© 2018 Greg & Sylvia RAY

Phyllis Mook, jitterbug star and pocket dynamo

The Mook family, an institution in the Hunter area for many decades, was justly famous for many reasons: Chinese restaurants, fruit shops, SP bookmaking, charitable work and – perhaps most of all to people who lived through the 1940s – producing the city’s best-known jitterbug star. Phyllis Mook was born in 1926 and grew up familiar with her family’s businesses. She worked in the fruit and vegetable shops and sometimes, according to her daughter Teresa Purnell, played the role of “cockatoo” or lookout at the family’s SP betting shop (known as “Mum’s”) in Beaumont Street, Hamilton.…

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Read more about the article August 15, 1945: the war is over!
Celebrations in Newcastle, NSW, for the end of World War 2, August 15, 1945.

August 15, 1945: the war is over!

Never in Newcastle’s history has there been a day of such celebration as VP Day. August 15, 1945, was the day the long-awaited news came that Japan had surrendered and the war was finally all over. In May the news that Hitler was finished was received with pleasure, but the direct threat to Australia had been from Japan and it wasn’t until the atomic bomb was dropped and Japan capitulated that the pent-up emotion was able to be released. The darkest days of the war, for most Novocastrians, had been three years earlier when a Japanese…

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Pantry moths are having sex on your food

Pantry moths never seemed to appear in my mother’s kitchen, years ago, like they do in our kitchen today. Sure, you saw weevils very occasionally, but the regular infestations of pantry moths that we experience these days are not a thing I recall from my childhood. I’m presuming you know about pantry moths because they seem a common feature in many households. They are small, nondescript-looking moths of a dull brownish-grey colour that fly out of the pantry when you open the door. Left to their own devices they will mate and lay eggs in whatever…

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