“I love a sunburnt country…”

And, I also love being able to welcome the second cultural heritage institution to The Commons on Flickr: the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, Australia.

The Powerhouse team has published 200 photos from its Tyrrell Collection into The Commons; wonderful old photos of Sydney and New South Wales from the turn of the 20th Century. One of the other exciting things about the Tyrrell images is that many of them are geotagged, so you can see what old Sydney town looked like 100 years ago! The Powerhouse is planning to open a group or two on Flickr to see if we can collect ‘then and now’ images of Sydney, using the Tyrrell images as the historical reference. Seb Chan from the Powerhouse has also written about it over at fresh + new(er).

Woman Inside a Settlers Hut
   
Wool-Sorting Room, Clifton Station

Harbour Beach, Manly
   
Cutting Out

In more news about The Commons, we’ve put together some more general information about what the “no known copyright restrictions” rights statement means, and provided links to the further information on the participating institutions’ websites. We also continue to receive expressions of interest from cultural heritage institutions around the world, large and small, and are actively working to continue to expand the program.

Mrs. Seligman, Mrs. Schiff (LOC)The Library of Congress has continued to publish new photos into the Commons after the huge success of the initial release—60,000 tags, millions of photostream views, 10,000 contacts—revealing more mysteries of baseball, battleships and Bankhead from their Bain News Service collection.

The title of this post is drawn from a poem called “My Country” by Dorothea McKellar, written about Australia.