Sepia Saturday: Iron work

This week's theme photo for Sepia Saturday shows people with practical and artistic skills employed in a  factory.

Well, I've searched my photo collection and failed to find anything similar, so I'm heading off on a tangent. The illustrations are not sepia but it is an old trade so I'm half way on theme.

A few years ago we were in northern New South Wales on holiday and one memorable activity was the morning we visited an industry in the small town of Uralla. It was an iron foundry, the oldest working foundry in Australia.

The buildings weren't large but I was mightily impressed. We saw a blacksmith in action, manipulating the hot iron like it was a piece of dough. We saw many old tools and examples of items they had produced over the years. We saw the patterns and moulds for the delicate-looking cast iron lacework. Until that day I hadn't fully understood the difference between wrought iron and cast iron. The blacksmith produces wrought iron from iron that, because it has less than 1% carbon content, is soft and malleable. It can be hammered and rolled. Cast iron is made from iron that has a higher (3%) carbon content so it can be melted and poured into sand moulds. It is hard and brittle and cannot be hammered or moulded.

The cast iron process is amazingly skilled. We saw the molten iron being poured into sand moulds and then placed into presses until they were cool enough to use. Some of the moulds were tiny, others very large. Most of the moulds are very old pattens. It's hard to imagine sand being used for such delicate work and as I write this I wonder if they use a particular type of sand.

Our visit coincided with a that of a historian from the New South Wales museum who was cataloguing each item in the foundry - every one of the hundreds of  tools and patterns was being photographed and described. And it is just as well because I have just done a web search and it appears that the foundry has now closed as a business and is only open by appointment as a museum.

We are all familiar with the work produced by a blacksmith or cast iron foundry. Houses, shops, public buildings and cemeteries from the 1800s and early 1900s were decorated in iron or had iron incorporated into the structures like verandah posts and street lighting. And bridges. Several years ago we visited the first iron bridge in the world, at Ironbridge near Shrewsbury in the UK. It was built in 1779 and the work and skills that must have gone into the building of that beautiful bridge is amazing.

The first iron bridge in the world is at Ironbridge in the UK.

For a number of years I was a guide at a local cemetery and ironwork got a mention in my tours along with famous people, interesting people, headstone architecture and symbolism. Sometimes it's easy to overlook the ironwork in the older sections of a cemetery even though it is very common. The headstones and memorials are the key focus. But we should stop to appreciate the delicate lacework, forget-me-knots, anchors, doves, crosses, finials, inserts, ornaments, posts and pickets all made from iron. These examples are all photos I took a decade ago in Eastern Cemetery, Geelong and research for this blog has made me curious to go back and see if there are makers' badges. It seems a shame if the work of the craftsmen is unacknowledged. There were several foundries in town so I imagine they are well represented.

The upside-down torches symbolise the finish of the 'race of life'.

You can see the work of other skilled people over at Sepia Saturday.

Sepia Saturday: The Millaira stud

George Henry Alford, my husband's great-uncle, was a very complex person and his life was complex as well but I'm not attempting here to write his biography. This post is in response to the theme photo for Sepia Saturday this week, an advertisement  featuring a horse.

In the late 1800s George's father was a successful dairy farmer at Warragul in Gippsland, Victoria and George himself was a fine judge of cattle and horses. Throughout his life George committed to a diverse set of business opportunities - farming, real estate, a stable of trotting horses, a livery stable, a boarding house - as well as serving the community on any number of committees, judging at shows (including the Perth Show in 1918) and was a councillor of the Brighton council.

This is an advertisement for the boarding house he had at Warragul.

Gippsland Gazette, 29 June 1909

But I think George's main interest in life was horses, trotting horses in particular. There are many, many newspaper articles mentioning the results of shows where George's horses gained prizes and trotting races where his horses placed well. The photo below is held by Museum Victoria and shows George with one of his trotters 'Alarm Bells'. In newspaper articles a lot of his horses have 'bells' in their names so I think the line must have been fine racing stock.

George Henry Alford and his champion trotter 'Alarm Bells' [Museum Victoria]

During World War 1 George and his family was living in the Brighton area near Melbourne. George worked as a real estate agent and had also built up a stable of horses that he called the Millaira stud. It was very well-known throughout Victoria and beyond. The family home was a substantial two-storied building and George was an elected member of the Brighton Council. But all was not well. Two of his sons were serving in France with the Australian Army (they returned in 1919), and his other son accidentally shot himself (dead) in 1916 and George himself was not well. So he put the Millaira stable of horses and the fittings on the market.

The sale was mentioned in newspapers in Hobart, Perth and Sydney as well as in Victoria and the results were very satisfactory.

The Australasian, 25 May 1918

Daily News (Perth), 30 May 1918

George must have held on to a few horses because there is another notice of a sale in 1926 and this time the reason given is that his son is not interested in carrying on the business. George was 64 years old and must have decided he couldn't keep it going himself but he lived until 1942 and I can't imagine he lost his interest in trotting and horses.

The Argus, 1926

I suggest you trot on over to Sepia Saturday to see what other bloggers have contributed.

Trove Tuesday: The old garage

We've owned the farming property near Heywood for over 40 years but we no longer live there, just visit a few times a year. We were there several weeks ago and I just happened to look more closely at the internal walls of a garage on the property.

Old garage

The walls are vertical slabs of timber nearly an inch thick and when I looked more closely I could see that they appear to have been recycled from an earlier building as there are notches where there shouldn't be. There was a house on the property that would have been built late in the 1800s and I'm surmising that it was pulled down to use the timber for this garage when the present house was built in the 1920s. The timber was probably milled on the property from stringbark eucalyptus trees.



Evidence that the timber has been recycled from an earlier building.

This is what I found on the internal walls. Newspapers have been used to line the walls, several layers over time, and on top of that is a layer of a flowered wallpaper. There are remnants and fragments of all the layers still on the interior walls of the garage, one hundred years later.

I used the resources of Trove to date the newspapers and found a spread of nearly twenty years from 1901 through to 1921.


The article refers to a court case in July 1901 in Yackandandah
but I couldn't find the exact matching article.

Hamilton Spectator 25 September 1917 (See newspaper image below)

Hamilton Spectator 25 February 1917. (See photo above)



Hamilton Spectator, 24 February 1917. (See photo below.)



Hamilton Spectator 24 February 1917 covered by a layer of wallpaper. (See newspaper image above.)

Try to imagine what the original house would have been like. The only material used for the walls was this timber. The newspapers weren't there for decoration, they were there to keep the drafts out, and probably snakes, insects and mice as well. The floor could have been packed earth. It would have been a simple building of several rooms with the kitchen, toilet and wash-house separate. At one end here would have been an open fire with a chimney. We know from Alexander Graham's selection files at the Public Record Office of Victoria that there was a cottage on the property. It was erected in January 1874 and is described as being 18 feet by 10 feet  in size and constructed of sawn and split timber slabs with a shingle roof. I wouldn't be surprised if this is the same timber.

Maybe it looked something like this hut at Beaudesert in Queensland.

Slab hut, Beaudesert, Queensland.



Sepia Saturday: Shirley's piano lessons

My mother-in-law, Shirley Alford, grew up in the small farming community of Mologa in Victoria and, like many of her generation, learned to play piano. Nearly 90 years later she is still playing piano and organ in church. For many years Shirley taught piano to students in Kerang, in her home and at the local Convent school, and has taken a keen interest in the local eisteddfod.

Shirley Alford

In the late 1930s, when she was a teenager, Shirley started work at Mitiamo, a bigger town nearby. She used to ride her bike there each Monday morning and home again on Friday evening. Sometimes she would ride home mid-week as well if her parents needed her to help milk the dairy cows- by hand in those days. She boarded with the Methodist minister and his wife at Mitiamo and taught at the Mitiamo school each afternoon (they were called 'sewing mistress' in those days but taught much more than sewing). For two hours each morning she practiced piano in the home of Annie and Roy Phelan who owned a general store in Mitiamo. She sat for the Associate London College of Music piano examination (scales and pieces) in Bendigo and passed. Diplomas are offered at four levels: Diploma of the London College of Music (DipLCM), Associate of the London College of Music (ALCM), Licentiate of the London College of Music (LLCM) and Fellowship of the London College of Music (FLCM). These qualifications permit the holder to append the qualification's letters after their name. So Shirley had an ALCM after her name. When she was 17, in 1942, she did the Licentiate exam so she was entitled to use the letters LLCM.

By that time Shirley was teaching full time at Mitiamo school. She was there five years altogether and then taught at several other schools in northern  Victoria (Kotta and Woorinen North). 

In 1948 she married and had to leave teaching because that was the rule then. And who did she marry? All the time she was practicing on Mrs Phelan's piano there was a photo of their son, Neil, in a frame on the piano. He was serving in the Air Force. Shirley says she was very taken by his wavy hair! So when Neil went home after the war they must have become better acquainted:)

This post is in response to Sepia Saturday's theme photo in which there are several barristers wearing their robes. I selected a photo of Shirley wearing her LLCM robe and I suggest you see what others have chosen to blog about.