Author Archives: dgm

I have been thinking a little more about what to do about human remains in museums. I claim no great ethical insights, but the experience of dealing with aboriginal remains in Australia may provide a baseline of good practice. For … Continue reading →

The dead, they say, are always with us. And sometimes, they are on display in museums. And as Jonathan Jarrett recently reminded me via a recent blogpost, there are a whole range of issues around the display of human remains. … Continue reading →

Vaccination day in Port Mackay – attribution When I went for my Covid shot, the nurse took a look at my arm to choose a vaccination site, noticed an old and faded scar, and asked ‘Was that a smallpox vaccination?’ … Continue reading →

I was reading Bella Bathurst’s The Lighthouse Stevensons, the story of the extraordinary Stevenson family, who over several generations built most of Scotland’s lighthouses, not to mention a quite a few elsewhere. Robert Louis Stevenson, of course, was one of … Continue reading →

Earlier today, I retweeted a link to a Conversation article about why we seem to remember more when we read an article in print than we do onscreen. The concern of the article was based around online learning and the … Continue reading →

 While messing about with family history this weekend I’ve finally found a Jamaican connection.  As you may remember, I’ve long been puzzled about why there quite a few people who are the descendants of enslaved people in the Bahamas with … Continue reading →

I’m about 80% through volume one of James Clark Ross’s Voyage to the southern seas, mostly speed reading it in idle moments on my newly acquired 7” tablet – the one I bought specifically for offline reading of pdf’s – … Continue reading →

J’s Australian ancestry is a mystery to me. Her lineal great^n grandfather is Henry Thomas Hill, who worked for Victorian Railways and who died in Castlemaine in May 1882. He had a wife, Anne Humfries or Humphries and they first … Continue reading →

Well, I’ve become a bit intrigued by the Elizabeth Farr story, not that I’ve got very far tracing her. What I have found is that no one really knows much about sealer’s camps – there seems to be an assumption … Continue reading →

The Sydney Gazette story of Captain Hasselborough’s demise is interesting typographically for its use of the long s. In the handwriting of the time the long s was only really used as the first s of double s in a … Continue reading →