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Monthly Archives: July 2020

Read more about the article Where does the job-cutting road lead to?

Where does the job-cutting road lead to?

ANOTHER day, another how many hundred jobs being lost? You can blame the pandemic for much of it right now. The impact of the virus on business has forced Qantas to cut at least 6000 jobs. Australia’s dominant news and propaganda distribution network, Rupert Murdoch’s News Limited, is shuttering papers all over the country and putting hundreds more people out of work. What’s left of the universities are slashing jobs and pay for non-executives with considerable ruthlessness. Accounting firms are cutting. Law firms are cutting. But really, the pandemic has only accelerated and exacerbated an existing…

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Read more about the article Some of the oldest photos of Newcastle, NSW

Some of the oldest photos of Newcastle, NSW

Tracing advances in the technology of recorded images is fascinating, particularly in relation to specific places. Not only does the place change over time, but the nature of the images changes too. In the period since European settlement of Newcastle, NSW - originally a prison-labour camp for political and intransigent convicts - one can trace the evolution of images from freehand sketches, to engravings and then to photography. Early photographs are predictably rare. Newcastle was not a prosperous or appealing place at the time that photography was being born. Nevertheless, some quite old photographs (or images…

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Read more about the article The great Newcastle railway debate of 1856

The great Newcastle railway debate of 1856

WHEN the newly formed NSW Railway Commission proposed in 1856 to extend the Newcastle railway line from Honeysuckle Point to the city's east, many of the town's inhabitants were horrified. An angry public meeting was held and nearly a third of the town's population signed a petition begging the government to put a stop to what they saw as a destructive plan. Newcastle was designed and laid out around its harbour and to have access to this tremendous feature wiped out by a fenced-in railway line was considered an outrageous imposition. Leading Newcastle citizens including James…

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