27/09/2026
The sixteenth in a series of random images from the collection of the Tweed Regional Museum.
The Museum's description: 'Eliza Rendell [sic]-Crowther-Maslem [sic].' Another copy dates the photograph to 26 August 1922.
The Tweed River Historical Society's 'The Log Book', Number 22, described the collection from which this photograph comes as follows:
'Two folios [books] of [Wesley Conway] Crowther's material have been put together. Folio One contains letters to himself, his mother, Mrs. Eliza Maslin [sic] and his father, Mr. Fred Crowther. One in particular to his father, written in a beautiful copper-plate hand, from the Curator of the Australian Museum in 1896, thanks him for his donation to that Institution.
'The second has a collection of postcards, religious, humourous, amorous, and photographic scenes from England. There are also old labels and advertisements, ration cards from World War II, a School Magazine dated June 1, 1993, etc., altogether a wealth of material for a researcher into times at the end of last century and the beginnings of this one in the Tweed.'
Eliza Randall was born in 1877. She married Frederick Crowther in 1895. She had three children - Wesley Conway born in 1895, Frederick Arthur born in 1897, and Ethel born (and died) in 1902. By 1901 her boys were in care, and through the first decade of the 1900s Eliza was chasing Frederick for child support. Her youngest son, Frederick Arthur, enlisted in the AIF during WWI, was wounded, returned to Australia, married in 1920, had a child in 1921, but unfortunately died on Christmas Day in 1923 when clambering about the waterfalls of the Blue Mountains. In the meantime, Wesley had moved to the Tweed and was exempted from the first conscription call up because Frederick was serving. Later, probably during the 1930s, Eliza moved to the Tweed to be near Wesley. She remarried in 1936. Her second husband, James Maslen (sometimes called Masten), died in 1946. She passed away in 1951.
It is interesting to see her belief system in the last years of her life reflected in a letter from the 'C.S.S. [Communitas Sancti Spiritus]', or more formally the 'The Panacea Society', a millenarian group of the 1920s and 1930s:
'Thank you for your report. We are glad to know you are drinking & using the Water regularly, for you will certainly be helped to become strong & well. The Blue Cross Packet will bring you a sense of comfort & protection, for when one realises they are in God's Hands, & are obedient enough to use His Method, a sense of peace always comes to them. Your writing is getting very nice & and is plain & clean to read, you will be helped even in that way, as you are trying.'
[The Panacea Society believed that Octavia’s breath [Octavia was Mabel Barltrop, the founder of the Society, supposedly the Daughter of God] had the power to cure. She would breathe over linen which was then cut into small squares and placed in water, while a prayer was spoken. The linen squares blessed by Octavia were a ‘panacea’ for all ills and posted out around the world. (https://panaceamuseum.org/news/hidden-gem-in-the-centre-of-bedford.)]
There is much more than 'copperplate' handwriting in this collection!
