© 2018 Greg & Sylvia RAY

NSW

Read more about the article Confessions of an ice dealer
Handling blocks of ice at Dark's Ice Works, 1936.

Confessions of an ice dealer

RAY Kime used to be one of the biggest ice dealers in the Wallsend area. He’d buy from his supplier in Newcastle and break down the pure ice into smaller quantities for his many customers who simply couldn’t get by without it. That was before electric refrigerators, of course, when most people used iceboxes to keep their foodstuffs cold. “When fridges came in, well that was the beginning of the end for the ice home delivery business,” Ray told me. He still has his ice pick, his ice tongs and various bits and pieces of paperwork…

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Read more about the article Panorama of Newcastle, circa 1902.

Panorama of Newcastle, circa 1902.

This delightful panoramic view of Newcastle Harbour, taken from Cathedral Hill, was created between 1899 and 1907 by Charleston Studios, a prominent photographic presence in the city at the time. It has been scanned from a folding copy in an old pamphlet and the digital copy has been carefully restored by Sylvia Ray. In the front right is a portion of the since-dismantled Cathedral graveyard. Stockton shows large in the background, with the masts of the sunken ship Regent Murray (lost in 1899) poking above the waterline at the end of the Oyster Bank. The old…

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Read more about the article Some wartime plane crashes in Newcastle, NSW

Some wartime plane crashes in Newcastle, NSW

When a US Army Douglas C-47A Skytrain aircraft crashed into a stormwater drain at Broadmeadow in World War 2, plenty of people crowded around for a look. Quite a few took photos, despite efforts by authorities to prevent this. The plane had been forced to make an emergency landing at Broadmeadow airstrip because of a severe storm, but it skidded on the wet runway, crashed through a fence and ended up in the drain. Of the 25 men aboard, two were slightly injured. According to newspaper reports, the plane was the seventh in two years to…

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