Category Archives: Uncategorized

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 →

It’s no secret I like crime novels. In fact one of my favourite forms of relaxation at the end of the day is to read some decent well written crime fiction for half an hour or so before dropping off … Continue reading →

It was the end of Autumn, and one of these weekends where the garden turns from a golden symphony of reds and yellows to a mess of sodden rain soaked leaves and bare branches. When we had gone to Apollo … Continue reading →

A long time ago I went down an internet rabbit hole while researching the use of Linux in education in Latin America, and instead came up with something else entirely – a story of the legacy of Anglo Irish migration … Continue reading →

This morning, when I was scrolling through my RSS feeds, I came across an article on the ABC website, about how John Harvey, one of the founders of Salisbury in South Australia had African heritage, yet had been born in … Continue reading →

While I was down the Charles Babbage and the Crimean War rabbit hole, I came across a couple of coding cribs designed to allow people using postcards to encode the message written on the cards. You see, when postcards were … Continue reading →