Getting hitched. Tying the knot. For those who walk down the aisle it's a big event, one way or another. And there's usually somebody there taking pictures so the wedding can be remembered, for better or worse. My collection contains a lot of wedding photos from a variety of places and times. Here's a selection of noteworthy images from interesting weddings. Joining the smile high club Sydney surveyor John Nicholls and his kindergarten teacher bride Elenor Simpson took a fancy to the idea of being married in an aeroplane flying 1000m above the ground. It was July 1968, and the couple chose Newcastle's Aeropelican airport, a six-seat Piper Cherokee and a Methodist minister - John Woodhouse, of Belmont. The first...
History Blog
In 2010 my wife, Sylvia, and I bought a collection of old photographic negatives. These amazing images, mostly of Newcastle and the Hunter area of NSW, were highly relevant to my long career as a journalist at The Newcastle Herald, where I had often written historical features.
The photos changed our lives. We used them to publish a book, which led to another, and another, until by 2023 we had produced 13 books.
I left the newspaper in 2015 but the passion for history hasn’t left me, hence this blog.
Here I’ll be writing about items of historical interest that take my fancy, some relevant to the Hunter area but some from all manner of sources.
I hope you enjoy my posts, and that you explore the backlog of material on this website.
In my teens I fancied I might become a poet, but lack of courage and a strong interest in economic survival dictated that I explore other career avenues. These included labouring in heavy industry, clerical work in both the public and private sector, sales jobs (including telephone canvassing and door-to-door) and an abortive attempt to study at university.
At uni I lasted just two years of an economics/law degree, ultimately pulling the plug when I failed my elective subject – Family Law.
All the while I’d been applying for jobs in journalism and had accumulated an impressive collection of rejection notes when I suddenly scored a job as a cadet reporter back in my home town of Newcastle, NSW. That was 1984, and I’d found my career. I worked at The Newcastle Herald until 2015, as a reporter, chief of staff, columnist, magazine editor, feature writer and editorial writer.
I won some nice awards, met lots of wonderful people, tried to right some wrongs, made a few mistakes and had a lot of fun. Leaving my job was sad but necessary, given the way newspapers were heading in 2015 and given the arithmetical reality of redundancy pay. But I still love writing, so my blogs, our books and our website are my outlet.
My wife, Sylvia, and I publish books of historical photographs. We have three grown-up children and we live in Newcastle, NSW.
Newsletter Sign-Up
Search for books, products and photos on Photo Time Tunnel:
Some of my favourite Hunter history sites
The latest...
I've wondered, recently, what on Earth I did with my time when I was a little child. Seeing the manic smorgasbord of potential entertainment options for the very young these days makes me suppose my own distant early childhood must have been exceedingly dull by comparison. There was no internet, no instant access to streaming videos on mobile phones and way fewer toys than are around today. Television turned up in our family when I was about four or five, but its offerings for children were limited and my parents rationed it - at first, anyway. What toys I had were generally pretty unsophisticated. Building blocks of various sorts I remember, supplemented by plastic bits and bobs from cereal packets....
If the past is another country, then the past of another country might be doubly foreign, I guess. When I travel overseas I'm naturally drawn to flea markets and vintage stores and among the things I like to buy are photographs and negatives. In dusty cabinets in old stores, on cluttered blankets on the ground at flea markets, at fetes and village yard sale days I hope to see them: tatty paper pouches of old negs and snapshots, cardboard boxes full of glass plate negs or old photo albums. Sometimes particular photo albums excite me enough to pay well. The photos might be of unusually good quality, of interesting subjects or otherwise appealing. I've bought bags full of old family...
Excelsior! I might have known Longfellow had something to do with it. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. I think of him as a kind of American Tennyson: the pair of them are corny balladeers whom I can’t help liking, at least a little bit, just on the strength of their word music. Epic poets of the Victorian era, pumping out metred rhyming stanzas packed with sentiment and imagery that was just right for its time. Mind you, I rate Tennyson a few leagues ahead of Longfellow just on the strength of In Memoriam, where I can dip and find gems of real worth to contemplate. But Tennyson took a big turn down in my estimation when I read a very unflattering description...
When a monster flood ripped through the Northern NSW town of Lismore and surrounding districts in 2022, veteran photographer Ron Morrison lost almost all his possessions and his health took a severe hit. Forced from a comfortable ground-floor flat beneath his son's home in the riverside town of Woodburn into respite care in a nursing home, Ron - already frail - struggled with the situation. Ron's wife Liz had already been moved into care before the flood, due to slowly encroaching dementia. Liz Morrison in the ground-floor apartment she shared with Ron, before it was destroyed by the 2022 flood. As the flood approached, Ron and his ambulance officer son Ken had been warned that the water might rise to...
There was a time when Hanimex-branded consumer goods - particularly in the photographic line - were everywhere you looked; in Australia at least. There were Hanimex cameras, projectors, slide viewers, binoculars and, quite honestly, too many other products to list. Growing up in Australia in the 1970s I often wondered who was behind this prolific corporation, but I never followed up on the question until, a year or two before the Covid pandemic, my wife and I stayed at a bed and breakfast at Bellingen in NSW, the owner of which, Frank Wynen, told me he used to work for Hanimex. That reminded me of my earlier interest, and I set about trying to discover what I could about the...