© 2018 Greg & Sylvia RAY

Vintage Photographs and Photography

Read more about the article Who are these Excelsior girls?

Who are these Excelsior girls?

Excelsior! I might have known Longfellow had something to do with it. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. I think of him as a kind of American Tennyson: the pair of them are corny balladeers whom I can’t help liking, at least a little bit, just on the strength of their word music. Epic poets of the Victorian era, pumping out metred rhyming stanzas packed with sentiment and imagery that was just right for its time. Mind you, I rate Tennyson a few leagues ahead of Longfellow just on the strength of In Memoriam, where I can dip and…

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Read more about the article Art from disaster: Ron Morrison’s last exhibition
Ron's submerged home, showing the peak flood level (left); Ron as a young man at The Maitland Mercury newspaper office; some flood-damaged items from Ron's collection.

Art from disaster: Ron Morrison’s last exhibition

When a monster flood ripped through the Northern NSW town of Lismore and surrounding districts in 2022, veteran photographer Ron Morrison lost almost all his possessions and his health took a severe hit. Forced from a comfortable ground-floor flat beneath his son's home in the riverside town of Woodburn into respite care in a nursing home, Ron - already frail - struggled with the situation. Ron's wife Liz had already been moved into care before the flood, due to slowly encroaching dementia. Liz Morrison in the ground-floor apartment she shared with Ron, before it was destroyed…

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Read more about the article The man who was Hanimex

The man who was Hanimex

There was a time when Hanimex-branded consumer goods - particularly in the photographic line - were everywhere you looked; in Australia at least. There were Hanimex cameras, projectors, slide viewers, binoculars and, quite honestly, too many other products to list. Growing up in Australia in the 1970s I often wondered who was behind this prolific corporation, but I never followed up on the question until, a year or two before the Covid pandemic, my wife and I stayed at a bed and breakfast at Bellingen in NSW, the owner of which, Frank Wynen, told me he…

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