All together, it took nine hours. Nine hours spent in the shuddering, claustrophobic hull of a WWI-era submarine. Cautiously travelling beneath an underwater minefield to then torpedo a battleship, only able to return to the safety of the open ocean via the same treacherous stretch of water. What type of person is capable of such […]
Holbrook’s unlikely association with submariners began in 1915 when the town was named after British submarine commander, Lieutenant Norman Holbrook (1888-1976). In 1992, after repeated visits from their namesake, the town officially awarded ‘Freedom of Entry to the Shire’ to personnel of the Royal Australian Navy Submarine Squadron. A few years later, in recognition of […]
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 […]
Today we live in a society that is saturated with images. Everyone with a smart phone has a camera in their pocket, ready to capture the world around them and share online in an instant. In the 1920s, photography was just starting to become more accessible to Australians. Cameras were getting lighter, cheaper, and easier […]
‘If Soviet Russia has the hydrogen bomb… then the West must turn again to its defences.’ Published in the Newcastle Morning Herald and Miners Advocate in 1953, this foreboding warning came in response to the Soviet Union’s explosion of their first thermonuclear weapon—a hydrogen bomb. Soviet Chairman Georgy Malenkov considered this the end of the […]
The Illawarra and South Coast Steam Navigation Company (ISNC) was established in 1858 as an amalgamation of three smaller shipping companies which transported goods between Sydney and the south coast of NSW. The fleet were well-known for carrying live pigs and so were often referred to as the ‘Pig and Whistle Boats.’ Townspeople and passengers […]
Leather worn through at the toes, broken laces, and soles coming apart. These boots were worn to the bitter end and seemed to serve their wearer well. But were they fit for purpose? Worn by a miner at the Stockton Borehole Colliery, at Teralba, Lake Macquarie, where coal was mined from 1901, boots like these […]
Cattle and sheep now roam the paddocks, and wheat crops stretch as far as the eye can see, but the area now known as Tambar Springs on the North West Slopes region was long the domain of enormous, flat-nosed kangaroos: Procoptodon goliah. Weighing over 200kg, it used its height of 2m to graze from tall […]
When it comes to design sensibilities today, I think many would describe this tureen as somewhat gaudy – particularly because any extravagant covered dish for serving soup would be a strange addition to modern dinner tables. However, this style of decorative art was once considered the height of refinement. Emerging from the salons of early […]
It is hard to know exactly how William Edwards (1819-1899) must have felt arriving to Melbourne in 1857. At the very least, he must have been slightly more comfortable than the average English traveller at the time. In an arrangement reserved only for noteworthy passengers, he had travelled in the chief cabin of the Blanche […]
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