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Read more about the article Holocaust echoes a warning for all times
Lisbeth and Wilhelm Mayer, about the time of their marriage in 1941. At right is their daughter, Maria Scurrah.

Holocaust echoes a warning for all times

Growing up in Peru in the 1940s and 50s, Maria Scurrah didn't know what a "Jew" was. When she was told she was one, she was mystified. "What? Was I supposed to have horns growing out of my head? I had no idea what it was all about," she said. Maria, who now lives in Newcastle, NSW, with her Australian husband, Martin, spent much of her childhood in South America blissfully unaware of antisemitism and of the horrors that in the 1930s drove her parents to leave their homes in Germany to make a new life…

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Read more about the article Vale Peter Mitchell, cartoonist and more

Vale Peter Mitchell, cartoonist and more

Former cartoonist, songwriter, folk singer, bookseller and latter-day recluse, Peter Mitchell, died last December. I knew him, but not well. I remember him mostly for his quirky cartoon contributions to The Newcastle Herald. But as with most people, there was more to him than met the eye. It was somewhere about the mid-1980s when Peter Mitchell's cartoons suddenly began appearing in The Newcastle Herald. In those days, the Herald's Saturday Magazine was still quite substantial, full of fine reading material and a bevy of regular features that made it a staple for many Newcastle people. To…

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Read more about the article Rankin Park street names record a corporate disaster

Rankin Park street names record a corporate disaster

I grew up in the Newcastle suburb of Rankin Park. It was a new suburb when we moved into the new house that was built there for my parents, in De Guerry Avenue, in 1969. It was a pretty good place to grow up. I could walk to South Wallsend school, to Scouts and to soccer practice. Rankin Park adjoined a big area of bushland where my brother and I spent countless hours, walking and riding our bikes on trails that extended between the old Wallsend brickworks, Jesmond Park, the Hollywood depression settlement, the Skyline Drive-in…

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