Jane Crowley was only seven years old, but she remembers the moment she became hooked on antiques as if it were yesterday. She was making the trip from Canberra to her grandparents’ home at Batemans Bay, NSW, for Christmas and, as per usual for any journey with her dealer parents, it involved countless stops at every second-hand shop and roadside junk stall. “Typically, an outing that should have taken two hours ended up taking eight,” she recalls. “At one of the stops, Dad pointed out a little clerk's desk and said it had potential. In our family, you received five cents for every year of your age in pocket money, so I was getting 35 cents a week and the $8 price tag seemed astronomical. But I took his word and invested my life's savings in this little desk. Over the holidays, Dad helped me do it up. I sold it for $35 and that was it, I was hooked for life.”
These days, Jane and her dad, Athol Salter, still share that extraordinary bond and passion for all things vintage as the powerhouses
