Category Archives: Uncategorized

We were visiting a hospital in Melbourne, nothing serious, just J’s periodic checkup with her rheumatologist, and as in the way of hospitals we skipped breakfast to make an early morning appointment, rushed there on the tram, only to discover … Continue reading →

Louisa M Alcott aged 25 or thereabouts (wikipedia commons) We’ve been watching the recent miniseries of Little Women on the ABC, as always showing years later than everywhere else. Being male, I, of course, had never read Little Women, and … Continue reading →

I’ve written before about Kath Bode’s work resurrecting lost fiction from colonial period Australian newspapers. At the time, I did say that in one sense it wasn’t a surprise, newspaper fiction had been a major event in the mid to … Continue reading →

I recently bought a book. Not an unknown event, but unusually I bought it for the title alone – The Queen, Her Lover and the Most Notorious Spy in History. The book can be summarised like this: After the end … Continue reading →

Totally unscientific I know, but my little Christmas recreation of investigating my family history has brought home to me just how many people died of what would now be preventable diseases, and in Dundee at least how many these were … Continue reading →

I grew up in a large messy family of aunts uncles and cousins, and while I only had one sibling, I had a whole scad of cousins and we always seemed to be visiting one another. What I didn’t have … Continue reading →

I’ve been doing a lot of reading about the Victorian era on the back of my work documenting Dow’s pharmacy. During that period the world changed immeasurably, with the electric telegraph enabling long distance near instantaneous communication, the railway and … Continue reading →

Recently I’ve become interested in the development of natural history in nineteenth century Australia. After all not only was the Victorian era the heyday of natural history, but in Australia it had an importance in people trying to understand how … Continue reading →

Visiting family always seems to involve a boozy dinner with alittle too much red wine, or at least ours do. And as always with coneversations involving a decent red, sometimes they take some slightly odd turns. And so it was … Continue reading →