Category Archives: Uncategorized

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 →

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 →