Still Working in the School

School Ma'am Sue and Libby from the cataloguing team are justifiably looking happy - they have almost finished the "Nature Study" display case. Only the name tags to go in, and the back to be screwed on (Thanks Rob!).

So we are still working in the school, refreshing displays and fine-tuning what is already there.

The Ducks are looking particularly good

Moving Right Along

This does not mean we have died and gone to Heaven - although from the last post yoou might think so. It means we have moved along after a successful audit of the front of the Funeral Parlour, to the last place catalogued in the 1990s. We are working in the Sunny Creek School, with The Ducks and Lizards.

Once we have finished there, we will have checked all the cataloguing that was done in the 1990s. Which will be a considerable relief. It has only taken about three and a half years to work through it, while working on other areas as well.

Working with things like this, which has just come in.

Looking at it, we think it is a lifter for taking boiled eggs out of boiling water. It has been in the donor's family for so many years, that they do not know what it is. Maybe, if you wanted to keep your eggs warm at the breakfast table, instead of an egg cosy, if there were a lot of people, they were kept in warm water. And this was used to lift out the egg you wanted?

So that is the best we can come up with - any suggestions, anyone?

LATE EDIT: We now believe this may be for lifting preserved eggs, which were sometime kept for months in a liquid, one of the most common being "waterglass" - one of our mothers used a product called "Ovo" in the 1950s to preserve multiple eggs in a galvanised cream can full of liquid, for months. They were not easy to get out of the liquid, and one of these, with hindsight, appears to be perfect for the job. Except those feet might get in the way .....

Returning to the previous post ........

What? You don't know what an egg cosy is? It is like a tea cosy, only smaller. We have one in the collection.

Imagine coming down to breakfast to find the maid had cosily put your egg in this. It even has lovely pink flowers on the other side. No fishing in the water for you, to get your own egg.

We are very, very Excited

We are very, very excited. After waiting about two-and-a-half years (which included a number of attempts), a significant number of the items from our Collection are up on CAN.

To see them, just go to the Search Screen, type in "Gippstown" (but without the "talkies") and you can go through them. Don't forget to click on the link to see more details of an item in which you have an interest.

There have been just a few teething problems, where some of our images do not show up (but we can solve that with time), and some come up a number of times, page after page.

But overall, it is really wonderful.

Many, many thanks to Ingrid Mason from CAN and her anonymous XML wizard.

Part of the problem was that we were unsure how to provide an InMagic input for CAN - now solved and we are hopeful the next batch will be up there much sooner.

Thanks Ingrid!

Sue the School Ma'am

The cataloguing team has been talking a little bit with Sue, Old Gippstown's School Ma'am. Sue is on deck to march the children into our school by the bus load (well, in small groups that total a bus load), adn lead them through lessons as they would have been many years ago.

She is especially interested in the old school readers, so we have been checking how many we have.

When she is not in the school, Sue is gardening in our Veggie Garden, where her husband Rob has been (in between everything else), edging the garden beds. Sue has just joined Flickr, so you can see her photos on her page - including the garden as it progresses. She is also loading them to the Old Gippstown Flickr Group - more posters there are always most welcome!

Thanks Sue!

Can anyone recognise this scene?

Ever since this cataloguing team started, about four years ago, this long-stitch embroidery has had us puzzled.

You can see a slightly larger version of the photograph HERE.

It appears to be a faithful rendition in wool, with some cotton, of a colonial harbour scene. The framing is quite old. There are flags on some of the buildings and ships, that do not really equate to any that we can recognise. There also appear to be icebergs in the distance in the harbour.

We have always wondered if it is supposed to be a faithful depiction of an actual scene. One knowledgeable person who has examined it feels that the clouds are similar to those rendered by engravers - meaning this could have been copied from an engraving.

So, does anyone know this scene?

Here is a detail - we would really appreciate knowing more about this work. We have just taken it from storage and placed it in one of the bedrooms in Ashdale.

Object of the Week

We have rebadged the Old Gippstown blog (not this blog, which is the Cataloguers blog), as Old Gippstown Object of the Week.

If there is anyone out there who would like to write up their favourite object (we will handle the photos), feel free. This is the chance to tell everyone about some obscure, favourite item in the collection.

We are over there as I write, looking at Shears. This set of Shears.

News from the Store

We had a very successful InMagic day with Barbara Kowalski from Maxus last week, getting into the nitty gritty of our Cataloguing. Seven user-groups were represented, and we hope to meet again in six months' time.

So now your faithful Cataloguing Team has returned to working away in the Narracan General Store. So there is not a lot of news. Except we thought you might be interested in seeing some of the items that we have found in the store, that are ear-marked for elsewhere in the park.

This is a good example of a piece of World War II "Trench Art" - souvenirs made by soldiers (and airmen, and sailors), from items to hand, designed to be sent home. We have located a photograph of the same plane on another example, so think there may have been a common mould for the plane, with the ash tray section being of much rougher construction. Anyone else have a similar one, or any thoughts? There is a larger version of the photo HERE. This piece is off to go into the Military Collection.

We were a little taken with this strainer, as it is made from perforated metal, not the mesh we are more familiar with. There are probably numerous examples in museums all over the place, but we thought it would be good to get it into a kitchen display, where it can shine a little more. Our main problem is that we do not have a lot of good, secure kitchen exhibition space. Our best one is the kitchen at the rear of the Cobb and Co building, but a lot of people miss walking around there. So we are looking for a good place to display it.

This souvenir plate shows a view of Commercial Road in Morwell, not yet dated. Items like this are becoming collectable (read "portable", which means at risk of being lifted). Maybe the best place for this piece is in the Camera display - as an example of one of the many mediums on which photographs can be found. And one of the few places where we have glass cases. It is hard to interpret buildings as if people lived in them, if they are full of glass cases.

Items like this are also a challenge for collections which have several databases to record their holdings. Is this a photograph? Is it an "object"? Which database does it go into? We are fortunate that we only have one database, for everything, so it just goes in their and we find it if we are searching for photographs of Morwell, or if we are searching for souvenir plates. Makes life much simpler.