© 2018 Greg & Sylvia RAY

Author: Greg Ray

This author has written 556 articles
Read more about the article Welcome home for the AIF’s 9th Division, April 1943.
Welcome home parade in Sydney for the AIF's 9th Division, April 2, 1943.

Welcome home for the AIF’s 9th Division, April 1943.

Early in World War 2, Australia wholeheartedly committed the bulk of its fighting forces to help England against Germany. Many people probably saw the war as a re-run of The Great War, and expected most of the action to occur in Europe. Some feared Japanese aggression, noting that Japan had already been at war in China for some years before Germany made its move in 1939, and that the Japanese had been conducting reconnaissance in the Pacific for some time. But it was generally accepted that the British Empire would always be more than a match…

Continue ReadingWelcome home for the AIF’s 9th Division, April 1943.
Read more about the article Phyllis Mook, jitterbug star and pocket dynamo

Phyllis Mook, jitterbug star and pocket dynamo

The Mook family, an institution in the Hunter area for many decades, was justly famous for many reasons: Chinese restaurants, fruit shops, SP bookmaking, charitable work and – perhaps most of all to people who lived through the 1940s – producing the city’s best-known jitterbug star. Phyllis Mook was born in 1926 and grew up familiar with her family’s businesses. She worked in the fruit and vegetable shops and sometimes, according to her daughter Teresa Purnell, played the role of “cockatoo” or lookout at the family’s SP betting shop (known as “Mum’s”) in Beaumont Street, Hamilton.…

Continue ReadingPhyllis Mook, jitterbug star and pocket dynamo
Read more about the article August 15, 1945: the war is over!
Celebrations in Newcastle, NSW, for the end of World War 2, August 15, 1945.

August 15, 1945: the war is over!

Never in Newcastle’s history has there been a day of such celebration as VP Day. August 15, 1945, was the day the long-awaited news came that Japan had surrendered and the war was finally over. In May the news that Hitler was finished was received with pleasure, but the direct threat to Australia had been from Japan and it wasn’t until the atomic bomb was dropped and Japan capitulated that the pent-up emotion was able to be released. The darkest days of the war, for most Novocastrians, had been three years earlier when a Japanese submarine…

Continue ReadingAugust 15, 1945: the war is over!
×
×

Cart