The Many Faces of Ernest Dunton

As demonstrated by the maker of this clock, Ernest Dunton, and his employer, Morris Blasbalk, to be a watchmaker in the late nineteenth century required more than just the skill of making and fixing clocks. Ernest John Dunton (b. 1878) was born in Wagga Wagga and completed a watchmaker apprenticeship with D. P. Symington in […]

Read More…

A Reminder of Home

Following the frenzied days of the gold rushes, which swept across various parts of New South Wales and Victoria between the 1850’s and the 1870’s, there was an influx of Chinese miners from these areas to Holbrook, then known as Germanton. A vast number of these men sought to find their fortune in the abandoned […]

Read More…

A Not So Off-the-Cuff Gift

Margaret Prendergast was born on the 2nd of May 1854 in Clonpet, Tipperary in Ireland. Only eighteen years later and half a world away in southern New South Wales, Margaret became the school teacher at St. Patrick’s Catholic School in Holbrook, a town which at that time was known as Germanton. These silver cufflinks were […]

Read More…

The Best Business Sites in Town

In 1902, the real estate agency Holmes, Wickham, and Co. received instruction to sell by auction a subdivision belonging to J. E. Spurr in Germanton (now known as Holbrook). On the 14th of March, the day prior to the sale, The Albury Banner and Wodonga Express reported that Germanton was quickly developing, and that this […]

Read More…

In Her Own Right

One imagines the clacking of the typewriter may have been particularly urgent on the 20th of September, 1915. Just a month earlier it had been reported that Lt. Norman Holbrook (1888-1976), the first naval recipient of the Victoria Cross in WWI, had been wounded. The details were vague but Shire Clerk John Taylor must have […]

Read More…