Category Archives: Uncategorized

Like everyone, our travel plans over the last few years were disrupted by the pandemic. We had planned to go to South Africa in March 2020. For obvious reasons that didn’t happen, and while we got most of the money … Continue reading →

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 →

Nineteenth and early twentieth century Australia were perpetually short of medicine bottles. Even though Felton and Grimwade, who were originally a specialist medicine bottle importer, started bottle manufacturing in the early 1870’s, Australia was always short of bottles. This is … Continue reading →

J, my partner in crime, is an accomplished artist. While she does do the occasional landscape, what she really likes doing is drawing people and doing portraits. And like everything, while innate talent helps, you have to practise, one of … Continue reading →

Earlier today I tooted about how the Scottish government had taken back control of the Caledonian sleeper from Serco. There’s an obvious parallel here with the Melbourne Adelaide train service, but that’s not my topic here. For along time the … Continue reading →