You wouldn’t think that a scruffy looking fence in the Australian outback would capture the imagination of so many people, myself included. Stretching for 5,614km it’s the longest continuous fence in the world. It was constructed to keep marauding dingoes out of the relatively better pastoral lands
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Early breakfast approaching Alice Springs. This was meant to be a travel piece, but I was side-tracked by the story of the gold. Now there has never been a murder aboard The Ghan (well not that we know of), but there was a heist of gold bullion
Read more →In days gone by you could turn up a week late to catch The Ghan and still be in plenty of time. The Aussie outback train was often delayed by wash-outs, sand-drifts or mechanical failures. I love this poem from 1952 about a car speeding along the
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This is a guest post from Warren Bishop, a direct descendant of James Smith, who built Tasmania’s famous ‘disappearing house.’ The Disappearing House at “The Corners” Conara Standing at the turnoff to St Marys at Conara, the so-called “Disappearing House” earned its name by the illusion of
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Dr Henry Croker Garde was a long term resident surgeon at the Maryborough General Hospital in Queensland. Born in 1855, he was a graduate of Queen’s University, Belfast and a prize winning Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh. The doctor was well travelled, having
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First, a little background. In 1931, art collector George Garnett presented prominent Hobart surgeon Dr. Victor Ratten with a gift, in thanks for saving the life of his young daughter. Appropriately, the gift was a large oil painting of the British nurse Edith Cavell. Nurse Cavell was
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In April 1929 there was a devastating flood in the small tin mining town of Derby, in north-eastern Tasmania. A dam burst after a period of unprecedented rain. Fourteen people lost their lives and many others their homes and livelihoods. The death toll would have been much
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IN APPRECIATION….. In 1931, Dr Victor Ratten performed life-saving surgery on 14 year old Myra Garnett at the Royal Hobart Hospital. Some weeks later the girl’s grateful father presented Dr Ratten with a generous and most appropriate gift. George Garnett was a British born art connoisseur and
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Stephen W. O’Flaherty was a worker in a sawmill at Derby, a small community in the north-east of Tasmania. In the early 1900s he suffered a significant injury when a lever at the mill rebounded, breaking his arm in two places. It was said that he had
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Recently I paused and looked skyward at this wonderful Sydney building. At street level it’s hard to appreciate its full, 300ft glory, sheathed in glazed cream, terra-cotta tiling. Somehow it reminds me of the toy blocks I played with during my 1950s childhood. However, it was built
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