Remember The Summit, that revolving restaurant towering above the city? It closed for renovations in 2012 and re-opened as O Bar & Dining. My partner Rob took me there recently for a significant birthday celebration. Due to the wretched Covid19 Rob and I hadn’t been to Sydney
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Hello Peeps, Editor Des reporting. Well I had a Covid escape to Sydney from Blackheath a while back….OK, a LONG while back! 😨 Cities are strange places, did you know that? You could disappear from one completely in the proverbial puff of smoke, or something even more
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Hello. Did you know that Australia’s dear little koala had a very bad time during the bush fires earlier this year? Well they can’t run very fast, so that was a problem. I was in Sydney the other day and people were protesting about it all. I
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Daydreaming in our pandemic iso-world is a national pastime. Here is an imagined dinner, hosted by myself and my partner Rob in our new house at Blackheath, in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales. There are four courses (well sort of), and four dinner guests from
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I was intrigued to come across a reference to one of my articles on the internet recently. It was included in the description of a rare and beautiful item offered for sale by Hordern House Rare books, located in Sydney’s Surry Hills. This tiny object was of
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Hello, Desmond Conolly here. I’m off to old Sydney town at last! Yay, lock-down has been such a challenge! Mind you, right from the start I knew the trip would be difficult for someone with an independent spirit comme moi. And wow, was I right! At Medlow
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Hello Peeps My elderly guardians Pauline, and Dr Bob went on a little ‘rest and recuperation trip’ to Sydney before lock-down, after a lot of building work at home in Blackheath. I believe it’s called a sojourn. I wasn’t allowed to stay home alone due to a
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Remember the old Gowings Department store in Sydney? Originally It was the place to go for rural chaps in town for the Easter Show. The following image is a self -measuring form, dating from 1910. The advertising catch-phrase ‘GONE TO GOWINGS‘ became part of the Aussie vernacular,
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My maternal grandparents James and Nora Larcombe raised a large family on a sheep farm at Reedy Marsh, seven miles from the small town of Deloraine in northern Tasmania. The pair married in the tiny Anglican church at nearby Exton just before WWI. For some reason Archdeacon
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To mangle the words of Oscar Wilde, for an institution to lose a miniature portrait would be unfortunate…. to lose a life-sized, framed oil painting sounds more like carelessness. Catherine Hayes (1818-1861) was a celebrated, Irish born soprana who toured Australia extensively in the mid 1850s. At
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