Week 6 e-tivity - Inscaping the past
Inscape is the reverse of landscape: the incidental details that make our picture of the past detailed and nuanced. Using inscape details you have sourced from a past newspaper or similar, write a descriptive narrative about your person or place from your family history.
Word limit 250 words.
Christmas in Windsor
If we travel back in time to Windsor, New South
Wales, arriving just in time for Christmas in the 1890s, where do we go for
provisions?
According to advertisements in the local newspapers,
the place to go is the Hawkesbury Store in George Street.
Need provisions for Christmas cooking? The
Hawkesbury Store ‘always keeps the best quality of Christmas Fruits, and
general stock of Groceries, at the very Lowest Cash Prices.’
If a Christmas cake is required purchase an Arnott’s
cake for 2/- or order a Christmas cake from the store bakery for sixpence a lb.
‘The Leading and Largest Bakery Establishment in the District’ also makes only
the best bread and pastries.
All groceries are sold but the speciality of the
store is Tea. Customers have the opportunity to purchase blends of China, India
or Ceylon tea having ‘an advantage of at least 3d per lb’.
And, of course, there is a wide range of fresh
confectionery available, perfect for the Christmas season.
The Hawkesbury Store sells much more than food. Need
‘cups and saucers, a kettle, a boiler to cook the Xmas pudding in’? Then go to
the Hawkesbury Store.
Other items sold include ironmongery, wall-paper,
paints and brush-ware, corn and chaff plus seeds of all kinds. In fact
everything you might ever need.
As an added bonus for customers, each day carts from
the Hawkesbury Store travel through the district delivering supplies and
collecting orders from those unable to make the trip to town.
Why would you shop anywhere else?
Eight of my convicts and their subsequent families lived in the Windsor district and it is not unreasonable to assume that many, if not all of them, would have shopped at the Hawkesbury Store.
The Hawkesbury Store was founded by Uriah Moses (1780-1847) and the business remained in the family for many generations. In the 1890s the proprietor was William Moses, one of Uriah's sons.
Trove shows a number of advertisements in the 1890s for the Hawkesbury Store in The Windsor and Richmond Gazette.
A detailed article describing the store can be found in The Hawkesbury Chronicle and Farmers Advocate 16 October 1886.
Eight of my convicts and their subsequent families lived in the Windsor district and it is not unreasonable to assume that many, if not all of them, would have shopped at the Hawkesbury Store.
The Hawkesbury Store was founded by Uriah Moses (1780-1847) and the business remained in the family for many generations. In the 1890s the proprietor was William Moses, one of Uriah's sons.
Trove shows a number of advertisements in the 1890s for the Hawkesbury Store in The Windsor and Richmond Gazette.
A detailed article describing the store can be found in The Hawkesbury Chronicle and Farmers Advocate 16 October 1886.
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