Lady Teresa Hamilton opened Hobart’s first “Christmas Card Exhibition” in late 1889. A good while later I became fascinated with this event and what it represented.
I’m admittedly a sucker for stories about things that were. Who wouldn’t like to find a painting thought destroyed or uncover a book once lost? So, as I contemplated the fact that that more than 450 Tasmanians had entered original designs, I realised this event was probably the greatest concentration of local art colonial Tasmania had ever seen. What had happened to all those entries? Where are Tasmania’s lost Christmas cards?
It is one of the great ironies of history that the common things tend to get thrown away, making them rare in the long run. Which is a shame because such everyday objects tell us as much about a society as the treasured things which tend to get deliberately preserved. But, in a way, Christmas cards are unusual for belonging in both categories: treasure and trash. Even as early as 1887 The Tasmanian newspaper could run a story headed “Christmas cards, and what to do with them”, offering advice for dealing with the seemingly timeless problem of nostalgic cardboard Christmas clutter, slowly collecting with the passing years.
The Christmas card really took off as one of the 19th century’s great fads. By the late 1860s it was leaving a discernible impact in Tasmania, where merchants were importing Christmas cards in bulk. In August 1868, for instance, three cases of “stationery and Christmas cards” were packed aboard the Windward in London and shipped to Hobart just in time for Christmas. The Araunah did similarly, bringing “a splendid assortment of Christmas and New Year cards” from London to Launceston, where they could be purchased at Davies’ Cheap Fancy Repository.
Imports dominated the Tasmanian Christmas card market well into the 1870s. While someone corresponded with The Mercury in 1873 to suggest local printers should manufacture Australian-themed cards, he or she lacked the conviction of their idea to put their name to their letter.
But a domestic Christmas card manufactory was so obvious an idea as to be inevitable. If the tipping point were to be dated, then few years could be better chosen than 1881 when Sydney publisher John Sands had the canny idea of running an inter-colonial competition. By offering cash incentives to elicit “the best designs, of a distinctively Australian character”, Sands attracted 662 entries and a lot of free advertising as word of the competition spread. Ultimately, second prize went to a Tasmanian. This was design number 183, entered by Emma E. Mather, of Hobart, which reportedly “represents a spray of flowers”.
If Sands’ competition was a stroke of commercial genius, then so too was his next idea: a follow-up competition for verses to go with the pictures. Here another Tasmanian placed well. The Reverend C. W. Roberts of Latrobe reportedly took out a third place in a “long” category and second place in a “short” one.
Able to see and replicate a good idea, Tasmanian stationers leapt into action in the months following this famous national competition. While J Walch and Sons still mainly imported cards from Europe and America, by late 1881 the stationer was also offering customers the option of buying “a series of hand-painted Christmas cards, representing Tasmanian flowers, which are certainly most beautifully done”.
This was proof that Christmas cards had become a popular form of local artistic expression. And this sense of a domestic artisanal aesthetic especially comes through in the contemporary reportage of the Christmas Card Exhibition of 1889, where Tasmanian themes and scenes dominated. Watercolour entries included “Tasmanian flowers”, perhaps mimicking the growing desire for floral Tasmanian cards which could especially delight friends and family still abroad in a European winter.
Most cards went undescribed, although a few attracted fleeting descriptions in newspaper accounts of the exhibition. Among the prize winners was a “sprig of native laurel” in the pencilwork category, and “a scene on the Huon-road” in the oil category, with “an evening scene off Battery Point” highly commended, and “Tasman’s Arch” taking first place in the pen and ink category. Collectively, they suggest of an increasingly familiar, almost touristic vision of Tasmania.
“View near New Town” was the photographic champion, usefully marking another major shift in the Tasmanian Christmas card market. But it also marks a turn in my story, for this is where I stopped following the newspapers and started hunting for cards.
. . .
Unsurprisingly, given its lack of a functional open access catalogue of the sort used by other state museums in the 2020s, the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery proved decidedly unhelpful. Who knows what Christmas card treasures it holds besides a few donations mentioned in droll annual reports?
I had better luck with the Tasmanian Archives in the State Library. There I could quickly find a suite of Tasmanian photographic Christmas cards. Some stunning images by Sorell’s Albert Archer Rollings stood out from the Christmases of yesteryear, including one depicting a sharp rose and another a group of dapper bicyclists.
Other photographic cards were less accomplished, but still interesting for their historic import. These included miners at Beaconsfield, the courthouse in Richmond, a church in Longford, and a waterfall that greeted the recipients with “Sincere Greetings”.
Similarly interesting was the State Library’s collection of illustrated Christmas cards. A bespoke example from 1911 “From the Staff of the Public Wks Dept” showed a house, while another undated but nevertheless antique one depicted both Russell Falls and Launceston’s Cataract Hill and wished “A Happy and Joyous Season to You”.
But the best was yet to come. After starting with the big public institutions, I turned to the smaller repositories and soon found a private collection of hand-painted Christmas cards that had been exhibited at the University of Tasmania’s Library. These were painted by Alfred May, who was in Tasmania by 1874. The cards had embossed messages, above which May had painted flowers and birdlife as well as bits of Tasmanian scenery in the background. There was a pair of birds sitting above a distinctly east coast waterline, some flowers which foregrounded bush and hills and reflective water, and my favourite: a beachside owl watching you while the moon rises above the sea behind him.
The instant I saw these, I recognised evidence of that Tasmanian tradition which, while it still endures among the crafty-minded, seemed to have peaked around 1889. Looking into the eyes of birds painted long ago I realised that, while I might not have found the cache of entries, I may have found an entrant.
May was living in Tasmania during the days of the Christmas Card Exhibition, after all, so I wondered if he was therefore also a contributor, perhaps even a winner. Among the things my little trawl through the story of Christmas cards had taught me was the fact that the watercolour prize had gone to an anonymous entrant. While May’s surviving cards belong to a different medium, who knows what else he did? And with this question still lingering I wondered further: what other Tasmanian scenes might endure from Christmases past?
Nick Brodie is a professional history nerd, based in Hobart. He is the author of several popular history books, including The Vandemonian War, Under Fire, and 1787: The Lost Chapters of Australia's Beginnings, which all have substantial Tasmanian content. Appearing regularly on ABC television and radio as a historical and current affairs commentator, Nick is one of Australia's most recognisable millennial historians.
