DISASTER! At three o’clock one afternoon this week my husband Rob called me outside. He looked very upset, and was holding a crimson rosella in an old towel. It had flown into one of the windows. We live in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales, and
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HITTING OFF One of Sydney’s first golf courses was laid out in the grounds of Grose Farm; land on which Sydney University was later built. We have proof of an official club being formed in a 1839 diary entry by the prosperous young merchant Mr Alexander Brodie
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In 1918 an article in The Sydney Morning Herald reported on brooms being hand-made in the Blue Mountains village of Blackheath; The brooms are manufactured under the most primitive conditions, the machine for binding them together being home-made, and it is contended by the maker that with
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Fire created havoc in the Blue Mountains and Lithgow during the summer of 2019/20. The heat was extraordinary. I am a firm believer in climate change, even though our beautiful Mountains have suffered very badly in years gone by. THE FURY OF FIRE The summer of 1952
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According to urban mythology, Sydney’s Sacred Ibis are actually a scary mutation of the seagull. The story goes that over succeeding generations, one strain of gull became larger, more aggressive, and far more athletic, until…..voila!; Instead of lolling about at the Sydney Cricket Ground as seagulls do,
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To be honest, Mr Wall, one of the Australian Museum’s pioneer curators, does not look well or particularly happy in the above photo. Let’s hope he had been more cheerful on his wedding day. On Friday, April 30 1841 The Sydney Advertiser announced; On Thursday, the 29th
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AUSTRALIAN FOOTBALL RULES I grew up in the small Tasmanian town of Ulverstone, where Australian Rules Football was the sport we were passionate about. Ulverstone’s colours have always been black and red, hence their name, The Robins. In the 1960’s football was untainted by the corporate sector and
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I first heard of the Wheeldon case in July 2017, on The Australian Broadcasting Commission’s Radio National. The story looked back to a day in 1986. Retired Macquarie University professor Peter Mason had gestured his daughters Diedre and Chloë to play an old video. He could only gesture because he
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In 1903 tuberculosis was rife in Australia, as it was in much of the world. The Queen Victoria Sanatorium was established at a remote area near Wentworth Falls, in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales. The property on Burragarong Road (now Tablelands Road) had been
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On the afternoon of August 18 1937, Mrs Dorothy Bunyan of Lithgow attended a funeral. It was a particularly sad occasion; the child of Mr Brown, of one of the local school teachers, had died. She hurried home because her nine year old son Donald was due home from primary school.
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