Hill End. An abandoned goldrush town. Home to the ghosts of pan-shackled miners, some who won big and others who lost. In 1872 it was NSW’s largest inland settlement. Incorrectly named Forbes before Hill End was chosen and the town gazetted, it is a place that carries the memory of the wily antics of the estimated [...]
Coffee-break Quick-Pick: The Shepherd's Hut by Tim Winton. Jaxie dreads going home. His mother's dead, the old man beats him without mercy, and he doesn't know how much more he can take. Then, in one terrible moment of violence, the life he's known ends - forcing Jaxie to flee his sleepy hometown. He's not just [...]
In February 1861 sixty Aboriginals attacked Coochin Coochin Station only to be repelled by the wife of the station owner L.E. Lester who wielded a revolver. A later inquiry heard that the Aboriginals had been angry over the loss of their native hunting grounds and it was also suggested that the homestead was too close [...]
Bathurst, NSW: Construct a one-hundred-mile road in six months, proclaim a township, disrupt the indigenous population, discover gold and begin taming the land; such was the beginning of Australia’s oldest inland settlement. Building a path across the Blue Mountains presented a mighty challenge however in 1814, Governor Macquarie approved an offer by William Cox to build a road [...]
Orroral homestead - a snapshot of a fabulous old homestead: Stock stations in the Canberra district were established towards the end of 1824 and several years later pioneers settled in the mountain valleys west of the Murrumbidgee, beyond the limit of the 19 counties. William Herbert paid £10 for a pasturage licence in 1839 for [...]
The Magic Pudding is said to have been written to settle an argument. Norman Lindsay's friend Bertram Stevens said, that children like to read about fairies, while Lindsay asserted that they would rather read about food and fighting. Food and fighting clearly won for October 12 was declared 'Pudding Day' in 2008 in honor of [...]
F. Scott Fitzgerald the author of The Great Gatsby coined the phrase the ‘Jazz Age’ and was known as the Great American Dreamer. If you haven't read the novel you may well have seen the movie with Leonardo DiCaprio. The Great Gatsby is the story of a mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby and his unrealistic obsession [...]
Elder & Co. brought the first ‘Afghans’ (Afghan cameleers) to South Australia to help traverse the desert terrain and long distances. Thirty-one Afghans arrived on the the ship 'The Blackwell' at Port Augusta and on New Year’s Eve 1865 the waiting crowd of onlookers watched the remarkable sight of 124 camels being lifted and deposited [...]
“Wilcannia, city of wind and dust, Queen of the western plains; Where man works for his daily crust, And it seldom ever rains.” (The Barrier Miner, Friday, November 3, 1939.) The Burke and Wills expedition is well known. Burke’s impatience on reaching Cooper’s Creek on November 11, 1860 and the unfolding disaster that transpired became [...]
It’s three years since I first started thinking about my new novel which I’m close to finishing. There’s been quite a few potholes to navigate along the way. Instead of my usual female protagonist I chose a male lead of Scottish descent and named him Ross Grant. Then I decided to track his life for [...]
