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NSW

Read more about the article John Jobson’s BHP and other photographs
A BHP loco in 1927, John Jobson and Ellaroo, the first ship in Newcastle's "new" floating dock, 1929

John Jobson’s BHP and other photographs

A bundle of photographic prints, handed to me recently, jogged my memory somehow. The matt black envelopes in which the photos had been stored - evidently for a long time - were familiar to me for a start. Then there was the compact writing on the back, and the reference to the photos having been taken in the late 1920s and early 1930s by a metallurgist at Newcastle's BHP steelworks. I went scurrying to my filing cabinets and, sure enough, I had two photos by the same photographer, given to me by a woman who had…

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Read more about the article Newcastle’s Obelisk and “the social evil”

Newcastle’s Obelisk and “the social evil”

Was Newcastle's famous Obelisk once a site for illicit sexual assignations? It may have been, if I have understood the transcript of an 1866 public meeting correctly. The transcript, created as part of an elaborate joke apparently designed to reflect discredit on Newcastle's young municipal council, is a record of a meeting at which a reluctant candidate for office, Mr C. W. Williams, was quizzed over many aspects of civic life. Mr Williams was not a highly educated man. At the time the law allowed unwilling candidates to be elected to Newcastle's municipal council against their…

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Read more about the article Old envelopes, old businesses

Old envelopes, old businesses

When we first acquired some of the late Ken Magor's vast collection of photographic negatives, many of the negatives were stored in second-hand envelopes that Ken had evidently scavenged from a variety of Newcastle businesses. Ken clearly needed something to store the negatives in, but in the late 1940s - in the wake of the war - many items were in relatively short supply. Ken was a master scavenger and he gathered large quantities of used envelopes from the printer Reg Pognoski, from the retail store Winns and from other sources as they became available. After…

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