Canberra Gallery and Museum held a well attended recent summer exhibition of more than 150 snowdomes - called "Shake It Up, Baby". The exhibit took Jacky Talbot and Penny Amberg 15 years to collect.
When Penny worked in Washington DC, US, she curated "Snowed Under : An Exhibition of Australian Snowdomes". While there, she joined a snowdome collecting group. The rarity of Australian-made snowdomes (and therefore, their allure) enabled her to trade many of them with US collectors.
While Penny concentrates on collecting domes from around the world, Jacky uses them as a source of inspiration for photography and painting.
Hold on there, you're probably asking! Precisely what are snowdomes? They're the little enclosed, liquid-filled objects that rain snowy flakes - against colourful fixed scenes - when you shake them in your hand.
Most of us have surely owned one; even Charles Forster Kane (played by Orson Welles) in the 1941 movie classic "Citizen Kane", kept a snowdome to remind him of his lost childhood. That particular example contained a sleigh called "Rosebud" which rolled from his hand and smashed to the floor of Xanadu.
Regarded by some as tacky tourist souvenirs and by others as cultural artefacts, ubiquitous snowdomes have mesmerised millions since their debut during the late 19th century.
Snowdomes evolved as extensions of solid glass paperweights, according to Nancy McMichael, US author of a definitive book on the former. In 1889 an enterprising Paris manufacturer sought to commemorate the construction of Paris' Eiffel Tower by placing a tiny model of the tower in a water-filled glass sphere mounted on a square ceramic base.
The idea quickly caught [on] around Europe. Snowdomes were produced at glass making centres in Germany, Austria, France, Poland and Czechoslovakia. During the 1920s, German companies began to export "waterglobes", as they were then known, to the US and Canada.
The injection-moulded plastic snowdome that we commonly see today was developed in West Germany during the 1950s when a new kind of plastic was used to create the now distinctive innovative flat bottomed, oval shaped, style.
There has been much trial and error over the years in seeking to achieve the right degree and consistency of "snow" in the dome. Used for the latter has been everything from bone chips to coarse pottery flkes, fine fragments of porcelain and china, sand, sawdust, mothball flakes, ground raw rice, camphor/wax - even dessicated coconut and, eventually, fine chopped plastic.
Snowdome liquid these days is a mixture of water and such chemicals as glycol - an anti-freeze and thickening agent which helps to keep the snow afloat. Miniature figures mounted in the domes are distorted and magnified by the surrounding liquid, points out Ms McMichael who has a collection of over 3000 snowdomes.
In Australia, scenes in the domes often depict landscapes, city and underwater scenes, native animals that include kangaroos and koalas, and such national landmarks as Uluru (Ayer's Rock), Sydney Harbour Bridge, Sydney Opera House and The Great Barrier Reef.
The paradox of such places being coated with snow in Australia's warm to hot climate doesn't seem to detract from their popularity as collectors items or souvenirs.