Douglas Jardine is surely the greatest villain in cricket’s age old battle for The Ashes between Australia and England. Tensions were high after the first test in Sydney early in December, but with Christmas coming the cartoonist Alex Gurney had some fun; The tourists arrived in
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In 1906 there were rumours spreading on Bruny Island and mainland Tasmania that one rural Bruny family had 23 children, and that the youngsters had never seen an illustration in any form. The secretary of the charitable Victoria League’s Book Committee had expressed her concern at their
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Tasmania’s Advocate newspaper provides incredibly detailed information for social historians and those researching family history. It has recorded daily life along the state’s north-west coast for generations. How it missed the story of the backyard lion is beyond me. In 1893 Esther Powley of Cressy married Alfred
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Always a progressive, two world trips convinced Tasmanian Labor Premier Mr A.G. Ogilvie that Australia was a land of ‘wowsers’. He expressed his views in Sydney in 1937, after attending the coronation of George VI in London. He had called in at the harbour city on his
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Edith and George Smith married in Queenstown around 1913. They later moved to the Hobart suburb of New Town, where they ran a general store on the corner of Carlton and Pedder Streets. The building still stands. The business was actually owned by Edith, who had
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Tasmania, as with most of the world, was coping with severe economic depression during the nineteen thirties. The State Government initiated capital works programmes to employ those who were ‘on sustenance’ as it was called. It was considered beneficial to the physical and mental welfare of the
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In 2012 a bowl featuring the ship Star of Tasmania was offered for sale by Gowans Auction House in Hobart; Other items related to this ship have appeared for sale over the years. It must have been a very special vessel. From Launceston’s Cornwall Chronicle on Saturday,
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When I was growing up on a farm in north-west Tasmania our fences were mainly barbed wire, supported by blackberries. I loved seeing the English style hawthorn hedges when we ventured further south, especially driving through sheep country in the Midlands. Here is an account of hawthorn
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In 1938 the Tasmanian newspaper The Mercury published the following, circa 1840s portrait of Mr John Osborne, one of the State’s pioneering horticulturalists. It’s impossible to make out from the reproduction, but he is holding….a pineapple! Osborne was born in Staffordshire England, on Christmas Day 1804. He
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Anyone growing up in rural Tasmania in the old days would be aware of the lunch basket, often taken out to the paddock by small children. And if a piece of cake or a biscuit disappeared on the way….well who could blame them? My farmer’s wife mother
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