Australiana, Vol 48 no 1, February 2026

After seeing three paintings of great historical significance, following a random but serendipitous encounter, severalSouth Australian collectors arranged for the items to be deposited in the State Library of South Australia where they canbe catalogued, preserved, and made digitally and physically accessible to researchers.

Well-researched histories exist on 19th-century Australian furniture, silver and ceramics. Most of them are reliable sources of information, although possibly outdated, especially since the advent of Trove. Other areas have not yet been researched or have little information available. Avid Queensland collector Bob Fredman has long had an interest in Australian timber products, and here he provides an introduction to items made from timber, generically known as treen, illuminating their history and a few of their makers. These items are generally inexpensive, but researching their history is often ignored or put in the ‘too hard’ basket. Dig a little deeper and you can discover the story behind many of these artefacts, enhancing our understanding.

Early Queensland artworks have interested Dr Kevin Lambkin over many years. He would occasionally see at auctions and antique shops attractive watercolours of unidentified rural homesteads signed ‘F Whitehouse’. Whitehouse was one of those obscure artists about whom very little was recorded, although the State Library of Queensland held his intriguing portrait of a First Nations Australian man from Booubyjan Station in south-east Queensland. The question of who he was and his work as an artist in Queensland, however, came to the fore in February 2025, when Kevin located a large oil painting of the BrisbaneRiver valley town of Esk, signed by Whitehouse and dated 1927. The size and ambition of the painting of the township, and the perceptiveness of the painting of the Booubyjan man, encouraged him to explore and tell Whitehouse’s story.

The Royal Western Australian Historical Society celebrates its centenary in 2026, with a new name History West, and a new home for members’ activities having display and storage areas for the books, archives, photographic collection and the considerable art and objects held in the art, costume and museum collections (plate 1). The RWAHS has played a pioneering role in the conservation and interpretation of Western Australia’s social history and now has at least 78 affiliated societies.The many treasured possessions associated with Western Australia and Western Australians that the Society owns can now be more easily accessed for research and presentation to the public in lectures, papers, the monthly newsletter History West, the annual journal Early Days and in exhibitions held at the new headquarters and elsewhere. Dr Dorothy Erickson shares information on a few objects as well as the Society’s history.

Nicola Kissane presents some maritime folk art in the form of ‘woollies’, images of ships made of coloured woollen yarn, each with an Australian connection. The maker, date, origin, subject and other data relating to folk art is often difficult to pin down. As records are generally lacking, these objects often don’t tell much of a story. Two of these woollies discussed here depict vessels with imaginary names but, by using her extraordinary determination and sleuthing ability, Yvonne Barber linked the vessel names to an English family which emigrated from Yorkshire to Melbourne, mostly settling in Victoria’s Goulburn Valley just before World War I.

In the last years of the 19th century, Arthur Fleischmann was born into a Jewish family living under the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which Emperor Franz-Josef had already ruled for 48 years. In the new century, Fleischmann studied medicine, then switched to sculpture. He fled the rising Nazi tide in Europe, settling in Sydney from 1939, where he was absorbed into the vibrant local artistic society. Relocating to London in 1948, he maintained his Australian links, producing works on commission. Fleischmann enthusiastically pioneered the use of Perspex, a plastic invented in the 1930s, to create innovative kinetic sculptures, as well as static works using traditional techniques. Dr Jim Bertouch goes hunting for one of Fleischmann’s kineticPerspex works, installed in Sydney in 1990 just months after he had died, but which had disappeared from public sight.

With 2026 upon us, we are only two years from our 50th Anniversary. As members should be aware, the Board committed to producing a major publication to celebrate this milestone...