From a prominent place on a public drinking fountain in central West Maitland, this plaque saw many a carthorse approach to lap at the cool water in the trough below and townspeople stop to drink from its bubbling spout. The fountain was installed in 1889 in memory of Dr Robert James Pierce, and the plaque […]
What was thirteen-year-old Irish girl Ann Boyd thinking about as she stood on the deck of the emigrant ship Australia on 8 June 1853, as it sailed into Sydney Harbour and approached Dawes Point to lower its anchor? Accompanied by her parents Mary and Adam, and her eight siblings, Mary might have been impressed by […]
In the 1870s, when Berry schoolgirl Helena Kinneally stitched the buttonholes, fancy borders and darning to create this needlework sampler, she probably didn’t know how useful those skills would later be, when she became the mother of ten children. Helena Kinneally (c. 1868-1904) was born in Victoria about 1868. She was the daughter of William […]
Setting out early one day in December 1840, a tall, dark-eyed Irishman named Edward Denny Day (1801-1876), the local Police Magistrate, led a police posse through the bush around Scone, not far from Maitland. They were tracking the escaped convict turned bushranger Teddy ‘Jewboy’ Davis and his gang, who for two years had been ‘terrorising’ […]
Coiled straw work, also known as lip work, has a long tradition and is practiced by many cultures from around the world, including Anglo-Celtic cultures. Margaret Casey, who was born to an Irish father and English mother, learnt and used the coiled straw technique to craft this sun-hat in the 1880s. She made it from […]
This elegant top hat first belonged to James Dalton Jnr (1834-1919) of Orange, who purchased and wore it in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Several decades earlier, James had fled the Great Irish Famine, leaving the town of Duntryleague in Limerick County, Ireland and migrating to NSW as a free-settler on the Panama, arriving […]
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