Thomas Bock (b. Sutton Coldfield, 1790–1855)
Woureddy, Native of Bruny Island, Van Diemen’s Land 1837
Watercolour
15.9 x 15.2 cm (image), 29.5 x 22.4 cm (sheet)
Presented by the Tasmanian Government, 1889
Wurati was a Nununi man from Bruny Island who spoke several languages. Between 1829 and 1835, he and his wife Trucanini were among the group of Aboriginal leaders who accompanied George Augustus Robinson on the expeditions of his ‘Friendly Mission’. He travelled with Robinson in 1839 to the Port Phillip district of Victoria, and died on the return journey to Flinders Island in 1842.
Thomas Bock, an English engraver and miniaturist, was a married father of five when he was convicted of administering the herb savin to his nineteen-year-old lover in order to induce her to abort their child. The judge commented that he had ‘never tried a more wicked or malignant case’. Transported to Hobart, Bock put his skills to work in designing banknotes and official stationery for the colonial government; he also produced evocative artworks that are treasured for their historical importance. Between 1831 and 1834 Bock created a series of portraits of Tasmanian Aboriginal people for Robinson, who took the original images back to England, where they remain in the British Museum collection. Bock produced several series of the portraits, using his printmaking skills to lightly transfer the images for reproduction.
Pat Brassington (b. Hobart, 1942)
The Frog
1998
Digital print
85.4 x 74.5 cm
Presented by an anonymous donor, 2002
In her early works, the photographic artist Pat Brassington paired images of her own devising with images taken from existing source material—films, books and photographic archives—to create unsettling, intriguing scenarios. But as digital processes evolved, Brassington was able instead to fuse disparate sources into single images. The focus of her work has long been on the human body, and her pictures often feature subtle and disturbing distortions. With its fairy-tale title, The Frog features a female figure who might be swimming or suspended in the sky. The red breath issuing from the figure’s lips might represent a kiss, or a spell, or something else entirely. However you choose to see The Frog, it is an image with all the characteristic mystery of a Brassington.
Annie Benbow (1841–1917)
Aborigines, Oyster Cove 1847
c. 1900
Pencil on paper
52.5 x 75.1 cm
Annie Benbow was the daughter of Sergeant David Macdouall, an Irish soldier from County Galway who was stationed at the convict probation station in Oyster Cove where Tasmanian Aboriginal people were incarcerated from 1847 to 1869. The child Annie frequently visited the probation station, and the people and events of that place figured strongly in her artworks.
Created around 1900, Aborigines, Oyster Cove 1847 is an extraordinarily detailed work that captures, from memory, what the artist imagined that she saw more than fifty years earlier, when she was a six-year-old girl. The level of detail demonstrates that Benbow had a phenomenal visual memory, and provides a unique insight into life at Oyster Cove in the 1840s. While naïve in style, the drawings depict particular people and known events, making Benbow’s work historically significant.
Benjamin Duterrau (b. London, 1767–1851)
The Conciliation
1840
Oil on canvas
121 x 170.5 cm
Purchased with assistance from the Friends of the Museum Fund and the Murray Fund, 1945
The colonial painter Benjamin Duterrau conceived of his famous The Conciliation as a study for an ambitious ‘National Picture’, which he described as measuring 3.04 x 4.26 metres. It is not known for certain whether this larger canvas was painted and lost, or never painted at all.
This more modestly proportioned canvas, regarded as the first historical painting in the Australian colonies, depicts the British ‘protector of Aboriginals’, George Augustus Robinson, as the romanticised saviour at the centre of a group of Tasmanian Aboriginal people. The painting, described by TMAG curators as being of ‘momentous importance’, served as a touchstone for the late twentieth century’s vigorous interrogation of Robinson and the role he played in the dispossession of Tasmanian Aborigines. As a result of his actions, Tasmanian Aboriginal people were transported to Flinders Island, where many died of disease and maltreatment.
Geoff Parr (b. Earlwood, NSW, 1933–2017)
Place II (detail)
1983
Cibachrome-positive photograph
Donated by Geoff Parr, 2001
While Benjamin Duterrau’s 1840 The Conciliation captured a colonial scene through the lens of nineteenth-century imperialism, Geoff Parr in the late twentieth century sought to radically reimagine the colonial artist’s iconic work. Parr’s wryly humorous and thought-provoking recreation of the Duterrau is the presiding image of Place II, a suite of six works that grapple with Tasmania’s complex cultural history and the role of the artist within it.
While reproducing and incorporating elements of the original work, Parr’s image foregrounds contemporary Tasmanian artists posing in the attitudes of several of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people from The Conciliation. In the place of George Augustus Robinson, Parr has inserted a mysterious composite figure—face supplied by a well-known photographic image of the Aboriginal woman Trucanini, while a more three-dimensional body is draped in a scarf of red, black and yellow. Where a living wallaby appears in the Duterrau, an empty pelt appears in the Parr. Surveying measures and a radio aerial take the place of the original painting’s spears, perhaps asking the viewer to consider how and when colonial violence has been committed in Tasmania.
Thomas Griffiths Wainewright
(b. London, 1794–1847)
The Three Graces: Portrait of the Misses Ellen,
Georgiana and Maria Butler
c. 1846
Pencil, watercolour & Chinese white on paper
45.6 x 51.8 cm
Presented by A. Wayn under the Taxation Incentive for the Arts Scheme, 1998
An English-born Regency-era dandy, Thomas Griffiths Wainewright trained as an artist, moved in elite literary and artistic circles, and wrote for the London Magazine under the creative noms-de-plume of Janus Weathercock, Egomet Bonmot and Cornelius van Vinkbooms. His biographer, Andrew Motion, says: ‘he was also an ingenious and unscrupulous criminal. In 1822 and 1823 he forged the deeds on a trust fund left to him by his grandfather, in order to finance his extravagant life in London. In 1828 his uncle died in suspicious circumstances, whereupon Wainewright inherited the handsome family home… In 1830 his mother-in-law also died unexpectedly. In the same year, Wainewright devised a complicated life-insurance scam which involved one of his wife’s half-sisters [who] died as soon as the policies were in place.’ Wainewright inspired writing by Charles Dickens (Hunted Down), Oscar Wilde (‘Pen, Pencil and Poison’) and Hal Porter (The Tilted Cross).
Although Wainewright was widely suspected of murder by poisoning, it was for the crime of forgery that he was transported to Van Diemen’s Land in 1837. He continued to produce work as a convict in the colony. His delicate watercolour of the Butler sisters is rarely on display at TMAG because of its fragility. Curators understand that Wainewright also painted a cousin of the Butler sisters, and because she wouldn’t stop talking, he drew devils coming out of her mouth and nose. Sadly, this companion work is lost; it is said that the girl’s father tore it up.
Thomas Bock (b. Sutton Coldfield, 1790–1855)
Mathinna
1842
Watercolour
30.2 x 24.9 cm
Presented by J. H. Clark (the artist’s granddaughter), 1951
Mathinna was born on Flinders Island, the daughter of Towterer and Wongerneep. Taken by Governor and Lady Jane Franklin in 1839, she lived at Government House until 1843, when the Franklins were recalled to England and decided to leave her behind. She was sent to an orphan school in Hobart before being returned to Flinders Island; she died at Oyster Cove in the 1850s.
In this striking and moving portrait by the convict artist Thomas Bock, Mathinna is seven years old. The red dress and the child’s haunting expression have made this portrait an icon of the TMAG collection, though its preservation depends on it spending more time being ‘rested’ than on display. The work was donated to TMAG in an oval mount, but when the painting was later de-framed, it was revealed that Bock had made the decision to paint Mathinna with bare feet. This tender detail may have been deliberately hidden by the oval mounting, but it says much about this child and the effect she had on the artist who painted her.
Owen Lade (b. Hobart, 1922–2007)
Portrait of Damon
1985
Oil on hardboard
92 x 61 cm
Purchased with the assistance of the Public Donation Fund, 1997
The Tasmanian painter Owen Lade came into the world after a difficult birth, and he suffered from mild cerebral palsy. He studied both art and science, spent time in the military, and worked as a laboratory assistant. In the 1970s, he began painting portraits of children, creating a series that would eventually include approximately two hundred canvases. His sustained focus on child subjects has created a unique archive, and the images within it give a sense both of melancholy and of the painter’s identification with his sitters. In the 1980s, Lade was diagnosed with glaucoma, and his vision problems may have contributed to the idiosyncrasies that are seen in the composition of his works. Lade’s paintings, naïve in style, retain an affecting rawness and vitality.
Harry Buckie (b. Melbourne, 1897–1982)
Okehampton Kitchen
1947
Watercolour and pencil on paper
25.7 x 33.5 cm
Presented by the artist’s daughter, Joan Buckie, in 2011
After serving in Egypt and France during World War I, Harry Buckie studied drawing in London before returning to his birthplace of Melbourne, where he worked as an engineering draughtsman while keeping up his study of art in the evenings. He came to Tasmania in 1935 when he was appointed as a draughtsman with the Hydro Electric Commission, and was a founding member of the Tasmanian Group of Painters. A keen bushwalker, he was one of a group to make the first plane landing on the beach at Lake Pedder before its flooding. TMAG holds a number of Buckie’s closely observed and deftly rendered watercolours, several of which feature the east-coast property of Okehampton.
Edith Holmes (b. Hamilton, Tasmania, 1893–1973)
Zinc Works
late 1940s
Oil on canvas
41 x 49.5 cm
Purchased with funds provided by the Electrolytic Zinc Company through the Art Foundation of Tasmania, 1985
Edith Holmes was a Tasmanian painter of landscapes, still lifes and portraits. A founding member of the Tasmanian Group of Painters, she studied art in both Sydney and Hobart, and in the 1930s worked from a studio in Hobart’s Collins Street as part of a community of women artists. Her landscapes were known for their vibrant palette and glittering waters, but in Zinc Works we see Holmes in a different mode. In one of the earliest industrialised scenes in Tasmanian art, the artist provides a view of the famously ugly zinc smelter that dominates a section of the River Derwent foreshore at Lutana, in Hobart’s north. The image is beautifully composed, with a road heading in to the centre of the image and a plume of black smoke belching into a sky gridded with powerlines. While Zinc Works may simply have been a study in composition, it may equally have been created in a spirit of protest at the smelter’s impact on the local landscape, community and environment.
Gay Hawkes (b. Burnie, 1942– )
Beach Figures
Woven fibres of three plants—New Zealand Flax,
Cordyline and Kniphofia (Red Hot Poker)—and seashells
Male 50 x 14 x 8.5 cm
Female 51 x 15 x 9 cm
The artist, furniture maker and designer Gay Hawkes has over decades created a body of work about Tasmania and her sense of place on the island. She crafted Beach Figures at a tender, bittersweet time in her life, when her youngest child had just left home. The male and female figures, which came to life by way of many hours of painstaking manual labour, are constructed from plant fibres and seashells, their creation an act of meditation and devotion.
Hawkes lived for many years at Dunalley, near the isthmus that joins mainland Tasmania to the Forestier Peninsula. There, in January 2013, the artist’s home, studio, and many precious and irreplaceable artworks were destroyed by bushfire.
Eliza Errington (b. Stoke, Plymouth, UK, 1808 – c. 1869)
Moonrise with Figures
1846
Watercolour
17.4 x 25.1 cm
Presented by Sir James Cruthers, 1998
Eliza Errington came to Van Diemen’s Land in 1843 aboard the Duchess of Northumberland as the wife of Captain Arnold Errington, who had been appointed Commanding Officer of the 51st Infantry Regiment at the penal settlement of Port Arthur.
Moonrise with Figures is painted in a naïve style and seems to be less a depiction of a specific place than an imaginative interpretation of the artist’s new surroundings. The vegetation, though wildly out of scale to the figures, is not ominous or threatening, but mysterious and possibly protective. The vast expanse of sea, and the delicate depiction of moonlight on water, may have been inspired by the artist’s sea voyage to Australia.
Capt. Michael Reynolds (1830–95)
Workbox
c. 1865
Wood (Baltic pine, Huon pine, Tasmanian blackwood, casuarina, honeysuckle, Oyster Bay pine, unidentified timber), bone (whale bone, baleen)
12 x 33.4 x 24.3 cm
Presented by J. Reynolds, 1942
This portable workbox, or sewing box, is fitted with a removable tray with both lidded compartments (the undersides of the lids decorated with pasted newsprint images) and unlidded ones, two of which are fitted with padded velvet pincushions, and a third with a bone reel holder and six turned bone winders. Several native Tasmanian timbers are used in the box itself, as well as in the parquetry decoration. The box is the work of a dedicated amateur rather than a professional cabinetmaker.
Captain Michael Reynolds, born in Hobart in 1830, first put to sea on a whaling vessel at the age of sixteen. In 1870 he was in command of the whaling brig Victoria when it was wrecked off Port Davey, on Tasmania’s west coast. The whale material incorporated into the interior of the box and the heart-shaped escutcheon surrounding the keyhole (which echoes the shape of a whale blow) both reflect Reynolds’ career in whaling. It is likely that Reynolds made this box as a gift for Lucy Ellen Stanhope, whom he married in 1870.
Robert David Stephenson (n.d.)
Thylacine Skin Buggy Rug
c. 1903
Animal skin (eight thylacine skins), textile (wool baize),
metal (brass)
108 x 118 cm
Presented by Federal Hotels, 2002
The first recorded killing of a thylacine by Europeans occurred in 1805 in northern Van Diemen’s Land; the last recorded killing of a wild thylacine occurred 125 years later, in 1930, in the north-west of the state. In 1936 the last known thylacine died in captivity in Hobart’s Beaumaris Zoo. Prior to the arrival of Europeans, the Tasmanian Aboriginal people and thylacines had co-existed for thousands of years.
The Stephensons owned two farms in northern Tasmania, including the sheep-grazing property Aplico, which the family claimed suffered heavy stock losses due to thylacines. To combat this, they set up a unique trapping system using fences to direct the marsupials into a series of pit-fall traps, snares and a box trap. Between 1888 and 1906 at least sixty thylacines were caught in this elaborate system, eight of them being used by Stephenson to make a buggy rug. Commentators have noted that Stephenson did not make the most of the animal’s marking when joining the skins. A more design-minded maker would probably have mirrored the skin pattern along the horizontal seam to produce a symmetrical arrangement.
Hannah Dyer (1822–1906)
Sampler
c. 1845
Textile (linen, silk, wool)
22.2 x 24.4 cm
Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program by Jane Peek, 2012
Artefacts attributed to female convicts in Tasmania are rare; rarer still are surviving artefacts with a detailed provenance.
On 3 January 1842, twenty-year-old Hannah Dyer, a house and nursemaid from the parish of Bethnal Green, was convicted of housebreaking in London’s Central Criminal Court (the Old Bailey) and sentenced to be transported for ten years. She sailed from London on the Royal Admiral, arriving in Hobart Town in January 1843. Soon after, she was assigned as a servant to Thomas and Eliza Sophia Tilley but was returned to the Crown in January 1844 for being pregnant. In 1847 she married John Fogo, one of the Tilleys’ assigned servants, and family legend has it that when Thomas Tilley died in 1852, six years after his wife, Hannah held the family together until relatives could step in.
The sampler was given to Emily Tilley, the second daughter of Thomas and Eliza Sophia, and passed down through the family until it was presented to TMAG in 2012 by Emily’s great niece. Family history suggests that Hannah worked the piece alongside Mary Anne and Emily, the two eldest Tilley daughters, as they also made their own. The embroidered verse is from a popular song.
Violet Mace (1890–1968)
Governor Davey’s Proclamation Board Cup
1930
Ceramic (glazed earthenware)
10.6 x 12.4 x 9.3 (dia.) cm
Anonymous donation, 2016
Now widely acknowledged as a pioneering Tasmanian studio potter, Violet Mace was trained by her cousin Maude Poynter at her studio at Ratho, in Bothwell. Mace’s work, which commonly features decorative motifs derived from Tasmanian history and Aboriginal art, is represented in many major Australian cultural institutions.
This hand-painted, glazed earthenware cup was made in 1930 in her studio. Alongside the maker’s initials, and the date and place of production, the underside of the cup also carries the inscription ‘Governor Davey’s Proclamation to the Aborigines Tasmania 1816’—incorrectly (though not uncommonly) attributing Governor Arthur’s Proclamation to Davey. It is one of several proclamation cups and jugs she produced between 1925 and 1934 that are of particular interest for their reworking (what Penelope Edmonds terms their ‘colonial quotation’) of the images found on the well-known proclamation boards distributed by Governor Arthur in 1829–30.
Emily Ferrar (1857–1940)
Thylacine Jawbone Pincushion
c. 1900
Bone (the inverted lower jawbone or mandible), textile (silk velvet, silk ribbon), fibre (cotton wadding), metal (steel pins), pigments
7.5 x 7.3 x 17.6 cm
Bequest of Sarah Mitchell, 1937
One of the items on display in the small country-town museum in Kate Grenville’s novel The Idea of Perfection (1999) is ‘a strange yellow velvet object with a hard triangular base, that had come with a note in tremulous old-lady’s handwriting explaining that it was the jawbone of a Tasmanian tiger made into a pincushion’.
The object Grenville borrows for her novel is a fancy pincushion that uses the lower jawbone of a young adult thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger, made by Emily Ferrar around 1900. It was entered in the fancy needlework section of the annual Glamorgan Horticultural Show, held at Morrison’s Store in Swansea on Tasmania’s east coast, where it won second prize. Handicrafts like this, fashioned with local flora and fauna, were relatively common in Australia at the end of the nineteenth century; but this is one of only a few objects known to have been made from the thylacine, and the only one that doesn’t use the animal’s hide. The jawbone used in this pincushion came from a thylacine trapped and killed on the Ferrar family’s east-coast property, Milton.
Maker unknown (Tasmania, Australia)
Hamilton Inn Sofa
c. 1825
Wood (Australian red cedar, Tasmanian blue gum), metal (brass fittings and steel screws), textile (linen, woven horsehair, teased horsehair), unprocessed wool
98 x 283 x 73 cm
Presented by the Federal Group, 2005
This double-ended sofa can be safely dated to the 1820s—though the neoclassical style, fashionable in Britain in the first decade of the nineteenth century, keeps open the possibility that it might have been made earlier—and is testament to good-quality furniture having been made in Van Diemen’s Land in the early years of European colonisation.
It is not known where the sofa was made, or for whom, but when it was sold in 2005 it had been in the possession of one family through four generations, from the earliest known owner, Albert Sonners (1860–1935), through to his great granddaughter, Essie Milley. The sofa is named for the original Hamilton Inn—in George Street, Hamilton, in the Derwent Valley—the family home of the Sonners from 1912 through to the 1990s.
John Smith (1948–2015)
Surge Seat
2011
Synthetic (glass-reinforced polyester)
85 x 87.5 x 75 cm
Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program in memory of John Smith, 2015
John Smith combined teaching at the University of Tasmania with his own designing and making practice. In 2011 he exhibited new work made from moulded fibreglass and glass-reinforced polyester, focusing on seating designs in forms influenced by the sea. As he explains in the exhibition catalogue, ‘The sea serves as a metaphor for the human condition—it is ever changing, yet always remains the same.’ Repose, which included the work Surge Seat, was shown in the Carnegie Gallery, Hobart, and the Tasmanian Design Centre, Launceston.
Devil’s Tongue Weed (Japanese Slipperyweed, Red Lettuce), Grateloupia turuturu
Seaweeds, in their element, are a spectacular and often unseen part of the flora, but they attain a different kind of beauty when prepared for botanical collection. Staff at the TMAG Herbarium float specimens in a shallow tank, slide beneath them a sheet of mounting card, then lift the card free of the water, creating results that often resemble delicate, abstract watercolour paintings.
The Herbarium collection is not only a historical catalogue of Tasmania’s endemic flora, but also provides an important record of environmental change. This specimen of Devil’s Tongue Weed, a species believed to have arrived in the east-coast port of Bicheno in ballast water or on the hull of a cargo ship, was the first of its kind collected in Tasmania (2008). While the native range of Devil’s Tongue Weed is the north-west Pacific Ocean, it has been recorded in many commercial ports around the world. Tasmanian gourmet food producers are making the most of its appearance: it sells for $250 per kilogram.
Silver Banksia, Banksia marginata
This specimen—the Herbarium’s oldest botanical fragment, and one of its most travelled—was collected at Adventure Bay, Bruny Island, in 1777 by David Nelson, the botanist aboard Captain James Cook’s ill-fated third voyage of 1776–80. The specimen made its way safely back to England where Cook himself could not: he was killed in Hawaii in 1778.
Part of the historical value of the specimen lies in the note affixed to the stem of the banksia, written in the neat hand of Nelson, who later served as botanist on board Captain William Bligh’s Bounty expedition. Beginning in 1787, the voyage famously ended with a mutiny in the South Pacific in 1789. Nelson, who remained loyal to his captain, was among the nineteen men cast adrift in an open boat, and although he survived the 3,500-nautical-mile journey to Timor, he died from a fever shortly after arriving.
While the silver banksia is itself a common plant, the survival of this specimen is testament to eighteenth-century appreciation of the importance of scientific endeavour. After spending centuries in London’s Natural History Museum, the specimen was transferred to the TMAG Herbarium in 1986.
Jack Thwaites’ Rucksack
Textile, metal, leather
47 x 48 x 37 cm
Presented by Anne Thwaites, 2013
Born in Kendal on the edge of the English Lake District, Jack Barrass Thwaites (1902–86) emigrated with his family to Tasmania in 1913. A public servant, he was also a passionate bushwalker and conservationist. He co-founded the Hobart Walking Club, pioneered many of Tasmania’s iconic walks and was a member of the party which made the first official crossing of the Overland Track, in 1931. Known affectionately in walking circles as ‘Gentleman Jack’, he was awarded the Order of Australia in 1977 for his conservation work.
Jack Thwaites’ canvas rucksack on a wicker A-frame has a single large compartment with three pockets sewn around the front of the pack. While it doesn’t bear any manufacturer’s labels, it is similar to rucksacks made by his good friend Paddy Pallin, whom Jack’s daughter believes may have made this pack to her father’s specifications. The pack also resembles some of the early Alpine ‘rucsacs’ in the British Bukta range, which later included such famous models as the Wanderlust and the Bergan.
John Douglas’s Saw
Metal (brass)
27 x 6.3 cm
Anonymous donor
Part of a handmade miniature brass saw with large teeth, this object, which carries the inscription ‘John Douglass Commandant’s Clerk Macquarie Harbour’, was presented to John Douglas, the settlement clerk, in recognition of his years of service. Though damaged, the saw is of outstanding significance as a very rare, convict-owned artefact. Apart from drawings and paintings, it is one of only seven objects to have survived from the Macquarie Harbour penal station.
John Douglas spent most of the convict period of settlement at the Macquarie Harbour penal station, where he held the position of Commandant’s Clerk, first as a convict and later as a freeman. A seaman and accountant by training, he had been sentenced to seven years’ transportation by the High Court in Edinburgh for defrauding the Bank of Scotland of a large sum of money. He is remembered for his meticulous record-keeping, especially the reports he compiled on the operation of the penal station for the Quakers Backhouse and Walker. He once told a Wesleyan missionary that he desired to ‘remain unnoticed and unknown’, and unsuccessfully petitioned to remain at Macquarie Harbour after the settlement closed in 1833. He died in Westbury, northern Tasmania, in 1860 from congestion of the lungs.
Scrimshaw, Sperm Whale Tooth with Tasmanian Devil
and a Cross
Whale tooth ivory, ink
15 x 6.9 x 4.8 cm
Purchased from Mr Keith Deutscher, 2009
Originally the term used to describe any of the handicrafts produced by sailors whiling away their time on long whaling or other voyages, scrimshaw now more commonly refers to the art created on sperm-whale ivory, baleen, skeletal whale bone or walrus tusks. Early scrimshaw designs were scratched onto the ivory or bone with knives or sometimes sailing needles, and highlighted with lampblack, soot or ink brought aboard by the sailors.
This sperm-whale tooth is engraved with a naïve depiction of a Tasmanian devil, together with a Christian cross that appears to have been etched earlier. While the pictures produced by scrimshanders cover many subjects, depictions of native Australian animals are unusual, and this one seems to have been drawn from imagination rather than experience.
Whalebone Ship Model, Lady Emma
86 x 75.5 x 31 cm
Presented by Miss Dowling, 1935
The Lady Emma was a 202-tonne barque built in Hobart Town by Peter Degraves as a whale ship and intercolonial trading vessel. The ship was launched in 1848 with much pomp and ceremony. Her first commander was the well-known Hobart whaler Captain William Young. After thirty years’ service as a whaler and trader—principally between Tasmania and New Zealand and the south coast of the mainland—the Lady Emma struck Actaeon Reef at the southern end of Recherche Bay while en route from Port Esperance to Port Adelaide. She was towed back to Hobart, where she was found to be beyond repair and hulked.
The provenance of this somewhat crude model of the Lady Emma is unknown. Painted a copper colour and green-gold to the waterline, the rest of the hull is black with gold details at the stern and a white line at the main-deck level. The top of the gunwales, most of the superstructure and all the spars are made from white whalebone.
Proclamation Board to the Tasmanian Aborigines
Oil on board (wood)
36 x 23 x 1 cm
Presented to the Royal Society of Tasmania by Mr A. Boltar, 1867
Following the first British landing in Van Diemen’s Land in 1803, conflict with the Aboriginal inhabitants of the land, initially sporadic, grew into a bloody struggle that became known as the Black War (1824–31). In an attempt to reduce frontier violence and explain the idea of equality, albeit within a climate of martial law, and the premise that those who killed, be they Aboriginal Tasmanians or British colonists, would be treated in the same way, Governor George Arthur issued a proclamation. Surveyor-General George Frankland suggested to Arthur that this be distributed in the form of picture boards, or proclamation boards.
The four-strip pictograms, painted in oils on wooden boards (by Frankland or by convict artists), were nailed to trees throughout the colony in late 1829 or early 1830. We have no knowledge of the way these visual tools were received, but today the irony of an assumption of equal treatment before British colonial law is stark. Of the approximately one hundred boards that were produced, only seven survive in public collections, two in Tasmania.
Model of Old Government House
Paper
48 x 138 x 113.5 cm
Purchased 1989
Old Government House in Hobart—the second Government House, albeit the first substantial one—was built in 1817, and, as it was added to and repaired, grew to cover the area that roughly corresponds to that now occupied by the Town Hall, a section of Elizabeth Street and Franklin Square. It was demolished in 1858 after Sir Henry Fox Young relocated to the present Government House, an impressive Gothic Revival edifice built on a hill overlooking the Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens and the Derwent estuary.
This cardboard and paper model, commissioned by Lady Jane Franklin, was built by a young Scotsman named Francis Low to a scale of ten feet to one inch. It is the only extant visual record of the entire complex of buildings as they were in the 1830s. As well as being the residence of the governor, the buildings at various times housed the Tasmanian parliament and served as a meeting place for the Tasmanian Society (later the Royal Society of Tasmania).
It is believed that the Franklins took the model with them when they returned to England in 1843. Apart from a brief period on display in the State Library in 1953, it remained in England until it was purchased by TMAG in 1989.
c. 1955
Steel, rubber, glass, vinyl, leather
174 x 95.5 x 55 cm
Presented by Mrs Helene Chung Martin, 1999
A fourth-generation Tasmanian, Helene Chung grew up in 1950s Hobart. She attended St Mary’s College, where she and her sister were the only ‘Ching Chong’ girls, and the University of Tasmania, before beginning a stellar career in journalism. She was the first nonwhite reporter on Australian television and, when she was appointed Beijing correspondent in 1983, the first female posted abroad by the ABC.
Chung presented her childhood bike, a women’s black Raleigh Sports bicycle, to TMAG in 1999. Made in Nottingham, England, around 1955, it is fitted with Sturmey-Archer three-speed gears, Lucas ‘King of the Road’ dynamo lights, a Mansfield saddle, and a saddlebag containing tools, a repair kit, and lock and key. She later donated to TMAG her Raleigh Stowaway—a folding version of the Raleigh Twenty—which she used while working in Beijing.
Box with Gravel
Wood, metal, gravel
33.5 x. 35.4 x 23 cm
Presented by Mount Lyell Mining and Railway Company, 2010
Created in 1880, Queenstown Oval on Tasmania’s west coast is infamous for its gravel playing surface. The Gravel, as it is known colloquially, was laid with silica from the smelters at the Mount Lyell Copper Mines until 1969, and is now laid with sand and loam.
Once the grand-final venue for the Western Tasmanian Football Association and currently home to the Queenstown Crows Football Club, it was the first ground in Tasmania to have a siren (borrowed from the Mt Lyell Mines) to signal the start and end of each quarter. It was inducted into the Tasmanian Football Hall of Fame in 2007, and is the only gravel oval in Australia.
The wooden box half-filled with gravel from the ground (collected by TMAG staff in 2010) was originally used as a first-aid box. It has a red cross painted on top and the letters L.F.C. painted on the front—the initials of the Lyell Football Club, which merged with Gormanston Football Club in 1976 to form the Lyell–Gormanston Football Club.
Australian Force Vietnam Badge
c. 1971
Metal
6 x 14 x 0.1 cm
Presented by Mrs Clare Hemsley, 2011
This metal badge was not an official Australian military medal or badge awarded during the Vietnam War, but rather belonged to the Tasmanian jazz musician Tom Pickering.
Between 1962 and 1972 Australia sent almost sixty thousand personnel to Vietnam, including ground, sea and air troops. By the time the Australian withdrawal commenced in November 1970, what was then Australia’s longest military campaign had become deeply unpopular, with anti-war marches being held in most major Australian cities.
During the war Australian performers brought a taste of 1960s music to the jungles of Vietnam. The long list of entertainers who performed for the troops included the Pearce-Pickering Ragtime Five from Tasmania, who toured in February and March 1971, led by Tom Pickering and Ian Pearce, two long-time musical collaborators and Australian jazz pioneers.
Molten Pennies
1967
Copper-bronze, tinplate, wood
Presented by R. Mills, 1983
Serving Plate
Royal Doulton
1930s
Ceramic
Bequest from Henry Baldwin, 2008
Measured in terms of the loss of life and property, the Black Tuesday bushfires of 7 February 1967—which claimed sixty-four lives and destroyed over twelve hundred homes—are the worst in Tasmania’s history. The melted pennies, recovered from a burnt-out house in Fern Tree on the mountain behind Hobart, were mounted on a myrtle base as a memento of the tragedy. While the primary purpose of this object was to serve as a reminder of the fires, its resemblance to a small bowl gives it intrinsic value, too, and as such it can also be viewed as an example of found art (objet trouvé).
Along with a great many homes in Fern Tree, the Baldwin family’s holiday home in Bracken Lane was gutted on Black Tuesday. This scorched serving plate is one of the few things they were able to salvage from the ruins. Henry Baldwin’s bequest to TMAG included Markree, his 1920s family home in Battery Point, which is now open to the public.
Woman Aviator’s Coat
1930s
Leather
112.5 x 65 cm
Bequest of Mr George Joseph, 1995
This full-length raglan-style leather coat was worn by the Tasmanian pioneer aviatrix Frances Jackson in the 1930s.
In 1930—seven years after Amelia Earhart became the sixteenth woman to qualify for a pilot’s licence, and three years after Millicent Bryant became the first Australian woman to gain a pilot’s licence—Frances Isabel Jackson (1908–88) was the first Tasmanian woman to obtain a pilot’s licence, and the first woman trained by the Goulburn Aero Club after it voted to allow women to join as pilots. Frances was a keen flyer, participating in numerous air races and pageants in Tasmania, Victoria and New South Wales between 1932 and 1938. Newspaper articles covering the events report her winning or placing in air races, and putting on aerobatic displays and exhibitions of stunt flying. The Launceston Examiner, covering the first Tasmanian air pageant, held in March 1931, reported: ‘Another brilliant performance of flying was given by Mrs F. Jackson, the only lady member of the club to hold an ‘A’ licence, having obtained it at Goulburn (N.S.W.) last year. She showed herself to be a fearless, skilful pilot, having excellent control of her machine throughout.’
She appears to have lost interest in flying after the death of her first husband, in 1938.
Thylacine Response Kit
1983
9.5 x 27.4 x 38.2 cm
Presented by Chris Arthur, 2009
The Thylacine (Thylacinus cynocephalus), commonly known as the Tasmanian tiger, was a large carnivorous marsupial. The dog-like animal, which grew up to 1.8 metres in length with a tail of up to fifty-three centimetres, is presumed extinct after the last known animal died in Hobart Zoo in 1936. Unverified claims of thylacine sightings continue to be made in Tasmania, and also on the mainland, where the animal is believed to have been extinct for over two thousand years.
Following plausible evidence of thylacine sightings in Tasmania in the early 1980s, a Thylacine Response Kit was prepared for Parks and Wildlife Service staff to take into the field. Along with the typed procedures for response, the cardboard box contains: a tape measure; a sealable plastic bag filled with dental plaster; a cylindrical clear plastic container; and a blue folder containing printed information on the thylacine, a National Parks and Wildlife sighting-report form, ten sealable plastic bags and an A4 pad.
1920s Washing Machine
1923
Metal
Presented by Mr L. W. Edwards
While electricity began to be used in homes around the world in the 1890s, few homes in Australia at that time were wired, and those appliances that were available were expensive. By the 1920s, however, domestic electricity use in Australia was increasing, and small appliances such as kettles, toasters and irons were in common use. Larger appliances such as vacuum cleaners, refrigerators and washing machines were still beyond the reach of many families.
From the 1920s, Hydro in Tasmania heavily promoted the use of electrical appliances to sell its power, contributing significantly to changes in domestic life. With an average annual income in the region of $750 in today’s money, a family in the early 1920s could have expected little change from one hundred dollars if they purchased an electric washing machine with attached wringer.
The washing machine in the TMAG collection was manufactured by the California-based Johnson Electric Washer Co., founded in 1902.
Louise Lovely’s Travelling Case
1920s
Metal, wood, fabric
109 x 71 x 59 cm
Presented by Belinda, Peter & Lucy Holloway, 2008
The actress Louise Lovely (1895–1980) was born in Paddington, Sydney, to an Italian father and Swiss mother. After a number of juvenile roles on the stage, she toured New Zealand with Nellie Stewart’s company before joining the George Marlow Company in her teens. After several successful film roles in 1911 and 1912, she married the writer and actor Wilton Welch and in 1914 they set out for Hollywood, where she made a string of successful films between 1915 and 1921. She is often cited as the first Australian to have a successful career in Hollywood. In 1922 she returned to vaudeville with her ‘studio act’ which, after returning to Australia in 1924, she toured across several states.
While in Hobart, Louise was approached by Marie Bjelke-Petersen to produce a film of her novel Jewelled Nights, which would turn out to be Louise’s final film. It was not a commercial success, her melodrama style of acting already outdated by the time the film was released in 1925.
Louise and her second husband, Bertie Cowan, settled in Tasmania in the 1940s when he took up the role of manager of the Prince of Wales Theatre, where she ran the sweetshop. She died in suburban Taroona a few decades later.
The travelling case—designed to be carried horizontally and opened vertically—was made by the American Herkert & Meisel Trunk Co., founded in 1888, and was popular among vaudeville and other entertainers through the early twentieth century. The outside of the trunk features the inscription ‘Louise Lovely Theatre’ in red on the top, as well as the remnants of many destination labels. When opened, the large dark plywood trunk, covered in vulcanised fabric and crown-grain leatherette, has five wooden drawers on one side, and on the other twelve wooden coat hangers on a removable metal frame, with a small drawer at the bottom.
Door with Stickers
c. 1981
Wood, Metal, Paper
203.2 x 82.5 x 12.5 cm
Donated by Robyn Trousselot, 2007
Sometimes political systems and events conspire to transform everyday objects into meaningful cultural objects. This is the case with a door that found its way from an ordinary Hobart home to the TMAG collection. The Trousselot family were active environmental campaigners but, after finding the bumper stickers on their car were attracting unwanted attention, daughter Christine began instead to use them to decorate her bedroom door. Collectively, the stickers provide a rich chronicle of the passion, politics and history of environmental activism in Tasmania in the 1980s and 1990s, as well as a visual record of the aesthetic design of bumper stickers during that period. Central to the collection of stickers (and centre of the door) is the Tasmanian Wilderness Society’s iconic ‘No Dams’ triangle, which became the symbol of the successful campaign to save the Franklin River.
Convict Cowl
Cambric, cotton
44 x 30 cm
Presented by BPCN, 1900
The horrors of the Port Arthur penal settlement have been well documented in histories of Van Diemen’s Land. Founded in 1830 as a punishment timber station, it quickly grew to become one of the most feared prisons in the Australian colonies, with a reputation for cruelty and degradation.
The opening in 1850 of the Separate Prison—based loosely on London’s Pentonville Prison and the reformist panoptic theories of Jeremy Bentham—heralded a shift from physical punishment to what was envisaged as a more enlightened system, but which today is viewed as psychological subjugation. Convicts were kept in dark solitary cells in enforced silence; in church each prisoner stood in an individual closed compartment, from which only the chaplain could be seen; and outside their cells they were forced to wear cowls with just small eyeholes deliberately designed to limit their field of vision. Unsurprisingly, this cruel deprivation of light and sound, and a lack of contact with other prisoners, often led to insanity.
The cambric and cotton convict cowl in the TMAG collection dates from around 1850.
Baskets Made by Tasmanian Aboriginal Women
c. 1840s
Woven native grasses
Assorted sizes
Tasmanian Aboriginal women traditionally used a number of common native fibre plants to construct their baskets, including rushes, sedges and irises. The collected fibres were placed over a low fire, then split or stripped, before being woven using a stitch unique to Tasmanian Aboriginal basket-making.
Basket-making was one of the few cultural practices approved by George Augustus Robinson and other government representatives, and between 1836 and 1838 Aboriginal women, including Trucanini, traded their baskets at weekly markets held at Wybalenna on Flinders Island. A number of the baskets traded in the nineteenth century can now be found in museum collections in Australia and Europe.
This important cultural tradition for Tasmanian Aboriginal women has now been re-established in the community. While they were originally practical items—used for a range of purposes including carrying personal items, collecting and storing plant food, and gathering shellfish—today the intricately woven baskets are valued for their aesthetic appeal, and collected by cultural institutions around Australia and beyond.
Fanny Cochrane Smith & Horace Watson
Edison Cylinders
1899 & 1903
Royal Society of Tasmania collection, c. 1905
The only audio recordings of any original Tasmanian Aboriginal language are contained in a collection of eight wax cylinders. The first set of recordings were made in 1899 by the Royal Society of Tasmania, and in 1903 Horace Watson made a second set of recordings at his home in Sandy Bay. On the recordings Fanny Cochrane Smith both sings and speaks in her language, providing the Tasmanian Aboriginal community with a permanent link to their ancestors, language and culture. In 2017 the recordings—which are among the earliest made in Australia—were inducted into the UNESCO Australian Memory of the World Register.
Fanny Cochrane Smith—the daughter of Tanganutura, a Trawlwoolway woman from the north-east, and Nikamanik, a Parperloihener man from Robbins Island—was born on Flinders Island in 1834. In 1847 Fanny and forty-five other survivors of the Wybalenna mission were moved to Oyster Cove. Seven years later she married William Smith, an ex-convict, with whom she had eleven children. She died at Port Cygnet in 1905, aged seventy.
While comfortable in the European world, Fanny always remained proud of her Aboriginal identity and traditional knowledge—from gathering bush food to stringing shell necklaces and making baskets—which she passed on to her family.
Pilunimina (Flora) (c. 1809–60)—attributed
Flora’s Shell Necklace
c. 1854
Green maireener shells (Phasianotrochus irisodontes),
cotton (cloth, animal)
27 x 20 cm
Purchased by the Art Foundation of Tasmania, the Friends of TMAG & the Office of Aboriginal Affairs, 2006
Pilunimina was a Trawlwoolway woman from Tasmania’s north-east. As a young girl she was stolen from her family by sealers. In December 1830 Pilunimina was one of a number of Aboriginal women removed from the sealers by James Parish on the instructions of George Augustus Robinson, and taken to Wybalenna on Flinders Island. It was Robinson who gave Pilunimina the name Flora. Pilunimina was later moved to Oyster Cove, where she made this maireener shell necklace, one of the oldest Aboriginal shell necklaces in the TMAG collection.
Shell necklace-making, which dates back at least two thousand years, is an important cultural tradition for Tasmanian Aboriginal women, and one of the few traditional practices that has continued unbroken from before European colonisation through to the present day. Collected in the nineteenth century as curios by Europeans—a note with this necklace reads ‘These shells I got from Queen Flora the Aborigine, 1854. Sarah Meredith, Victoria Point, Oyster Cove’—Palawa shell necklaces are now collected by cultural institutions around the world.
Ricky Maynard (b. Launceston, 1953– )
The Mission & The Healing Garden, Wybalenna, Flinders Island, Tasmania
from the Portrait of a Distant Land series
2005
gelatin silver photograph
44.1 x 44.4cm, 36.8 x 54.1 cm (respectively)
Photographer Ricky Maynard came to prominence in 1988 with the photo essay The Moonbird People, inspired by his personal, family and cultural connections to the Furneaux Islands. Maynard’s career has produced a wealth of iconic images, and in 2009 Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art presented a major exhibition of his work, Portrait of a Distant Land.
The two Maynard photographs reproduced here are haunting images taken at Wybalenna, the historic site of the Aboriginal mission that was established on Flinders Island in 1833. The mission’s exposed position and poor rations, along with the effects of illness and displacement, were a devastating combination for the approximately two hundred Aboriginal people who were transported there. Only forty-seven Aboriginal people from the Mission were alive when it closed in 1847. Maynard’s potent images suggest that Wybalenna, as well as being the site of unimaginable tragedy, is also now a symbol of survival and healing.
Simon Cuthbert
Muttonbirds on Big Dog Island
c. 2000
Short-tailed shearwaters (Puffinus tenuirostris), or muttonbirds, are migratory seabirds that breed in large numbers each summer in coastal colonies in southeastern Australia. When the southern-hemisphere winter descends, the birds fly north to the Arctic region, returning again in spring. Every year, these long-lived birds fly approximately fifteen thousand kilometres in each direction.
Tasmanian Aboriginal people have harvested muttonbirds and their eggs for many generations, and a number of families continue this practice. During an annual open season, chicks are taken for their feathers, flesh and oil. This image—by TMAG’s resident photographer, Simon Cuthbert—was taken around the turn of the century at Big Dog Island in Bass Strait’s Furneaux Group, as part of a survey that documented the processing sheds and associated dwellings where muttonbirding families spend ‘the season’.
Olegas Truchanas (1923–72)
Two Children Running from the Centre of the Beach into the Warm Shallows of Lake Pedder, Tasmania, 1972
Lake Pedder was a south-west Tasmanian lake that was drowned in 1972 as part of a Hydro-Electric power scheme. The impassioned but ultimately unsuccessful campaign to save the lake is often cited as the birthplace of contemporary Australian environmental politics.
The true Lake Pedder—nine square kilometres of water, four metres deep at its deepest and fringed by a three-kilometre beach of pink-tinged quartzite sand—now lies twenty metres beneath the waters of an impoundment created by dams on the Huon and Serpentine rivers, and its flooding is widely considered to be one of the greatest environmental disasters in Australia’s history.
This photograph of two young women splashing through the lake was taken by the Lithuanian-born Tasmanian photographer Olegas Truchanas, whose pictures of Pedder were influential in galvanising opposition to the lake’s inundation, and have since allowed generations of people to feel a connection to a lake they never had the opportunity to visit. Truchanas drowned in the Gordon River in 1972; the campaign for the restoration of the lake continues.
Sidney Charles Brammall
MV Loatta Being Loaded with Muttonbird Oil at Babel
Island
Lantern Slide
c. 1938–41
While stationed in the Bass Strait’s Furneaux Islands between 1938 and 1941, the young Anglican clergyman Sidney Charles ‘Charlie’ Brammall pursued his keen interest in photography. His visual record of island life, including images of landscapes, seascapes, maritime activities and the annual muttonbird harvest, is preserved in a set of glass lantern slides. Lantern-slide technology was the precursor to the slide projector and today’s data projector, and in their heyday these slides were often shown as accompaniments to lectures and popular entertainments.
Brammall, who died in 1977, was a third-generation Anglican minister who served in parishes across the state, as well as in schools and hospitals. In this image he captured a coastal trader, the MV Loatta, being loaded with barrels of muttonbird oil at Babel Island.
Roger Lovell
Salamanca Protest Photograph
1988
In September 1988 the Tasmanian Gay and Lesbian Rights Group set up a stall in the Salamanca Market to hand out information sheets and collect signatures for a petition to decriminalise homosexuality. The Hobart City Council banned the stall, but the TGLRG was defiant. The protestor Rodney Croome explains, ‘over seven successive Saturdays 130 people were arrested while hundreds more gathered to protest the council’s discrimination and repression. Because of the bravery and defiance of many hundreds of ordinary Tasmanians, we finally won the right to have our Salamanca Market stall. From that flowed a more confident and determined movement to decriminalise homosexuality [which] led to Tasmania becoming a far more tolerant and inclusive society.’
The photographer of this image, Roger Lovell, was himself arrested at Salamanca Place. He recalls how acutely aware was his partner, a schoolteacher, of the consequences of being arrested in the protests. In 2008 the council apologised to those arrested at Salamanca, and in 2017 the state parliament apologised to all those affected by its anti-gay laws.
Tasmanian Hairy-Cicada, Tettigarcta tomentosa
The Tasmanian hairy-cicada is one of two species in Australia that are the only living representatives of the family Tettigarctidae, otherwise known primarily from northern-hemisphere fossils. This species is ancient and there is speculation that it may have been an occupant of the supercontinent Pangea.
At first glance these cicadas look a bit like their noisy cousins from the other major cicada family, the Cicadidae, members of which are so conspicuous in the bush on hot, summer days. However, Tasmanian hairy-cicadas and their mainland relatives, alpine hairy-cicadas Tettigarcta crinita, differ fundamentally because they are incapable of producing the loud sounds so typical of other cicadas. Instead they probably communicate by producing low-intensity vibrations that are transmitted through the substrate.
Hairy-cicadas also look distinctive; and, rather than being active in the daytime on hot summer days, they are active at or around dusk and dawn, hiding in crevices during the day. The specimen pictured here was collected in the summer of 2015, at the junction of the Pieman and Donaldson rivers, in the Tarkine rainforests of north-western Tasmania.
Malcolm W. Harrison Egg Collection
Malcolm Harrison was a naturalist, collector and the founder of the Tasmanian Field Naturalists Club. Harrison’s collection, created during the late 1800s, was bequeathed to TMAG by the collector’s wife in 1940. Still stored in its original timber display case, the collection comprises the eggs of a wide range of Australian birds, including the now critically endangered orange-bellied parrot.
Bird-egg collections have, over time, provided much useful information to the scientific community. Along with their associated data, they have provided important breeding records, and allowed for discoveries such as the thinning of peregrine falcon eggs, later proven to be linked to the use of the pesticide DDT. Harrison’s collection—although aesthetically pleasing and potentially scientifically significant—represents an outmoded pursuit. When egg collecting became a popular ‘schoolboy’ activity, say TMAG curators, the negative effect on bird populations was significant.
Butterfly Display Drawer
The majority of the butterflies shown in this display drawer are endemic to Tasmania. Belonging to the families Nymphalidae and Lycaenidae, they are generally referred to as browns. These small butterflies are relatively common, although one among their number—the Ptunarra brown—is on the threatened-species register.
While natural-history museums may hold a number of specimens from the same species, they should not be considered duplicates. Each specimen, with its own specific dataset about where it was collected and when, is unique; and only through collecting multiple individuals, from different places, over spans of time, can scientists track the changes in a species and its distribution.
Donated to TMAG by the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, Paris, 2000
This delicate, double-shafted feather belonged to a live King Island emu collected by naturalists aboard Nicolas Baudin’s 1800–04 expedition to the southern hemisphere. King Island emus were small: about half the size of the mainland emu Dromaius novoehollandiae. Like the emus of Kangaroo Island, which were similarly dwarfed, King Island emus have been extinct since the early nineteenth century.
Several King Island and Kangaroo Island emus were captured on the Baudin expedition. They endured an arduous fifteen-month sea voyage to France; a number died en route. Two survivors (one from King and the other from Kangaroo) arrived in Paris in 1804 and were installed in the garden of Madame Bonaparte, later the empress of France. When Empress Joséphine no longer wished to keep the emus, they were sent to the menagerie at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. The emus died within months of each other in 1822. This feather was taken from the King Island emu’s taxidermied remains, now held in the Muséum’s collection.
King Island emus were driven to extinction, probably not long after Baudin’s visit. The flightless birds were convenient prey for sealers and their dogs. Once considered a separate species, the little emu is now officially classified as Dromaius novoehollandiae ater, a subspecies of the mainland emu.
The Governor’s Wombat
One of the challenges for natural scientists working in Europe during the age of global exploration was working out how taxidermists ought to pose the bodies of the weird and wonderful dead animals that were brought or sent back from the far-flung corners of the world. The first wombat sent to England came from Preservation Island in Bass Strait. It had been caught alive and sent as a gift to Governor Hunter in New South Wales. When the wombat died, it was preserved in a barrel of spirits and sent to Sir Joseph Banks to be forwarded to the Literary and Philosophical Society at Newcastle-upon-Tyne. It was described as being ‘the size of a turnspit dog…a squat, thick, short-legged, and rather inactive quadruped with an appearance of great, stumpy strength’. Although images of wombats had been published, the taxidermist working on the governor’s had little idea of the common behaviours and postures of the animal. Noticing the thick skin on its rump, he concluded that wombats sat upright, and the completed exhibit was displayed in this pose in the Newcastle Museum for many years.
The upright wombat that can be seen today in TMAG is a modern replica of that wombat.
Thylacine Skeleton
The TMAG collection contains ninety-four registered thylacine (Thylacinus cynocephalus) specimens, making it one of the largest and most diverse collections of this extinct marsupial carnivore in the world. The collection is used by researchers and is frequently in demand by documentary film-makers. The permanent display about the thylacine is a source of ongoing fascination for visitors.
TMAG holds six complete thylacine skeletons. One from a male animal and one from a female are ‘articulated’: arranged with the bones connected in the order and position that they would have occupied in the animal’s living body. Four other skeletons, including this one, A295, are ‘disarticulated’.
A295, stored in a box, with all bones carefully labelled, is the skeleton of an adult thylacine collected in August or September 1920 by Theodore Thomson Flynn, the first professor of biology at the University of Tasmania and the father of the quintessential Hollywood swashbuckler, Errol Flynn.
Tanned Animal Hides
These tanned animal skins represent part of a larger collection of approximately forty pelts, believed to have come into the TMAG collection following the closure of a commercial tannery. The native animals represented include the eastern quoll, spotted-tailed quoll, possum, echidna, Tasmanian devil, water rat, potoroo and bettong. The collection also contains pelts from introduced animals such as cats and rabbits. TMAG curators regard the skins as both a valuable zoological reference resource and a vivid record of the fur industry, which was an important part of rural Tasmanian life in the early twentieth century.
Tasmanian Devil Skulls
TMAG holds a collection of fifty-six Tasmanian devil (Sarcophilus harrisii) skulls that were part of the research collection of the distinguished biologist Eric Guiler. Guiler migrated to Australia in 1947 after serving with the British Army during World War II. During his career as a University of Tasmania scientist, he published more than one hundred papers as well as two books about the biology, and tragic fate, of the thylacine. In the 1960s and 1970s Guiler conducted research that contributed greatly to knowledge about the Tasmanian devil’s general biology, reproduction, growth and development. He died in 2008.
Wattlebird Display Cabinet
Donated by Mrs J. W. Kenmure, 1964
The birds in the case are yellow wattlebirds, or Anthochaera paradoxa. The largest of the Australian honeyeaters, and endemic to Tasmania, the yellow wattlebird was once the target of an open hunting season, and early Tasmanian cookbooks included instructions on how to prepare them for the table.
Said the Tasmanian domestic goddess Marjorie Bligh: ‘Brush each bird over with warmed butter after plucking them. (Do not clean birds in any other way; their insides are left intact). Tie a thin slice of fat bacon over each breast. Put in fry pan (electric) on a wire grid and cook slowly for 5 to 6 hours. Take off wire grid after 3 to 4 hours, and cook in the fat that has dripped off them. Baste often. Serve on buttered toast.’
John Burns, the Circus Lion
c. 1899
John Burns the lion was not only on display during his life as a circus performer: he has also had an afterlife in the public eye. Upon arriving at TMAG in 1899, his body was prepared by a taxidermist as an entire specimen, which became part of a tableau that also included a female lion and some cubs that were believed to be John Burns’s progeny. The lion tableau was on display in what is now TMAG’s Central Gallery, when that space was first opened in 1901. At some point in the following decades, the lions were removed from display and placed in storage.
John Burns came to light once again in the 1930s, at around the time that two ‘Sustenance Workers’ took on the task of clearing out TMAG’s store rooms. Perhaps because the condition of the male lion’s body had deteriorated, his head was remounted on a backing board. In this new form, John Burns became part of TMAG’s educational collection and was lent to schools.
Due to his well-worn appearance, John Burns would likely have been a candidate for disposal—or he might have been pulled apart, and only his skull retained—if not for the rediscovery of his biography. Today, he is one of those museum exhibits that straddle disciplinary boundaries: part zoological specimen, part cultural curiosity.