© 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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Alexander Galloway, Hunter photographer and composer

The entrepreneurial Alexander Galloway was a prolific photographer and amateur musician who composed some popular pieces of music in the early years of last century. He left an impressive legacy of photographic images of the Hunter Region's Coalfields district, a large number of which were recovered in 2010, in the form of hundreds of glass plate negatives, from beneath a house in Weston. Rescued by the diligent volunteers at the Edgeworth David Museum, these plates have been scanned and are now available through the University of Newcastle's online database. Alexander, Amy and William Galloway. Born on…

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Newcastle 360 degree panorama, circa 1910-1920

Our friend Bruce had been to a garage sale one Saturday morning where he found, sitting on a nogging in the frame of a neglected shed, a little cardboard box of glass plate negatives. They didn't cost him much and that same night he passed them into our hands as a gift, asking only that we give him copies of whatever images we scanned from them. When I first scanned them I could see that at least a few were from the Newcastle area, but the others seemed mysterious to me. One was clearly taken on…

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