Newspaper classified advertisements can provide an invaluable insight into the wants and needs of a time and place. Some are utterly inexplicable to modern readers. Here’s a selection from various decades.
THE EARLY YEARS
Wants and needs were pretty basic in the first decade of free settlement. Trade, buildings, getting the mail.
The Experiment was the first of the commercial river steamers. She had a short and often troubled life plying trade between Brisbane and Ipswich, due to an almost preternatural ability to leak, despite constant repairs. She finally foundered in a squall at Queen’s Wharf in 1848. Her role was taken over by the Tamar.
The Courier’s Windmill Reporter reported on the gradual encroachment on his billet by looters and souvenir hunters, and he wasn’t really kidding. Duramboi Davis claimed that the bricks for his shop came from the Windmill. Fortunately the Old Windmill was saved from destruction and repurposed as everything from an observatory to a television transmitter.
Oops.
SITUATIONS
You must understand the management of sheep and men. In that order.
Needlework in all its branches. There are branches.
You need to be multi-lingual as well as multi-skilled in order to drum some much-needed culture into a rough old squatter’s family out in the boondocks, is what the ad doesn’t actually say.
Lots of ads for men to “be boots” at hotels. I presume that they were the people who took the boots from outside rooms for cleaning, and returned them of course, hence respectability being a requirement.
This had me puzzled until I realised that they were asking for hands to help with elastic siding of boots.
Well this seems a bit discriminatory. Why an old man in particular? What if the poor fellow was too old to be generally useful? No social security payments in those days, so they probably found the man and worked him half to death.
And finally, a job advertisement that would make perfect sense to someone in 1866.
It would be inadvisable for me to speculate.
pictures, baths and vegetarian cafes
Before there were photographs, an artist skilled at capturing likenesses would be in demand. You could send your likeness ‘home’ to the family to show that you were not perishing from want, or worse, suffering a lapse in social standing, in your Colonial career.
And the precursor to photos were unique keepsakes for people at the time. Hours of preparation and posing were put into making sure that your likeness reflected your appearance and social standing in the best light. The idea of just picking up a device and inflicting your duckface on random acquaintances would be unthinkable.
Either the indoor plumbing situation in Moreton Bay was even worse that I had imagined, or this is some sort of spa/Turkish scenario. Rules and regulations for the comfort of subscribers suggests the latter.
The Emu Vegetarian Cafe? Oh well, if they wanted to name it after a game meat that was their business. I was pleasantly surprised to hear that Old Brisbane had a vegetarian cafe, albeit one that succumbed to intermittent pescatarian demands.
Another ad that needs context. I’m not an expert, but a sociable is probably the antithesis of the sulky, which I believe was the nickname for a single-occupant horse-drawn carriage. You drove a ‘sulky’ if you were not in the mood for company.
All of the advertisements appeared in the Moreton Bay Courier, The Brisbane Courier and the Courier.
Moreton Bay and More 