Author Archives: dgm

Easter Monday was damp and rainy. Too rainy to get anything done in the garden so we went to the National Portrait Galley to look at this years Photographic Portraiture prize winners. And I didn’t like any of them. All … Continue reading →

I’d been quite enthusiastic over this weekend’s lunar eclipse. It had been quite some time since I’d seen a good one, and this one promised to be interesting, and happened to occur on a weekend, and even better, at a … Continue reading →

Sunday was a nice day, so we went for a walk. Nothing strenuous, just up Orroral Valley to the abandoned settlement site, and to have lunch sitting on the rocks by the river. Our walking lunches tend to the basic … Continue reading →

What did it mean to be literate in antiquity, or indeed in the eighteenth century, or in any other age where schooling was variable and there was a great range of standards and capabilities. Clearly in both the eighteenth century … Continue reading →

From those of you who don’t know, Eden is a fishing and former whaling town way down the south east coast of New South Wales and the last settlement of any size before you ‘turn the corner’ at Green Cape … Continue reading →

Living pictures in the Albanian style. Now that’s a phrase if ever there was one. It’s from the journal of one of the Rothschild daughters describing a holiday in Scarborough in 1858 and refers to the spectacle of swimmers, presumably … Continue reading →

We’re going to go on holiday. We’d originally planned to go to central America and Mexico to go visit the Maya sites but the Aussie dollar’s sudden drop against the US currency put a stop to that foolishness. So, where … Continue reading →

I’ve written before about urban foxes in Canberra. Well, no new sightings to report, but from the amount of fox like roadkill I’ve seen on my way to work, I’d say it was still a problem. Today’s ABC news website … Continue reading →

I’ve been thinking recently about oral transmission, and also what happens to documents when they’re copied and recopied as part of the process of manual transmission. And I found myself thinking again about the Lucius Hiberius passage in Monmouth’s History … Continue reading →

Following on from my post about medieval and e-book publication and how medieval books really were compilations or syntheses of stories, we can probably say the same about the Iliad and the Odyssey. Bronze age Greece was a literate society … Continue reading →