Month / March 2021

by W.P. Howey

Historic Scone Shire 2000 Calendar: Dennewald’s Store

Historic Scone Shire 2000 Calendar: Dennewald’s Store

Featured Image: Dennewald’s Store

Alfred Dennewald’s store was in business from the middle of the 1890s into the first two decades of the 20th century. The store sold groceries, small general items and some green groceries. Alfred  was assisted not only by his wife but other members of his family, Eric, Myra, Edith and Reginald.

Alfred Dennewald is standing on the right of the photograph with the dark horse. The man on his left with his arm around the grey horse is thought to be Scott Johnston. Jim Dennewald was also in business and used to travel around the town in a horse-drawn vehicle. He kept his horse in the then empty paddock opposite the store.

In more recent years the store was known as Potter Macqueen, retailing giftware. With proposed expansion of the nearby Bi-Lo supermarket, the building was to be demolished. Instead it was bought by Jim and Adi Ritchie. On February 14, 1999 they relocated the building to their property at the northern end of Scone to be restored to its former glory for domestic purposes.

by W.P. Howey

The Land; Wampanoag Sachem Massasoit

The Land; Wampanoag Sachem Massasoit

Featured Image: Chief Wampanoag meets the English Settlers 1621

The Puritan Pilgrims at Plymouth (1620) had considerable early admiration for the local Wampanoag people and had an understanding that these friendly and cultivated natives – who were decidedly helpful to the nervous strangers now in their midst – had a particular reverence for land they had clearly been using for a very long time, and with evident sophistication for agriculture.

“Massasoit, the great sachem of the tribe, described their feeling for the land beneath their feet. The land, he declared, was ‘our mother’, nourishing all her children, beast, birds, fish and all men; the woods, the streams, everything on it belongs to everybody and is for the use of all. How can one man say it belongs to him?”

‘Land’; How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the World; Simon Winchester; William Collins 2021; pp 129 – 130

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by W.P. Howey

Barbara Baynton, Lady Headley

Barbara Janet Ainsleigh Baynton, Lady Headley (4 June 1857 – 28 May 1929)

Featured Image: Barbara Baynton . 1892

Australian writer, made famous by Bush Studies.

Not many Gundy-born natives have made it into English Aristocracy. Barbara Baynton was an exception; and exceptional. Her imagination and inventiveness may have been fueled by the ambience of her early life in Gundy. I’m thinking of the Hunter River; and the ‘Linga Longa Inn’. It’s a potent mix. The result was an outstanding Australian author who excelled in her chosen field. Like many others before her pathway to ultimate success was littered with dangerous potholes; and worse. She overcame them all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Baynton

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by W.P. Howey

Horses in leisure and sporting pursuits

Acknowledgements: © State Library of New South Wales; Equinity in the Picture Gallery; Free Exhibition from 8 October 2007 to 13 January 2008.

Featured Image: ‘The Chase’ (Detail), c. 1856, Samuel Thomas

Horses were the focus of leisure and sporting pursuits, provided unparalleled assistance as working animals and attracted revenue to the colony through the export trade in Walers. For these reasons the horse was a valuable commodity throughout the nineteenth century and held in high esteem.

The settlers’ desire to recreate aspects of the English lifestyle is also reflected in these works, highlighting the adaptation required to accommodate the unique environment of colonial Australia.

The influence of British cultural forms on depicting colonial life is evident, due in part to the ready availability of sporting prints and engravings by British artists, along with the fact that most professional artists working in the colony were born and trained in Europe.