I think this was about 1970, I was a nerdy kid of about 10, really interested in the environment around me. (Way before ‘environment’ was understood). It was probably the summer school holidays, and there was this explosion in spiders, including a really fascinating one that made this complicated web. It came in several colours of the abdomen, green and brown and red. The web was large with an intricate net like dome where the spider sat and a chain of egg sacs rose up in the web. My parents had not recalled seeing such a spider before and we had dozens in our yard. This is before the internet, and the encylopaedias we had did not describe this spider. I was desperate to find out what they were. Eventually my Mum took me to the Museum, to the entomology department and asked if there was anyone who could identify the spider. A lady scientist came out and looked at my live specimen in a honey bottle. She told us it was a dome building spider. (This has remained a common spider in Brisbane since). I was delighted. I had an answer and the lady kindly suggested a spider book which my Mum could buy for me to identify my own spiders in the future. (I still have that well used book today). But also there was the encouragement she gave me to keep looking around me and that a girl could be a scientist! I have never killed a spider in my life, I remain fascinated by them. I went to University and studied medicine 7 years later. I think the Museum experience played a part in that choice.
A note from the editor: Thanks to Geoff Thompson for commenting on this story, and revealing the identity of that lady scientist—Dr Valerie Todd Davies (1920–2012)—and providing a link to her obituary.
We were living at Redcliffe. Mum and Dad used to bring the four of us to the museum for the day and we’d spread out, exploring. It felt a little bit dusty with light streaming in through the lovely old windows. All the nooks and crannies, including the staircases were packed full of exhibits: photography gear, precious stones, minerals, thunder-eggs and crystals. An aeroplane hung suspended from the ceiling between the balconies, tantalisingly close but still out of reach. There were rows of dark, wooden display cases covered with brown, leather blinds and each one was like opening a Christmas present when you pushed it back to reveal what treasure was inside. There was an amazing array of insects: butterflies, beetles, dragonflies; I was glad the one with the spiders was covered so I didn’t have to see them. In some there were birds eggs of all shapes and sizes and colours; in others, a huge variety of seashells. There were old coins and ancient objects from all over the world, and against the walls, taxidermied birds and animals, and a box jellyfish floating broodingly in a tall glass tank. “Mum, Dad, come and look at this!” I’m sure they enjoyed our excitement as much as they enjoyed their own explorations, and enjoy them they certainly did. Dad loved to answer our questions, and give us that little bit of extra information. It was like having our own personal guide. He was like a walking encyclopedia!
Mum always had a picnic prepared and we would eat it under the downstairs balcony near the old army tank and the ancient lung fish. I used to feel sorry for that fish lying there all alone in a tank too small for it to move around in. Then we’d forget about it and go back inside to see some more.
It was always a disappointment when we had to leave—there was so much more to see than you could possibly manage in just one day.
Next time we’d make new discoveries, or go back to our old favourites. And was that mean old jellyfish still there? I can still see it, in my mind, with it’s long, long tentacles pooled at the bottom of its prison. Was it alive, or preserved and floating in alcohol? I don’t know, but it gave me the horrors, anyway.
I’ve always wished I could go back as an adult and explore the old place as it was, with Dad at my side to answer the questions, of course. I’m sure there was something I missed.
I was five years old, very fair skinned with a tendency to freckles. Our family was holidaying at Redcliffe and, despite my mother’s care, I got very sunburned one day on the beach. My father decided to go to Brisbane the next day for various reasons and, as I was not allowed to go out in the sun that day, he took me with him. One of the places we went to that day was the Queensland Museum. As I entered the imposing doorway, all thoughts of my painful red shoulders vanished, my eyes widened and I was transported into a world of wonder.
Glass cases filled with fascinating beetles and butterflies, shells and crustacea, Egyptian mummies, suspended aeroplanes, oh, there was so much for my little self to absorb. I never lost the wonder of that museum. Every holiday after that, when we went to Brisbane, I made it compulsory to visit the museum.
Many years later, I found myself working on the museum’s crustacea collections, deep in the offices below the galleries. Again several years after that, I undertook a placement in the Anthropology Department of the museum, researching the Aboriginal rainforest shield collection, while studying for a career in museums.
The sunburned five year old lived the dream born of that long ago wondrous visit to a treasure house.
The Old Museum gardens are unique amongst Queensland’s institutional and public gardens in having a gardens maintenance and support area still on site and in operation. This area includes propagation facilities and potting tables, shade houses, compost facilities, and gardener’s storage and facilities building. This is a rare occurrence in Australia and an area that should be highly valued and kept intact and in operation.
Through the 20th century, the gardens had its own gardeners who were based at the gardens and worked from their yard and the bush house there. As well as maintaining the gardens and lawns, they propagated all the plants used for the seasonal changing displays in the beds. It should also be noted that there were generally not generous or even sufficient funds for the gardeners to undertake all they would have liked to do for the gardens. The lack of funds for new plants led from the early part of the 20th century to the gardeners collecting seed from their plants, taking cuttings and propagating and growing on the plants to meet the different garden beds displays. These gardening practices and traditions involved a considerable amount of work for the gardening staff.
It seems highly likely that the primary reasons these gardens remained generally intact and one of the finest gardens in Brisbane through the 20th century was the continuity of the gardeners, their attachment to this special place, the practices they passed on to the following gardeners, and the lack of funds to generate changes and extensive plant changes.
All the gardeners at the Old Museum Gardens were not recorded in the past studies. It would be wonderful to complete the list. Gardeners included: Ray Priest, Dave Dowdless from 1966, Col Harmon (who had been the head gardener at the Yungaba Migrant Centre, and retired in 1970), David Hockings there from 1970, Jack Kennedy head gardener, who passed on to Ted (Dude) Neilsen there from 1966 to 1979 and head gardener for 5 years, and John England.
In 1989 and 2000 when I was part of the team preparing the Old Museum Gardens conservation study I met the gardeners who were still working in the gardens, and contacted a couple of the retired gardeners. Col Harmon told me of the gingko tree that used to grow near the entrance to the bush house. It was 10 to 14 metres high and an original planting in the list of plants at the place prepared by Frederick Manson Bailey, the Queensland government botanist at the turn of the century.
Ted Neilsen recalled the large Moreton Bay fig tree which grew just near the lawn near the corner of the old fernery, the fishpond, and the round garden under the present demountable building. He also told of the seed beds being in the open where the spirit store building is now, and recalled the fine garden along there comprising a hedge along the fence, a line of alternating frangipani trees and palms with annuals displayed along the garden frontage. He had tended the historical beds of annuals removed for the dinosaurs, and the roses. He told me that “dozens came daily just to look at the roses”.
John England told me about the paths always being asphalt with tile drains or a raised timber edge, that he planted the macadamia tree in the lower garden, the bougainvillea hedge near the potting shed was “always there”, and there were two timber slatted ferneries—one open to the public—and much more about the gardens and the plants now gone but which were there through his time as gardener in this very special place in Brisbane.
My old museum story is from the 1960s, the time of my childhood, when my family—my parents, bother and sister—lived in northwestern Queensland. My father’s family had moved from north Queensland to Brisbane in the 1930s and most years of my growing up we made the long drive down the coast—turn right at Townsville—in the Christmas holidays. We visited members of my mother’s family along the way. From Caloundra we made short trips to Brisbane to my grandparents in New Farm.
I remember visits of the museum, and seeing the diorama about Aboriginal people on the ground floor, and the wide flight of stairs to the next level. The impressiveness of the staircase stayed with me—I had never been in such a large and beautiful building before. I can recall the magnificent display cabinets on this next level, in long rows, just like in the photo. I don’t remember Bert Hinkler’s plane, though it must have been there!
The mezzanine level of the Queensland Museum, with Bert Hinkler’s Avro Avian aeroplane hanging from the roof. John Oxley Library photo
I do remember the lung fish in its tank on the verandah, and the garden beyond. Once, in my memory, my mother and we children walked home from the museum to my grandparents’ house—I recall feeling very tired, and it being a long way. But, in hindsight, I realise that we probably walked to Fortitude Valley and caught the tram from behind McWhirters.
The Queensland Museum is the custodian of Mephisto, the only First World War German tank left in the world. The tank was captured in France by Australian soldiers in 1918.
Most of the troops who captured the tank came from Queensland. They campaigned for Mephisto to be brought to Brisbane, where it was put on display at the Queensland Museum in 1919.
A group of museum curators are writing a book about Mephisto and are appealing for your help to find old photographs of the tank.
Have you got a photo of Mephisto at the old museum? If you do, the museum curators would love to hear from you. And please, share the story here too.
The German First World War tank ‘Mephisto’ on display outside the entrance to the Queensland Museum. The photo was taken before 1921 when an open-sided shelter was built to give it some protection from the weather. John Oxley Library
My maternal grandmother saw Nellie Melba sing at the old Exhibition Building Hall. I was a child when she told me about it. I think we had gone to the Art Gallery, then in that building, and she was explaining how it had changed. She loved singing and was in the old State and Municipal Choir and had great admiration for the then conductor a Mr Sampson who was also, if I remember, the organist at St John’s Cathedral.
My grandmother’s maiden name was Hannah Gartside and she lived in Gregory Terrace in a house called Preston Villa (now long demolished) but it was more or less opposite the Centenary Pool. Her grandparents lived a couple doors along in a house called Daisy Nook, also gone I think; another member of the family lived close by also.
The Gartside family were gunsmiths and had a successful business in town (Gartside and Sons). Their neighbours were the Miss Watsons whose front fence still survives but the site is now a motel.
I’ll have to check when my grandmother was born. Her father was an engineer in Queensland Railways, well respected, and her father was credited with designing the Normanton Railway Station and the first Kuranda Station. He worked on that railway when the government had to resume control. There was a model in the old museum which my grandmother would show me. He also did work at Cooktown and must have been involved with the Cooktown to Laura railway line.
James Gartside also became Lt Colonel of the Moreton Regiment but died young of a brain tumour. There is a quite grand obelisk in Toowong Cemetery erected by public subscription.
Hannah’s mother was Miriam Costin and that family came to Brisbane in 1840s or even earlier. Later one Costin became Clerk of Parliament.
My grandmother as a young woman would accompany her father to the Easter Encampments as her mother wouldn’t go. I think my grandmother enjoyed the attention she received being the Colonel’s daughter. There must have been a dress-up dance of some kind. I’ll have to check my grandmother’s date of birth and when she started at Brisbane Girls’ Grammar which of course was just up the road.
Unfortunately I don’t know anything more about Nellie Melba in Brisbane.
A note from the editor:
The internationally-celebrated Australian soprano Dame Nellie Melba (1861-1931) performed in five seasons in the exhibition concert hall—in October 1902, June 1909, August 1909, May 1922, and June-July 1927. The performances were described in the newspapers in lavish detail. Here is part of a typical article:
Melba’s farewell concert will be a night to be remembered by many, for the Exhibition Concert Hall was thronged to overflowing, and long before the opening time a crowd had been patiently waiting tor admission. The body of the hall and the galleries were taxed to the utmost, while on the stage and at each side of the organ accommodation was also provided for music lovers. The Diva received an ovation as she appeared on the stage in a creation by Worth of pale shell pink georgette, fashioned with straight-lined back, and pouched and draped front. At the low set waistline in the front appeared elaborate embroideries in crystal and diamante, from beneath which fell a drape of powder blue, drawn to the right side, and falling below the hemline. Diamante clasps caught the filmy sleeves, and round her shoulders the singer wore a scarf of misty pink tulle. A diamond tiara and glittering diamante shoes completed her toilette, while Melba wore her most-magnificent jewels, comprising diamond rings and bracelets, ropes of pearls, and a long slender chain of platinum-set diamonds, from which hung a sapphire pendant.
At the close of her first group of songs, and, again, later in the programme, Dame Nellie received quantities of floral gifts. Among them was a sheaf of poinsettia and spikes of gladiolus toning from palest lemon to deep red, mounted on a pedestal, the base of which was hidden in blossoming banksia and roses. From the Lyceum Club was a bouquet of pink roses and sweet peas set in powder blue tulle, and tied with blue ribbons, and other floral gifts were a sheaf of arum lilies, and bouquets of Iceland poppies, gerberas, roses, and sweet peas.
—“Melba’s farewell: gala night at exhibition”, Brisbane Courier, 14 June 1927. (The article went on to name many dozens of worthy and notable Queenslanders who were in the audience).
At her final farewell concert in Brisbane, on the evening of Thursday 7 July 1927, the performance was broadcast live on radio station 4QG. Here is a newspaper report:.
It was the first time in her wonderfully successful career that a whole concert given by Dame Melba was broadcast. The information that the concert would be broadcast had been wired to other States, and New Zealand, and it is possible that between two and three million persons listened-in to the concert.
During the evening, Dame Melba spoke into the microphone, and said she hoped the listeners had had as much pleasure in listening to her as she had had in broadcasting the concert.
Responding to numerous requests by letter, Dame Melba sang two old favorites, “Comin’ thro’ the Rye,” and “Hame Sweet Hame.”
—“Melba concert broadcast”, Daily Mercury (Mackay), 8 July 1927.
Here are recordings of the voice of Nellie Melba as she sings those two favourites. First, “Comin’ through the rye”, recorded in New York in 1913. We hear an original disc played on a 78rpm gramophone to evoke the experience many of her fans enjoyed. [source]
And here she is singing “Home, sweet home.” This recording has been digitally processed to remove some of the hiss and crackle.
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