PLACE REPRESENTED: Cooma, New South Wales , Australia
ITEM: ornament
NOTES: A wooden statuette of a boat. This is a beautifully detailed travel trinket where the sails even move! But the trinket seems to have been made from left overs from other souvenirs. The boats hull is a Dutch clog (confirmed by the windmill depictions), the sails seem to resemble that of Spanish galleons, the flag on the main mast (I talk the salty sea dog talk) is Dutch and there is a little sticker that says Cooma, NSW.
Waste not , want not, huh?
Cooma is no where near the coast either so I’m not sure about the whole boat choice.
As far as I know neither the Dutch nor the Spanish colonised Cooma, but I wouldn’t put it past them.
Cooma, though, did become the headquarters of the Snowy Mountains Scheme (a hydroelectricity , irrigation, and dam complex that is the largest engineering project ever undertaken in Australia taking some 25 years to complete) during the 1950s and 1960s. The employment of workers was from 32 (mostly European) countries so, perhaps, this explains the cultural potpourri of this trinket.
YEAR (APPROXIMATE): 1960s
MADE FROM: wood
MADE IN: unknown
MANUFACTURER: unknown
DIMENSIONS: 15cm high , 6cm long
From the Goulburn Evening Post Thursday 10 May 1951
“200 HOMES FOR COOMA A Dutch firm, Brederes Boubedriff with its head quarters in Utrecht, Holland. has secured a contract valued close to £400,000 with the Snowy Mountains Authority, for the erection in Cooma of 200 three-bedroomed pre-cut cottages. The first units of this firm, some twelve administrative officers and foremen have arrived in Sydney, and will be the advance guard of a large party of Dutch workmen who will erect the cottages, the timber for which has already been pre-cut In Finland. Both workmen and timber are now on route by sea from Europe, and the first cottage is expected to be erected ready for occupation by the end of November, as the first timber components are expected hero by June. The target set by the Dutch firm is the completion of the 200 cottages by June of next year, and to aid this target the firm is shipping its own hostels with its men. Needless to say the arrival of the Dutch in Cooma will add colour and variety to the cosmopolitan group of workmen already in the area and will soon make Cooma as free from local prejudices and inhibitions as King’s Cross, or at least a worthy rival of that area”.