When English explorer Matthew Flinders unexpectedly sighted Frenchman Nicolas Baudin’s vessel at sea near the South Australian coastline on the 8th April 1802, both men were probably a little wary. As far as they knew, Britain and France were still at war. The French Revolutionary Wars (1792-1802) were a series of sweeping military conflicts stemming from the French [...]
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 after recovering from wounds received on the battlefield. His first-hand accounts of the ‘fog of war’ exposed the heroism, logistical [...]
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 of the bush-ranging years in Bailed Up. Never one to stay long at home, even after marrying relatively late in [...]
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 destination. It was an important milestone, for never before had an Australian colony sent paid soldiers to fight in an [...]
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. Some of these tradespeople delivered orders to your front door, milk, bread and meat being staples. Other street-traders swung their [...]
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 that transaction occurred in London in 1821 it wasn’t in a fancy exchange with hundreds of interested buyers but at [...]
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. His economical word usage and understated style struck a chord with me and at some deeper level I wanted his [...]
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 it turned out to be an excellent idea. The first record of imported camels is in 1840, when the lone [...]
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 troops desperate for water and a never-ending desert, in front of them, the heavily fortified town of Beersheba. The 4th [...]
Yesterday I had my first foray into live television cooking, via Skype. It was all lights, camera, action with liberal assistance from my mother, Marita who along with the savvy technicians and producers at Studio Ten helped get things set up both at home and virtually. What an experience. I was asked to share rural [...]
