Category Archives: Uncategorized

While I was researching something else entirely, I had this light bulb moment about trams, and why they were a product of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras. A tram in Launceston Tasmania on a sunny Edwardian afternoon A lot … Continue reading →

‘Seven Colonies’ was a phrase used in nineteenth century Australia and New Zealand to refer to the six Australian colonies and New Zealand in the run up to federation, which formed a little squabbling group of British polities a long … Continue reading →

I was reading about the history of the gold rush in Otago in the 1860s, and the author consistently referred to the seven colonies – basically the six colonies of colonial Australia plus New Zealand. And certainly in the 1860s … Continue reading →

In 1953 L P Hartley wrote The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there, something doubly so when dealing with two quite different and alien cultures – Tsarist Russia and Meiji Japan. Winston Churchill, always one for … Continue reading →

Tasmania. For reasons too complicated to explain in an opening paragraph, we were going to Tasmania for a few days. I knew nothing about Tasmania – I had never been there and my ideas, such as they were, had been … Continue reading →

I’ve been trying to pull together some family history stuff to try and see what use farming folk in in the late nineteenth century made of the railways in rural north east Scotland. (digitised 1920 Ordnance Survey map of St … Continue reading →

There’s a genre of Australian crime fiction known as ‘outback noir’. And, since I discovered that my local library was stuffed with outback noir books, I’ve read rather a lot of it as my bedtime reading to help me turn … Continue reading →

When I was little, I wanted to be an archaeologist. I really did. I remember that when I was about eight we had a school inspection and one of the things that the inspector asked kids to see if they … Continue reading →