The man and the memorial.
Charles E. W. Bean is considered Australia’s finest WW1 correspondent and historian, having served as a journalist at Gallipoli, arriving there only a few hours after the sea-landing, and then travelling to the Western Front [...]
Women, rams and research.
Artist Tom Roberts is perhaps best known in Australia for his iconic paintings which depict our rural life and pastoral history, such as The Golden Fleece painted in 1894 or the romantic and dangerous era [...]
Khartoum, the death of a famed General & Australia’s call to arms
On the 3rd March 1885 an infantry and artillery battalion of 758 men and officers set sail from Sydney for the Sudan with great fanfare. By the end of the month they had reached their [...]
The iceman cometh
Before today’s supermarkets offered home delivery services, and corner stores supplied busy household’s needs, urban dwellers had access to fresh bread, fruit and vegetables, fish and meat from the many vendors who plied their wares. [...]
How Australia’s first consignment of wool was sold over a cup of coffee in 1821.
It took over twenty years for Australia’s first consignment of wool to be sold at auction following John Macarthur and the Rev. Samuel Marsden’s importation of Spanish merino sheep to Australia in 1797. And when [...]
Reading about the country in which we live
I’ve been infatuated with Ernest Hemingway from an early age. It was he that swept me away in my early teens with For Whom The Bell Tolls and later, The Old Man and the Sea. [...]
A camel called ‘Misery’.
In 1837, forty-nine years after the arrival of the white man in Australia the suggestion was made that Australia was a country sorely in need of camels. Considering the extent of Western and Central Australia [...]
They rode for victory and they rode for Australia – Beersheba.
In the late afternoon of October 31, 1917 around 800 men of the 4th Australian Light Horse Brigade looked from a ridge across six kilometres of sloping ground towards Beersheba. Behind them were thousands of [...]