The jewellery’s significance was immediately recognised by many bidders and it sold for many times its estimate to a private Australian buyer, according to a report in the British Antiques Trades Gazette.
It is hard to see much of a profit left in the price of a gold bracelet, the most expensive of the Australian jewellery lots sold by Chorley’s Auctions of Prinknesh Abbey Park near Cheltenham for £57,000 plus premium as reported in the latest edition of the Antiques Trades Gazette. The price was eight times the mid pre-sale estimate of £7000.
They were all well provenanced to the same source. They came by direct descent from Hugh Hamilton (1822-1900) a younger son of the Hamiltons of Sundrum in Ayrshire. The catalogue told us he went to Australia as an early pioneer settler at the age of 19 in 1841, establishing the Tomanbil and Boyd stations on the Lachlan River in New South Wales. He lost most of his cattle in a severe drought in 1849 and took on the post of assistant gold commissioner at Ophir near Bathurst during the gold rush but eventually returned successfully to farming.
Notes in the lot descriptions include references to the catalogue 'Brilliant' edited by Eva Czernis-Ryl, 2011 published by the National Library of Australia, and celebrating "an astonishing century of gold and silversmithing and jewellery making in colonial and post-Federation Australia."
The bracelet was in the style of Julius Hogarth but bore the mark of Ludwig Qwist – two leading colonial silversmiths in one! The oxidised silver figure of a kangaroo, an emu and an Aborigine would have been supplied by Hogarth, the cataloguer surmises.
As well as the bracelet there was a gold brooch, attributed to Hogarth & Erichsen, Sydney circa 1860, of oval openwork form depicting a kangaroo and emu within a surround of native flora including grass tree and banksia, 5cm wide, approximately 19.2gm, which made £14,000 hammer
The third item in the group, a pair of Australian gold ear pendants, possibly by Hogarth, Erichsen & Co, circa 1860, each of oval openwork form, with one depicting an emu, the other a kangaroo, both with surround of native flora, screw fixings, in a fitted case sold for £1900.
The second group of objects offered in Dixie was obviously of much less obvious interest to Australian arbitragists. It was a hoard of objects associated with, and including the journal of an American ship, the Shenandoah, that visited Melbourne during the Civil War. Those offerings were as much, if not more, Americana than Australiana.
These were well off the beaten highways of Australiana searchers and the lot sold for $US19,470 including 18 per cent buyer's premium.
This was far less that the bracelet, which glistened, and the Dixie ephemera seems to have attracted little poking around by members of the Australiana repatriation trade, better known as arbitrageurs.
That journal was sold well over a year and a half ago at an auction held by Case Antiques Auctions & Appraisals in its rooms in Knoxville near the Smokey Mountains, in Tennessee south of the Mason Dixon Line, where objects of Confederate history are usually at a premium.
But a public appeal by the State Library of Victoria to raise $100,000 to secure the journal was successful and it has now gone into the library’s collection.
The so far unnamed Melbourne dealer Mr Doug Stewart is the dealer who managed to smoke out the journal and turn it into a most unlikely sleeper. Americana usually sells for much more than Australiana. Dealers Down Under often shame local collectors by comparing the big sums payable for Americana, compared with the movable heritage of Australia’s past.
It seems that in the Land of David Crockett, “King of the Wild Frontier” the journal less highly valued than in Australia. Mr Stewart confirmed that he had bought the diary at an auction in the US. The description in the Knoxville catalogue shows it is the same item. By the standards of sleepers in the book trade, the find has produced no more than a comfortable profit. The estimates were $US10,000 to $12,000.
Mr Stewart told Australian Art Sales Digest that he was amazed to secure the item for the price, which must be largely explained by the absence of any serious counter-bidding by other members of the Australian book trade.
This was despite the extreme diligence with which the book trade has pursued Australiana overseas. Why, Sydney rare book dealer Anne McCormick has even turned up at Australian stamp sales where early colonial correspondence occasionally can be found inside envelopes any other buyer in the room (most stamp dealers are on the phone bidding) will be chasing for the stamps or postal markings placed upon them.
Mr Stewart, as subscribers to his catalogues will agree, seems to be learning something from those handsome depictions in early colonial picture plate books of Aborigines smoking out possums.
Only his forte is old and rare books and prints. This year he is also doing more than half a dozen book fairs around the world.
A big part of the success required of a dealer in smoking out a sleeper is having an obvious buyer for it.
If the State Library of Victoria had not been interested, then perhaps the Australian National Maritime might have been, especially given its American Gallery.
The Shenandoah was responsible for firing what was to be the last shot in the American Civil War. Further, it was the centre of expensive post-Civil War litigation, known as the Alabama Claims, between the American and British governments for raids on the Union merchant fleet carried out by Confederate ships whose port of origin was the United Kingdom
Offered in Knoxville by descendants of the onboard officer, Lieutenant Dabney Scales’ descendants, the previously unknown journal had been kept within the family for generations and offered a fresh insight into the world of the Shenandoah, particularly the 24 days it spent in Melbourne and the subsequent voyage through the Pacific Ocean to the Arctic circle, its rounding of Cape Horn and final surrender and lowering of the Confederate flag in Liverpool in 1865.
Given the orders to destroy the New England whaling fleet, the partially crewed Confederate ship circumnavigated the earth, capturing 38 vessels and taking over 1000 prisoners between 1864-65.
Starting bid for the journal, acquired with rare photographs and other documents from Scales’ descendants in West Tennessee, was $5,000. Case Antiques President John Case, said before the auction that national, state and Civil War museums as well as private collectors were interested in the account.
The most interesting part of the deal however is the greater applied financial appreciation of the item in Australia, for that, of course is where it ended up. The item is just as significantly a piece of Americana and Australiana vendors have repeatedly pointed to Americana prices to justify their prices.
The only reason it seems that it was let go – that American interests ultimately triumphed over Australian – was that it was not mainstream Americana. It was Confederate.
The State Library of Victoria also acquired:
An ambrotype portrait of Lt Dabney Scales, in his US Naval Academy uniform, Annapolis, c.1859.
· A carte-de-visite photograph of Dabney Scales, in Confederate dress uniform, taken in Melbourne, 1865.
· A contemporary photograph of an artist’s representation of the “Shenandoah”; with the name of the Paris photographer on the back.
· Presentation copy of the pamphlet Cruises of the Confederate State Steamers “Shenandoah” and “Nashville”, by Captain William C. Whittle, dated 1910, and inscribed by the author 'To Dabney Scales'.