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 […]
Esther Batstone was born Jane Wilhelmina Esther Arnold (1888–1992) at Walla Walla to Johann Gottlieb (J.G.) (1854–1929) and Johanne Elisabeth (1856–1923). The seventh of twelve children, she moved to Albury with her parents in 1892. In the same year, J.G. began cultivating a vegetable garden and selling produce from a barrow. This small step became […]
The young couple in the first photograph are Jane Wilhelmina Esther (Esther) Arnold (1888–1992) and Albert John Batstone (1885–1965). They were married in a ‘quiet ceremony’ on 1st August 1911 at St Matthew’s Church in Albury. This marriage brought together two old business families of Albury. Albert’s father, John George established a cabinet-making and furniture […]
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 […]
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