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Dressmakers of Auschwitz: amazing, true story of Women Who Sewed to Survive
Thank you to the Jewish Writers’ Festival in Sydney who will be discussing this book on Zoom at 8 PM Thurs 14th October 2021.sisters Berta and Katka Kohút, 1941 and 2013Times of IsraelAmid the horror...
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Tsar Peter the Great single-handedly modernised Russia!
Tsar Peter the Great (1672-1725) ruled alone from 1694. Although Russia was huge, its navy was weak at a time when European powers like Britain and the Dutch were exploring and colonising the globe,...
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Anti-vaxxers believed God sent smallpox to punish people. Mary Montagu 1717...
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762) was born in London, oldest child of the Duke and Duchess of Kingston-upon-Hull. Given access to her family’s huge home library, this clever child taught herself...
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Franz Marc's precious Foxes painting (1913). Taken by the Nazis, will it be...
L-R: Maria & Franz Marc, Bernhard Koehler, Heinrich Campendonk, Thomas von Hartmann, Vasily Kandinsky (seated), Munich, 1911Franz Marc (1880–1916) and Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) were the main...
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Republic of Ireland's best ever gift to Australia - football star Jim Stynes!
When the Irish Experiment was conceived at the Melbourne Football Club in the early 1980s, Gaelic Football was seen as more like Australian Rules than soccer, rugby or gridiron. The experiment was very...
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Capt James Cook's Cottage - a long way from Yorkshire to Melbourne
James Cook (1728-79) lived in a thatched cottage in Marton Yorkshire during his youngest years. Shortly after, Cook Snr left Aireyholme to become a stonemason and in 1736, they all moved to Ayton....
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Ethel Rosenberg - never a spy, but executed anyhow
Newspaper coverage on their execution dayLos Angeles TimesRead Anne Sebba’s biography, Ethel Rosenberg: A Cold War Tragedy (2021). Ethel came from modest Belarusian immigrants, leaving school at 16...
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Obituary for a dear friend, Candice Feldt
Candy Feldt 73 passed in Phoenix AZ this year, from kidney failure, surrounded by family. She was born in Nov 1947, to Florence and Max Feldt in Temple Texas. She grew up in Temple and Stamford TX, and...
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historic Gastown in beautiful Vancouver
Vancouver actually started in Gastown, the core of the city named for Gassy Jack Deighton. He was a Yorkshire seaman, steamboat captain and barkeep who arrived in 1867 to open the area’s first...
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fun-filled Victorian & Edwardian seaside resorts
Clacton PierJohn Hannavy's book coverTaking the waters, fresh air and exercise were so popular for the Georgian moneyed classes that Jane Austen featured spa towns in her novels. These trips were an...
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Guy Fawkes Night was popular for 400 years! And now he is dominating protest...
Arrest of Guy Fawkes at the Houses of Parliament 5th Nov 1605, GettyWhy was Guy Fawkes Night so popular? The first reason was the spectacular nature of the event that it commemorated. Had the...
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Young single women sadly losing their babies to adoption: USA and Australia.
In the 1960s, a group of unwed mothers wrestled with their decisions to give birth in secret at St Paul Minnesota’s Booth Memorial Hospital. With the help of revealing interviews, historian Kim...
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I love Rio de Janeiro ..........guest post
Rio de Janeiro is Brasil’s second city and was its capital from 1763-1960, when Brasilia took over. I was at an academic conference in Rio and only had time to visit the following tourist attractions,...
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Names we gave to our newborn babies in 2020: Oliver, Olivia and Charlotte!
Note the influence of British royal names in England and Wales of 2020. George was very popular, after the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge chose it for their first son. Archie, the name chosen by the...
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Anne of Green Gables - Canada's best literary and rural tourist sites
The book Anne of Green Gables, a children’s novel by Canadian author Lucy Maud Montgomery (1874-1942), was published in 1908. Born in Cavendish in the Gulf of St Lawrence off Canada’s east coast,...
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Brides of Christ, a deeply sympathetic tv series from 1991 is back again
Brides of Christ appeared on TV in 1991, giving the ABC national broadcaster its biggest-ever audience for a non-sporting programme. The series became an international hit, attracting c8 million...
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Oscar Pistorius - Olympic champion athlete or murderer?
Athletics Oscar Pistorius (b1986) was born in the Transvaal, South Africa. As a toddler he was diagnosed with the rare medical condition, Fibular Hemimelia. At a year old, both his legs were amputated...
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Inventing and improving pace makers - from Sydney to the world (guest post)
As the body’s primary device for pumping blood over the body, the heart was seen as the most critical organ (after the brain), protected by the rib cage. But even healthy bodies were vulnerable to...
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Coco Chanel in Melbourne - a gorgeous exhibition
The Palais Galliera is a permanent fashion museum in Paris, established in 1977 in a C19th building commissioned by Duchesse de Galliera. This museum displays French fashion designs from the C18th on....
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The famous needle at Seattle's World Fair 1962, guest post by Packy
The Needle was being built for the upcoming Seattle World’s Fair, Century 21 (Ap-Oct 1962). The Fair was designed to put Greater Seattle on the map i.e to turn a provincial port city on the edge...
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