What, you ask, is ‘Butt dust’? What do you do or say, when an innocent child asks you something so innocent and they are so serious? Read on and you’ll discover the joy in it! These have to be original and genuine. No adult is this creative!! MELANIE (age 5) asked her Granny how old…
A century ago, many houses and public buildings were built with stone foundations. Corner stones (quoins) were used on larger buildings to provide additional support for brick walls as well as for decorative effect. Gardens featured stone walls and pathways, while crushed stone was used as road base and to repair roads that had been…
Portion of a diary kept by a French-Canadian exile, François Maurice Lepailleur, whose group had been landed at the original wharf at what is now called Bayview . . . Wednesday, 11 March 1840. Today we disembarked from the Buffalo to go to work for the government. It was half past nine in the morning…
We recently received a copy of a home movie of the Official Opening of the New Council Chambers & Offices in Wellbank Street, Concord in 1962. It was made by local resident Alexander John Fuller and donated by his son Andrew, who told us a little about his father, who everyone knew as John. He…
Although not heard as much these days the saying, shoot through like a Bondi tram, was very common in the early 1900s. There was a time when Sydney was one of the world’s great tram cities and Bondi Trams shot through Paddington like, well, a Bondi Tram. In its heyday, Sydney’s tram network was the…
While chatting recently about possible displays for our City of Canada Bay Museum, it was mentioned that there are many commemorative coins out there in circulation, The question was asked – “Why haven’t we been collecting these?” The only answer we could come up with was that we hadn’t thought of it. I know we…
There was an age, not a generation ago, when local news was circulated by suburban and regional newspapers. The lifeblood of such publications were the “classifieds”, commonly referred to as “Hatches, Matches and Dispatches” or births, deaths and marriages. There were also notices of engagement, anniversaries and obituaries. Goods and chattels were advertised for sale,…
“Said Hanrahan” is a poem written by the Australian bush poet John O’Brien, the pen name of Roman Catholic priest Patrick Joseph Hartigan. The poem’s earliest known publication was in July 1919 in The Catholic Press, appearing in 1921 in the anthology Around the Boree Log and Other Verses. The poem describes the recurrent natural cycle of droughts, floods and bushfires in rural Australia as seen by “Hanrahan”, a pessimistic man of…
I’ve grown up Aussie style, a sun-kissed Weet Bix kid;I’ve played street cricket, broken windows then hid.I’ve choked on a fly and still been a happy little Vegemite;I’ve smiled even when the mozzies have started to bite.I’ve swung from the Hills Hoist, then ran from Mum’s smack;I’ve learnt that a kid could starve if it…
Pie Birds, the Whimsical Victorian-Era Baking Tool While you’ve likely heard the nursery rhyme “Sing a Song of Sixpence,” with its “four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie,” it would probably surprise you to find a bird’s head peeking out of your fresh-from-the-oven dessert, whether or not it “began to sing” upon being sliced. Don’t…
Hen and Chicken Bay is a bay on the Parramatta River, in the inner-west of Sydney. It lies approximately 8 kilometres due west of Sydney’s central business district. It is surrounded by the suburbs of Abbotsford, Drummoyne, Wareenba, Five Dock, Canada Bay, Concord and Cabarita. It is one of the three big estuarine inlets on…
The REAL story of the man in your wallet. How many of you have ever looked at the Aboriginal man depicted on our $2 coin and just thought to yourselves, “Just another depiction of an Aboriginal to honour the first inhabitants of our country”? According to the Royal Australian Mint the design brief for the…
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