DEMENTIA; THE SILENT THIEF A few months ago my mother-in-law Jean moved into a Sydney nursing home. She had previously been in residential care for eighteen months after dementia and failing physical health meant she could no longer remain in her own home. My husband and I live
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ARE MINTIES NUMBER ONE? It would be hard to name Australia’s most iconic lollies Fantails? Jaffas? Life Savers? Minties must surely be a contender. They were invented in 1922, by Sydney’s James Stedman, son of Australia’s first large-scale confectioner. The factory was located in Rozelle. Just look at
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TO CHICAGO – A MEDICAL MISSION On September 3 1906, a wealthy young dentist from Brisbane boarded the passenger ship Aorangi. He disembarked in Vancouver, then entered the United States and made his way to Chicago by train. His name was Victor Richard Ratten. Soon after he arrived
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How very special our natural history is. The Echidna has been known by quite a few names; spiny ant-eater, porcupine, even hedgehog! Its real name is Echidna acubata. Oddly enough it is a cousin to the equally weird platypus. This intriguing creature lays eggs (usually two), and
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THE BIGGEST SHOW IN TOWN Last week we went to the Royal Easter Show in Sydney. It’s a huge fair, and farmers and gardeners take their produce along and win prizes. Well some of them win. I wanted to enter some of my vegetables, but Pauline Conolly (she’s my guardian)
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Hello, here is a rather sad story about my Halloween pumpkin. I forget when I planted the seeds, and also what kind they were. And maybe I was a bit late getting them in. Our bees seemed to have left when the lavender and thyme and all the Australian
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TIMES ARE A’ CHANGING AT THE SHOW As I wandered around Sydney’s Royal Easter Show on my last visit I was struck by how accurately this iconic event reflects changes in our society. The cookery section is a classic case in point. If we want it to
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THE LITTLE WEBSITE THAT GREW! Recently this website clicked over to 340,000 visits. Maybe not a great deal by some standards, but amazing to me. When I began in late 2012 I had no idea about SEO (search engine optimization), effective tags or stop words. It must
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A CONTINUATION OF THE STORY, THE STRANGE LIFE OF EDWARD RIDLEY – PART ONE. In May 1933, police were called to a crime scene at a damp hovel below what had once been Ridley and Sons Department Store complex, on the Lower East Side of New York. The Ridley family had disposed
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Hello from Editor Des, MY MUSHROOMS Well my guardian Pauline Conolly wrote a story about fungi the other day called Fungi: Flowers of the Fall . So I thought I would do a better one. Mine is about very special, magic mushrooms. I think you will love it
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