The Lake View House documentation project has restarted

 The Lake View house documentation project has restarted after a bit of a hiatus over winter with the discovery of a suspected black mould problem.

When the project was paused I was in the middle of documenting a nightstand in the main bedroom, and I finished off the documentation yesterday with a rather fine chamber pot made by W.A. Adderley in England.

As Adderley’s changed their potters marks reasonably often we can date this to somewhere between 1886 and 1905, which helps make the point that even in quite middle class and well to do houses in rural Australia at the turn of the twentieth century, indoor plumbing was unusual, and a night time trip to the loo would have involved a trip in the dark to the outhouse at the bottom of the yard - hardly an inviting prospect on a cold and wet winter’s night - explaining the continued use of chamber pots.

It also explains the presence of a hip bath in the kitchen. (I havn't yet documented the kitchen, which is in a separate brick building to reduce the risk of fire spreading to the main house.)

Having a bath was a major undertaking requiring water to be heated on the range, and having a bath in the kitchen - which would be warmer in winter - makes perfect sense.

Besides the chamber pot I documented some Guerlain pasteware from Limoges and a rather nice early twentieth century oil lamp made by Sherwood’s in Birmingham.

And this reinforces something I observed while documenting Dow’s pharmacy - prior to world war one, most manufactured products in Australia were imported, usually from the UK. 

Between the wars and in the immediate post world war two period you see a lot of import substitution with locally made items replacing imported goods and then, from the 1960s onwards one sees local brands being taken over by overseas conglomerates with production being moved offshore to countries with lower production costs.

On a technical note I also used the revived Lumix to photograph the artefacts, rather than the point and shoot Nikon I used document the contents of Dow’s. Using a small lightweight DSLR camera definitely works better documenting larger artefacts and pieces of furniture, although for small objects such as bottles and jars, the Nikon is more than adequate.