Powerhouse Museum Collection. Gift of Mr and Mrs Handcock and Martha Lennard, 1921.

This plaque features an appropriately vivid but depressing scene in the shop imagined by Dickens as the home of Little Nell and her grandfather. Along with the bucket-loads of Dickens-branded merchandise available today, it is testament to the popularity of his tragicomic novel The Old Curiosity Shop, which has been in print continuously since 1841.

The earthenware transfer-printed hand-tinted plaque was made by William Adams and Sons of Tunstall, England, between 1896 and 1921. In the 1930s or 1940s Waddingtons made a set of playing cards that ironically bore an illustration of the shop, the girl, and her grandfather, who was addicted to gambling on card games. Today’s fans might prefer to buy a t-shirt or bumper sticker asking ‘What would Little Nell do?’

In considering why Dickens’s stories are of interest to Australians today, we can point to his rich array of characters and situations. We can make parallels between the episodic and dramatic nature of his novels and the current popularity of TV serials that share this approach. Or we can reflect on Dickens as a commentator on issues that are still relevant today.

The issue at the core of The Old Curiosity Shop is problem gambling, which amplifies Nell’s poverty and leads to her travels, tribulations, starvation and death. The same issue is important in Australia today, both socially and politically, but the current focus is on poker machines rather than cards. Gambling addicts still borrow and steal to feed their habit, families still lose their homes because of the losses incurred, but poker machines are promoted as fun for players, providers of jobs and a means of raising funds for community projects.

Powerhouse Museum Collection. Gift of Mrs Shirley Nutt, 2008.

Of course, many players readily control their outlays, but problem gamblers provide an unhealthy share of the profits made by clubs, pubs and State governments. The best solution might be to restrict payouts. I wager not many of today’s gamblers would be tempted to pour streams of cash into this early poker machine just to win a few cigars.

Powerhouse Museum Collection.

Bold multicolour graphics, coloured symbols on the spinning reels, and the prospect of a cash payout made this 1930s machine more inviting. Although poker machines were illegal in Australia at the time, their use in NSW clubs was tolerated. Today, poker machines are big business in several States, and the lure of huge jackpots makes dazzling video poker machines even more seductive.

Powerhouse Museum Collection.

In 1956 poker machines were legalised in NSW. This 1950s poker machine, made in Sydney, appears to have paid a maximum of 10 shillings on a bet of sixpence. The player could pull the handle and anticipate the thrill of seeing twenty sixpences clattering into the chrome tray. Above the tray, the lined and curved chrome fascia mimics the cars of its day. Some players imagined they were in the driver’s seat, able to improve their odds by pulling the handle of the ‘one-armed bandit’ in a special way.

The symbols on this machine’s reels are playing cards – which takes us back to Nell’s grandfather, the ruinous risks he took in the hope of winning at cards, and his zealous certainty that the odds would soon turn in his favour. Charles Dickens was indeed a master storyteller, and his stories still speak forcefully to us today.

2011/32/1 Status fibre school case made by Consolidated Plastics Industries Pty Ltd, Sydney. Gift of Nicky Balmer, 2011. Collection: Powerhouse Museum

All over Australia thousands of new backpacks are being slung over shoulders as students begin or go back to school. Backpacks were used from about the mid-1980s as health professionals worried about the damage to children’s spines caused by heavy school cases. These were made of composite fibre, or if you were really lucky you had a tough Globite one made of vulcanised fibre. The Globite school case is such an iconic symbol yellow ones served as goody bags for the audience attending the opening ceremony of the Sydney 2000 Olympics.

Last year I acquired a school case, not a Globite, we’ve got a couple of those already. You must be thinking there are thousands of old school bags tucked away in cupboards and garages storing mementos. I know some-one who still has his tiny cardboard Kindergarten school case from 60 years ago. He keeps bits and pieces of electric fittings in it. But Nicky’s school case, the one I acquired, is special. It’s empty now but contains a wealth of stories and shared memories triggered by its Dymo name tape label, treasured stickers and childish handwriting on the inside name label. The bag evokes such a strong feeling of school you can almost smell the remains of an old banana. It provides a wonderful snapshot of attending primary school in Sydney in the 1970s added to by contemporary photos provided by Nicky and the memories she has written of her primary school days-

“This suitcase is the first case I owned as I had a larger one when I left Infants School and moved to Primary School. I would have owned the larger one until I changed schools in third class, in the last term, and went to Queenwood. Everyone at Queenwood took a grey vinyl bag with a red Q on the side.

This suitcase has a Norco sticker on the outside which I think was given away as a dairy promotion. In infants school we still received free milk at morning tea so it might have been associated with that but I can’t remember. I still remember the little glass milk bottles with the foil lids. They were stored in trays in a concrete box/shelf at the entrance to the school. I can still remember how it tasted when it went off in the sun.

Inside the interior of the case, the smiley face stickers are cut out from left over sticky backed plastic that my Mum used to line the drawers of my new desk which Dad made about that time. The stickers of the little girl and Santa were from a packet Mum had purchased as Christmas gift tags. I thought they were very special and hoarded them for a long time before I could bring myself to use them.

I don’t really remember what I used to carry in the case. I don’t remember having homework or having to bring my own pencils. I know I took cotton hankies with cartoon pictures on them because I can remember the horror when one dropped out of my uniform and went down the toilet.

Initially, I would have had a toothbrush too as Dad forced me to take one in Kindy to brush my teeth with at lunch time. I don’t think that lasted long, so then for the rest of my school life I would be forced on the way to school to eat either a carrot or a piece of celery.

The case must have carried my lunch, but the only thing I can remember at that age is sitting on the bench to each lunch under the trees, unwrapping a vegemite sandwich and realising I was fed up with always having them. Mum always used white bread and cut them into three fingers, cutting off the side crust but leaving the top. I also think they were wrapped in miles of glad wrap. I don’t think I owned a lunch box.

At some stage in primary school, I can also remember Mum using a white plastic sandwich bag printed with pictures of cartoon animals or monsters on the side, and as it was the days before zip lock they had a little turn over at the top. I had to make sure I brought them home again so Mum could keep re-using them.

I don’t think I bought lunch from the tuck shop very often. I remember the first time I did, I ordered a meat pie and sauce and a finger bun with pink icing. It was a scary experience as at four and a half I didn’t have the skills to eat tidily and remember being covered in food and crying.

I vividly remember drinking from the bubblers at school but I can also remember occasionally having cordial in a round plastic drink bottle with a little cup lid.

In third class I can remember the mortification of pureed apple leaking all over the interior of the suitcase.

I probably carried a grey school jumper and possibly my yellow plastic raincoat. There would not have been a hat as I never wore a hat to school for sun protection.

I certainly carried toys to school in the case too and I remember a time when I played a lot in the girl’s toilets and pushed paper boats around the floors. The boats were made from folded newspaper.

Nicky with her Mum off to school in 1971. Collection: Powerhouse Museum

To get to school it was a 10 minute walk which I did with my Mother or sometimes I was picked up by my friend’s father Mr Bower, and Rebecca and I would go to school together. By high school the smell of my morning celery in the car was enough to turn Rebecca off celery for life.

At some stage after I stopped using the case I turned it into a closet to hang my Barbie doll clothes. Dad made loops to hold the hangers and glued them to the top of the case inside. The Barbies stayed in the case until last week (2007) when I gave them to my daughter.”

Walking into the Castle Hill stores of the Powerhouse Museum is like walking into the prop warehouse of a Hollywood movie studio. You enter through a nondescript door in a modest, unassuming looking set of buildings, and when you turn around you encounter a cornucopia of steam engines, Mardi Gras floats, flywheels the size of a Mini Cooper, and exotic old X-ray machines that could be used for set dressing in a Frankenstein remake. The air is crisp and clean from the climate control system; the objects are neatly ordered and tagged, on stacks as high as a giraffe. We round a corner, and we come across an object that looks as if a drawer full of hanging files got intimate with the plumbing section at Bunnings.

“Take a look at this.” says Debbie.
“What is it?” I say.
“It’s one of the most promising battery technologies of the last 20 years,” she begins.

The vanadium flow battery.

The vanadium flow battery is a brilliant archetype of the trials and triumphs that accompany research and development. Throughout the development, led by Professor Maria Skyllas-Kazacos at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, research momentum was maintained by the phenomenal theoretical promise of the battery. Imagine a fully electric car that you could ‘recharge’ in a matter of minutes. Imagine a battery that would let small businesses and power companies store cheap energy generated at night, and use that power during the day, when energy is expensive.

A typical rechargeable battery contains two electrodes of differing material, immersed in a liquid electrolyte; chemical reactions occur between the differing metals of the electrodes, mediated by the electrolyte. But in a flow battery, like the vanadium battery, the principal chemical reactions instead occur between two liquid electrolytes. These electrolytes are pumped past one another (hence the name flow battery) in separate chambers that are separated by a thin membrane. As the two electrolytes flow past one another, they exchange ions (charged molecules) across the membrane, and this generates current.

Close-up of the exterior of the vanadium battery cells, where the electrolytes interact with each other.

To understand the difficulty in designing a flow battery, consider how your lungs extract oxygen from the air, and remove waste carbon dioxide from your body. Inhaling causes thin-walled sacs in your lungs (called alveoli) to inflate. Alveoli are surrounded by clusters of blood vessels; oxygen diffuses across the thin alveolar membrane, into the blood. Simultaneously, carbon dioxide diffuses from your blood into your lungs, to be exhaled. It’s critically important that the blood and air are kept in separate compartments (failure to do so would of course be fatal), and only selected molecules — oxygen and carbon dioxide — are allowed to pass through. Analogously, the challenge of designing a flow battery is making a membrane that will allow current to flow between the different electrolytes, but that doesn’t let the two electrolytes mix. The vanadium battery wasn’t the first flow battery, but it was the first to use the same metal in both electrolyte solutions, thus neatly eliminating the problem of electrolytes mixing across the membrane.

Golfcart powered by vanadium battery, used as a prototype during battery development.

The unique strengths of the vanadium battery are a short recharge time and the ability to store charge efficiently for long periods. The vanadium battery can be quickly recharged at high voltages; or — perhaps most attractively — it can be instantly recharged by replacing the electrolyte with fresh, charged electrolyte. Second, by pumping the electrolytes out of the ‘cells’ (where the reactions take place) and into storage vats, the vanadium battery can sit for many hours, with no self-discharge. These two attributes suggested potential commercial applications. For the consumer, there could be electric cars that you refilled with vanadium ‘fuel’ instead of gasoline; and for the business customer, the vanadium battery could be used as energy storage for the electric grid, allowing arbitrage (charge batteries when electricity is cheap, use battery power when electricity is expensive) and providing stability during intermittent drops in power supply.

Vanadium batteries have found a home providing energy storage for power stations, with several stations world-wide trialling the technology. Unfortunately, the harsh light of reality intruded on the dream of vanadium-fuelled cars — vanadium batteries are expensive to manufacture, have problems operating at low temperatures, and no battery to date has an energy density (that is, power per unit weight) that can compete with the fantastic energy density of petrol. But research continues: scientists have recently boasted numerous improvements to the energy density and temperature tolerance of vanadium batteries. Don’t give up on the dreams of the vanadium car.

Sextant, used by Phillip Parker King, made by Matthew Berge, London, England, 1805-1819

Like many early scientific instruments that made their way to Australia this particular sextant is doubly significant. For while it played an important role in Australia’s early colonial history it was also manufactured by one of the foremost instrument makers of the early 19th century.

It was made by Matthew Berge an apprentice of the famed London scientific instrument maker Jesse Ramsden and is signed ‘Berge late Ramsden”. The reason for the two names being that Matthew took over running the shop when Ramsden died in 1800 and the instruments he produced bore both names prior to Berge himself dying in 1819.

One of the secrets to Ramsden’s success was his invention of a dividing machine which allowed makers to cut very fine graduations into their instruments. Berge appears to have used Ramsden’s dividing engine to create the amazingly detailed silver scale on this small instrument. Another feature of this sextant is a foot for the pillar stand on the exterior of its wooden box and the black finish used to lower the reflections. All of which suggest the instrument was made a few years before Berge’s death in 1819.

Phillip Parker King, engraving from Picturesque Atlas of Australasia, Vol. 2, Sydney, 1886

Another reason this navigating instrument is so significant is because it is one of a number of items acquired by the Museum from relatives of Governor King. We originally believed it belonged to Governor Philip Gidley King but as King had retired as Governor in 1804, and was so ill he had to delay his trip back to England (where he died in 1808), it seems more likely that it was purchased by his son Phillip Parker King in London around 1817 for his surveying expedition of the western coast of Australia. If this is the case then this instrument played a pivotal role in this surveying project and King certainly looked after this little instrument remarkably well considering its many years at sea.

As a native born son P. P. King played as important a role in the development of New South Wales as his father Governor Philip Gidley King. He was born on Norfolk Island in 1791 to Philip Gidley King’s legal wife Anna and after the family returned to England in 1796 joined the Royal Navy in 1897. When his father and mother returned to New South Wales P.P. King stayed in England but fate was to bring him back to Australia when, in 1817, the navy decided to survey the western coast of Australia and perhaps due to his links to the country appointed King, now a lieutenant, to the task.

He arrived in Sydney in September 1817 and by December had embarked on an especially fitted out cutter, the ‘Mermaid’, to the North West Cape where the survey was to begin. Returning to Sydney in 1820 for repairs the ship was completely submerged in attempt to rid the decks of both cockroaches and rats. In 1821, after being promoted to commander, King made a survey of northern Australia in the “Bathurst”. He briefly returned to Sydney in April 1822 before being recalled to England where he became the English representative of the Australian Agricultural Co. and becoming a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.

In 1826 he published his ‘Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia’ which was partly illustrated with his own sketches. The wanderlust apparently continued to beckon King as in May of the same year he took command of H.M.S. ‘Adventure’ which sailed with H.M.S. ‘Beagle’ (whose company included Charles Darwin) to chart the coasts of Peru, Chile and Patagonia. He returned in 1830 in poor health but now promoted to captain, and a member of the New South Wales Legislative Council, to which he was appointed in absentia. We are not sure but it is possible that this little sextant survived all King’s journeys, and the fact it is in such good condition may be due in some part to the exquisitely made wooden case which traces the contours of the instrument as well as providing a base once set up.

King returned to New South Wales in 1832 but had to wait until 1839 to get a seat on the Council, ironically he was soon after appointed resident commissioner of the Australian Agricultural Co. (AAC) and had to resign this seat. King continued to do valuable survey work in the colony recording his observations in the Murrumbidgee, visiting New Zealand and Norfolk Island in the Pelorus, and surveying the area around Parramatta, Newcastle and Port Stephens. Over the same period the AAC tried to establish monopolies on coal and sell wool but its main investments were tied up in land grants and these were eventually freed up for sale between 1845 and 1847. King was a well respected figure by this time and when the Parramatta Observatory was scheduled for closure it was done so on the basis of King’s report.

By 1854 sickness had begun to dog King and one evening in February 1856, while walking home after dining on board H. M. S. ‘Juno’, he had a stroke outside the gates of his home ‘Grantham’ at St. Leonard’s. He expired at half-past two in the morning of the Tuesday 27 Of February.

Geoff Barker, 2012

References
Anita McConnell, At the sign of the Golden Spectacles, Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2007Burlington, VT, USA, 2007
P.R. de Clerq, Nineteenth Century Scientific Instruments and Their Makers, CIP-Gegevens Koninklijke Bibliotheek, Den Haag, Amsterdam, 1985
‘King, Phillip Parker (1791 – 1856)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 2, Melbourne University Press, 1967, 61-64
The Sydney Morning Herald, 28 February 1856, pp. 4-5

97/92/15-11 Dragon or lion, ceramic, part of personal effects, Wong family, Australia, 1880-1930 Collection: Powerhouse Museum

Sydney holds the largest Lunar New Year festival outside Asia, where communities from Asia celebrate the first day of the first lunar month of the year. Lunar or Chinese New Year falls on 23 January this year, with celebration lasting 15 days, until the first full moon appears.

It’s a time for renewal, family gatherings, eating rich foods and paying respect to your ancestors and elders. Sydneysiders have become familiar with the festival of the new year celebrated with dragon boats races, lions dances and night markets, creating a festival atmosphere, particularly in Chinatown and Ultimo communities.

Chinese new year celebrations, Chinatown in haymarket, Sydney, Image: Sotha Bourn, Powerhouse Museum

The Year of 2012 is the Year of the Dragon, the fifth sign of the Chinese Zodiac, which consists of 12 Animal signs. More specifically it is the year of the water dragon a creature of myth and legend and in ancient China, the celestial Dragon represented an emperor and power. Today, it is the ultimate symbol for success and happiness.

A4034-4 Snuff bottle, famille-rose enamelled porcelain, maker unknown, China, Qianlong reign (1736-1795) of Qing dynasty. Collection: Powerhouse Museum

The origin of the Chinese dragon is not certain. The presence of dragon in Chinese culture can dates back several thousands of years with the discovery of a dragon statue dating back to the fifth millennium BC from the Yangshao culture in Henan in 1987, and jade badges of rank in coiled form have been excavated from the Hongshan culture circa 4700-2900 BC.
The dragon and other symbols of good luck are represented within the Museum’s collection.

2010/75/1-6 Glass lantern slide, Jiulong Bi (Nine-Dragon-Screen) in Beihai Park, hand coloured glass / metal, made by Serge Vargassoff, Peking, China, 1920-1949. Collecton : Powerhouse Museum

Like this lantern slide taken by the Russian-born photographer Serge Vargassoff (1906-1965) who established himself as a professional photographer at the age of 20, in Peking (Beijing), China and became a long-term resident of the city. The slide shows a panel depicting a pair of dragons playing in the clouds. They are the two of the nine dragons on the Jiulong Bi (Nine-Dragon-Screen) in Beihai Park, Peking. This large glazed stone screen was built in 1756 and is one of three screens of the same kind in China. The screen is decorated on both sides with nine dragons playing in the clouds.
The Museum will hold activities to celebrate Chinese new year.

89/1346 Thongs, rubber, unknown maker, 1977-1979, Gift of A W Fuller: Collection Powerhouse Museum

Not what you were expecting – tricked you!

Have you bought shoes for 99 cents and got ten years international travel out of them?

Well a Mr Fuller bought these in 1978 and trudged them all around Europe. He mended one toe strap with wire and felt they had a good two more years’ wear left, when his family prized them from him out of sheer embarrassment and gave them to the Powerhouse Museum.

Rubber thongs were a recognised anti-establishment symbol in the 1960s and 1970s, known as bangers and double pluggers, they epitomised an unpretentious and egalitarian society and reached iconic status. Australians embraced them heart and sole! Some men were even seen in them at the Opera! The residue from those subversive days is evident in the banning of thongs from many clubs and restaurants. Provocative fashion statements soften with time and thong sandals have now evolved into a benign unthreatening style of footwear – now the most popular shoe style around the world for both men and women.

Surprisingly much engineering expertise and ingenuity went into the design of thongs – the right rubber formula – the plug must not pull out – harder than you might think. Engineer Jim Merser designed the plug in a cupped shape so that as the toe thong pulled up vertically the round disc holding it into the sole spread sideways, getting wider and it did not pull through. Dunlop patented this design as a ‘device by which central forces are diverted externally.’

Thongs gained ground from the 1950s and from the early 1960s Dunlop often sold over a million pairs a year. China has long overshadowed this, producing 800 million pairs in 2001 – no surprise then that 6 million thongs are floating on our oceans.

Marine biologist Gary Carlos has a theory that the thong’s innate asymmetry separates the right thong from the left on our oceans.

Left thongs veer to the right and end up in Indonesia and right thongs end up on remote Queensland beaches and Pacific Islands.

So get down to the beach and make sure you leave your thongs above the high water mark!

Further reading:
Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion, Vol 7
Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific Islands
Joanne B. Eicher, Margaret Maynard, 2011.

Satellite fragment, one of 2, titanium / vanadium / aluminium, maker unknown, USSR, found in New South Wales, Australia, 1957-1972,
height 340 and width 379mm. Collection: Powerhouse Museum

Somewhere between 5 and 6am on Monday morning (Sydney time), Russia’s ill-fated Fobos-Grunt space probe disintegrated on re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere, most likely over the southern Pacific Ocean off the coast of Chile (a summary of information about the Fobos-Grunt re-entry can be found on the Planetary Society blog . This was the third re-entry of a large defunct spacecraft since last September (the other two being NASA’s UARs and the German ROSAT), all of which attracted considerable media attention due to their size and potential to cause serious property damage or injury if their debris impacted in a populated area.

The danger from space debris to any individual is actually quite low, since a re-entering satellite is more likely to disintegrate over the oceans than over the land, and large tracts of the Earth’s land masses are very sparsely inhabited. In fact, dead satellites, spent rocket stages and other items of space debris regularly re-enter and burn up without creating any hazard, although fragments of space debris large enough to survive re-entry and reach the ground are not uncommon, with a handful of finds reported every year. These pieces of space junk are often found in remote areas or washed up on beaches after impact in the sea and can be quite perplexing for their discoverers. The Powerhouse receives a couple of enquiries every year from people who think they may have found a piece of space debris, or are just not sure what the strange piece of burnt material or slagged metal they have discovered might be. I recall one enquiry from a person who thought they had found a piece of space junk in the bush-but it turned out to be a dumped chunk of catalytic converter from a car engine!

94/254/1Space debris, Skylab space station, titanium/fibreglass, McDonnell Douglas Astronautics Co, USA, 1970-1972, height 810, width 1120 and depth 900mm. Collection: Powerhouse Museum

In its collection, the museum holds a piece of the Skylab space station, which re-entered over the Indian Ocean and Western Australia in 1979. I’ve written about this artefact and the unusual story of its discovery in a previous post. Another piece of space debris is currently in display in the Space exhibition, one of two fragments that the museum acquired as a donation from the finder in 1972. This partly-melted metal sphere is one of three similar objects that were found on Dobikin merino stud, near Bellata in northern NSW, in 1972. Two spheres were found in late September of that year, with the third being discovered in mid-October. At two of the impact sites, scorched and burned grass testified that the spheres were extremely hot when they landed.

In the 1960s and early 70s there were several finds of space debris in Australia. A report on the Bellata spheres from the Weapons Research Establishment (which is part of the documentation provided to the museum by the donor, Dobikin stud manager Mr. J. T. Vickery), lists seven ‘space objects’ that had been found and reported between 1963 and 1973. This is perhaps not surprising as Australia’s landmass covers a wide horizontal swath of the Earth’s surface. All these items were spherical pressure vessels, their shape better suited aerodynamically to survive the stresses of re-entry, and showed varying degrees of melting and other re-entry damage. They would have originally contained gases or cryogenic liquids.

When the first ‘space ball’ was found on Boullia Station in far western NSW in 1963, media speculation as to its origins ranged from evidence for an advanced ancient lost civilisation in Australia, to debris from a damaged UFO and “Boullia Ball” became a nickname for this type of spherical object found in Australia and New Zealand (some were found across the Tasman in 1972). However, investigations of the Boullia Ball and later space debris finds by the Weapons Research Establishment (WRE), Australia’s defence science agency and forerunner of today’s Defence Science and Technology Organisation (DSTO), demonstrated that they were of definite terrestrial origin, mostly from US launch vehicles.

The first two “Bellata Balls” were sent to the WRE for examination and it was established, on the basis of the type of weld used in their construction, and lettering on one ball in the Cyrillic alphabet, that the pressure vessels had originated in the USSR. In the Cold War environment of the time, the Embassy of the USSR in Canberra declined the WRE’s invitation to inspect the balls and confirm their origin, but there is little doubt about the identification. After examination, the WRE forwarded the two balls to the museum in 1973, in accord with Dobikin manager Mr. Vickery’s wish to donate them to the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences. The third ball discovered remained in Mr. Vickery’s possession.

The two Bellata balls donated to the museum are made of a titanium/vanadium/aluminium alloy, a relatively light but strong metal. The sphere on display in the Space exhibition is the most complete of the two, although it was partially melted away and shows a jagged rim slagged with congealed metal. The body and interior of the ball are spattered with other blobs of metal slag, but it is otherwise reasonably intact. The other sphere was burned through in two places, so the WRE decided to cut it into pieces for examination and analysis: only a segment of the original now remains, stenciled with lab markings.

B2093-2 Satellite fragments (2), titanium / vanadium / aluminium, maker unknown, USSR, found in New South Wales, Australia, 1957-1972, height 195, width 390 and depth 360mm. Collection: Powerhouse Museum

Finds of space debris, tangible items that have been in space and thus are imbued with the mystique of space exploration (however mundane their actual role) continue to fascinate the public and the media. They are also important reminders of an issue that is assuming increasing significance-the dangers to operational satellites from the remnants of old satellites littering the most useful orbits. This is a topic that I’ll address in a future blog post.

Sandals, Japanese Waraji, 19th century. Image: Powerhouse Museum

Warm weather changes the way we dress including what we put on our feet, initially I started thinking about strappy, elegant, contemporary sandals and yet when I looked at our collection I was drawn to a range of 19th century sandals from a variety of cultures and made out of unusual materials. Like the Japanese waraji sandals above, that were made out of vegetable fibre. Traditionally made out of a rope material of rice straw, waraji can be made out of various other materials such as hemp, stalks of myōga, palm fibers, and cotton thread.

The word sandal derives from the Greek word ‘sandalon’ People wear sandals for several reasons, they are cheaper to make (sandals tend to require less material than shoes and are usually easier to construct), are comfortable in warm weather, and as a fashion choice.
Theories on the origins of footwear link the type and material to environmental considerations. Its thought in cold climates people would want to cover the feet up as much a possible for warmth and in hot climates the focus was on protecting the sole of the foot. Its likely sandals developed first in hot climates.

Theses sandals are made from pandanus fibre and were worn by locals in the New Hebrides (Vanuatu) to protect their feet when walking over the sharp coral reefs and purchased by the Museum in 1898.

H1851, sandals, pair, pandanus fibre, Reef Islands, Banks Group, New Hebrides, 1895. Collection: Powerhouse Museum

A definition of a sandal is “footwear consisting essentially of a sole which is attached to the foot by straps” 1. It seems a common understanding is that a sandal leaves most of the upper part of the foot exposed, particularly the toes.

H4448-1023 Burmese sandals, maker unknown, late 19th century Collection: Powerhouse Museum

These sandals pictured above was made in Burma in the late 19th century and are part of the Museums significant Joseph Box Collection. They were exhibited in in the Shoe and Leather Fair, Islington, 1895 and the Bethnal Green Museum Shoe Exhibition, London, England in 1897, described as: ‘Sandals, a pair; soles of leather stitched along rows at short intervals through large perforations, the tops of the soles are of thick felt; the feet are held by bands of flannel fastened between the toes to the soles. originally thought to be Armenian, footwear specialist June Swann, attributes the sandals to Burma.

These and many others were featured in the Museums 1997 exhibition ‘Stepping out: three centuries of shoes’ and documented in its accompanying publication.

1/ The feet of ingenuity: a catalogue of footwear, Horniman Museum, UK, 1993

New Year's card, Laszlo and Sibyl Moholy-Nagy to Dahl and Geoffrey Collings, 1937

This is the third post in our series based on the cataloguing of 2007/30/1, the archive of Dahl and Geoffrey Collings, specifically on the Christmas and New Year’s cards sent to them by family, friends and professional colleagues.

After moving to London in 1935 the Collings’ lived in a small flat at 158 Clifford’s Inn, Fetter Lane, just off Fleet Street. In February 1936 Dahl Collings met Professor Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, formerly of the Bauhaus School in Berlin which had been forced to close by the Nazis in July 1933, when applying for a job with his Pallas Studio to assist with the interior design and presentation of Simpson’s Department Store in Piccadilly, coincidentally some decades later the model for Grace Brothers in the British television sitcom ‘Are You Being Served?’. She always described Moholy-Nagy as the greatest influence on her career but initially neither she nor Geoffery Collings grasped the significance of this first meeting. In Geoffrey Caban’s book A Fine Line – A History of Australian Commercial Art, Dahl Collings reminisced that it was only through her friend, the Australian journalist Leicester Cotton, that she learnt of Moholy-Nagy’s reputation and that Cotton “couldn’t believe my luck”. Later she discovered that Moholy-Nagy had been impressed with her portfolio of work which showed “that I had used watercolour, fabrics and other materials in a way he hadn’t seen before.” In Caban’s book Dahl Collings also described her time with Moholy-Nagy as “absolutely stunning” because of the creative possibilities he encouraged her to explore and the team environment which he had he established. Through Dahl Collings, Alistair Morrison was employed on the project and he also found it to be a rewarding experience as “Moholy-Nagy introduced him to the potentialities and subtleties of design.” (Geoffrey Caban, A Fine Line – A History of Australian Commercial Art. Sydney: Hale and Iremonger, 1983, pp71-73)

Dahl and Geoffrey Collings quickly became friends with Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and his wife Sibyl (1903 – 1971) as well as with Gyorgy Kepes (1906 – 2001) and his English girlfriend, Juliet Appleby (1919–1999), an artist and illustrator who married Kepes in 1937. These friendships continued well after the Moholy-Nagys and Kepes’ had left England to help establish the ‘New Bauhaus’ in Chicago, Illinois, in 1937 and the Collings’ had returned to live in Australia.

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy died from leukemia in Chicago on 24 November 1946 and we hold a card within the archive from Sibyl Moholy-Nagy thanking the Collings’ for their condolences. The card reads, “To Dahl and Geoffrey Collings with much love and admiration and in memory of Moholy-Nagy who was the teacher of us all.” (2007/30/1-22/1/6)

Today Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s name is commemorated through such institutions as the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in Budapest, Hungary, and the Moholy-Nagy Foundation, Inc. which is based in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

New Year's card, Laszlo and Sibyl Moholy-Nagy to Dahl and Geoffrey Collings, 1938

The two cards we have selected for this post feature images created by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy using the photogram process. Photo-sensitive materials including photographic paper were exposed to light without the aid of a camera which allowed Moholy-Nagy to create interesting shapes, lines, angles etc often by placing objects on the paper or by moving them during exposure. Moholy-Nagy first experimented with this process in Berlin in 1922 working with his first wife Lucia Schulz as well as with Man Ray who termed his works ‘Rayographs. The 1937 card includes a photogram entitled ‘Selbstbild’, a self portrait of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, which is dated 1925. A print from the collection of Sybil Moholy-Nagy is held by George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, while another print of this photogram is in the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra. The photogram on the 1938 card is reproduced in a book we hold on Moholy-Nagy and is dated 1923 but at this stage we don’t have any other details about it. It is similar to other photograms made by Moholy-Nagy around the same time including this one at George Eastman House.

Post by Paul Wilson, Project Archivist

Recently we were doing the final proofs for a new book about the issues of long term preservation of digital information. I came across a discrepancy in two separate entries on the same object that introduced its own issue about information preservation.

The book, Digital Dark Age: a cautionary tale, is a collaboration between the Parramatta Heritage Centre and the Powerhouse Museum and draws on the graphic art work of Matt Huynh. It looks at the issues associated with the storing of personal and society’s information records using technology that is likely to be obsolete in a few short years.

One of the Museum’s objects that feature in the story is a Sumerian clay tablet which is a record of a financial transaction that took place 4000 years ago.

Sumerian clay tablet, receipt for livestock, 2041 BCE, 85/452

The tablet is mentioned in the body of the text and in a glossary of objects. A translation of the cuneiform script on the tablet in the body text referred to a receipt for ‘..five sheep, one lamb and four grass-fed male kids..’.  Later in the object glossary the caption referred to ‘receipt issued- Total: five grass-fed sheep, Total: one lamb. Total: four male kids’.

I drew a red ring around both entries and made a note to find out whether the sheep or the kids had been grass-fed and wondered if it was me who was the duffer who had incorrectly transcribed the information from the acquisition record or whether I could blame someone else.

I went to the Collection’s  database record and found that the transcriptions for the front and back sides of the tablet were the source of the error. Obviously who ever transcribed the information from the original paper file had made the mistake. (The tablet had been acquired in 1985 before the museum had a computer based collection records system.) That let me off the hook.

So I went to the original file to find out the true identity of the grass-eaters but again  found the accession form had the same discrepancy.

I had decided that modern museum professionals should all hang their heads in shame and that we would have to get the cuneiform translated again when I found a note at the very back of the file – the original translation.

Translator's notes for Sumerian clay tablet 85/452

Click above image to see the original transcription.

Note to self: if my records are going to be preserved I’ll have to make sure they are correct.