© 2018 Greg & Sylvia RAY

Miscellaneous

Read more about the article Dulcie Hartley’s memories of the Depression

Dulcie Hartley’s memories of the Depression

Some years ago my late dear friend Dulcie Hartley shared these memories of the Great Depression with me. Dulcie was an amateur historian with wide-ranging interests. She wrote a number of very good books. Her Depression recollections are so interesting I'd like to share them more widely. Thanks to Dulcie's daughter Venessa for her help. My birth in January 1929 heralded the onset of a most disastrous year for the Goddard family. An unplanned addition, I joined my eight year old sister Vera and completed the family group. During the same year my father, Sidney Goddard,…

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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 Back to flattening the curve

Back to flattening the curve

This round of Covid-19 has got me thinking about how things were when it began. When we speculated - wrongly - that the virus was easily transmissible from surfaces, that the early strain was extremely contagious and that it might take years to find a vaccine. Back then all the talk was of "flattening the curve", which meant we assumed most of us were going to be exposed to the virus but we hoped that by being careful we could keep the numbers of infected people from skyrocketing all at once. Our goal was to stop…

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