Imagine the sound of thick, rich cream splashing and slopping against the insides of this glass jar, as one of its owners, Ella or Ada Mellshimer of Ulladulla, wound the handle to move the paddle inside. Nearly every kitchen in Australia had a butter churn in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and this […]
If you were a tea drinker in the 1920s, you probably would have begun making your morning brew by boiling water in a kettle just like this one. When you heard the water bubbling inside, you would pour it out into your teapot and wait for your Bushells tea leaves to steep. If you didn’t […]
On the 21st of September 1869, eight members of the Ulladulla Volunteer Corps came together for one of their earliest performances as the town band at the Milton School of Arts Bazaar. One attendee gleefully relayed the day’s proceedings to The Kiama Independent, but they soon became lost for words when describing how well the […]
The tables of wealthy colonists in Australia benefited greatly from the immigration of Danish and German silversmiths in the 1850s. Immigration programs to Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide, coupled with discoveries of gold, lured many young men to the colonies after they had completed their apprenticeships. Joachim Wendt was one of them, alongside Christian Qwist, Julius […]
Competitive rowing events on the Birrarung, or Yarra River, in Melbourne began in 1860. The annual regatta was a feature of the social calendar by the time this Grand Challenge cup was presented to Melbourne Rowing Club in 1868. The event attracted crowds of picknickers to the banks of the upper river to cheer the […]
As a young child approaching my grandparent’s farm out beyond Bugaldie, north-west of Coonabarabran, I used to stare out the car window. After many hours on the road, mesmerised by hours of endless gum trees, the Warrumbungle Mountains finally appeared. As we drove along the flat plain near the railway siding of Bugaldie, my mother […]
When Norman Victor Reid went to join the AIF at Sydney on 11 February 1915 he was still 11 months short of the minimum age for enlistment (19). So, he took with him a letter from his father giving him permission to join the Army Medical Corps and go to the front. Norman was accepted […]
It’s a simple message, welcoming visitors to the Maitland Regional Art Gallery (MRAG) – don’t worry, be happy. A smiling cloud sheds happy tears, brightening the day of anyone who sees it on the outside of MRAG, where it was installed in 2019. Its message is most effective at night, when its neon light illuminates […]
It may have been painted 340 years later and on the other side of the world, but Michael Fitzjames (1948-) has channelled the spirit of the Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer’s famous View of Delft (1663) in View of Maitland from the riverbank (2006). Like Vermeer, Fitzjames has split his canvas into three horizontal bands of […]
A question the artistic collective AES+F ask of themselves is: despite our technological advancement, how different are we psychologically from the people who lived in antiquity? The four artists of AES+F, Tatiana Arzamasova (1955-), Lev Evzovich (1958-), Evgeny Svyatsky (1957-) and Vladimir Fridkes (1956-), explore this query through highly produced video and photographic works that […]
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