© 2018 Greg & Sylvia RAY

Some Newcastle businesses in 1891

The Town and Country Journal was an interesting weekly newspaper which ran from 1870 to 1919. On April 11, 1891, it published an illustrated article about some businesses in Newcastle, NSW. The article reads like a modern-day advertorial, leading to a suspicion that the subjects may have paid for the glowing accounts of their business enterprises. The largest and by far the most important city of this colony after Sydney the capital is Newcastle, and in this issue some excellent views of the principal streets and places of business are given. Newcastle is the great emporium…

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Big business’s vision for Australia

I wrote this piece as a tongue-in-cheek column for The Newcastle Herald in 2014. I'm reproducing it here because it seems to me that the plan, as outlined, is coming together nicely. IT’S not all bad news on the economic front. Yes, unemployment is high and rising, especially among the young. And yes, the real estate boom is forcing up living costs and pricing the young out of the housing market. And yes, retail demand is down because even those with spare money are worried about whether they’ll have a job next week. But our big…

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Lonely Beasts, a father’s review

At the outset I have to declare that Lonely Beasts is a book created by my son, Jerry, and therefore readers will have to decide whether anything I say on the topic from this point on can be treated as reliable. Naturally I will declare that if I had a poor opinion of the book then I would say nothing about it at all. Still, you will have to decide whether to read on, and if you read on, you will have to decide whether to depend on my comments. And then of course you will…

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