Tost & Rohu Museum
Bill of sale of artefact to Australian Museum 1904
When the Chicago World Fair Committee reported in 1891 that ‘a good deal of bird and animal stuffing, done in Sydney, is performed by females’, it was definitely including the dynamic mother and daughter team of Jane Catherine Tost and Ada Jane Tost. Ada Jane Coates was widowed with three children when the taxidermy firm Tost & Coates was born in 1872. By the time Ada married Henry Stewart Rohu in 1878, the growing middle-class taste for fancy work and stuffed animals in the home meant that the enterprise in 60 William Street was set to expand.
Tost & Rohu – taxidermists, tanners, furriers and curio dealers – was widely advertised. Visitors to Sydney were enticed to visit the shop boasting ‘the largest stock in Australia of genuine native implements and curiosities, carved emu eggs and other beautiful souvenirs, skins of foreign and Australasian birds, beasts and reptiles, live snakes (non-venomous), entomological specimens & requisites, birds and animals mounted in life-like style, fancywork goods and glass domes.' There was something there for everyone. The taxidermists won at least 20 medals for their meticulous craftsmanship at international trade exhibitions.
Tost & Rohu – taxidermists, tanners, furriers and curio dealers – was widely advertised. Visitors to Sydney were enticed to visit the shop boasting ‘the largest stock in Australia of genuine native implements and curiosities, carved emu eggs and other beautiful souvenirs, skins of foreign and Australasian birds, beasts and reptiles, live snakes (non-venomous), entomological specimens & requisites, birds and animals mounted in life-like style, fancywork goods and glass domes.' There was something there for everyone. The taxidermists won at least 20 medals for their meticulous craftsmanship at international trade exhibitions.
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Between the 1870s and 1920s the Australian Museum kept a watchful eye on goods being offered at ‘the queerest shop in Australia’, as it came to be known, acquiring about 130 ethnographic items from them as well as other, natural history specimens. Tost and Rohu artefacts can be found today in museums in Australia, New Zealand, England and Ireland.
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Sydney Morning Herald, Friday 31 December 1886
This newspaper article gives us some idea about the range of items, artifacts and animals that made the Tost and Rohu Museum 'the queerest place in Australia'. Exhibits included an electrical machine, a working model circus, mechanical figures and a galvanic battery. The museum had live snakes and reptiles, including a snake 14 feet in length!
It is interesting to note that Henry Rohu gave lectures at the museum about snakes and reptiles and was planning to visit public schools in the district to educate students on the difference between poisonous and harmless reptiles.
