October 2020 - Photo Time Tunnel

Maverick, the beer-drinking goat. April 1961. Photo by Ron Morrison.

Animal stories

Post author:Greg Ray
Post published:October 30, 2020
Post category:History Vintage Photographs and Photography
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During his career as a press photographer, Ron Morrison took a lot of photographs of animals in many situations. Here are just a few. Maverick, the beer-drinking goat of Tanilba House Maverick enjoying a smoke with George Oberland at Tanilba Bay. In April 1961, the Oberland family of Tanilba Bay made news with their six-month-old pet goat, Maverick, who not only liked to drink beer, but also loved cigarettes. According to the article written at the time in the Sunday Mirror, Maverick used to steal any unguarded packets of cigarettes, rip them open and eat the…

Donald Trump and Rupert Murdoch. Symptoms of our times. Photos from Wikimedia commons.

Are the wheels falling off everything?

Post author:Greg Ray
Post published:October 30, 2020
Post category:- Politics, economics etc Greg Ray's Writing
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THERE are times, like this week, when it feels to me as if the wheels are falling off just about everything. The US election looms like an iceberg ahead. In a nominally democratic system based on voluntary voting, the name of the game has become voter-suppression, with the Republicans using every dirty trick imaginable to prevent people from being able to exercise their theoretical rights. Cutting the number of polling places, urging armed goons to patrol among voters, changing rules and systems to stop postal votes being counted – the list goes on and on. A…

Mugshots: photos from the NSW Police Criminal Register

Post author:Greg Ray
Post published:October 25, 2020
Post category:History Miscellaneous Vintage Photographs and Photography
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Among the strange books I've collected over the years is a melancholy volume of photographs, designed as a supplement to the 1944 NSW Police Criminal Register. It's a sad collection of mugshots of unhappy lawbreakers, accompanied by short descriptions, and some paragraphs about their known misdeeds. I've often thought the book would make a good source document for any novelist trying to create characters to populate the pages of their hard-boiled crime stories. Published in the war years, it reeks of the leftovers of The Great Depression, and features many uniformed service personnel as both perpetrators…

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