Gunning & District Historical Society

Gunning Public School visited Pye Cottage Museum in 2019. Forty students from years 3 and 4 kept their guides busy as they studied the displays and asked questions about family life in a four-roomed, slab-walled house. Before 1867, there were only two rooms - a kitchen/dining room and a bedroom. When the children entered these first rooms, they tried to imagine how the "folk" who lived in this tiny house kept warm and clean, how they cooked their food and how they relaxed at the end of the day. A PYE RETURNS TO PYE COTTAGE Nicholas Pye and Harrison Picker at Pye Cottage Museum Photo G Dickson Nicholas Pye and Harrison Picker started by examining the automobile advertisements in the Gunning Gazette.   Perhaps when Pyes lived in the cottage at Dalton from the mid 1920s through to the 1940s, the adults also read this local paper, mended the clothes or played popular songs or hymns on a portable organ?     Pye Cottage showing the original two rooms. Photo RA Spiller With the ...

The mystery is solved! Five sewing machines were taken out of store in 2020 and displayed in Pye Cottage Museum, Gunning. The blog “A Touch of Old World Charm,” featured two “hand-operated” sewing machines. The small, iron machine seemed to be a “mystery.” The second blog covered two of our treadle machines, an Australian Beale and a Singer model, the Sphinx . (1, 2) In this blog I can correct an earlier error and show off the fifth sewing machine in our collection, a Nirvana “drophead treadle machine.”  It seemed that the mystery was, which “hand-operated” machine had been “Donated by Mrs Offley of Jerrawa?” That label, hand printed by someone from Gunning & District Historical Society, was in one drawer of a very well-kept drophead, treadle machine, the Nirvana. In other drawers, there were two sets of attachments and a detailed manual. The illustrations in the manual clearly match our Nirvana.  This handwritten note was in another drawer of the treadle machine: Donation...

by Leslie Bush Well we have certainly been very lucky over the past several months. We have had some very generous donations come in and while they vary in kind, they are each a treasure in their own right.   Historical Mortgage & Conveyancing Documents Donated by Phyllis & Margaret Iliff,  Victoria Mortgage, Conveyancing and Statutory Declarations  In November we received a donation of a wonderful collection of Historic documents from a Mother and daughter in Victoria. They were going to donate them to History society in Melbourne, but lucky for us they looked up Gunning and found there was a Historical society, so decided to donate them to us.  And it was by chance that this great collection was found. Margaret and her mother Phyllis were cleaning out cupboards in Phyllis' house when they came across them in an envelope. Margaret thought they may have been old wills as her Mothers' partner Alan Belcher who had passed 4 years earlier was a solicitor. Who gav...