© 2018 Greg & Sylvia RAY

History

Read more about the article A BHP mail-room boy and shipping clerk remembers

A BHP mail-room boy and shipping clerk remembers

When Neville Chant started work as a clerk at the BHP Company's Newcastle steelworks in 1936, he was allocated to the correspondence department as a mail-room boy. He'd just finished his school leaving certificate and he started at the BHP just before Christmas. It was a different world from that of 2021, but although communications technology might seem primitive compared to today's, it was capable of great efficiency. While BHP's headquarters were in Melbourne, it had important interests in many parts of Australia. The BHP steelworks and its satellite industries were a huge presence in Newcastle,…

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Read more about the article The Harlem Blackbirds

The Harlem Blackbirds

In 1955 Australia was visited by the "Harlem Blackbirds", a troupe of performers from the United States. The group of 32 performers was billed as "Australia's first all-coloured revue" and by all accounts the show was very popular. I've often seen programmes of the tour in my travels around second-hand bookshops and recently I found one in Newcastle - rather bug-eaten, unfortunately - that was distinguished by bearing signatures of many of the performers. I've been able to find surprisingly little written about the show and its performers. Or perhaps, sadly, that isn't surprising, given that…

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Read more about the article Notes from the frontier wars, NSW, 1848
Unrelated illustration from The Town and Country Journal, December 14, 1872. Indicates how white people viewed the frontier wars.

Notes from the frontier wars, NSW, 1848

Ten years ago I was loaned two fascinating letters, which I was told had been written from the NSW settlement of Stroud in 1848. The letters are of great interest since they bear very strongly on the conflict between indigenous people who had been living in the area near Gloucester and the white settlers who were moving into their territory to claim the land as their own private property. For a long time I had no idea who wrote the letters, having been told they may have been written by somebody named "Robert Scott". Since the…

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