Category Archives: Uncategorized

I was reading about the history of the gold rush in Otago in the 1860s, and the author consistently referred to the seven colonies – basically the six colonies of colonial Australia plus New Zealand. And certainly in the 1860s … Continue reading →

In 1953 L P Hartley wrote The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there, something doubly so when dealing with two quite different and alien cultures – Tsarist Russia and Meiji Japan. Winston Churchill, always one for … Continue reading →

Tasmania. For reasons too complicated to explain in an opening paragraph, we were going to Tasmania for a few days. I knew nothing about Tasmania – I had never been there and my ideas, such as they were, had been … Continue reading →

I’ve been trying to pull together some family history stuff to try and see what use farming folk in in the late nineteenth century made of the railways in rural north east Scotland. (digitised 1920 Ordnance Survey map of St … Continue reading →

There’s a genre of Australian crime fiction known as ‘outback noir’. And, since I discovered that my local library was stuffed with outback noir books, I’ve read rather a lot of it as my bedtime reading to help me turn … Continue reading →

When I was little, I wanted to be an archaeologist. I really did. I remember that when I was about eight we had a school inspection and one of the things that the inspector asked kids to see if they … Continue reading →

Like a lot of people I became interested in the whole retro photography thing during the pandemic, but I’ve got to admit that while I’ve had a couple of false starts, I really havn’t done much with it. I’ve some … Continue reading →

Following on from my post about why Roman ghosts were not a nineteenth century thing I thought it would be interesting to take a look at what was mentioned in English language newspapers in Wales about a single  Roman site … Continue reading →