horseshoe, ornament, luck, tradition, ballarat

This medallion was issued to all competitors at the 1996 Australian Rowing Championships to commemorate the official opening of the Sydney International Regatta Centre at Penrith , March 1996 in which Marion Taffe was rowing.

The Sydney International Regatta Centre at Penrith was opened in March 1996 as the new venue for the Sydney Olympic Games 2000. The national regatta 1996 was the first regatta held at the centre and used as a trial for its suitability for the Olympic rowing and canoeing events and the regatta was sponsored by ABN Amro.

rowing, regatta, sydney

The Catholic Church held an International Congress at Sydney in 1928. This was the first such gathering in the Southern Hemisphere and special trains were run from other states to convey visitors to the event. A range of souvenir items were purchased by Catholic families and a collection of these souvenirs including Congress rail tickets were collected and remain in the Taffe family Hymettus collection.

This, the 29th Congress was the first ever held outside Europe or the USA. It was first great public demonstration of faith celebrated by Catholics in Australia this event attracted a crowd of half a million, the largest religious spectacle ever seen in Australia to that time.

sydney, eucharistic congress, pope pius xi, medal,

australian bi-centenary, , ballarat community bi-centenary committee, ballarat

medal, horticulture, royal horticultural society victoria, ballarat horticultural society, michael taffe

arawata, holmes family, centenary, bookmark, souvenir, family history

fiction

avenues of honour, war, war memorials

fiction

book, juvenilia

Victorian photo album bound in leather stamped in naturalistic motifs of flowers and insects with heavy board pages and inserted frames for photos. Covers held with metal clasp.

non-fiction

wedding gift, taffe, photgraph album

non-fiction

thesis, great war, ballarat, avenue of honour, michael taffe, war memorials, memory, landscape

non-fiction

Portrait photograph with artistic brushwork by Ballarat photographer Thornton c.1917. Thornton & Richards were one of Ballarat's major photographic studios and their work and historic records of schools, sporting and civic events remain a major record of social and family life in Ballarat region over a century.

Thornton & Richards were one of Ballarat's major photographic studios and this is an exceptional demonstration of their portraiture.

portrait

Pressed tin buttons were produced in large numbers between 1900 and the Second World War and being ephemeral have rarely survived. This button was produced for fundraising for local charities at Ballarat on Button Day in October 1925.

Historically and socially significant artefact, revealing much about the attitudes and values of the period in which they were produced. Button days were a popular way of fundraising and commemoration that developed through Wattle Days and the First World War retaining their popularity into the early 1950s.

Small tin badge with stylised rising sun motif in red with forget-me-nots in blue beneath a banner and on beneath the nosegay the words forget not. in blue.

ballarat, charities, fund raising, button day, 1925, badges

ceiling paper, wallpaper, ballarat, hymettus,

melbourne, centenary of melbourne, 1934, eucharistic congress, mermbership card

ceiling, hymettus ballarat, dining room, wallpapers, ceiling papers, decorative papers, ballarat

non-fiction

black saturday, herald sun, victoria, melbourne, bushfire, newspaper

non-fiction

Marion Taffe was Features Editor for Melbourne's MX commuter newspaper and wrote this feature following the loss of her cousin and family at Kinglake in Victoria's Black Saturday bushfires of 2009. Her article was published in newspapers worldwide.

bushfire, black saturday bushfires, victorian bushfires, kinglake, warnambool, marion taffe, mx, newspaper, davey family

Faille silk and braided with barley twist to top and military braid to scalloped lower edge.

window decoration, valance, dining room

This example of a late 1920s valance retained in the front parlour at Hymettus is a part of the period decoration and still fills its purpose of over a century ago in concealing the curtain rails. of the room. Although the house was built 1900 -1901 the room was redecorated in the late 1920s.

A rare surviving example of a silk patterned and machine embroidered valance in situ since the 1920s.

valance, window, parlour, hymettus, ballarat

One of a series of sketches in 1943 by war artist Geoffrey Mainwaring while covering the war in the Pacific. Mainwaring went on to take charge of the Art department at the School of Mines Ballarat, SMB now Federation University.

war, landing craft, mainwaring, ballarat smb, sketch, war in the pacific, new guinea, war artist