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Monthly Archives: August 2022

Read more about the article Newcastle in the 1960s
Ron and Liz Morrison at Woodville, NSW, in 2017

Newcastle in the 1960s

BETWEEN the two of them, Ron and Elizabeth Morrison took more photographs of Newcastle and surrounds than they could possibly have counted. Working at times as photographers on the staff of Hunter newspapers including The Newcastle Herald and the Maitland Mercury, and then running their own press agency in the city, the duo shot portraits by the score, covered news and sports events and worked for commercial clients. Later, they both worked in academia and dabbled in artistic pursuits, as well as publishing a string of successful books. Among their highly regarded volumes of photographs are Newcastle Seen (1989)…

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Read more about the article The turret ship Mokatam’s long goodbye

The turret ship Mokatam’s long goodbye

For some years after the end of World War II an ungainly hulk of a ship lay moored at Stockton, Newcastle, NSW. It was a battered old rustbucket that ended up in Newcastle as part of the postwar flotsam that drifted around the Pacific in the conflict's confusing aftermath. I'd seen photos of the ship lying there, and was often curious about its extremely odd shape. It's hull was unlike other ships, with a huge bulging section down low, and I wondered what the reason was this peculiar form. In time I learned the ship's name…

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My theory about conspiracies

A conspiracy theory is when you think that some people are working together against the interests of others. In modern language a “conspiracy theorist” is understood to be a person with unreasonably paranoid beliefs about implausible conspiracies. It’s a label with negative connotations of mental illness and wrong-headedness because we know that some mental disorders are accompanied by paranoid conspiracy beliefs. I’ve known a few people who have abused too many drugs and wound up thinking everybody was conspiring against them. People on the radio were talking about them, they believed, and one guy who was…

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