© 2018 Greg & Sylvia RAY

What to do with that old slide collection?

NOT so many years ago the hearty suggestion: “Let’s have a slide night” was often enough to make the whole family groan and to induce friends and relatives to suddenly discover prior pressing engagements. And yet, despite the fearsome reputation of family slideshows as the definitive cure for insomnia, hardly a family was without a slide projector and folding screen, and many amateur photographers in the 1960s, 70s and 80s shot more colour transparencies than negatives on their days out with their cameras. (One reason was that it was cheaper.) Actually, the slide fashion was an…

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Read more about the article The real Tomahawk Joe, at last
Tomahawk Joe and friend at Cronulla, February 1938. Photo by Ray Olson, courtesy of the State Library of NSW.

The real Tomahawk Joe, at last

Time and again, over the years, I've heard stories of a "wild white man" known as Tomahawk Joe who made a name for himself in the Newcastle area in the 1930s as a showman, hurling tomahawks at a target, often accompanied by his female assistant, "Lone Star". I've seen photos of him: tall, gaunt and unshaven, always stern-faced and usually dressed in Wild West gear and holding his trademark tomahawk. And once, in a bookshop, I even found a copy of a pamphlet written by Joe and apparently published with the assistance of bookshop owner Jim…

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Read more about the article Of sharks and musical ladies
Verona (Ronnie) Ayerst, Pat Charker and Iris Hayes.

Of sharks and musical ladies

Verona “Ronnie” Ayerst grew up in Wickham, in a house with a yard full of sun-bleached shark jaws. Killing sharks was a family business, and her father Jim was good at the job - as well as being an accomplished jazz trumpeter. Jim had boatsheds at Wickham, like his father Joseph before him, who had been a providore on Newcastle Harbour. When I spoke to Ronnie a few years ago she remembered her father’s “fetish” against shoelaces, which he held responsible for drownings when people fell overboard from boats and couldn’t get their shoes off. Ronnie…

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