Category Archives: Uncategorized

I was talking about toilet parlours with J, and she mentioned that when she was a teenager there was still an old fashioned Ladies’ Retreat in Melbourne where, not only could you go to the toilet, you could change if … Continue reading →

In quite a few places in Victoria you can come across old colonial post boxes – sometimes even still in use as in the early example I spotted in Port Fairy. Well, Beechworth we don’t have any old pattern boxes … Continue reading →

There, I was innocently working away documenting old pharmacy bottles when I came across one that caused me quite a degree of puzzlement: it’s from Lane’s Pharmacy in Wangaratta. It’s difficult to see from the picture but underneath the Lane’s … Continue reading →

I’ve become interested recently in Egyptomania – the sudden engagement of western countries with Ancient Egypt in the nineteenth century. Egyptomania spawned a whole range of things – from the Egypt Exploration Society to the Amelia Peabody novels and is … Continue reading →

Researching family history can be incredibly frustrating, especially when one tries to find people born before the start of systematic record keeping in the 1850’s. Just to make it doubly confusing people in my family line at least kept on … Continue reading →

Well I did the obvious thing and ran the query “spectacle maker” on querypic: Querypic doesn’t differentiate between “spectacle maker” and “spectacle-maker” as a query, so we can say that graph shows usage of both forms of the term. The … Continue reading →

It turns out the whole rural oculist thing is more complicated than I thought. Firstly I was wrong in thinking that oculist was the preferred term in the nineteenth century. Five minutes with Querypic showed that while that might have … Continue reading →