© 2018 Greg & Sylvia RAY

Newcastle, NSW, Australia

Read more about the article Brian’s childhood polio helped feed his love of coalmines and railways
Young Brian Andrews, photographed by rail and mine enthusiast, the late Jim Webber.

Brian’s childhood polio helped feed his love of coalmines and railways

Brian Robert Andrews was born in the midst of coal and steam near his father's workplace at West Wallsend Extended Colliery at Killingworth in 1948. His father was in charge of maintaining Caledonian Collieries' fleet of coal wagons, and the family of eight lived in a company-owned house. At 17 months Brian contracted polio. He went to bed one night fit and strong and woke next morning unable to stay upright. The doctor was called and passed sentence: the infant had polio and nothing could be done. That was the beginning of a lifetime of trials…

Continue ReadingBrian’s childhood polio helped feed his love of coalmines and railways
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.…

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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 all 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…

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