Fishing flies inside turquoise and white cardboard box

View this record on the National Museum of Australia's website

Type: Fishing lures
Place: London, England; Bungendore, New South Wales, Australia
Materials: Cardboard, Feather, Glue, Ink, Metal - non specific, Paper, Unidentified material
Collection: Gidleigh collection
Accession number: 2005.0105.0196

Description

A set of eleven fishing flies inside a square turquoise and white cardboard box with a removable lid. The black ink text on the lid partially reads 'OGDEN SMITHS / FINEST QUALITY / "MERMAID" / TROUT FLIES / ...'. The flies consist of brown fluffy feathers and have a single barbed hook. A pinkish beige powder is loose in the box base.

This box of fishing flies belonged to Thomas Lloyd Forster Rutledge, who was a keen fisherman. During the 1930s, he and some friends spent some time camping and indulging his passion for fly fishing for trout near the Crackenback river in the Snowy Mountains in New South Wales.

About the collection

This collection comprises over two hundred objects belonging to the Rutledge family of 'Gidleigh', a pastoralist property first established near Bungendore, NSW, in 1855. The collection includes tools used for agricultural practices, animal and household management, and equipment used for fly-fishing and horse-riding. Collectively, these objects illustrate aspects of rural life and domestic activities undertaken most notably by Jane (Jean) Ruth Morphy Forster Rutledge (1853-1932) and her son Thomas Lloyd Forster Rutledge (1889-1958) during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This collection is illustrative of broad areas of Australian social history including pastoralism, medicine and veterinary science, and domestic and recreational lives. The land at 'Gidleigh' was first granted to Admiral Philip Parker King (1791-1856) in 1834, and was subsequently purchased in 1855 by Irish settler Thomas Rutledge (1817-1904) to run sheep and cattle. The family owned and managed the property for 150 years until 2005. This collection offers significant research potential into both rural self-sufficiency, and agricultural and veterinary technologies.

Read live from the Museum's Collection API (12/11/2026, 6:15:20 am). Record last updated by the Museum 2025-02-17. Licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.