Furnishing the house museum
Once the conservation of Elizabeth Farm’s buildings was nearing completion, attention turned to the interiors. The furnishing of Elizabeth Farm as an access-all-areas house museum involved a variety of traditional crafts and trades, some of which had to be completely relearned using historical sources. The process was detailed in a series of four articles by curator Susan Hunt in Craft Australia magazine in 1985, which were then published in a 31-page booklet titled Australian colonial crafts: craft revived for the presentation of Elizabeth Farm.1
The images below show a selection of soft furnishings created for the museum: bed hangings for the principal bedroom, an oilcloth in the vestibule, and a case cover for a chair in the pink bedroom.
The booklet is divided into four sections: ‘Early Australian floorcoverings’ includes oilcloths, rag rugs and matting; ‘Colonial textiles’ discusses bed hangings, window treatments and curtains; ‘Colonial furniture’ emphasises that using replicas of known Macarthur items of furniture shifts the focus of the interpretation from the object itself to how the former occupants lived in the house; and ‘Old technology and new’ explores how convincing copies of known Macarthur objects, such as an elaborate inkwell, were created using modern techniques.
The impact of a historic house’s interior is both visual and tactile. The right “look” is not good enough without the right “feel”. The creation of a “feel” that is both convincing and enjoyable is largely dependant on the careful selection and hanging of textiles.
An excerpt from Australian colonial textiles, p9
Notes
- Susan Hunt, Australian colonial crafts: floorcoverings, textiles, furniture, facsimiles: craft revived for the presentation and restoration of Elizabeth Farm, Historic Houses Trust, Sydney, 1985.
Published on
Dr Scott Hill
Curator
Formal studies in architecture, along with travels through Asia and Europe, furthered Scott’s interest in colonial building, domestic design, and the intrinsic relationship between architecture and landscape. This culminated in his PhD ‘Paper Houses’, which examines the significant colonial identity John Macarthur’s interest in architecture, and the design of the Macarthur houses Elizabeth Farm (1793) and Camden Park (1834). In Scott’s words: ‘understanding a historic house, an interior or landscape is for me a process of 'reverse‐designing', about taking the finished product and digging down to find the 'why': the reasons, the decisions and the myriad hidden influences that led to its creation’. He has been curator at Elizabeth Bay House and Vaucluse House and most recently at Elizabeth Farm, Rouse Hill Estate, and Meroogal; ‘The Curator’ in the award-winning SLM blog The Cook and the Curator; co-curated the Eat Your History: A Shared Table exhibition; and in 2023-24 he was senior curator of the exhibition ‘The People’s House: Sydney Opera House at 50’ at the Museum of Sydney.