Top of the Crop

Farmers have harvested wheat from the fertile soil around Inverell since the 1850s, when the town was established on the land of the Gomeroi and Ennewin peoples. By the late 1920s, when this trophy for a crop of wheat was awarded to JF Morris of Hopgrove, near Inverell, land was becoming scarcer as towns grew. […]

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Flying the Flag

Miss Zelma Coralie Futter, of Inverell, waved this Union Jack during the armistice celebrations in Sydney in November 1918, to celebrate the end of WWI. It was the British flag that Australian soldiers had marched under during the war, and it was British foreign policy that dictated the movement of Australian troops. So, the Australian […]

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Memento Mori

The family of Mrs Mary Gibson had this card made in memory of their mother, who died in July 1913. The handsome card is gilded and embossed in keeping with the conventions of the time, which were a continuation of the Victorian practices around death and mourning. Strict conventions dictated the length of mourning, styles […]

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Leading Lights

William and Annie McIlveen, who were members of two old and established families in the Inverell district, married in 1883. This pair of lustres, a wedding gift, decorated the dining room of their home in Brodie’s Plains, near Inverell. Surviving through the generations, they were kept as family heirlooms until they were donated to the […]

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Sounding Off

Nobody knows who made this horn, or when, but it’s believed to have sounded the daily knock-off at Colin Ross’s general store and flour mill in Inverell. Horn bugles can be blown with pursed lips like a trumpet to produce a single note that can resonate over quite a distance. The horn is decorated with […]

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Kindly Heart

There are ‘few better loved women’ in Glen Innes, northern NSW, than Miss Kate McCann. As the longest-serving teacher at Glencoe Public School just south of Glen Innes, McCann (also known as Biddy) had a ‘kindly heart’ and ‘sterling character.’ McCann was born in Ireland in 1865 and emigrated to Australia with her family. At […]

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