The Collectors
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Friday 17 November 2006
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Mark collects pot lids and other pharmaceutical related products.
He has 280 lids, 50 of these are Australian. Most of his collection is dated 1850 – 1910 and was imported from the UK. He has some that were made in Victoria during the gold rush era due to the wealth of the state at this time. He has a pot of hair preserving cream with the brand name ‘Pomade’ made by a chemist in Geelong in the late 1800s. Mark started collecting when he was 12 and used to dig around tips, derelict housing sites and backyard dumps. He still has his first lid that he found in a Ballarat dump. Mark has two pots from 1890 that contain white rose paste used as toothpaste. He found these in a cellar in the Barossa Valley still with the paper band wrapped around the rim – they hadn’t been opened.
Gradually over time the products moved from being printed pots to having paper labels. Some of most valuable are the ones produced for the Australian chemist. Mark says a new world record was set when a lid that had been broken and re-glued fetched $11,000. To begin a collection such as this, garage sales and auctions are good places to start looking.
