Happy New Year

HAPPY NEW YEAR AND HERE IS TO OUR NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTION TO BE A MORE ACTIVE AND RESPONSIVE WEBSITE. We start with some recent and older posters and the like for new year’s eve.

If you haven’t looked it up already, don’t bother. Just after midnight in Washington, Donald Trump tweeted: “Despite the constant negative press covfefe.” That was it. No more. Just that word “covfefe” left hanging there.

Raphael Kirchner (1876 – 1917) was an Austrian artist, principally a portrait painter and illustrator best known for work in the Art Nouveau style and especially in postcard format. In Germany pigs, four leaved clovers, horse shoes, toadstool and a chimney sweep are all signs of good luck. Do three pigs mean good luck x 3?

Wikipedia advises (and is quoted by Trove):

The Queenslander was the weekly summary and literary edition of the Brisbane Courier (now The Courier-Mail), since the 1850s the leading journal in the colony and later federal state of Queensland, Australia. The Queenslander was launched by the Brisbane Newspaper Company in 1866 and it was discontinued in 1939.

In a country the size of Australia a daily newspaper of some prominence could only reach the bush and outlying districts if it also published a weekly edition. Yet the Queenslander, under the managing editorship of Gresley Lukin (managing editor from November 1873 to 21 December 1880), also came to find additional use as a literary magazine.

Make Melbourne marvellous again (to misquote President Trump), why and when did this name come about. The Museum Victoria website advises:

Visitors to Melbourne in the 1880s were amazed. Here in the Southern Hemisphere was a city larger than most European capitals. In just a decade the population had doubled, racing to half-a-million. Citizens strutted the streets, bursting with pride as their city boomed.

While Sydney was seen as slow and steady, Melbourne was fast and reckless. Ornate office buildings up to 12 storeys high rivalled those of New York, London and Chicago. Money was poured into lavishly decorated banks, hotels and coffee palaces. Towers, spires, domes and turrets reached to the skies.

By 1891 the high times were coming to an end. Banks closed their doors, stockbrokers panicked and thousands lost jobs, homes and savings. Some escaped unscathed but many were plunged into hardship.

It was a dramatic fall, and a far more sober and cautious Melbourne faced the new century.

What will 2018 be like for collectors? Sober and cautious? Probably not. Happy new year.