© 2018 Greg & Sylvia RAY

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Read more about the article Putting a label on it: ephemera from all over

Putting a label on it: ephemera from all over

Pretty pieces of paper. I like them. So I've made a collection of them, gathered from all sorts of places. I like the artistry of them. Sometimes I see some humour or something peculiar in them that makes me collect them and put them in albums, occasionally to look at. Here's a selection of some of my paper ephemera. Beer labels - all Australian. Some older iterations of products that are still around, and some others not so much. My Dad was a KB drinker, in longnecks and later in those gold cans. Back in the…

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Read more about the article Barrington and Gloucester Tops in 1925

Barrington and Gloucester Tops in 1925

Industrial and commercial newsletters and in-house publications are a rich source of fascinating historical material, often of a type that can't be found anywhere else. One of my favourite Australian business journals is Bank Notes, the journal of the Commonwealth Bank of Australia. I pick up copies and bound volumes from time to time, mostly from the 1920s and 1930s, and love to comb through them for great old photos and articles about many aspects of Australian life. Mostly the articles are written by bank staff members, and the photos come from many sources. Among the…

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Read more about the article Of green grass and geniuses

Of green grass and geniuses

In 1939 a vice president of General Motors, Charles F. Kettering, was asked to name the most important research problem in the world. His answer? To find out why grass is green. Kettering was a remarkable man, one of that likeable breed of far-thinking, imaginative capitalists we see too few of these days. His great enthusiasm was research. Pure research for its own sake. Not narrow, stifled, research of the kind some governments think is the only type worth funding. You can get a sense of the kind of man he was when you read some…

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