Written by British born Australian writer Maggie Joel, The Second-Last Woman in England is a novel centred on class, snobbery and hypocrisy in post war England as the coronation of Queen Elizabeth looms. It was published in 2010. Unusually, the prologue reveals that as the royal family
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Did you ever wonder when the elusive 1930 Australian penny became so sought after? For some reason it wasn’t immediately valuable, even though very few were struck due to the Great Depression and the cancellation of orders from the Commonwealth Government. However, it is thought that 1,000
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Fifty sent pieces were introduced in Australia and New Zealand with the advent of decimal currency. The 1966 Australian coins were round and had a high silver content (80%). Within twelve months the silver price had risen substantially and the coins were suddenly worth more than their
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Visits to the dentist these days are vastly different to those of my 1950s childhood. However, this does not guarantee that the experience will be any less horrific. A DENTIST VISIT DECADES LATER It all began with a broken tooth, which left a fifty year old filling
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John and Hannah Duff lived in a hut on Spring Hill Station in the Wimmera region of Victoria. Their three children; Isaac (9) Jane (7) and Frank (4) often went into the bush to gather bunches of twigs for their mother, who used them to make simple
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When my partner Rob and I were visiting New York some years ago we spent a rainy morning in Bloomingdale’s department store. It was serendipitous, because I found a pair of classic tweed pants I had searched for unsuccessfully in Sydney. I wear them to this day;
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We hear very little about individuals who fought in the Boer War, sometimes referred as The Transvaal War. One notable exception is the story of Breaker Morant. Unlike the two World Wars, there are no detailed service records. Letters home published in local newspapers are the best
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The Bridge was published by Jonathan Cape in 1986. I found a copy recently in our local street library. This slim volume is a fictionalised account of one of British artist Philip Wilson Steer’s final painting trips to his beloved Sussex seaside town of Walberswick. It was
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This is the remarkable case of a fossil sent to Sydney from a Queensland copper mine circa 1912. It was identified in 1922 as being the wing of an extinct Australian insect. The Sydney Geological and Mining Museum opened in the building below in 1909. Despite walking
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Etched into the memory of Australians is the horrific kidnapping and murder of Sydney boy Graeme Thorne in 1960. It represented such a loss of innocence for our country. However, this was not the first time that the kidnapping of a child accompanied by a ransom demand
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