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Read more about the article Hartley Spurr, legendary bait man
Hartley Spurr in 1943, photo by Ivan Ive. State Library of NSW

Hartley Spurr, legendary bait man

Quite a number of years ago my elderly next-door neighbour asked me what I knew about a man named Hartley Spurr. I told him I had never heard the name, and he asked me to help him find out. All he knew, he told me, was that the name "Hartley Spurr" had made its way into a saying among some of his acquaintances. "If you wanted some obscure tool or object, somebody would pipe up and say: 'Hartley Spurr had one of those'," my neighbour said. I assured him I would try to find out, and…

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Read more about the article The amazing photograph of the Hinton Wharf collapse

The amazing photograph of the Hinton Wharf collapse

IT was a photograph that should not have been possible, considering the cumbersome glass-plate camera Jack Little was using. Press photographer Jack Little was at the right place at the right time on August 14,1932. Not only that, the assignment the veteran Sydney and Newcastle Sun photographer had been sent to cover on August 14, 1932 was the epitome of boring. And yet, by pure chance, Little took a photo that day that remains a wonder of news photography. Little, who was working at the Newcastle Sun on secondment from the Sydney Sun, had been sent…

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Read more about the article Allara, the ship that wouldn’t die

Allara, the ship that wouldn’t die

WHEN a torpedo-damaged freighter was towed into Newcastle Harbour in July 1942, at the height of Japan's deadly submarine campaign against Australian shipping, a Newcastle Herald photographer was on the spot to capture some extraordinary images of the crippled ship and its wounded crew members. But the superb dramatic photographs weren't published. Tight censorship by the government, preventing the publication of bad news that might harm public morale, saw to that. The negatives were filed and forgotten for decades, before passing out of the newspaper's ownership during a "downsizing" in the 1970s when collector Ken Magor…

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