A Small Town at War – the Drouin Collection
Jim Fitzpatrick,
Red Cross members outside the Soldier s Memorial Hall, Drouin, Victoria, nla.pic-an24294971
In 1939 the Department of Information was established to ‘undertake the large publicity campaign necessary to support Australia’s war effort’. This campaign was centred principally on increasing and sustaining the people’s faith in the cause for which they were fighting, and sought to gain support for the government’s security and fundraising activities and distribute ‘sound’ facts on the war and its progress.
The activities of the Department were extensive and various, and when, in 1981, two packets of ‘historical’ photographs of a rural Victorian town were returned to Australia by the New York office of the Australian Information Service, a small but fascinating example of those activities came to light.
William Henry Corkhill and the Tilba Tilba Collection
William Henry Corkhill (1846-1936),
The John Poole Family, c. 1895, glass negative, nla.pic-an2441607
In 1890, at the age of 44, William Henry Corkhill of Tilba Tilba, accountant, cheesemaker and farm manager, decided to become a photographer. There is no record that he received any training in photography, but he had, it seems, read a few books on the subject. Over the next twenty years he would take thousands of pictures of his family, friends and neighbours, seldom taking his camera beyond the confines of his local community. Corkhill’s collection of glass plate negatives, reduced over the intervening decades to about 1,000 in number, were offered to the National Library by his daughter in 1975. Suffering the decays of time and damp, only 840 of the plates still retained printable images, but the record they contain of life in a small but thriving rural community at the turn of the twentieth century is fascinating. As
The works of William Hardy Wilson
Hardy Wilson (1881-1955),
India, 1951, pencil and French crayon, nla.pic-an2812810
William Hardy Wilson, or Hardy Wilson as he styled himself, is best known for his wonderful series of drawings of Australian colonial architecture undertaken at the beginning of his career, and for his increasingly ‘visionary’ statements about the future of humanity towards the end of his life. Born in 1881, he trained as an architect in Sydney , before pursuing his career and aesthetic education in London with time spent touring Europe and North America.
His return to Sydney in 1910 filled him with horror at the unimaginative and inappropriate building styles. Only a renewed awareness of beauty, he felt, would stimulate the creativity so clearly lacking. He began his studies of Colonial architecture to reawaken an interest in Australia ’s heritage, in part to preserve it from further loss, and to reveal the qualities of the past that might enrich modern p
John Hamilton Mortimer and the discovery of Captain Cook
John Hamilton Mortimer (1740-1779),
Captain James Cook, Sir Joseph Banks, Lord Sandwich, Dr Daniel Solander and Dr John Hawkesworth, c. 1771, oil on canvas, nla.pic-an7351768
The National Library of Australia holds within its large collection of artworks a most intriguing eighteenth century painting, the bequest of Dame Merlyn Myer. A beautiful work in good condition, the painting is unsigned and lacks its original title. Early research into the painting revealed that it had hung unremarked in private collections for 150 years and then suffered a misattribution to Johann Zoffany which, while initially inflating its value in the art market, had obscured the painting’s true identity and significance. Rejection of the Zoffany attribution also cast doubt on the subjects Joseph Banks and Captain Cook and the date 1771
Perverts, burglars and bullies among those put behind bars in May 2021
All these criminals were jailed at Newcastle Crown Court last month
Updated
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Victims of rapists, burglars and domestic brutes saw their tormentors brought to justice when they were locked-up in May.