In 1999 my English friend Errol Fuller produced an extraordinary work, The Great Auk. The book incudes 450 lavishly illustrated pages on the extinct, flightless bird, and covers its ecology, habits, distribution and tragic history. I treasure my signed copy. On June 3 1844 the last two
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Sydney’s Botany Cemetery was consecrated in 1888, and initially located on a ten hectare site. It is now known as the Eastern Suburbs Memorial Park. When fifty year old Thomas George Jones died in Sydney in 1947 his body was identified by his sister Sophia and his
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Bookmarks have a rich social history. Along with books themselves they have survived the invention of electronic reading devices. I have gathered a lot over the years, and also managed to lose a fair few. The leather one below is quite special. My partner and I walked
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Sydney’s Rookwood Cemetery is the largest in the southern hemisphere, and dates from Victorian times. When retired Sydney schoolteacher Arthur Apsey died on May 24 1925, he was buried just two days later in Rookwood’s Anglican section. Apsey had lived in a substantial property called The Pines,
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The Rookwood murder of William King and his young wife Elsie in 1898 shocked not only Sydney, but the entire colony of NSW. William King had been manager of the large, Roman Catholic section of Rookwood Cemetery for decades, living there in a quaint cottage surrounded by
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What’s in a name? Well to French artist Charles Camoin it was everything. This story begins in 1939, when an exhibition of modern French and English art came to Australia. In Sydney, the paintings went on show at the David Jones Gallery. The following newspaper photo shows
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Did you, like me, have a relative who gave you a tin of Danish butter biscuits every Christmas for decades? Maybe you still do? 😎 There’s nothing really wrong with them, but they just don’t measure up to chocolate covered macadamia cookies, or a bottle of champagne…especially
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FOR THE FIRST PART OF THIS STORY ON PERCY BUSH-COX, CLICK HERE. Percy Bush-Cox enlisted with the Leicestershire Regiment in World War I. In June 1918 he was reported in the press as having been wounded for the second time. Percy Bush-Cox is pictured at right in
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Returned serviceman Ernest Durham would have been amazed to find that after his death in 1949 he would become the centre of a story so bizarre I hardly know where to start. 😎 Private Durham signed up in 1916 with the newly formed 34th Battalion. It was
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FOR THE PREVIOUS PART OF THIS STORY, CLICK HERE. Sawson is a quiet village south of Cambridge in the U.K. On December 30 1954 there was disbelief when local widower ‘Ernest Durham’ was found dead in his garden, a bullet through his head. In the same incident
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