The American inventor Thomas Edison is claimed to have said that to invent ‘you need a good imagination and a pile of junk’. It would have been easy for excavators working in William Street, Brisbane, to see these tubes as junk and throw them away. But these tubes are of World Significance as some of […]
This elegant Taiwanese screen is both functional and beautiful. But loaded with symbolism, its greatest purpose is its meaning. The plum blossom branch depicted in the central panel, with its delicate buds and flowers that only appear in winter, represents strength and endurance; the two birds perched together seem to symbolise a friendship or partnership. […]
Like most pieces of iron machinery made in the nineteenth century, this ‘Ewbank Jewel’ laundry mangle was built to last. And last it did, now as solid and sturdy as the day it left the Entwhistle & Kenyon factory in Lancashire, England, sometime after 1875. Mangles were used to quickly flatten sheets, towels and tablecloths, […]
This brilliant jacket certainly fits the story of its former owner the country musician Tex Morton (1916-1983), born in 1916 as Robert William Lane. Robert or ‘Bobby’ began busking at 14 before recording several albums in Wellington, New Zealand. These are believed to be the first country music recordings made outside of America. In the […]
Nowadays we have smart meters that monitor and, in some cases, remotely measure and control our power use. In the 1890s, as the availability of electrical power became more common, two of the most successful electrical power meters measuring power usage were the Edison and the Aron electricity meters. The Edison meter had two copper […]
These hard homes of tiny soft bodied molluscs that once lived on the sandy bottom of the Pacific Ocean, washed up on the beaches of the Solomon Islands, and eventually became souvenirs for Paulene White, a young woman from Morpeth, NSW. While employed by the British government, probably in the 1950s, Paulene travelled from her […]
Above all, Kerrie Lester (1953-2016) was a passionate and committed art-maker. During her career she created well over thirty solo exhibitions while also finding time to become a finalist in the Archibald Prize sixteen times. She became well-known for her unique style of painting which incorporated twine sewn through the canvas to create texture. Lester’s […]
After an artist residency in Beirut in 1999, Locust Jones (1963-) had a realisation: he had the story all wrong. Through his time in Lebanon, it became clear that his understanding of the region had been founded upon a deep, unnoticed bias in the media he had been consuming. From then on, his work became […]
It was in 1995, during an artist’s residency at Hyde Park Barracks, that Anne Ferran (1949-) began to make art about Australia’s past: ‘You can live in a country all your life and feels like nothing happened before you got here.’ From this emerged a practice of unearthing forgotten or unspoken history and using it […]
In the days before the twentieth century’s marketing of alcohol with distinctive bottles and branded labels, alcohol was decanted at home into glass decanters. Wine labels, or ‘bottle tickets’ as they were sometimes known, were hung on the necks of decanters to identify the contents within – in this case, madeira and brandy. Decanters and […]
Museums & Galleries of NSW acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of the lands that comprise the state now known as NSW.
We pay respect to them as First Nations people with a continuing connection to land, place, waters and community
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are advised that this site contains stories, images, voices, and video of people who have died.
Some material may contain terms that reflect common usage of the period in which it was written or recorded but may not be considered appropriate today. Such terms do not reflect the views of Museums and Galleries of NSW and are provided only to reflect historical context.