© 2018 Greg & Sylvia RAY

History

Read more about the article An American rugby player in Maitland, 1910
The 1910 US rugby team that toured Australia. Ken Dole is in the back row, fourth from the left.

An American rugby player in Maitland, 1910

In 1910 things were tense between two rival rugby football competitions in New South Wales, Australia. For some years the game styled on that originally played at the Rugby school in England had been administered by the so-called Rugby Union, but the conservative reign of the union bosses was being threatened by a breakaway group of rebels who played the same game but called themselves the Rugby League. The main reason for the rebellion was the same as that which had precipitated the formation of a breakaway rugby league in England - an argument over whether…

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Read more about the article Seeing double: 3D in vintage stereographs
3D viewing in the early 20th century. Photo by William Fraser

Seeing double: 3D in vintage stereographs

Humans have two eyes for a good reason. Viewing the same scene from two close but very slightly different locations creates an impression of depth. The brain, processing visual data from each eye, builds a scene in which it's easy to determine which elements are near and which are far away. We can learn to interpret a two-dimensional image - like a painting or a photograph - as representing depth of field, but of course it is never the same as viewing the real item or scene with two eyes. In the 1830s when photography was…

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Read more about the article Time to break free from the robber state

Time to break free from the robber state

Opinion by Greg Ray The biggest mistake Newcastle ever made was in 1967 when its voters helped kill the idea of Northern NSW seceding from the Sydney-dominated south. After decades of agitation and a huge push, the so-called “Northern Separation Movement” had managed to force a formal referendum on the issue. People in the north of the state had brought the issue up repeatedly from the time that Queensland split from NSW. Their complaint was and has always been the same: that the Sydney-based government extracts far more from regional areas than it puts back, that…

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