Published 2 August 2023
ISBN: 978-1-922923-03-5
Format: Paperback
AU: $32.99
Categories: Memoir
about the authors
Jane Crowley has worked side by side with her father Athol for most of her life. Her career in the world of antiques began in earnest at the age of eight, when she restored and sold her first piece, an Australian cedar clerk’s desk. Since then, the two have attended auctions, cleared estates and sold more pieces of furniture than they could count. Their love of the hunt and for storytelling is only surpassed by the passion they have for their family and the businesses they began together, Dirty Janes Bowral and Canberra.
Beeswax and Tall Tales
By JANE CROWLEY and ATHOL SALTER
As an antique dealer, Athol Salter has peddled in other people’s stories for over sixty years. From humble beginnings in his Junque Shop in country New South Wales in the 1960s to Dirty Janes in the Southern Highlands, he has rummaged through ramshackle huts, dealt with dubious property from deceased estates and cleared grand country properties and crumbling mansions looking for pieces filled with stories to pass on.
Beeswax and Tall Tales includes not just snippets from Athol’s hilarious and poignant life, but the stories told in the antiques he trades and the enchanting people he meets along the way – from farmhands, colourful eccentrics and Italian migrants to long-lost relatives, British squires and a charming cockatoo…