In Australia’s golden age of piano production, between 1870 and 1930, the piano was, as Michael Atherton notes, ‘as much a coveted possession as a smartphone or an iPad is today’. The First Fleet imported an eclectic assortment of items, including dogs, rabbits, cattle, seedlings, and a ‘Frederick Beck’ piano. The latter belonged to the naval surgeon George Wogan, who played it on the long voyage. Pianist and historian Geoffrey Lancaster maintains that a piano, of the same brand, now in a collection of 130 instruments owned by the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, is Wogan’s piano.