Australiana, Vol 48 no 2, May 2026

Board Director, Professor David Johnstone recommended to the Board that the Society consider establishing an annual scholarship grant for research into a specific topic of Australiana... The Board agreed to pursue potential partners and provide a maximum grant of $10,000 per annum to one or more recipients, with agreed outcomes which benefit the Society. The first scholarship grant will be awarded during the 2027 financial year following an extensive selection process.

All are worthy contenders but this year The Peter Walker Fine Art Writing Award is presented, for the first time, to joint winners – siblings Dr Jennifer Harris and Lindsay Harris, who collaborated but published

Dr Dorothy Erickson continues the evolving story of the Royal Western Australian Historical Society, now known as History West. She reveals more of its collection of treasured objects documenting the history of British settlement in Western Australia, explaining their tangible connections to Western Australia’s historical figures, communities and past ways of life. She shows too how the means and direction of collecting over 100 years have changed and developed, partly influenced by the personalities involved.

The Regent bowerbird (Sericulus chrysocephalus) is the type species of the genus Sericulus established by William John Swainson in 1825, one of eight genera constituting the Australo-Papuan bowerbirds together forming the family of Ptilonorhynchidæ.. Although initially unrecognised as a bowerbird, the species became known to the European scientific community in 1808 through John William Lewin’s image in The Birds of New Holland, published in London. This paper focuses on the documentation and contextualisation of the earliest known depiction of the Regent bowerbird dated 1803 and not published until now and another early depiction produced prior to Lewin’s well-known auto-engraved plate.

Always on the lookout for those rare early paintings of Brisbane, Kevin Lambkin located a highly accomplished oil of a Brisbane River scene at auction in Sydney in 2024. The painting was simply signed ‘Huston’, a name unknown to Kevin and to the painting’s Sydney auction cataloguer who suggested a New Zealand artist. The 1930s style of the painting’s original frame was a starting point for an intensive search of Trove. ‘Huston’ was Wyclif Emmanuel Huston, a highly talented youth from a dairy farm on Queensland’s Darling Downs whose art was much acclaimed in Queensland in the 1930s. His promising future, however, was interrupted by the war and after army service and moving to Melbourne his name virtually disappears from the record of Australian artists. Was he, as art historian the late Glenn Cooke suggested, yet another artistic casualty of World War II?

Most collectors of anything have a small table or two, useful to hold your tea, coffee or wine within reach while you relax in an old-fashioned easy chair. Avid collector Bob Fredman takes us through the several different styles made in Australia over a hundred years, and highlights the importance of the technical innovations and changes in materials in the 1930s.

The Australiana Society’s 2026 national tour, from 24–31 March, commenced in Launceston and travelled south via the Fingal Valley and Tasmania’s east coast, concluding in Hobart. The tour focused on historic properties and collections in private ownership not generally open to the public.

William Petsalis and James Bateman’s A Survey of the Bateman Collection is a most welcome survey of more than 200 pieces from one of the most impressive collections of Australian colonial furniture and folk art ever assembled, the successor to the dispersed collections of Lord McAlpine and the late Caroline Simpson. Certain pieces will be known to members from their publication in Australiana and in Fahy & Simpson’s Australian Furniture Pictorial History and Dictionary 1788–1938 (1998).

In the 19th century, jewellery was the go-to gift for men to show their affection for a wife, fiancée or sweetheart. A century later, rarely do we know who gave what to whom, or when. Often the link has been lost, or the design has fallen out of favour, and the gift becomes neglected. Worse, it might have been melted down for bullion value, as the price of gold soared. Greg Street describes one ‘Kalgoorlie’ gold mining brooch bought and presented in the late 1890s in Western Australia and which, over more than a century, had only two owners. Descendants decided to sell it with its complete provenance and with historic photographs of it being worn by its original owner.