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Monthly Archives: April 2019

Read more about the article Bushland find a missing link for a vintage car project
The builder's plate from the vintage Crossley tourer

Bushland find a missing link for a vintage car project

In April 2008 I took my son Oliver metal-detecting. We'd been to beaches a few times, but this particular weekend we decided to go to bushland near the Newcastle suburb of Jesmond. We chose the spot of a former settlement named "Hollywood" where people built shacks during the Great Depression of the 1930s. There isn't much left of Hollywood now, and I guess when they build the next stage of Highway 23 there will be even less. But I remember stumbling on some old hearthstones, chimneys and fruit trees when I was a kid, and learning…

Continue ReadingBushland find a missing link for a vintage car project
Read more about the article Trauma and tragedy in the life of a Hunter Valley preacher in the 19th Century
Missionary John S Austin, at 70, from his book

Trauma and tragedy in the life of a Hunter Valley preacher in the 19th Century

As a young circuit preacher at Murrurundi, in the Upper Hunter Valley of NSW in the 1860s - then later at Maitland, Singleton and Newcastle - the Reverend John S. Austin had his fair share of near-death experiences, witnessed a fatal traffic accident in High Street, Maitland and lost his daughter in a drowning tragedy in the Hunter River. The Methodist minister John S. Austin lived into his 80s and wrote an autobiography with the unpromising title Missionary Enterprise and Home Service, a Story of Mission Life in Samoa and Circuit Work in New South Wales.…

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Read more about the article How a vanished soldier’s “deserter” label harmed his family, and how he eventually “died”
Russell Atkinson was labelled a deserter on the basis of no evidence at all. How Smith's Weekly reported his eventual vindication.

How a vanished soldier’s “deserter” label harmed his family, and how he eventually “died”

Private Russell Atkinson went into the front line with his unit of the Australian Imperial Force's 54th Battalion in October 1916. When his unit was relieved on October 28, he had disappeared. On the tumultuous Western Front in The Great War many men disappeared. Sometimes they deserted to enemy lines in the hope of surviving the war as a prisoner. Sometimes they drowned in waterlogged shellholes, were buried by explosions or were blown into unrecognisable fragments. In the case of Private Atkinson, the army decided desertion would be the official explanation. He had already been treated…

Continue ReadingHow a vanished soldier’s “deserter” label harmed his family, and how he eventually “died”
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