Monthly Archives: August 2023

I’ve been reading Daniel Mason’s The Piano Tuner as my evening reading – a change from outback noir crime novels – when I came across Steven’s Consumption cure. Even though I’ve finished with Dows’ Pharmacy for the moment, I’ve acquired … Continue reading →

Earlier today I tooted the following doodle by Charles Collinson Rawson Charles Collinson Rawson was a migrant from England who settled in Port Mackay, now simply Mackay, in Queensland in 1867. As well as being a grazier, a Justice of … Continue reading →

J was down in Melbourne for a meeting in Heidelberg ast Thursday. Chatting over breakfast this morning she said ‘Did I tell you that I saw a view that’s similar to Streeton’s Golden summer?’ Not terribly surprising, even if the … Continue reading →

I’ve been down an internet rabbit hole with this one. I was reading Peter Hopkirk’s ‘Trespassers on the Roof of the World’, which summarises the adventures and misadventures of late nineteenth and early twentieth century travellers to Tibet, which for … Continue reading →

Every time I drove down to Chiltern to work on the documentation of Dow’s pharmacy, I would pass a dirt road signposted to Yeddonba with a stylised hand on the road sign, and I always wondered what it led to. … Continue reading →

Almost the last item I catalogued at Dow’s was a cardboard box containing a bottle of Owbridge’s Lung Tonic with the contents still intact. Lung tonics were common in the nineteenth and early twentieth century – in the days before … Continue reading →