© 2018 Greg & Sylvia RAY

Miscellaneous

Read more about the article Newcastle and the Hunter Region, by Ourselves: 2000 to 2020. We’re asking for help.

Newcastle and the Hunter Region, by Ourselves: 2000 to 2020. We’re asking for help.

A few years ago Sylvia and I were giving a talk to a group, about old photos of course, and there was a lot of discussion about how lucky we and others had been at times to benefit from chance discoveries of caches of old negatives. Then Sylvia wondered aloud about photos from the digital era, and how future enthusiasts would manage to stumble on forgotten troves of images that had no physical analogue to help them survive. Having suffered the agony of a hard-drive failure, and the misery of a lightning strike that knocked out…

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Read more about the article Stories from old postcards: Part 1

Stories from old postcards: Part 1

Old postcards can be interesting for a variety of reasons. For a start, they are often interesting for the subject matter they depict. And sometimes they also carry interesting titbits of historical information in the messages written on their backs. I've picked a handful from my collection and transcribed the often hard-to-read inscriptions. . Your parcel is on its way . . . This one is easy to read, at least, having been typed by a staff member of renowned Newcastle department store Winns. Mrs Lowrey, of Booral, has ordered a parcel from Winns, and Winns…

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Read more about the article When Killingworth Colliery blew up
Killingworth Colliery before the explosion. From an old postcard.

When Killingworth Colliery blew up

Thanks to Brian Robert Andrews for correcting and informing this text. At 5.25am on December 7, 1910, people who lived near Killingworth, NSW, were awoken by a huge, ground-shaking explosion. As they looked outside, they saw a great black cloud of dust over the area of West Wallsend-Killingworth Colliery and immediately guessed what had happened. The colliery had exploded, hurling dust and debris about 300m into the air. Fortunately the mine was not working at the time. It had been in care and maintenance for two months, and the deputies and maintenance men who were due…

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