Australia In The Good Old Days
By Lasseter's Commercial Review 1911
Published by Paul Hamlyn Pty Ltd: Sydney 1979
"What was it really like in Australia in the good old days of 1911? Social histories and biographies, old newspapers, museums, and antique and curio shops provide some of the answers—but not all, for choice of subject and specialisation tend to isolate the objects from their original crowded and complex environment. Catalogues, however, fill many of the gaps. In a huge, sprawling country, where cities and towns were few and far between and where the nearest general store, often many miles away, could not hope to stock all the requisites of a household, farm or station, mail order catalogues brought all the necessities, luxuries and trivia of daily life to people living f from department stores. Foodstuffs, wines, tools, clothing, reading matter, kitchenware, furniture, toys, sporting goods, saddlery, farm machinery—there was nothing that could not be bought through the pages of the great Lassetter catalogues that flourished during the last decades of the nineteenth and early decades of the twentieth century. More than 1200 pages were tightly crammed with some 7000 items in Lassetter's Catalogue No. 26 of 1911, from which the facsimiles that make up this book were chosen.
Here are pages to delight the collector of Edwardian Australiana, the person tripping on nostalgia, the home or apartment owner looking for new decorating ideas. Travelling through this huge department store, moving from department to department, browsing over this counter and that, you will find the things that provided the true domestic flavour of Australia in the good old days."
