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Monthly Archives: April 2019

Read more about the article Maud Butler, the Kurri girl who wanted to be a soldier, and her bad soldier brother
Maud Butler in uniform. Photo from The Sydney Mail

Maud Butler, the Kurri girl who wanted to be a soldier, and her bad soldier brother

The main fighting Maud Butler did in World War I was with the authorities who wouldn’t let her go to the front to “do her bit”. A feisty Kurri Kurri teenager, Maud stowed away twice on troopships – having first disguised herself as a boy – and later got in trouble for collecting donations in uniform on a wartime Anzac Day. Stowaways were not rare. Digger diaries refer to stowaways being caught after troopships had sailed and being taken on strength and posted to battalions. But only if they were male. Maud Butler claimed at the…

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Read more about the article Anzac donkey-man Kirkpatrick’s links to Newcastle, NSW
John Simpson Kirkpatrick, with donkey and wounded man at Gallipoli

Anzac donkey-man Kirkpatrick’s links to Newcastle, NSW

John Simpson Kirkpatrick, perhaps the best-known Anzac of them all, had some ties to Newcastle. The subject of repeated calls for recognition with a posthumous Victoria Cross, the famous “man with the donkey” was a popular figure on Gallipoli because of the huge risks he ran in order to rescue wounded men.Like many other Anzacs, Kirkpatrick was British. A “Geordie” from England’s industrial Tyneside, he left school at 13 to work as a milkman and on ships in the Mediterranean. In May 1910, aged 18, he arrived in Newcastle, NSW as a crew member on a…

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Read more about the article The David Cohen warehouse blaze of 1908
David Cohen warehouse fire, Newcastle 1908

The David Cohen warehouse blaze of 1908

The Cohen building - the biggest in Newcastle - before the fire. Early on January 20, 1908, Newcastle’s biggest building, the David Cohen warehouse, caught fire. Firemen were called from surrounding districts to come and help quell the blaze, but little could be done. Parts of the building collapsed and damaged their neighbours, including the Shortland Hotel and the library of the Newcastle School of Arts. The fire’s aftermath was extensively photographed and became a popular postcard subject. A newspaper report of the fire can be read here. Morning after the David Cohen warehouse fire in…

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