© 2018 Greg & Sylvia RAY

The joy of scrounging and the tales things tell

I've always been a scrounger, ferreting around in dark corners for the old and the interesting, hunting for odd and unusual stories. Here are a few bits and pieces gathered in my travels. The case of the flattened shell It's a German artillery shell case, cunningly crushed almost flat by some clever machine that has managed to leave the finished product oddly symmetrical. Not only that, when you view it side-on, it seems the flattened metal has the form of a strange malevolent face. On the bottom of the shell case you can read its pedigree:…

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Read more about the article A tantalising photo mystery
An exquisite child portrait from the collection: a real masterpiece.

A tantalising photo mystery

One of the problems with many collections of old photographs and negatives is that they are too often disconnected from their history and provenance. Sometimes that doesn't really matter. If the subject matter is mostly generic then the images may stand on their own. But some collections cry out for more explanation. I recently bought a small collection of 35 glass plate negatives from a seller in Melbourne. My main reason for buying was the presence in the collection of five plates depicting some of the decorative arches erected in Melbourne at the time of the…

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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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