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00:30Welcome to Antiques Down Under.
00:33We're on the search for incredible antiques and collectibles.
00:37From private collections, historic homes, backyard sheds, museums and galleries.
00:42We'll be talking to the experts, the custodians and the passionate collectors.
00:47Coming up on this episode of Antiques Down Under, World War II.
00:51We take a look at the home front, 1939 to 1945.
00:55I meet up with Stephen Ryan to learn about Ellis Rowan, the artist.
01:02Claudia visits an incredible collection of Art Deco sculptures.
01:07And Opals, Australia's national gem.
01:21Today I'm in Canberra, visiting the Canberra Museum and Gallery.
01:24Go to meet with the curator and the collector of a special exhibition, Australia, Homefront, 1939 to 1945.
01:40Today I'm with Hannah Padden.
01:43And Hannah is the curator of this amazing exhibition.
01:46Hannah, welcome to Antiques Down Under.
01:48Thank you so much for having me.
01:50It's great to see all this put together.
01:52What was the main inspiration for you?
01:55Well, Rowan came to us, the collector, about two years ago and explained what his collection was.
02:02I went out to view it and we felt it was so important to be able to share this with our community,
02:08particularly as it's the 80th anniversary this year of the end of the Second World War.
02:12And this part of the story of the war hasn't been told very much, has it?
02:16No, it hasn't.
02:17I think a lot of the times we think of high intrinsic value objects as being really important to share.
02:25But in this instance, it's a lot of the things that would have been used by Australians every day during that war period,
02:31which was a really, really difficult period of rationing and shortages of raw materials.
02:37So it was a really, really important collection to bring to the fore.
02:45Rowan, welcome to Antiques Down Under.
02:48Yeah, hello, Greg.
02:49And it's absolutely fabulous to see your collection.
02:53Yes, it's taken me 25 years to amass my home front collection that you see here.
02:59This is in the early stages of the war, isn't it?
03:02It is, yes.
03:03And we had to raise money for the war.
03:05Very much so, yes.
03:06This is all about the liberty loans and war savings
03:10and harnessing the economic power of the domestic economy to fund our war effort.
03:17So to produce the tanks and the planes and the ammunition
03:20and to fund an army overseas.
03:23And this is a Prime Minister up there?
03:26Very much so, yes.
03:27John Curtin's philosophy was all in.
03:29Everyone in Australia was all into the war effort.
03:31And here he is making a plea where he says,
03:35with every shilling you can lead to back the attack.
03:38So John Curtin was our great wartime Prime Minister.
03:41Down here we've got the war savings books.
03:44Yeah, we have.
03:45Yes, yeah, war savings.
03:47Significantly, each street we're encouraged to donate money through war bonds.
03:51And then if the whole street was successful,
03:53they got a little enamel sign saying,
03:56War Savings Street.
03:58Let's move on down to the coupon jewel.
04:01Because everything was made for the forces,
04:09everything at home got rationed, even petrol.
04:12Also clothing, every type of food,
04:15anything that maintained life had a coupon.
04:18Now, Rowan, you've collected a few coupons here.
04:21Yes.
04:21Especially the producer gas vehicles.
04:24That was a very interesting story.
04:26Yeah.
04:26And a lot of these continued well after the war, didn't they?
04:30Yeah, rationing continued in Australia for several years after the war.
04:33Yeah, well, I know with the petrol, it didn't cease being rationed until 1950.
04:45Rowan, we have some items here that were used at home on the home front for protection.
04:49Yeah, that's a civilian for gas mask issued to the civilian population in the event of a gas attack, which never occurred.
04:57We've got these items here, strange items here.
05:01Well, what you point to there, Greg, is headlight covers for commercial vehicles
05:05designed to reduce a headlight beam during an air raid.
05:09Right.
05:10In terms of blackouts and brownouts.
05:12Be a bit dangerous driving without a headlight, wouldn't it?
05:15Well, they still provide a beam, but not a full beam,
05:18and so reducing the beam that could have been seen by enemy aircraft.
05:27In this cabinet, we've got some items that apply to the returned soldiers.
05:32And many of these returned soldiers came home wounded.
05:36And Diana Pottery was a very famous pottery,
05:40and they were commissioned to make some pottery so these soldiers could be fed in the hospitals.
05:45And here we found some.
05:48We've had a wonderful day here at the Canberra Museum and Gallery,
05:57discovering what happened in Australia between 1939 and 1945, World War II.
06:04Thanks, Rowan and Hannah.
06:06I hope you all want to come and have a look at this exhibition while you're in Canberra
06:09or inspires you to come and visit Canberra.
06:12Now, Vas and Mark, we've got a very interesting object here.
06:28It's pretty obvious what we think it is, but where do you think it's from?
06:32Well, it's a fob watch, and it's got a huge amount of damage to it.
06:38What do you think, Mark?
06:39Yeah, maybe from World War I, probably in the trenches in France somewhere.
06:45Why do you say that?
06:46Well, that's where a lot of, if it's Australians, where a lot of Australians would have been
06:51and would have been in the action.
06:53They've obviously been shot at and saved their life with that.
06:58So now I've got Louis to give a guess.
07:00Louis, where do you think this is from?
07:03Do you think this is from the Vietnam War?
07:06Do you think this is from the Vietnam War?
07:09Am I right?
07:10Have to wait and see.
07:11A couple of good guesses there.
07:14Do you want to guess the mystery object?
07:16Head to our Facebook and Instagram pages to enter.
07:27Antics Down Under is in Mount Macedon with Stephen Ryan,
07:30and Stephen is going to tell us all about Ellis Rowan,
07:33a famous Australian botanical artist.
07:36Stephen, welcome to Antics Down Under.
07:39I'm looking forward to hearing the story behind Ellis Rowan.
07:43Yeah, well, in her time she was world famous.
07:46So it's sad that a person like that, a really famous artist and a woman to boot,
07:52and it sounds silly to say that, but back in the day,
07:54women were being trained to look after the house and have children.
07:57And here's a woman that went out and painted over 3,000 paintings in her life,
08:01went all over Australia to lots of areas where no white woman had ever been to paint flowers.
08:06And many of the things she painted, it was the first time that that plant had actually been reproduced.
08:11So she found a lot of new plants that she sent back to Baron von Muir at the Botanic Gardens in Melbourne.
08:17He was sort of her mentor.
08:18And she went everywhere.
08:20She went to the Torres Strait Islands painting flowers up there.
08:23She spent 10 years in America painting flowers for three really important field guides that were being done there.
08:29She went everywhere.
08:31She painted wherever she went.
08:32So if she was exhibiting in India or exhibiting in Norway,
08:36then she would spend time in those countries painting flowers of the country.
08:43She took two trips, one in 1916 and one in 1917,
08:48up into Papua New Guinea, into the highlands,
08:51to paint the birds of paradise because they thought they were going to go extinct
08:55and she felt that they needed to be illustrated somewhere.
08:59And of the 50-something species that were known, she managed to paint 41.
09:09She was a remarkable woman and she was a local resident.
09:13And that's where I come into the scene.
09:16Alice Rowan, her father, had a huge garden up on Mount Masson when she was a young woman
09:21and she spent a lot of time up here walking the grounds with her father.
09:24And at the time, it was Australia's most famous garden.
09:27She spent her later years off and on back here at Mount Masson.
09:30And her family went through a hard time in the 1890s when there was a big credit squeeze going on
09:35and banks were foreclosing and all sorts of things.
09:38And they moved into what at the time was going to be the gardener's cottage for the property he had.
09:43And they called it at the time, The Cottage.
09:45It was never given any other name.
09:47And so he moved in there, her father, her mother, her two unmarried sisters.
09:54And slowly over the years, they started to pass away.
09:57She moved in when her mother and the two unmarried sisters were still alive.
10:00And she spent her last years up here at Mount Masson and is now buried in our local cemetery.
10:10There's been a push in Victoria particularly about equality in sculpture.
10:14So we decided that this was an obvious choice.
10:17So we found a site.
10:19We've got the sculptor whose husband actually grew up in the house Alice Rowan died in.
10:23So there's lots of synergy going on.
10:26And we're now at a point where the mould is being made.
10:30We still need to raise vast amounts of money.
10:33But people can even donate and get a tax deduction.
10:36Well, that's very good, isn't it?
10:37Yeah, Australian Cultural Fund.
10:38So if anybody wants to find it, they can go in there and make a donation.
10:42And I also, in the long term, want to endow a Botanic Art Prize in Alice Rowan's name.
10:47Because there isn't one.
10:49I mean, you've got the Glover.
10:51You've got the Archibalds.
10:53So there's lots of other prizes for specific art forms in Australia.
10:57But there isn't one of major importance for Botanic Art.
11:01And so I need lots of money.
11:03And that's why I invited you here, Greg.
11:06Well, hopefully our viewers will go on and we'll put a...
11:11Yes, if you can pop something on the bottom of the screen for people to...
11:14QR code, they call it these days, don't they?
11:17Two old crocs talking about QR codes.
11:22We have a local sculptor.
11:24It's a lady called Jennifer Mann.
11:25And there's a sculpture outside the Trades Hall in Melbourne that she did a couple of years ago
11:30of Zelda Di Prano, who was a very strong feminist in her time.
11:34And so she's got lots of points on the board.
11:37She's done all sorts of interesting sculptural works.
11:44Stephen, it's been fantastic having you on Antiques Down Under
11:47and catching up with you again after all these years.
11:49Yes, it has been fabulous, Gregory.
11:51And hopefully everybody will help support me with my big project.
11:54I hope so, too.
12:16Art Deco burst onto the world stage in Paris in 1925.
12:21Robert Pringle's collection starts there.
12:24Powerful men, elegant women, inspired by mythology and the dance.
12:29Let's go meet the collector.
12:33Come and sit down, Claudia.
12:35Oh.
12:36Robert, this piece is absolutely incredible.
12:41It's this man reaching for the stars.
12:44It's so terribly dynamic.
12:45It certainly is.
12:47It's aerodynamic.
12:48And as you can see, he's riding on clouds.
12:53He's a projectile himself, related really in part to the myth of Icarus, flying too close
13:00to the sun, courting danger.
13:02But this is, I think, made with a degree of confidence, l'aviation, it's called, which, of course, was really revolutionary in those times, in the 1920s.
13:13And as you can see, it's also very geometric and streamlined in form, especially his wings, which are not really literally representational.
13:23They are very, very geometric.
13:25So who is the artist?
13:26Frederick Vogt, a Swiss sculptor, but very little is known about him.
13:31He died in 1937.
13:32We know that much.
13:33So I have another piece by Frederick Vogt, Toujours Ojo, which is always to the highest.
13:40It's of a very athletic, muscular man thrusting a rocket ship or projectile into the sky in a similar way to the sculpture.
13:51And this, of course, is the time of Buck Rogers.
13:53So we're going into the future.
13:59The female form is always so elegant.
14:04But in a piece like this, she's telling us something.
14:07What's the story behind a piece like that?
14:11Well, you can see in her sort of elongated hand, she's holding up a dove, symbolic of peace and hope.
14:18And this is in the context of the end of World War I, which was a period of great aspirations for hope and peace.
14:27This is by Pierre Le Farguez.
14:29Now, this one here, she's also holding a bird, offering it to the sky.
14:34She is.
14:35And this is a very different sculpture in that you could base this really within the war period, because in her hand, she's holding a pigeon, a carrier pigeon.
14:47Carrier pigeons were used to send messages between troops, between forces within World War I.
14:55Robert, when we think of Art Deco sculpture, we think of a woman like this, standing on tippy toes, back arched, holding a ball of light.
15:08Who is she?
15:09This sculpture is Lumina by Max Le Verrier.
15:13This Lumina was exhibited at the 1925 exposition in Paris.
15:18So as you say, it is iconic.
15:19It's got the symmetry to it, the elongated lines.
15:23And holding up, it seems like an offering of light, which I suppose is in a way symbolic of that interwar period, the light of hope for the future.
15:32So this is probably the sculpture that spawned a thousand knockoffs.
15:35So how do we tell a reproduction Art Deco from the real thing?
15:41Look, I think you can tell, first of all, by the authenticity of its signature.
15:46And then the stepped base that it's on and the quality of the marble is also an indicator.
15:51In this example, you have the globe itself is moulded into the fitting itself.
15:58That's quite unique.
15:59The heaviness of it is a telltale as well.
16:02This is really quite substantial as it looks.
16:06It may weigh about eight kilograms.
16:08It's a sort of a look that you know over time.
16:11You get experience in knowing what is a fake and what's not.
16:20What I love about these sculptures are their dynamic quality.
16:24Nothing is static.
16:25There is energy and vitality.
16:29Today in Antiques Down Under, we're discovering the world of opals.
16:47I'm with Elaine, who is at the forefront, goes out, meets the miners, buys from the miners,
16:54and processes them before they go into the retail trade.
16:57Tell us about yourself and your opals.
17:00I've been Ausgems now.
17:02I was 30 years old.
17:03And you go to Lightning Ridge several times a year and buy the knobbies?
17:08At the moment, we go once a month.
17:09And I buy rough material, sometimes rubs, sometimes cut, but mainly the rough from the miner.
17:18And the knobby is the rough?
17:20Yes.
17:21Knobby and seam opal.
17:22Right.
17:23Is salt in the rough.
17:25Knobby would have looked like this one.
17:27And then I've cleaned it up.
17:33Explain to me the different types of opal.
17:35The seam opal from Grawan, Glengarry, Sheepyard area at Lightning Ridge is also very highly
17:42sought after.
17:43The black opal in the seam opal is beautiful and normally, these days, cut free form.
17:50And Lightning Ridge is known for the black opal?
17:53Yes.
17:53The black knobbies and the black seam.
17:55And we also get the lighter materials and the lighter crystals as well that you can get
18:01at Coober Pedy, we get at Lightning Ridge as well.
18:03How do you select what you're working with?
18:11So I buy the entire production from the miner, his tail out if I can.
18:16And then I process all of it.
18:19I break it down into what's going to be better material.
18:23And then I'll end up with, you know, what is here is, you know, the last of the cutting
18:28every last piece.
18:33We've got a lovely selection here.
18:37Tell us about it.
18:38The most valuable and sought after piece of opal is the red on black.
18:45I believe this lot here are a day's work.
18:48Yes, that was yesterday.
18:53Now we're going to go over and have a look at you polishing.
18:56Elaine, it's been fantastic today learning all the background from what happens to the
19:14stones when they leave the mine to before they go into the shops and become jewellery.
19:19Thank you very much for coming on Antiques Down Under.
19:26Hi, Fiona.
19:30Hello.
19:30Hi.
19:31Nice to meet you, Gregory.
19:32Welcome to Alvin and Cherney.
19:34That's fantastic.
19:35Let's go and have a chat about opals.
19:37I know it's your passion.
19:38I've got lots to show you.
19:45Fiona, tell us about your passion for opals and where it started.
19:49Well, I've actually been in the industry a number of years.
19:52I'm actually the third generation and some of those memories were sorting stones with
19:56my grandfather and I actually design all the jewellery too.
20:04This is one of the very first pieces of opal jewellery I ever designed.
20:08Definitely inspired by the deco period.
20:10One of the things I noticed as an antique dealer, it's the story behind the item that the buyers
20:16want to know.
20:17It's so much fun to talk about Australian opals.
20:19It's so uniquely Australian and I think it's the one gemstone no one really knows very much
20:23about and it's Australia's national gemstone.
20:27We have 97% of the world's gem quality opal.
20:30Over the years, your family has made some very, very special pieces, but they've also discovered
20:41some very, very special pieces.
20:43That's right.
20:44I happen to have the largest gem opal in the world here on display, so let me show it
20:48to you.
20:48Okay.
20:51So this is the Olympic Australis.
20:54I've been waiting to see this one.
20:55Very exciting.
21:00It's actually found in 1956 and that was the year we hosted the Olympics in Melbourne and
21:07that's actually why it's called the Olympic Australis.
21:10My grandfather bought it directly off the miner and we've had it ever since.
21:18It's been wonderful to be able to see both sides of opals today.
21:23Fine cutting and selecting through to the making of jewellery.
21:26We've had a great time on antics down under today.
21:30Next time on Antiques Down Under, Elizabeth visits an avid collector of antique jewellery.
21:41Shangri-La.
21:42Gregory catches up with the Billichers in their new gallery and studio.
21:48Antiques Down Under discovers the world of miniature books.
21:53And Lee and I talk Wedgwood.
21:55Missed an episode of Antiques Down Under?
22:24Check us out on Nine Now.
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