Close at Hand

From the 1920s, this medicine chest was kept and used by the Gall family on their dairy farm near Berry. It remained in the family until the property sold, around 2007. It is a simple but captivating artefact that offers an insight into basic medical care on a family-run farm in twentieth century Australia. In […]

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Sign of Respect

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 […]

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A Measure of Good Health

Mothers regularly pushed their prams up the ramp of the local courthouse in 1950s Morpeth. But it was not a judge and jury that they were to there to see—it was a baby health nurse. In this unlikely place from 1954, about ten years after the the building had been closed as a court house, […]

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