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00:00Welcome to Antiques Down Under.
00:28We're on the search for incredible antiques and collectibles.
00:32From private collections, historic homes, backyard sheds, museums and galleries.
00:37We'll be talking to the experts, the custodians and the passionate collectors.
00:42Coming up on this episode of Antiques Down Under, World War II.
00:46We take a look at the home front, 1939 to 1945.
00:52I meet up with Stephen Ryan to learn about Ellis Rowan, the artist.
00:57Claudia visits an incredible collection of Art Deco sculptures.
01:02And Opals, Australia's national gem.
01:06Today I'm in Canberra visiting the Canberra Museum and Gallery.
01:19Go to meet with the curator and the collector of a special exhibition, Australia Home Front, 1939 to 1945.
01:29Today I'm with Hannah Padden and Hannah is the curator of this amazing exhibition.
01:41Hannah, welcome to Antiques Down Under.
01:43Thank you so much for having me.
01:45It's great to see all this put together.
01:47What was the main inspiration for it?
01:49Well, Rowan came to us, the collector, about two years ago and explained what his collection was.
01:57I went out to view it and we felt it was so important to be able to share this with our community,
02:02particularly as it's the 80th anniversary this year at the end of the Second World War.
02:06And this part of the story of the war hasn't been told very much, has it?
02:10No, it hasn't. I think a lot of the times we think of high intrinsic value objects as being really important to share.
02:20But in this instance, it's a lot of the things that would have been used by Australians every day during that war period,
02:26which was a really, really difficult period of rationing and shortages of raw materials.
02:32So it was a really, really important collection to bring to the fore.
02:35Rowan, welcome to Antiques Down Under.
02:43Yeah, hello, Greg.
02:44And it's absolutely fabulous to see your collection.
02:47Yes, it's taken me 25 years to amass my home front collection that you see here.
02:54This is in the early stages of the war, isn't it?
02:57It is, yes.
02:58And when we had to raise money for the war.
03:00Very much so, yes.
03:01This is all about the liberty loans and war savings and harnessing the economic power of the domestic economy
03:10to fund our war effort.
03:11So to produce the tanks and the planes and the ammunition and to fund an army overseas.
03:17Yeah.
03:18And this is Prime Minister up there?
03:20Very much so, yes.
03:21John Curtin's philosophy was all in.
03:23Everyone in Australia was all into the war effort.
03:26And here he is making a plea where he says with every shilling you can lead to back the attack.
03:33So John Curtin was our great wartime Prime Minister.
03:36Down here we've got the war savings books.
03:39Yeah, we have.
03:40Yes, yeah.
03:41War savings.
03:42Significantly, each street were encouraged to donate money through war bonds.
03:46And then if the whole street was successful, they got a little enamel sign saying War Savings Street.
03:53Let's move on down to the coupons.
03:55Sure.
04:00Because everything was made for the forces, everything at home got rationed, even petrol.
04:07Also clothing, every type of food, anything that maintained life had a coupon.
04:13Now Rowan, you've collected a few coupons here.
04:15Yes.
04:16Especially the producer gas vehicles.
04:19That was a very interesting story.
04:21Yeah.
04:22And a lot of these continued well after the war, didn't they?
04:25Yeah, rationing continued in Australia for several years after the war.
04:28Yeah, well, I know with the petrol, it didn't cease being rationed until 1950.
04:40Rowan, we have some items here that were used at home on the home front for protection.
04:45Yeah, that's a civilian for gas mask issued to the civilian population in the event of a gas attack, which never occurred.
04:53We've got these items here, strange items here.
04:56What you point to there, Greg, is headlight covers for commercial vehicles designed to reduce a headlight beam during an air raid.
05:04Right.
05:05In terms of blackouts and brownouts.
05:07It'd be a bit dangerous driving without a headlight, wouldn't it?
05:10Well, they still provide a beam, but not a full beam.
05:13So reducing the beam that could have been seen by enemy aircraft.
05:17In this cabinet, we've got some items that apply to the returned soldiers.
05:27And many of these returned soldiers came home wounded.
05:30And Diana Pottery was a very famous pottery and they were commissioned to make some pottery so these soldiers could be fed in the hospitals.
05:40And here we've found some.
05:42We've had a wonderful day here at the Canberra Museum and Gallery discovering what happened in Australia between 1939 and 1945 World War II.
05:58Thanks, Rowan and Hannah.
06:00I hope you all want to come and have a look at this exhibition while you're in Canberra or inspires you to come and visit Canberra.
06:06Now, Vas and Mark, we've got a very interesting object here.
06:22It's pretty obvious what we think it is, but where do you think it's from?
06:27Well, it's a fob watch.
06:29Oh my God.
06:30And it's got a huge amount of damage to it.
06:33What do you think, Mark?
06:34No.
06:35Maybe from World War I.
06:37Yeah.
06:38Probably in the trenches in France somewhere.
06:39Why do you say that?
06:40Well, that's where a lot of, if it's Australians, where a lot of Australians would have been and would have been in the action.
06:48They've obviously been shot at and saved their life with that.
06:52So now I've got Louis to give a guess.
06:55Louis, where do you think this is from?
06:58Um, Vietnam War.
07:01Am I right?
07:04Have to wait and see.
07:06A couple of good guesses there.
07:08Do you want to guess the mystery object?
07:11Head to our Facebook and Instagram pages to enter.
07:17Antiques Down Under is in Mount Macedon with Stephen Ryan.
07:24And Stephen is going to tell us all about Ellis Rowan, a famous Australian botanical artist.
07:30Stephen, welcome to Antiques Down Under.
07:34I'm looking forward to hearing the story behind Ellis Rowan.
07:37Yeah.
07:38Well, she was in her time, she was world famous.
07:41So it's sad that a person like that, a really famous artist and a woman to boot.
07:46And it sounds silly to say that.
07:48But back in the day, women were being trained to look after the house and have children.
07:52And here's a woman that went out and painted over 3000 paintings in her life.
07:56Went all over Australia to lots of areas where no white woman had ever been to paint flowers.
08:01And many of the things she painted, it was the first time that that plant had actually been reproduced.
08:06So she found a lot of new plants that she sent back to Baron Von Mueller at the Botanic Gardens in Melbourne.
08:11He was sort of her mentor.
08:13And she went everywhere.
08:15She went to the Torres Strait Islands painting flowers up there.
08:18She spent 10 years in America painting flowers for three really important field guides that were being done there.
08:24She went everywhere.
08:26She painted wherever she went.
08:27So if she was exhibiting in India or exhibiting in Norway, then she would spend time in those countries painting flowers of the country.
08:34She took two trips, one in 1916 and one in 1917, up into Papua New Guinea, into the Highlands, to paint the birds of paradise because they thought they were going to go extinct.
08:50And she felt that they needed to be illustrated somewhere.
08:53And of the 50 something species that were known, she managed to paint 41.
08:58She was a remarkable woman and she was a local resident.
09:07And that's where I come into the scene.
09:11Alice Rowan, her father had a huge garden up on Mount Macedon when she was a young woman.
09:15And she spent a lot of time up here walking the grounds with her father.
09:19And at the time it was Australia's most famous garden.
09:22She spent her later years off and on back here at Mount Macedon.
09:25And her family went through a hard time in the 1890s when there was a big credit squeeze going on and banks were foreclosing and all sorts of things.
09:33And they moved into what at the time was going to be the gardener's cottage for the property he had.
09:38And they called it at the time the cottage.
09:40It was never given any other name.
09:42And so he moved in there, her father, her mother, her two unmarried sisters.
09:48And slowly over the years they started to pass away.
09:51She moved in when her mother and the two unmarried sisters were still alive.
09:54And she spent her last years up here at Mount Macedon and is now buried in our local cemetery.
10:00There's been a push in Victoria particularly about equality in sculpture.
10:08So we decided that this was an obvious choice.
10:11So we found a site.
10:13We've got the sculptor whose husband actually grew up in the house Alice Rowan died in.
10:17So there's lots of synergy going on.
10:20And we're now at a point where the mould is being made.
10:25We still need to raise vast amounts of money.
10:27But people can even donate and get a tax deduction.
10:30Well that's very good isn't it?
10:31Yeah, Australian Cultural Fund.
10:33So if anybody wants to find it they can go in there and make a donation.
10:36And I also in the long term want to endow a botanic art prize in Alice Rowan's name.
10:41Because there isn't one.
10:43I mean you've got the Glover, you've got the Archibalds.
10:47So there's lots of other prizes for specific art forms in Australia.
10:52But there isn't one of major importance for botanic art.
10:56And so I need lots of money.
10:58And that's why I invited you here Greg.
11:00Well hopefully our viewers will go on and we'll put a...
11:05Yes, if you can pop something on the bottom of the screen for people to...
11:08A QR code, they call it these days don't they?
11:12Two old crocs talking about QR codes.
11:14We have a local sculptor.
11:18It's a lady called Jennifer Mann.
11:20And there's a sculpture outside the Trades Hall in Melbourne that she did a couple of years ago.
11:24Of Zelda Di Prano who was a very strong feminist in her time.
11:29And so she's got lots of points on the board.
11:31She's done all sorts of interesting sculptural works.
11:34Stephen, it's been fantastic having you on Antique Thunder and catching up with you again after all these years.
11:44Yes, it has been fabulous Gregory.
11:46And hopefully everybody will help support me with my big project.
11:49I hope so too.
11:50Art Deco burst onto the world stage in Paris in 1925.
12:14Robert Pringle's collection starts there.
12:18Powerful men, elegant women inspired by mythology and the dance.
12:23Let's go meet the collector.
12:25Oh, come and sit down Claudia.
12:29Oh, Robert.
12:32This piece is absolutely incredible.
12:35It's this man reaching for the stars.
12:38It's so terribly dynamic.
12:40It certainly is.
12:41It's aerodynamic.
12:43And as you can see, he's riding on clouds.
12:47He's a projectile himself.
12:50Related really in part to the myth of Icarus.
12:54Flying too close to the sun, courting danger.
12:57But this is, I think, made with a degree of confidence.
13:01L'aviation, it's called.
13:02Which of course was really revolutionary in those times in the 1920s.
13:08And as you can see, it's also very geometric and streamlined in form.
13:13Especially his wings, which are not really literally representational.
13:18They are very, very geometric.
13:20So who is the artist?
13:21Frederic Vogt, a Swiss sculptor, but very little is known about him.
13:26He died in 1937.
13:27We know that much.
13:28So I have another piece by Frederic Vogt.
13:31Tujua Oho, which is always to the highest.
13:35It's of a very athletic, muscular man thrusting a rocket ship or projectile into the sky.
13:43In a similar way to this sculpture.
13:45And this of course is the time of Buck Rogers.
13:47So we're going into the future.
13:54The female form is always so elegant.
13:59But in a piece like this, she's telling us something.
14:02What's the story behind a piece like that?
14:05Well, you can see in her sort of elongated hand, she's holding up a dove, symbolic of peace and hope.
14:13And this is in the context of the end of World War I, which was a period of great aspirations for hope and peace.
14:22This is by Pierre Le Farguez.
14:24Now this one here, she's also holding a bird, offering it to the sky.
14:29She is.
14:30And this is a very different sculpture in that you could base this really within the war period.
14:37Because in her hand, she's holding a pigeon, a carrier pigeon.
14:42Carrier pigeons were used to send messages between troops, between forces in World War I.
14:50Robert, 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.
15:03Who is she?
15:04This sculpture is Lumina by Max Le Verrier.
15:08This Lumina was exhibited at the 1925 Exposition in Paris.
15:12So as you say, it is iconic.
15:14It's got the symmetry to it, the elongated lines.
15:17And 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.
15:26So this is probably the sculpture that spawned a thousand knock-offs.
15:29So how do we tell a reproduction Art Deco from the real thing?
15:35Look, I think you can tell, first of all, by the authenticity of its signature.
15:40And then the stepped base that it's on and the quality of the marble is also an indicator.
15:46In this example, you have the globe itself is moulded into the fitting itself.
15:53That's quite unique.
15:54The heaviness of it is a telltale as well.
15:56This is really quite substantial as it looks.
16:00It may weigh about eight kilograms.
16:02It's a sort of a look that you know over time.
16:06You get experience in knowing what is a fake and what's not.
16:15What I love about these sculptures are their dynamic quality.
16:18Nothing is static.
16:20There is energy and vitality.
16:32I love it.
16:33I love it.
16:34I love it.
16:35I love it.
16:36I love it.
16:37I love it.
16:38I love it.
16:39Today in Antiques Down Under we are discovering the world of opals.
16:42I'm with Elaine who is at the forefront.
16:45Goes out, meets the miners, buys from the miners and processes them before they go into the retail trade.
16:52Tell us about yourself and your opals.
16:54I've been Ausgems now.
16:56I was 30 years old.
16:57was 30 years old. And you go to Lightning Ridge several times a year and buy the
17:02Nobbies? At the moment we go once a month and I buy rough material, sometimes
17:08rubs, sometimes cut but mainly the rough from the miner. And the Nobby is the
17:14rough? Yes, Nobby and seam opal is sold in the rough. Nobby would have looked
17:20like this one and then I've cleaned it up. Explain to me the different types of opal.
17:30The seam opal from Grawan, Glengarry, Sheepyard area, Lightning Ridge is also
17:36very highly sought after. The black opal in the seam opal is beautiful and
17:42normally these days cut free form. And Lightning Ridge is known for the black
17:47opal? Yes, the black Nobbies and the black seam and we also get the lighter
17:52materials and the lighter crystals as well that you can get at Coober Pedy, we get
17:57at Lightning Ridge as well.
18:02How do you select what you're working with? So I buy the entire production from
18:09the miner, his tail out if I can, and then I process all of it. I break it down into
18:15what's going to be better material and then I'll end up with, you know, what is
18:20here is, you know, the last of the cutting every last piece.
18:30We've got a lovely selection here. Tell us about it.
18:33It's the most valuable and sought after piece of opal is the red on black.
18:37I believe this lot here are a day's work.
18:43Yes, that was yesterday.
18:48Now we're going to go over and have a look at you polishing.
18:51Elaine, it's been fantastic today learning all the background from what happens to the
19:09stones when they leave the mine to before they go into the shops and become jewellery.
19:13Thank you very much for coming on Antiques Stand Under.
19:24Hi, Fiona.
19:25Hello. Hi. Nice to meet you, Gregory. Welcome to Alvin and Cherney.
19:28That's fantastic. Let's go and have a chat about opals. I know it's your passion.
19:33I've got lots to show you.
19:35Fiona, tell us about your passion for opals and where it started.
19:44Well, I've actually been in the industry a number of years. I'm actually the third generation
19:48and some of those memories of sorting stones with my grandfather and I actually design all
19:53the jewellery too.
20:00This is one of the very first pieces of opal jewellery I ever designed. Definitely inspired
20:04by the deco period.
20:06One of the things I noticed as an antique dealer is the story behind the item that the buyers
20:11want to know.
20:12It's so much fun to talk about Australian opals. It's so uniquely Australian and I think it's
20:16the one gemstone no one really knows very much about and it's Australia's national gemstone.
20:22We have 97% of the world's gem quality opal.
20:25Over the years your family has made some very, very special pieces but they've also discovered
20:37some very, very special pieces.
20:39That's right. I happen to have the largest gem opal in the world here on display so let
20:43me show it to you.
20:44Okay.
20:45So this is the Olympic Australis.
20:49I've been waiting to see this one.
20:51Very exciting.
20:52It's actually found in 1956 and that was the year we hosted the Olympics in Melbourne and
21:01that's actually why it's called the Olympic Australis. My grandfather bought it directly off
21:06the miner and we've had it ever since.
21:13It's been wonderful to be able to see both sides of opals today. Fine cutting and selecting
21:19through to the making of jewellery. We've had a great time on Antiques Down Under today.
21:29Next time on Antiques Down Under, Elizabeth visits an avid collector of antique jewellery.
21:34Shangri-La. Gregory catches up with the Billichers in their new gallery and studio.
21:41Antiques Down Under discovers the world of miniature books.
21:46And Lee and I talk Wedgwood.
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