© 2018 Greg & Sylvia RAY

Australia’s bushfire revelation

The spring 2019 bushfire emergency in Australia has been a revelation to many people.Questions that had seemed in doubt have been clarified, and things that had been ill-defined have now been shown in their true light. The first and most obvious is climate change. Vast efforts have been made in Australia (as they have all over the world) to cast doubt over the science of climate change. Those with huge commercial interests in fossil fuels have invested fortunes in protecting their status quo, working simultaneously from many directions. They have sponsored the promotion of alternative views,…

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Ray Standen’s Newcastle earthquake video

Back around Christmas 1989, Islington man Ray Standen, 64, was making a video in Hamilton. It was a jolly yuletide film about the suburb - and particularly the shopping strip of Beaumont Street - preparing for Christmas and New Year celebrations. Ray had made video his hobby about three years before, after he'd suffered a heart attack and stroke, and he credited the hobby with helping him find a reason to keep living. (My source for this information is an article by Mike Scanlon, in The Newcastle Herald. I'm afraid I don't know the date of…

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Our Town Revisited: Newcastle in colour with a focus on the 1970s

This is the Newcastle that I remember from my own younger days. And this is the most personal of our books to date, peppered with fragmentary anecdotes of my memories of growing up in Our Town. My unrequited wish to go on Romper Room, for example. And of course my still-jarring memories of the 1989 earthquake - the 30th anniversary of which coincides with the production of this book. Newcastle's East End, late 1970s. Photo by Ron Morrison. For the past decade, Sylvia and I have produced a collection of historical photographs each year. It started…

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