A FAMOUS NOVEL BY MR DICKENS When Pip meets the jilted Miss Havisham in the novel Great Expectations she is dressed in her decaying wedding attire, presenting a terrifying blend of waxwork figure and living skeleton. According to many people, Charles Dickens based this character on the
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BON VOYAGE In early June 1898 a young man called Victor Richard Ratten resigned from his position at the Union Bank in Forbes, a small town in the Central West of New South Wales. His colleagues presented him with a memento and wished him Bon Voyage. I
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On June 15th 1215, King John was forced to sign the Magna Carta by his rebellious barons. The event has a romantic association for me. My first true love was a nine year old baron called Leigh Dunstan, who made my heart flutter in grade four
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Memories, imagination, old sentiments, and associations are more readily reached through the sense of smell than through any other channel. Oliver Wendell Holmes How true that quote is. After my mother died I treasured a cardigan she had worn that retained her special fragrance. It was a
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HERE IS A GUEST POST FROM MY TALENTED FRIEND JACKIE SAYLE; ARTIST, WRITER, GARDENER…. AND FABULOUS COOK. When Pauline first invited me to write a guest post about cookery you could have knocked me down with a feather ‘500 – 800 words should do,’ she said,
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Behold the lilies of the field, how they grow…. This is a little tribute to my mother, and to the lilies that grow in my garden, as they once did in hers.. When we moved to our property in the Blue Mountains of New South
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VISION FOR A NATION By 1815 Governor Lachlan Macquarie’s extensive building programme and his efforts to raise the moral standards of the colony of New South Wales were bearing fruit. Sydney, which had been little more than a squalid penal camp when he arrived, was becoming a
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Well I’d been looking forward to the Easter Bunny visiting for weeks, but on Saturday everything started to go wrong. See, we were in Sydney visiting my Granny Jean when it started raining so hard that Dr Bob decided we shouldn’t drive home because it was a
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LITERARY AGENT ANGST In 2011 I completed a narrative non-fiction book on a controversial, 19th century criminal case. The events in The Water Doctor’s Daughters take place in France and England, and as an opening gambit I aim high and email a query letter to one of
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*THIS ARTICLE WAS FIRST PUBLISHED, IN A SLIGHTLY SHORTER VERSION, IN THE SYDNEY MORNING HERALD. FROM THE BATTLEFIELD TO SAVING SOULS. Much has been written about the mysterious ‘Mr Eternity’, Arthur Stace, who chalked his famous one word sermon throughout the streets of Sydney. Less well known
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