Winifred Craig (1879-1970)

Early HSV member

Winifred Craig was the daughter of Thomas Major and Frances Taaffe. Her husband Matthew was an architect and surveyor. Their only child Sybil, born in London in 1901, was an artist. The Craigs returned to Australia in 1902 and lived in Caulfield in a home designed by Matthew Craig. Here, they entertained artists and musicians, daughter Sybil describing it as a ‘suburban bohemian household’.

Winifred and her daughter were avid collectors of art and Australiana. Both had extensive collections of books, artwork, photographs and book plates. It seems that nothing was ever thrown out and daughter Sybil, who died in 1989, bequeathed the family’s collection to the State Library of Victoria – 108 boxes of it – while much of Sybil’s artwork went to the National Gallery of Victoria.

The Winifred Craig material in the extensive State Library collection is made up of letters, diaries, invoices, notes written on scraps of reused paper or in school exercise books, many relating to book collecting and her interest in art and all things Australian. She was also interested in history and joined the Historical Society of Victoria in 1937. Among her papers are notebooks, scrapbooks and an unpublished manuscript of her history of the south-eastern suburbs of Melbourne. There are also a number of her daughter’s designs for an logo for the Historical Society of Victoria.

Kaleidoscope exhibition text by Cheryl Griffin, February 2022. Full entry to follow.