JOHN BIGGE; REGIME CHANGER Commissioner John Thomas Bigge (1780-1843) arrived in New South Wales in September 1819. He had been appointed to conduct a wide ranging inquiry into governor Lachlan Macquarie’s administration. Bigge was highly critical of the Governor’s championship of ex-convicts, and his ‘wastefully expensive’ building
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OFF TO SCHOOL! The photo below was among my mother’s ‘treasures’ for many years. It was taken by the Tasmanian Advocate nearly 60 years ago. The children are from the Ulverstone Central State School’s kindergarten class of 1956. I am the chirpy looking kid standing up on
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My father planted his first commercial crop of beans on our farm near Ulverstone on the north-west coast of Tasmania, in 1958. Initially we grew just a couple of acres, without the benefit of irrigation. We picked the crop four or five times over, struggling to fill
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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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Introduced to Australia with the First Fleet, rabbits began to breed in plague proportions, especially in Tasmania. As early as 1827 the Colonial Times and Tasmanian Advertiser reported: ‘…the common rabbit is becoming so numerous throughout the colony, that they are running about on some large estates
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TALL TALES, EMPTY TANKS – AN AUSTRALIAN ODYSSEY On late night radio an elderly man talked about catching giant Murray cod on chicken eggs; ‘I thread a fish hook through the shell of a raw egg then I hard boil it,’ he assured the dubious host. His
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My interest in John Mortlock was aroused when I discovered that his journey as a convict paralleled that of my own relatives, the Shadbolts. WHERE THERE’S A WILL…… John Frederick Mortlock was born in Cambridge on August 8, 1809. His father, Frederick Cheetham Mortlock, had been
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Hello from Editor Des. Well do you know what? We went to the city of Goulburn last week. My guardian Rob Conolly’s ancestor William Conolly used to live there when it was just a little town. This is him;
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GOODBYE HOBART TOWN On October 20 1914, the 12th Battalion AIF embarked from Hobart on the troopship Geelong. They were accompanied by two Australian army nurses; Sister Alice Gordon King ( left in the picture below) and Sister Janet Ella Radcliff (right). Alice was twenty eight years
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The Mystery of the S.S. Waratah On July 28 1909 the SS Waratah was sighted by a passing ship off the east coast of South Africa, enroute to London from Sydney. She was carrying 211 passengers and crew, many of them Australian. The ship was never
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