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Bauhaus cinema architecture in Haifa (1935)
I imagine that in the early days of the British Mandate for Palestine (later Israel), people went to the cinema in whatever temporary facilities were available. Perhaps it did not matter at a time when...
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ANZAC Day: our Ode of Remembrance
I learned off by heart the Ode of Remembrance in primary school in the early 1950s and can still remember the words now. But I had no idea who the poet was, so I am citing the ABC News in this postThey...
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Clunes: a delightful goldrush town (from 1857 on)
The first European settler in this part of central Victoria, a young Sydney man called Donald Cameron, took up a pastoral run in 1839. The area was 36 ks north of Ballarat, a place Cameron named Clunes...
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The German American Bund in 1939
Initial support for American fascist organizations came from Germany. In May 1933 Nazi Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess gave authority to German immigrant Heinz Spanknobel to create an American Nazi...
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Faroe Islands, the Vikings and the Shetlands
The Faroe Islands archipelago lies halfway between Norway and Iceland, 320 kilometres off the NE Scottish coast of Great Britain. The Faroe Islands were part of the Kingdom of Norway until 1814. when...
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Would a handsome, educated man ever be found guilty of murder in 1949 Australia?
John Bryan Wallace Kerr (1925-2001) had been educated at Scotch College, one of Melbourne's finest school. In his early 20s, this classy young man was an up-and-comer in the modern world of radio. Then...
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Architects Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright and Walter Burley Griffin
The connection between like-minded architects, often across a period of time and sometimes in different continents, continues to impress. Consider Australian architect Best Overend, who had worked with...
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One very fine (art) family: the Bernheimers of Bavaria.
Lehmann Bernheimer (1841-1918) was born in Württemberg into a fine Jewish family. In 1864, Lehmann founded a business for high-quality textiles in Munich’s old town and expanded his business into...
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Exhibition of Arthur Streeton landscapes at the Geelong Gallery
Undoubtedly one of Australia’s most important painters from the Heidelberg era, Arthur Streeton (1867-1943) was born near Geelong. From 1886 to 1888, Streeton was apprenticed as a lithographer in town,...
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Medieval hospitals in Islamic cities: scientific and evidence-based medicine!
Medieval hospitals in Christian Europe were typically represented as places of misery and squalor, over-crowded reservoirs of infection that had no medical role. Rather they were places in which sick...
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John Osborne and Look Back in Anger (1956)
The Angry Young Men were a group of British writers who came to fame in the 1950s, especially John Osborne and Kingsley Amis. They were young males, often from working class families in post-WW2...
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Gabriel Astruc - Paris' special theatrical impressario
In all our discussions about the Belle Epoque in lectures, it was been the impact of Sergei Diaghilev and his Ballets Russes that fascinated the students most. In 1906 Diaghilev took a major...
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Russian Orientalism and Rimsky-Korsakov
My late mother, a knowledgeable lover of C19th Russian music, left me booklets on Rimsky-Korsakov by Yvonne Frindle 2009 and by Jane Jones 2014. Many thanks to these two authors, and to my mother for...
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Liverpool, The Cavern Club and the Beatles
Liverpool’s Cavern Club was said to be the cradle of British pop music. But the photos show how grim and cramped it really was. The Cavern Club opened in Jan 1957 in a warehouse cellar at 10 Mathew St...
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Frost Fairs on the Frozen Thames
Years ago I wrote about a shocking skating disaster that I assumed happened in Russia but actually occurred in Britain. The newspapers at the time (Jan 1867) discussed how, until the accident,...
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The Durrells on Corfu and their animals: 1935-1939.
I was very familiar with the Durrell Wildlife Park on the Channel Island of Jersey that naturalist-author Gerald Durrell (1925–1995) founded in 1959. Beautifully set in large grounds, the zoo is in...
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An Adelaide hotel, Lionel Logue and the future King George VI
At a conference in South Australia in 2014, I went on a self guided tour of Burnside, a small village in eastern Adelaide. The guide booklet noted that Burnside became a primarily upper-middle class...
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William Hogarth, English pride and 18th century gallophobia
In early 1745, a terrible year for Britain, Prince Charles Edward Stuart’s attempt to overthrow the House of Hanover and restore the House of Stuart to Britain was being taken very seriously. By Sept,...
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Musée Nissim de Camondo, Paris
In a course on the Belle Epoque, I asked the students to consider why talented artists flocked to Paris from across France and from abroad, after the Franco-Prussian War of 1871. We were interested in...
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Colonial gold rush architecture: Craig's Royal Hotel in Ballarat
Two amazing events happened in mid C19th that determined the importance of Victoria’s central gold fields. Firstly the leaders of the Port Phillip district had campaigned for Separation (from New South...
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