Have you ever looked at the date on the War Memorial in Burwood Park? It’s worth looking at carefully because it reveals an interesting fact . . the dates of the First World War are given as 1914-1919. This is in contrast to most modern sources which give the dates as 1914-1918. On researching the…
A favourite pastime of residents is to walk along the waterfront to enjoy the peaceful vista. Not many of us know that between the “green lights” opposite the cove is a monument to one of Australia’s greatest rowing athletes, Henry Ernest Searle. Little is known of his childhood except that he came to Sydney when…
As we board the 504 or the 438 for the CBD, most of us miss a little street 50 metres on our right hand side, Henry Lawson Avenue. Henry Lawson, an Australian literary giant of poems and stories, wrote mainly about the average Australian. He died 79 years ago, and should we today read his…
At the birth of Australia we had not one, but two giants of literature, Lawson and Paterson. Andrew Barton Paterson was born on 17 February 1864 near Orange NSW. He was educated at Sydney Grammar School, then he studied law at Sydney University and practised in Sydney. Paterson started writing for The Bulletin in 1889….
When Charles Dickens visited Australia, he used characters he met or heard about for characters in his various novels. Miss Haversham, from Great Expectations was in fact Eliza Donnithorne from Newtown, Sydney. Another character was Fagin from Oliver Twist, who was based upon Ikey Solomon. In the late 1820’s a paradoxical situation existed in Hobart…
A Day With the Happy Patients at Yaralla Noble Work of Great Founder (by E.J. Martin) “This Hospital for Convalescents was founded by the late Thomas Walker of Yaralla, in the hope that many sufferers would be restored to health within it.” This inscription, which may be regarded also as an epitaph, runs in gold…
In 1956 I was in the middle of the Simpson Desert attached to 1 Troop of 17th Independent Field Squadron Royal Australian Engineers as part of the advance party preparing the site for the intending round of Atomic bomb tests to be held later in the year. Towers were being erected and bunkers dug to…
Colonel George Arthur, after 12 years a Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen’s Land, was appointed to a similar position in Upper Canada (now Ontario). His first task on arrival, in early 1838, was to clean up the remnants of a rebellion against the British rule which had been going on for some time in both Upper…
“The forgotten history of Five Dock and Canada Bay” It is hard to imagine Five Dock and the surrounding suburbs of the City of Canada Bay as anything but contemporary and cosmopolitan. Beneath the shiny, renovated surfaces, café strips and bountiful new apartment complexes, any signs of Canada Bay’s history have mostly been reduced to…
Yaralla ‘given away to the Government’. Good intentions are often misconstrued as Miss Eadith Walker discovered to her dismay in 1914. Returning from an overseas trip, Miss Walker heard that the Governor-General, Sir Ronald Munro Ferguson, did not have a place to call home for his stay in Sydney. She generously offered the use of Yaralla, not realising the political and social storm that would…
Nowadays there’s no mystery about motor cars. They infest every road and are driven with varying degrees of competence by teenagers and grandmothers. When it comes to buying a car, schoolboys can usually give their fathers all the performance figures of the leading makes but back at the dawn of motoring things were very different indeed. Between fifty and sixty years ago the tempo of…
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