no 1, February 2025

I trust all members had a most enjoyable festive season with family and friends. 2025 is well and truly upon us with significant events planned for the calendar year.It was most pleasing to finish 2024 with 556 members. This is a record for the society and demonstrates the value which members perceive they are receiving. Our challenge is to ensure membership is not only retained but increased. A reminder to members who have not renewed for the 2025 calendar year that renewal is now overdue. While you have received this issue in good faith, please renew soon.

Two gold sculptures featuring Australian animals expertly cast in Sydney bySimon Adrien Schagen (1923–2013)were offered by West Sussex auctioneersToovey’s on 8 August 2024.

Some hold the view that, except for Conrad Martens and Isaac Walter Jenner, no accomplished artists found anything to interest them in the wilder regions of colonial Queensland. Where are the grand landscape paintings to rival those of John Glover or Eugene von Guérard? In fact, several accomplished but now forgotten artists worked in the colony in the second half of the 19th century, clearly attracted by the expansive landscape, the dramatic mountain peaks, and the impact that the new settlers were making. Dianne Byrne reveals the story of one of those artists, George Hart-Taylor (1853–1940), whose works are being re-discovered.

London silver dealer Wynyard Wilkinson suggests an explanation and chronology for the punches used on silver created by the convict silversmith Joseph Forrester, who worked in Tasmania and later Victoria. In the absence of a formal hallmarking system in Australia, he postulates that some Scottish-trained silversmiths working in Australia and Tasmania adopted theScottish practice, observed both in Scotland and other British colonies, of adding a letter punch to denote the place of origin of silver they wholesaled, in this case a ‘T’ for Tasmania.

Ginni Woof reports on the Australiana Society visit to Fairfield at Cressy in north-east Tasmania, about 30 km south of Launceston, in December.

Curators know that the best place to find good artefacts is in the neglected corners of a museum store. Megan Martin found an interesting cast-iron historical plaque, an item from a radical time when a commitment to state-owned enterprises was a central plank of the policy platform of Queensland’s Labor Government. Some familiar initials suggested its maker was the famous Queensland craftsman and teacher, L.J. Harvey.

When we eventually and inevitably lose some of our friends and colleagues, we have a duty to encapsulate their contributions to the heritage movement generally. Ian Stephenson was such a person, an active member of the Australiana Society and many other organisations. Starting his working life at the Tax Office, Ian’s career in heritage, reinforced by a Museum Studies diploma, could be said to have been funded by the ATO. His long-time professional colleague and friend SCOTT CARLIN sums up Ian’s achievements and the personal qualities that endeared him to many.

A new bank in 1880s Brisbane needed a solid, impressive building and a ‘pleasing and interesting’ event to lay its cornerstone. The Queensland Deposit Bank arranged a formal ceremony, with a silver trowel to symbolically ‘well and truly lay’ the corner stone, under which were placed current newspapers and gold coins. Kevin Lambkin tells the story behind the trowel which was elaborately engraved by an apprentice of Brisbane jeweller, the Goldsmith’s Hall Company. After the ceremony, 600 ‘influential citizens’ enjoyed a ‘cold collation’ at the Columbia Skating Rink.

Over a period of nearly 60 years from 1913 to 1970, about 200 outstanding Queensland school students, sons and daughters of employees of the Queensland Railways, were awarded gold medals valued at £3/10/, or the equivalent in scholastic books, in memory of Railway Commissioner J F Thallon (1847–1911). The awards were designed to recognise their academic achievements and to inspire the students.