In May 1930, Mallawa Amateur Racing Club held their first Picnic Day on grazier Mathew Boland’s property, ‘Narba’ near Moree. The community was abuzz with excitement about the event, the turf received high praise and a shed formerly used by the cricket team was relocated to house the secretary and jockeys. Maude Gunthorpe, from the […]
Originally from Russia, Albert Abram Coppleson (1865-1948) was never one to shy away from a challenge. After leaving home at sixteen, walking to Hamburg, then travelling to London, he met Polish-born Woolf Ruta Cohen. In search of adventure, the pair made their way to New South Wales. Spending his first few years in the colony […]
In the early 1900s, on the Greek Island of Kythera, a little boy watched as his father, Minas Comino unloaded sacks of veggies onto a wharf. In the terrifying moment that he watched his father fall, he had witnessed the heart attack that turned his whole world upside down. Born in 1897, Andrew Comino became […]
In the 1840s, graziers in the colonies were beset by falling prices for meat exports due to a depression in Britain. A smelly solution came in the form of boiling-down – the boiling of carcasses in vats to extract tallow (or animal fat). Used to make soap and candles, tallow was worth more than meat, […]
Farmers have harvested wheat from the fertile soil around Inverell since the 1850s, when the town was established on the land of the Gomeroi and Ennewin peoples. By the late 1920s, when this trophy for a crop of wheat was awarded to JF Morris of Hopgrove, near Inverell, land was becoming scarcer as towns grew. […]
Miss Zelma Coralie Futter, of Inverell, waved this Union Jack during the armistice celebrations in Sydney in November 1918, to celebrate the end of WWI. It was the British flag that Australian soldiers had marched under during the war, and it was British foreign policy that dictated the movement of Australian troops. So, the Australian […]
The family of Mrs Mary Gibson had this card made in memory of their mother, who died in July 1913. The handsome card is gilded and embossed in keeping with the conventions of the time, which were a continuation of the Victorian practices around death and mourning. Strict conventions dictated the length of mourning, styles […]
William and Annie McIlveen, who were members of two old and established families in the Inverell district, married in 1883. This pair of lustres, a wedding gift, decorated the dining room of their home in Brodie’s Plains, near Inverell. Surviving through the generations, they were kept as family heirlooms until they were donated to the […]
Nobody knows who made this horn, or when, but it’s believed to have sounded the daily knock-off at Colin Ross’s general store and flour mill in Inverell. Horn bugles can be blown with pursed lips like a trumpet to produce a single note that can resonate over quite a distance. The horn is decorated with […]
Until relatively recently, a strange ritual gripped Australian households at Christmas time. As families excitedly sunk spoons into Christmas pudding, they kept an eye out for a glimmer of silver between each rich and sugary bite. They weren’t simply trying to avoid cracking a molar. Instead they were hoping to find one of the charms […]
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