With her two masts fully rigged, the Martha, a small colonial-built schooner, tacked out of Port Jackson (Sydney), her sails catching the fresh breezes which would carry her northwards. It was July 1800, and the ship’s master William Reid, formerly Quartermaster of the First Fleet ship HMS Sirius, had been instructed to collect coal at […]
On the floor of the dark, dusty, pit the miners shuffled about loading skips with the recently sorted chunks of coal. As each pair of miners filled a skip, they attached a string carrying a small piece of leather bearing their number. Then the winding mechanism hauled the skips carrying the rich black ore up […]
Setting out early one day in December 1840, a tall, dark-eyed Irishman named Edward Denny Day (1801-1876), the local Police Magistrate, led a police posse through the bush around Scone, not far from Maitland. They were tracking the escaped convict turned bushranger Teddy ‘Jewboy’ Davis and his gang, who for two years had been ‘terrorising’ […]
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