Showing 18 items
matching gold-rush, themes: 'creative life','immigrants and emigrants','kelly country'
Diverse state (42)
Aboriginal culture (7)
Built environment (11)
Creative life (7)
Family histories (3)
Gold rush (11)
Immigrants and emigrants (10)
Kelly country (1)
Land and ecology (7)
Local stories (13)
Service and sacrifice (6)
Sporting life (2)
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The Welsh Swagman
... Castlemaine was a thriving gold mining town in the 1850s and 1860s when Joseph Jenkins lived and worked in the area. Jenkins stayed at this hotel during one of his visits to Castlemaine. Photograph: albumen silver carte-de-visite. ...Joseph Jenkins was a Welsh itinerant labourer in late 1800s Victoria.
Exceptional for a labourer at the time, Jenkins had a high level of literacy and kept detailed daily diaries for over 25 years, resulting in one of the most comprehensive accounts of early Victorian working life.
Itinerant labourers of the 1800s, or 'swagmen', have become mythologised in Australian cultural memory, and so these diaries provide a wonderful source of information about the life of a 'swagman'. They also provide a record of the properties and districts Jenkins travelled to, particularly around the Castlemaine and Maldon area.
The diaries were only discovered 70 years after Jenkins' death, in an attic, and were in the possession of Jenkins’s descendants in Wales until recently, when they were acquired by the State Library of Victoria in 1997.
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Dame Nellie Melba
... Melba’s most famous operas are represented, including Otello, Rigoletto, La Traviata, Faust, La Boheme, Romeo and Juliet and I Pagliacci. The most elaborate item is a gold cloak, hand-painted and sewn with jewels, which was worn by Melba ...“...the voice, pure and limpid, with an adorable timbre and perfect accuracy, emerges with the greatest ease.” Arthur Pougin, in Le Ménestral (Paris), May 12, 1889.
Dame Nellie Melba (1861 – 1931), was Australia’s opera superstar, performing in the great opera houses of the world - the Paris Opera, La Scala, the Metropolitan Opera House, and the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, where she became prima donna, returning season after season.
The extensive Melba Collection at the Victorian Arts Centre includes costumes, records, accessories, letters, programs, photographs, opera scores and other personal effects. Other holdings of interest include 78rpm disks at the State Library of Victoria.