Tony Marshall
Senior Librarian (Heritage Collections)
State Library of Tasmania
The Allport Library and Museum of Fine Arts is a wonderful collection of rare books, maps, manuscripts, photographs, works of art and decorative arts (furniture, china, silver and glass).
The Allport collection stands as a record of the creative endeavours of several generations of the Allport family. Joseph and Mary Morton Allport settled in Van Diemen’s Land in 1831 and they and their descendents were a gifted and artistic family. In addition, their grandson Cecil Allport (1858-1926) and his son Henry (1890-1965) were assiduous collectors and added greatly to the Allport family’s collections.
Henry Allport saw the collection’s potential for enriching ordinary people’s lives and envisioned it as being ‘as nearly as may be on the lines of the Mitchell Library in Sydney but with a small fine arts museum attached’. He bequeathed it to the State of Tasmania in 1965 ‘for the benefit of the public’ and it now forms part of the State Library’s Heritage Collections.
The Allport furniture and decorative arts collection consists of pieces created in Great Britain in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. These were collected by Henry Allport and his wife in the early twentieth century to furnish their Sandy Bay home. The collection is now displayed in a series of ‘rooms’ designed to re-create the atmosphere of a gentleman's house of more than 100 years ago.
The State Library was delighted when John and Penny Smith proposed the idea of inviting fourteen of Tasmania’s finest furniture designer-makers to seek inspiration from the Allport collection for the creation of new work, and to then present an exhibition of the resulting pieces alongside the sources of their inspiration.
It has been a great pleasure for staff of the State Library to see this magnificent collection being drawn on, and into, the twenty-first century with such obvious skill, admiration and enjoyment. Different Readings is a fascinating, beautiful, challenging, thought-provoking and humorous exhibition, and wonderfully represents Henry Allport’s vision for how he wanted the Allport collection to be used: to enrich and stimulate the imagination of the people of Tasmania.
