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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