© 2018 Greg & Sylvia RAY

Adrift on the river of time

I wrote the column above in The Newcastle Herald back in February 2005. That's nearly 17 years ago, as the crow flies. I use that seemingly odd expression deliberately, since it seems to me that time moves like some rivers: sometimes running pell-mell in a straight line through tight canyons of circumstance, sometimes meandering gently through sun-kissed meadows and sometimes twisting and turning through unexpected rapids and past overhanging branches at such a rate that the only thing to remain in your memory after the hectic passage is a few blurry images and a sense of…

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Old envelopes, old businesses

When we first acquired some of the late Ken Magor's vast collection of photographic negatives, many of the negatives were stored in second-hand envelopes that Ken had evidently scavenged from a variety of Newcastle businesses. Ken clearly needed something to store the negatives in, but in the late 1940s - in the wake of the war - many items were in relatively short supply. Ken was a master scavenger and he gathered large quantities of used envelopes from the printer Reg Pognoski, from the retail store Winns and from other sources as they became available. After…

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Postcards from the Past, by Greg and Sylvia Ray

I've long been fascinated by postcards - especially old ones. They speak of a time when communication was a more leisurely business than it is today, and yet they symbolise the desire of people for quick and snappy means of staying in touch. Printed in vast numbers in the early years of last century, postcards were a collecting craze too, and many families still have old albums full of these intriguing ambassadors from the past. Our 13th book, Postcards from the Past, is a collection of cards depicting Newcastle, NSW, and its Hunter Region hinterland. The…

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