Percy Puck Sing Young must have been impressed when he walked into the Kwong Sing War store (later known as Kwong Sing & Co.) in 1894. The owner, Wong Chee, had recently erected a new building for the business in Glen Innes, northern NSW, and it stocked a huge range of items. Young soon got […]
While this metal contraption might look a little scary, it provided life-saving support for hundreds of newborn babies who struggled to take their first breaths. Dr William K. McIntyre (1881-1969), was a gynaecologist and obstetrician who practised in Launceston, Tasmania, on Kanamaluka county. McIntyre grew frustrated with the lack of options when it came to […]
When Jean Bellette (1908–1981) painted this modernist still life in the kitchen of her newly-acquired weekender in Hill End, she could not have foreseen the legacy she was creating for the arts in Bathurst. Her painting won the inaugural Carillon City Festival Art Prize in 1955 and was the first work acquired for the Bathurst […]
A chance encounter with a travelling photographer changed the course of young Charles Bayliss’s life in 1866. He was sixteen years old and living in suburban Melbourne when Beaufoy Merlin knocked on the door and asked to photograph the family home. The entrepreneurial Merlin had started a business documenting the buildings and houses of the […]
Greg Weight (1946- ) has been photographing artists since he joined Martin Sharp, Brett Whiteley, George Gittoes, and Peter Kingston at the artist-run Yellow House in Sydney in 1970. There, he met people who fascinated him for the ways in which they interpreted ‘the mystery and phenomena of the real world.’ For Weight, taking photographs […]
After his sudden death in 1992, Brett Whiteley’s daughter Arkie remembered her artist father as a ‘generous, sweet intuitive man’ who would go to eternity wearing his ‘funny little turned up black hat with the frangipani brooch.’ The hat, now in the collection of the Bathurst Regional Art Gallery, was his ‘good luck hat. He […]
This would become Alec Mildren’s ultimate moment of glory – one he had been tirelessly working toward. Stepping up to the podium in June 1960, he accepted this trophy for his thrilling win of the 25th Australian Grand Prix (est. 1928). It was official, he had the fastest car in Australia. Engraved with his name, […]
Discarded by a tradesman, this small cardboard electrical installation tag lay silent and forgotten for decades in the darkness of the roof of the Chifley family house in Bathurst. In the rooms below, the residents lived out their lives as the Great Depression and World War II unfolded. In 1914, Bathurst-born Ben Chifley (1885-1951) and […]
Elizabeth ‘Lizzie’ Chifley liked to knit. On the wall of her rendered brick cottage at 10 Busby Street, Bathurst, nearby the comfortable sage green armchair where she often sat to pursue her craft, this beautiful Chinese scroll had been hanging since about 1948. Lizzie was Prime Minister Ben Chifley’s wife, and this was their home, […]
Swords and daggers conjure up images of hand-to-hand combat; brutal, bloody and deadly. But it is likely that these examples were never wielded against an enemy. Though they were carried on the belt as part of the uniform of a Japanese military officer during World War II, this sword and dagger had a deeper purpose […]
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