Playing Your Cards Right

The lady who kept her calling cards in this delicately carved ivory case may have been one of Thomas Arkell’s daughters, from Charlton near Bathurst. She clearly looked after it. Perhaps it was only brought out on the days on which she ‘called’ on her social network. Calling, in the days before telephones, meant visiting […]

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Best Laid Plans

Several ladies were in attendance at the Maitland Technical College on the evening of 4 March 1913. It was one of the first meetings of the newly formed Maitland District Scientific and Historical Research Society, and the members might have been surprised to see so many women active in a domain from which they had […]

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Making Her Mark

sampler with multicolour thread listing the alphabet in various cases

Embroidery samplers from the late nineteenth century made by children were often small in size and called ‘marking samplers’. The one shown here was worked by Catherine Frost of Orange in 1872, when she was eight years old. Typically, samplers were made by girls between the ages of five and fifteen, they were the work […]

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