Our Mystery Sundial: Fake or Fortune? 

Is the damaged sundial on display in our museum really a 320-year-old antique from an English cathedral? Or is it a 90-year-old reproduction, with a previously unknown link to one of the trailblazers of Bermagui’s hospitality industry?

It sounds like the storyline for an episode of Fake or Fortune. Thanks to recent research by the society, the answer sheds new light on Bermagui’s early days as an emerging tourism mecca. 

For several years, a large glass display case in our museum has featured a sundial – a square (253mmx 253mm) plate of bronze or brass, with an intricate incised design, and an inscription attributing it to a well-known English clockmaker in 1705.  

The design of concentric circles features a clockface with Roman numerals indicating daylight hours from 4am to 8pm, a compass, and two inscriptions: “Seize the present moment The evening hour is nigh” and “Thomas Grice 1705”. A hole is pierced in each corner to allow the plate to be screwed or bolted onto a base. 

But the sundial is badly damaged. The gnomon – the projecting piece that casts a shadow onto the dial – is lost, seemingly snapped off at some point in its history. Welding suggests an early repair was attempted. The sundial is also lightly scratched, and the metal plate is slightly warped – as if it had been levered off its base.

It is an impressive object, weighing just over a kilogram, and it radiates mystery. How and why did it come into the museum’s collection? And how old is it really?

To answer these questions, our research took us back to Keiran (Ken) O’Shea, the popular and energetic publican of the Bermagui Hotel, who died suddenly in October 1936. He left a widow, Eileen, and four young children. O’Shea was described in the Bega District News (2 November 1936) as “a lovable personality” who “threw his whole soul into the advancement of Bermagui”: 

“Zane Gray is credited with putting Bermagui on the map, but Ken O’Shea had done it in a more tangible way long before the famous American author’s advent. … It is more than a tragedy that he should pass away just when [Bermagui] is coming into its own as one of the great tourist and big game fishing resorts of Australia, and at a time when he was preparing to still further improve and enlarge the accommodation of his hotel.”

In early 1937, plans were announced to erect a civic memorial to O’Shea. To be erected on the foreshore opposite his hotel, it would consist of a plinth made of polished Tilba granite, an inscription celebrating the deceased, and on top of the plinth, a sundial.

This is where it gets murky, because the Bega District News reported several different claims about this sundial.

One report (18 January 1937) said the sundial had “a history dating back to 1705” and had been “donated by a Mrs Murray”.  Another (8 April 1937) said the sundial was “a gift from Mrs Moreton of Sydney” and “is said to have once belonged to a cathedral in Worcester where it was placed in 1705.”

Alas, we have no idea who Mrs Murray/Moreton was. And it does seem – at face value – pretty unlikely that a rare and valuable piece of English scientific equipment would be donated to sit in the sea air at Bermagui. More likely is that the sundial was a mass-produced reproduction, part of a craze for decorative garden features in the early years of the twentieth century. Perhaps Mrs Murray/Moreton had just returned from a trip to England where she had bought this object at Worcester. 

(If anyone has any tips on identifying Mrs Murray/Moreton, please contact us at the Museum!)

The O’Shea memorial still stands in a beautiful location in front of the hotel, gazing north out to Horseshoe Bay, with Gulaga in the distance. A rectangular granite column bears a carved inscription: “erected to the memory of Ken O’Shea, by his friends 1936”.  On top of the column, like a tabletop, is another flat block of highly polished granite. 

But there is no sundial – just four drill holes that precisely match those on the sundial in our collection.

What had happened to it?

The answer was revealed by chance, in another Bega District News article published eight years later (16 April 1945). As the Second World War was drawing to a close, the editor of the News wrote a long and charming article about a week he had just spent in Bermagui. He stayed in the Bermagui Hotel, where he saw the O’Shea memorial: 

“If you like the surf, all you have to do is step across the road from the hotel on to the pretty little beach, and on the way you pause for a moment at the memorial erected by the Bermagui people to the memory of the late Ken O’Shea, but I was sorry to learn that mischievious [sic] boys had knocked off the historic sun-dial from the top.” 

Ahh! Mischievous boys – we might say, vandals – had “knocked off” the gnomon from the sundial and the whole thing had been removed. What happened then is unclear. But at some point, the metal plate must have been rescued and, perhaps, repaired with a weld. 

It seems plausible that Sam Sinclair, a blacksmith, did this. At any rate, the plate ended up in his hardware store. After his death in 1964, the sundial, along with other Sinclair material, was stored and later came into the Museum’s collection.

The Museum has decided to repair the sundial so that we can display it with its full story – watch this space!