Pewter Case and Illuminated Address

One of the most decorative and beautiful items in the Cairns Historical Society Collection, now on show in the Cairns Museum 22 March 2025 – 19 May 2025, is an impressive, pewter box hammered deftly in the Arts and Crafts style, which was popular in the late 19th Century and early 20th century across the British Empire. This casket holds a rare and delightful illuminated address intended as a gift from the community to a significant early settler of Cairns: Mr William John Munro.

W. J. Munro built substantial business interests in livestock, butchery, mining and sugar cane, before entering civic life as Alderman on the Cairns Divisional Board in 1895. The address depicts the aspects of his personal and professional life for which he is best remembered locally. It contains watercolour depictions of the Munro-Martin home “Fairview” (locally known as ‘The House on the Hill’) and scenes of the sugar industry around the Mulgrave River, including the river itself, the Mulgrave Sugar Mill and the Cairns-Mulgrave Tramway. 

These images reference Munro’s leadership and investment in the local sugar industry that enabled the district to capitalise on the Government’s Sugar Works Guarantee Act (SWGA) of 1893. The Act committed the Colonial Government to financing the construction of sugar mills in any district that had enough cane available to enable the mills to operate profitably. Reportedly the first public railway constructed and worked by a Local Authority in Australia, Munro was a driving force behind construction of the Cairns to Mulgrave (and later Babinda), 3ft 6-inch railway gauge tramway. The foundations laid for the sugar industry during this era would underwrite the development of Cairns right through until the 1970s.

First established in Sydney 1853, Hardy Brothers jewellers and importers of silverware opened a show room in Brisbane in 1894. They were the premier colonial jeweller of the time for NSW and Qld. This decorative, silk lined, pewter box was made by Hardy Brothers, to hold an illuminated address. Illumination is a labour intensive art that ‘lights up’ the pages of significant texts such as bibles, addresses (designed to commemorate special occasions or people) and albums. The illuminated text within this pewter box was commissioned by the Ratepayers of the Shire of Cairns c.1911 for presentation to Mr William John Munro.

The box and its contents are a marker of a significant civic entrepreneur in early Cairns.  The celebration of Munro’s role indicates an era where development – economic, population and infrastructure – were seen as the primary civic enterprise. The manuscript is also a clear document that attests to the significance of the sugar industry to the fortunes of Cairns.

The quality of the work and the commissioning of such a fine pewter casket from the leading jeweller in Brisbane, indicates the existence of a refined taste and the associations between the north and Brisbane and Sydney with which to commission and deliver it. It is evidence to which fully formed networks, conventions and tastes of the business and political elites were imported into a frontier settlement.