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;
Read more →
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
Read more →
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
Read more →
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
Read more →
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
Read more →
In 1960 a revolving restaurant opened at Scenic World, Katoomba, in the NSW Blue Mountains. It was the first in Australia and just the second in the entire world. Katoomba had been pipped at the post by Florianturm in Germany, which had opened its doors in 1959.
Read more →
Imagine the excitement of the 19th century gold rushes in Victoria and New South Wales. The shops would have been bursting at the seams with everything required for a stay at the diggings. Note the clever branding in the clothing advertisement below; a Hargrave’s gold mine top
Read more →
This is the final chapter in the life of Raymon Campbell Miller. When Miller was seven years old, his mother began a passionate affair with an Italian Count. She divorced, abandoned her son, and left Sydney to marry her lover. Three months after the wedding in Rome
Read more →
When Sydney tutor Raymond Miller discovered his female student Ngaire Payne was ill-prepared to sit entrance exams for medicine, he came up with a plan. He would dress as a woman and sit the exams at New England University in her place. It sounds crazy and well…it
Read more →
Lilian Beatrice Simpson was born in Sydney in 1883. She was the fourth daughter of Elizabeth and William Parker Simpson (died 1889) English born William was a sculptor and it seems Lilian inherited his artistic sensibility. She dreamed of becoming an opera singer. In 1901, Lilian married
Read more →