Agnes Grant Hay was the very wealthy widow of South Australian pastoralist, merchant and politician, Alexander Gosse Hay. She was an inveterate traveller…and an author; After spending many months in England and Scotland during 1908, Mrs Hay and her unmarried daughter Helen (Dolly) returned home on
Read more →One Tuesday morning early in August 1894, Tasmanian Jack Badger decided to sail his cutter May Queen from Stanley to Hummock Island in Bass Strait. The reason for his trip was never reported, but it almost cost him his life. Three weeks later he told his dramatic
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Professor Bonner was a self-styled hypnotist, touring the eastern states of Australia in the early part of the 20th century. On January 30 1906, the professor was in Ballarat, performing with Bostock and Wombwell’s Circus. As part of his headline act, a pocket knife was secreted in
Read more →Writing in 1926, a journalist (The Daily News, Perth) reflected on the sport of wood chopping in the years before WWI. He appeared to have been pretty impressed by competitors from the island state. In Tasmania, in the underhand events, the axemen invariably were barefooted, and they
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The Mystery of the S.S. Waratah On July 27 1909 the S.S. 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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