Welcome to November’s Objects in Articles Edition! This month I have collected articles featuring old photographs of London, 20th century records for model cooking classes in Sydney, and a current news story on the Female Factory at Parramatta. I have also been fascinated by a story of an heirloom wedding gown and by the efforts of an Englishman who created records of thousands of Mayan cultural artefacts. As always, pop the article title in a comment below if you found it interesting!
A collection of photos from Victorian London. We take photography for granted today, but it wasn’t even invented until the Victorian period. So it’s only from this point in history that historians can study a generally authentic image of the past at a given moment. A couple of the pictures really resonate with me; the lady bicyclists wearing boater hats and the mass of carriages on London Bridge. Apart from the horses, it’s not so different to today’s traffic congestion!
A current news story for Sydney-siders: the female factory at Parramatta has been heritage listed. The ‘factory’ is a group of buildings built for female convicts as accommodation and a work place from 1818 onwards. The equivalent site for male convicts was Hyde Park Barracks in the CBD. Later the site was home to an orphanage, Parramatta Industrial Girls School, and finally a correctional facility.
The lovely story of a handmade wedding dress that was first made in 1932. Maria Moreno created the dress for her own wedding, and since then three of her family members have worn it for their’s with only small alterations made each time. A precious heirloom, the family keep it safe for future generations to wear and continue the dress’ story.
A great article on the life of a young Sydney-sider who took cooking classes at the age of 12. This article tells the story of Dolly Youngein who lived with her family in one of the apartments of Susannah Place, an 1844 terrace in The Rocks. Find out how she fared in her cooking education.
At the turn of the 20th century, a gentleman by the name of Alfred Maudslay made it his personal mission to make records of as many Mayan sculptures and inscriptions as possible. Now, these records in the form of plaster casts, photos, and paper moulds, are sometimes the only surviving evidence for now lost or damaged artefacts. A new project has begun to digitally and physically preserve these records by the British Museum and Google.
