The Carney Family, Sydney and Melbourne, (Clive, Edna and June Carney) (Clive Carney d.1965)
The role of the Carney family in interior design is discussed in some detail in an SIDA-commissioned interview with designer James Fisher, a former employee as well as in an interview with Malcolm Forbes, also a former employee. The Carney firm was known as “Artistry”.
In this abbreviated excerpt in a 2010 interview with James Fisher, he was asked, “Who were the principals of Artistry?”.
“There was Clive Carney, he was the founder of Artistry, he started in 1933, the same year that Reg Riddell started in Melbourne. And his daughter, June Carney was with them. […] Edna Carney, June’s mother was in the business, she ran the office. They did a huge amount of business in Sydney.
When I was there, they employed five sales people, accountants, a secretary, transport, they were big time. They did most of the Hoyt’s Theatres; they did the Royal Apartments at Government House for the Queen’s visit in 1954, the Australia Hotel. I started working for them in 1962.
Then, they opened a store in South Yarra, Melbourne; they also had a shop in Pymble, one in Edgecliff. They had three shops in Sydney. [In this era] Edgecliff would be similar to Toorak Road, South Yarra. Then there was Queen Street, Woollahra, a fashionable area too. I recall that Deric Deane had a studio in Edgecliff along with Mary White’s School.
In 1963, I moved to their shop in Toorak Road, South Yarra, sort of diagonally opposite from Reg Ridell. Clive Carney, who was born in Melbourne, was determined to open a store in Melbourne. […] Artistry was mad about America so they had many trips to the
States and did a lot of buying from Schumacher and Stroheim and Romann. These were fabulous materials that were ahead of their time in Australia. We had access to all this fabulous stock […].
Mr. Carney died about six years later [death recorded in NSW in 1965]. Then the whole thing became too much for Edna and June and they closed Melbourne down in 1969. […] He never professed to be a decorator, he wasn’t a decorator, he was purely a figurehead who created a very successful company. [Clive Carney, introduction to Furnishing. Art and Practice states: After 25 years experience as a practical furnisher…” i.e. Carney’s career began in 1925]”
His daughter Ms June Carney [later Steglick] trained in design at the Sydney Technical College (ca.1944) and had a high design profile in Sydney in the 1950s. Her travels to the USA and Europe were reported extensively in the social pages in the mid-1950s. After the death of her father in 1969, her career appears to have languished. Resident in Sydney, she declined an interview for the SIDA history project in 2013.
Clive Carney made a significant contribution to interior decoration and design in Australia through his generously illustrated books and a series of radio talks on 2FC in the 1930s and his 1950 book Furnishing. Art and Practice establishes the Carneys as important figures in the development of the discipline.
Clive Carney. Furnishing. Art and Practice. Oxford University Press, 1950. (The dust cover of this book states “This is the first comprehensive book on furnishing to be published in Australia.”) Line drawings by June Carney, ASTC [Associate, Sydney Technical College].
Clive Carney. Impact of Design. Lawson Press, 1959. Foreword by Walter Bunning, Appreciation by Florence Taylor.
Clive. Carney. International Interiors and Design. Angus and Robertson, 1959.
- Writers:
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- Date written:
- 2013
- Last updated:
- 2018
