© 2018 Greg & Sylvia RAY

Walsh Island Dockyard in 1929

Industrial and commercial newsletters and in-house publications are a rich source of fascinating historical material, often of a type that can't be found anywhere else. One of my favourite Australian business journals is Bank Notes, the journal of the Commonwealth Bank of Australia. I pick up copies and bound volumes from time to time, mostly from the 1920s and 1930s, and love to comb through them for great old photos and articles about many aspects of Australian life. Mostly the articles are written by bank staff members, and the photos come from many sources. Among the…

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The Queen and Covid: slanting the news

Is it news? Or is it propaganda? If it's propaganda, what is it trying to achieve? Living in Australia at the moment these are important questions. Long ago I worked at a newspaper. One job I had for a time (an honorary additional duty, actually) was to mentor cadet reporters. A thing I liked to do during our little "lectures" was to compare the different treatments given to news stories by different newspapers and media outlets. This was, and is, a very instructive and helpful exercise, not only for journalists but for anybody who wants a…

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Three’s a crowd in a matchbox

What is it with matches and the number three? Always a sucker for brightly coloured bits of paper, I've managed to accumulate a small collection of matchbox labels. I like these odd little works of art that flourished for years in a seemingly unlikely niche. They are like postage stamps, I suppose, in that they had strictly utilitarian beginnings but soon became a field for fertile design imaginations. I'm often baffled as to why certain designs were chosen to decorate the outsides of matchboxes, and some are nothing short of weird. Threes. Three of them. But…

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