Standing the test of time, these ceramic bottles have remained in a near-pristine condition for over a hundred years. They tell the story of Narrabri’s famous cordial maker, Septimus Faulkner (1859-1936). In the late 1800s, a young Faulkner arrived in Narrabri to work for Edmund Fuss, a chemist who had turned to cordial making. Under […]
The laptop of its day, this portable writing desk allowed the writer freedom to move around. Perfect for use next to an open fire or beneath a shady tree in one’s garden, its lower compartments tidily held ink, paper and pens. This late nineteenth-century example belonged to Alexander (1837-1915) and Ann Hanlon (nee Boyd) (1839-1929). […]
These napkin rings belonged to the Wilson family of Berry. James C Wilson (1834-1901) emigrated to Australia in 1857 and found work on the Berry Estate, before co-founding Wilson and Co. Store, establishing other business interests that included coal mining, and becoming Berry’s first Mayor. Around 1880, with wife Robina nee Tait (1849-1918), the Wilsons […]
In 1886 John Stewart of the farm Mananga, Broughton Creek, carefully arranged and pressed buttercups, lilacs, daisies, grasses and ferns in these bound books to create a herbarium. Then he dipped his pen in an inkwell and inscribed his name inside the front covers and recorded the botanical names of the specimens on each page. […]
After returning home each evening, weary from work, Morpeth furniture craftsman Joseph George White (1822-1912) probably followed the fashion of his fellow Victorian era gentlemen. Retreating to a quiet room in his home after dinner, he probably put on a smoking jacket and this smoking cap. But did he then light up a pipe and […]
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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