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Yearly Archives: 2019

Read more about the article Newcastle’s harbour punts and the Trial Bay disaster
Newcastle car ferry Kooroongabah, photo by Ron Jones

Newcastle’s harbour punts and the Trial Bay disaster

Crossing Newcastle Harbour has for many years been both a challenge for travellers and commuters and an opportunity for the operators of ferries and punts. A great variety of ferries came and went from Newcastle over the decades, with some used chiefly as industrial transport and others available for general passengers. A car awaits a ride across Newcastle Harbour on April 14, 1910. Photo by Ernest Brougham Docker. Vehicular ferries (always known in Newcastle as punts) filled a vital role, and until the advent of Stockton Bridge in 1971, they often had their work cut out…

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Read more about the article What to do with that old slide collection?

What to do with that old slide collection?

NOT so many years ago the hearty suggestion: “Let’s have a slide night” was often enough to make the whole family groan and to induce friends and relatives to suddenly discover prior pressing engagements. And yet, despite the fearsome reputation of family slideshows as the definitive cure for insomnia, hardly a family was without a slide projector and folding screen, and many amateur photographers in the 1960s, 70s and 80s shot more colour transparencies than negatives on their days out with their cameras. (One reason was that it was cheaper.) Actually, the slide fashion was an…

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Read more about the article The real Tomahawk Joe, at last
Tomahawk Joe and friend at Cronulla, February 1938. Photo by Ray Olson, courtesy of the State Library of NSW.

The real Tomahawk Joe, at last

Time and again, over the years, I've heard stories of a "wild white man" known as Tomahawk Joe who made a name for himself in the Newcastle area in the 1930s as a showman, hurling tomahawks at a target, often accompanied by his female assistant, "Lone Star". I've seen photos of him: tall, gaunt and unshaven, always stern-faced and usually dressed in Wild West gear and holding his trademark tomahawk. And once, in a bookshop, I even found a copy of a pamphlet written by Joe and apparently published with the assistance of bookshop owner Jim…

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