The sundial, the earliest device for time-keeping, indicates the time of day by the position of cast shadow from a vertical object. As the sun moves across the sky, the shadow of the object moves, marking the passage of time. In Mother (Merry-Go-Round), artist Michael Cook (1968-) has utilised the placement of the Mother offset […]
Against a strikingly empty, yet occupied Australian landscape, art photographer Michael Cook (1968-) has managed to capture the heavy, solemn weight of both motherhood and memory in a poignant moment—looking forward but also static, with the past still in easy view. In Mother (Pedal Car), it is easy to see Cook’s own personal journey reflected. […]
Setting out early one day in December 1840, a tall, dark-eyed Irishman named Edward Denny Day (1801-1876), the local Police Magistrate, led a police posse through the bush around Scone, not far from Maitland. They were tracking the escaped convict turned bushranger Teddy ‘Jewboy’ Davis and his gang, who for two years had been ‘terrorising’ […]
This 1826 penny, discovered in 2005 beneath a sandstone windowsill of A-Wing at Maitland Gaol, could only have been placed there during the building’s construction in the 1840s. For about 150 years the coin remained in place, witness to the thousands of inmates once incarcerated within the building’s walls, many of whom were female. When […]
Imagine the sweltering summer days in West Wallsend, when tired and dusty miners crowded into the Clyde Inn (est c. 1893) on Carrington Street to quench their thirst. Many ordered beer, but others had a taste for the fizzy lemonade, soda water, ginger ale, and ‘fruit champagne’, which the bar-keep William ‘Bill’ Smith (licensee 1899 – […]
When Max Watters (1934-2020) was drawn to the simple beauty of this setting, the cows that once grazed the grassy paddocks at the Merton dairy, near Denman in the Upper Hunter Valley, were long-gone. Max was a lifelong resident of Muswellbrook, a twenty-minute drive from Denman. He lived his entire life in a modest timber […]
Where there are people, there is noise. Yet this photograph by Michael Cook (1968-), part of a thirteen image series, titled Mother (Bicycle), exudes only silence and stillness. Born in 1968 and adopted by white parents who were staunch activists and allies of the Indigenous community, Michael Cook has explored a wide breadth of subjects […]
As a girl at West Wallsend in the 1950s Narelle Kemp watched her mother Elvie, with pointed index finger, turn the number dial on this black Bakelite telephone. She listened to the distinctive rotation sound as the dial returned. When someone called, the phone’s built-in-bell made a cheerful ring, which carried throughout all the rooms […]
Its been more than 100 years since electricity was installed at West Wallsend. The bulb and fitting shown here is an electric light that belonged to undertaker and carpenter William Turnbull (Snr). It dates from the era when West Wallsend, then a small coal mining town, switched to using electricity. Today, safe, reliable lighting in […]
Along with the forge, the anvil was the most important tool in the blacksmith’s kit. Using the anvil, hot metal was ‘worked’. It was repeatedly hammered and shaped around its angled and conical edges. Imagine the loud clanging blow of a hammer forming the metal, while the whoosh of bellows pumped air into the forge […]
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