In the press
Click to introduce the journalism — decades of reporting, features and photography. Add pieces as normal posts in a “Journalism” category and they’ll gather below.
-
The hated Protector
Telling for the first time the extraordinary experiences of Charles Sievwright, Assistant Aboriginal Protector from 1839-42 in what was then part of the British colony of New South Wales, now the Western District of the Australian state of Victoria. “A disturbing insight into the tragedy that accompanied white occupation and a forensic expose of injustice.”…
-
Steve Pappas
As the Wet Season approached in the Northern Territory late in 1929, Stavros Papavassiliou had fallen in love with the Never Never country. “They who have lived in it and loved it Never-Never voluntarily leave it,” Jeannie Gunn had written a few years earlier in the classic Australian novel, We of the Never Never. Gunn…
-
Joe Saffigna
In the sugar cane fields of tropical north Queensland in the early 1930s, men were dropping dead at an alarming rate from Weil’s Disease, or leptospirosis. The disease, spread by infected rats, killed 19 men in 1933-34 alone, and left many others far too ill to work. Cane cutters were convinced the outbreak could be…
-
Ella, Queen of the Air
A new biography of Ella Zuila, the Sydney girl who entertained the world on a wire…coming soon!
-
“A small match-box full of gold…”
The birth of Bendigo, and a nominee for Aussie iconography… Christian Asquith began life in one of the poorest, filthiest parts of London, then the world’s biggest city. But it would be his mud-splattered actions on the other side of the world that would help to change the destiny of a new British colony, and…
-
A top hat, five tame rabbits and a plank
A top hat, five tame rabbits and a plank. In another time and place, they’d be a magician’s props. But in separate trials at the Old Bailey between 1828 and 1836, they were the stolen items that led to three brothers from one family in the outer London suburb of Whitton being transported to one…
-
Grace Vale: pioneer female doctor
Grace Vale (1860-1933) was a pioneer Australian female doctor and suffragist who devoted much of her career to improvement of health services for women and children in Victoria and New South Wales in the late 1800s and early 1900s, especially in rural areas. Vale was born in the then British colony of Victoria, in the…
-
Amy Castilla: pioneer female doctor
In the 1890s, when women cyclists in Melbourne were uncommon, and women doctors very rare, for several years Amy Castilla (1868-1898) was a familiar sight in some inner suburbs, as she rode between patients with a large doctor’s bag tied to the handle bars of her bike. Born in the Melbourne in 1868[i], in the…
-
Lucinda Musgrave: charity worker and anti-suffragist
Born Jeanie Lucinda Field (1833-1920), Lady Lucinda Musgrave was a prominent American-born promoter of women’s charitable projects in at least three British colonies, then in Britain of conservative politics, and the anti-suffrage movement. Early life in the US Jeannie Lucinda Field was born on 9 October 1833 in Massachusetts, probably in a family home in…
-
Bob ‘Doc’ Cunningham: magician
Robert (Bob) ‘Doc’ Cunningham (1873-1951), was an American illusionist, stunt performer, and showman whose stage names included Zante, Cunning the Jail Breaker, Cunning the Handcuff King, Doc Cunning, The Mental Miracle Man, and Cunning the Supermind. Bob Cunningham was born in Provo, Utah, on 12 April 1873.[1] He began public performances as a magician under…
-
Frank Eliason: illusionist
Franklin ‘Frank’ Eugene Eliason (1878-1921?), was an American illusionist, magician and shadographer, who used stage names including Dante, Dante the Marvellous and Frank Frazee. Born in Salt Lake City, Utah, on 9 January 1878[1], Franklin ‘Frank’ Eugene Eliason was the son of Mormon pioneer migrants from Sweden, Olof Larsson Eliasson (1836-1920) and Ingar Emma Andersson…
-
Edmunda Hammer: magician
Virginia ‘Verge’ Edmunda Hammer (1873–1946), was an American variety performer, whose stage names included Electra the Magic Wonder, Mademoiselle Edmunda and Madame Edmunda. Virginia ‘Verge’ Edmunda Hammer was born in 1873 in Salt Lake City, Utah. [1] Her parents, Paul Edmund Balthazar Hammer (1838-1929) and Julia Marie Funk (1839-1947), had migrated to the US as…