Gunning & District Historical Society

Two treadle sewing machines with a Touch of Old World Charm This post covers two nineteenth-century sewing machines displayed in “A Touch of Old World Charm” exhibition in the folk museum in Pye Cottage, Gunning, New South Wales.  They are the Singer Sphinx and the Beale. Two hand-operated machines donated to Gunning and District Historical Society were described in an earlier blog, and a treadle machine made in 1910 will feature in a later post. A foreign country? “ The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. ” is the opening sentence of L P Hartley's The Go-Between  (1953). But those words were first spoken by the writer’s friend in a 1949 lecture. (1.) Obtaining clothes was undoubtedly different in rural New South Wales in the late nineteenth to today’s easy shopping. Of course, then there was a local store or two and mail-order from the big city, for a price, for ready-made clothes. When the train line was extended from Goulburn to Gunning in 1875, ...