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 […]
The jockey atop this impressive silver racing trophy has lost his more than his whip; he has lost his place in history. It’s not known who won this cup, or indeed, if it was ever presented as a trophy. The cartouche (ornate frame), which would customarily be engraved with the name, date and place of […]
Soup was an important part of nineteenth century dining. In her 1863 book of household management, Mrs Beeton devotes fifty pages to soup, ranging from the cheap and cheerful ‘Hodge-podge’ to turtle soup – ‘the most expensive brought to table’. Soup was always the first course at any meal, and in wealthier households was brought […]
‘This’ll be over by Christmas’ became more difficult to believe each year that passed during World War I. Australian soldiers, some who had served since the beginning of the war, had spent Christmas days in camps and trenches far from home. In 1918, an article in a Sydney newspaper reported some words given by a […]