Australiana, Vol 47 no 3, August 2025

Thank you to members who provided feedback on the proposed changes toour national tour registration procedures, detailed in May Australiana. Many members advised that they understood the constraints of having limited places on these much sought-after tours, mostly of private houses. The board agreed to adopt all the proposed measures for future national tours: interstate members will take priority, with host-state members able to attend the opening event, the Kevin Fahy Lecture and the closing event, at a minimum. If demand does not exceed supply, host state members will be accepted for the full tour. A ballot will be conducted if required.

Unusually for an artist, Ada Whitingnee Cherry (1859 –1953) was a celebrated success in her lifetime.1In 1900, the first time she submitted a portrait miniature to the Royal Academy in London, it was hung ‘onthe line’ – a small work needs to be exhibited at eye level. Remarkable for a‘colonial’, a female, a first submission, and the first Tasmanian-born artist tobe exhibited at the RA! The same year, Ada exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy, the Hibernian and the Paris Salon to considerable acclaim.

Embroidered samplers worked in various stitches by girls or young women to demonstrate their needlework skills. Typically, samplers include the alphabet, some mottoes, and simple pictures and patterns, often with the maker’s name and the date.This mid-Victorian sampler is a tribute to Thomas Rice (1808–1887), patriarch of the Rice family in South Australia, with an elevation view of his single-storied home Rose Cottage at Lyndoch in the Barossa, plus plans of its fenced stockyard andgarden, with paths and ornamental borders.

The Orrong Pottery operated for just four years, from 1880 to 1884, in Melbourne’s eastern suburb of Prahran, and under several names. It produced bricks and sewer pipes, as well as employing several prominent, Staffordshire-trained journeyman potters to introduce a range of domestic pottery to compete with wares imported from Britain and with wares from local potteries. This article outlines the short history of the Orrong Pottery and explores the structure and economics ofthe pottery industry in the 19th century. While few of the Pottery’s products were marked, Greg Hill suggests that identifying ‘crossovers’, such as the distinctive moulds and glazes used by journeyman potters such as William Holford at several potteries, may allow us tentatively to attribute extant examples to these potteries.

A chance online encounter with an arresting 19th-century oil painting depicting a scene of forlorn industry on the banks of the Saltwater River, executed by one of Australia’s foremost portrait painters of the Victorian period, and its offering in a Hobart auction may have misled some to assume it depicted a scene from Tasmania’s long abandoned, convict-driven experiment at Saltwater River on the Tasman Peninsula. For Sam Nichols, it prompted recollections of a six-year residence in inner-west Melbourne and walking the banks of the Maribyrnong River, surveying the relics of the city’s 19th-century livestock-based industries in the area of Kensington and Footscray.

Rob La Nauze highlights his research into the cinematic achievements of Ernest Jardine Thwaites (1873–1933) that identified 16 short films Thwaites made, 18 films attributed to Thwaites, and seven other films that Thwaites possibly made in Victoria.Yet his notable pioneering achievements in film spanned only a brief two-year period. Cinematography was not the Melbourne inventor’s only claim to recognition, as he experimented with new technologies in the late 19th and early 20th century.

Jonoski Takuma, a young, missionary-educated Japanese man, arrived in Australia in 1888 and within a few years began engraving emu eggs depicting Australian scenes. Reflecting his Japanese cultural heritage, these delicately carved eggs,along with postcards and a children’s book, embody a fusion of Japanese art with Australian themes that appealed, withthe advent of Federation, to a growing nationalism. Jonoski became entangled in a notorious stamp forgery case that fundamentally impacted upon his Australian-born family. Eventually Jonoski and his daughter left Australia and moved between the United Kingdom and Japan in an involved series of relocations marked by divorce, desertion, suicide and war. This article seeks to illuminate, within the constraints of available records, the experiences of Jonoski, his children and grandchildren and the interplay of culture, trade, race and war on this Japanese-Australian family, adding biographical information to Dr Jennifer Harris' article on emu eggs in our May issue.

Collector Bob Fredman relates a recent project – identifying, cleaning and restoring a nondescript terracotta garden urn,covered in house paint, with links to Brisbane and the early European settlers of the Sunshine Coast hinterland.

Ken Orchard, James Ashton, Artist of the Fleurieu Coast. Royal South Australian Society ofArts, Adelaide 2025. Soft cover,95 pages 29 x 21 cm. Exhibitioncatalogue, all paintings and objectsillustrated, chronology, bibliography.$30, available only at the RSASA,Institute Building,North Terrace, Adelaide.

Dr Phyllis Murphy AM, a long-time member of the Australiana Society, died in May, just a few weeks short of her 101st birthday. Born Phyllis Slater in Melbourne in 1924,Phyllis developed a strong interest in buildings and design from an early age. Her son Jock Murphy records her architectural work and her passion for historic wallpaper.