‘Make-do’ or ‘makeshift’ chairs, like the examples pictured here, were a product of the Depression-era and an inventive way to provide both seating and storage in the home. This type of chair was illustrated in Makeshifts, a booklet published in 1925 outlining how to build one. More often made from used kerosene packing cases as […]
This certificate, issued to Albert Arthur Robert Wallbank (1909–1975) gave him the right to mine under the 1906 NSW Mining Act. Albert lived in Dudley in the heart of the coal mining district of the Hunter Valley of NSW but it is unlikely that he was intending to mine for coal. Gold was his target. […]
Discarded by a tradesman, this small cardboard electrical installation tag lay silent and forgotten for decades in the darkness of the roof of the Chifley family house in Bathurst. In the rooms below, the residents lived out their lives as the Great Depression and World War II unfolded. In 1914, Bathurst-born Ben Chifley (1885-1951) and […]
In late 1929, stock markets crashed and the world fell into the Great Depression. By 1932, one in three Australian breadwinners were unemployed. Families queued at soup kitchens or relied on government payments that allowed them to buy only the bare minimum of food. For many poor families, the staple meal was bread and ‘dripping’ […]
During the 1930s, the Great Depression meant that one in three Australian breadwinners were out of work, and many families struggled to survive. It was during this time that this cabinet was used to store books at a school, as indicated by the typewritten page pasted inside the door which was sent home with pupils […]
It was a careful hand, using a fine-tipped paint brush, that expertly filled in the blocks of pastel watercolour paint on these architectural drawings in early 1933. It might have been the young architect Edward Boyd Scobie (1904-1988) who copied and coloured them at his drafting desk, in the offices of his father’s architectural firm at […]
‘Potter’s clay sticks to the fingers’, replied Alice Fieldsend when asked why her family stayed with the craft. The alchemy of pottery, from clay to mould and kiln was with her from childhood as she watched her father, James Silcock, work the potter’s wheel. Alice married Frederick Fieldsend and together they established the F.J. Fieldsend […]
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