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A fine classics and archaeology collection in Melbourne
According to the Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne’s Edwardian society was in the throes of economic expansion and social change. The press release showed that John Hugh Sutton, born in Edwardian 1906,...
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Holocaust testimony of uncle Yaakov Weiss
My name is Yaakov Weiss, I was born 5th Dec 1910 in Soldobos near the town of Chust. At that time, it was in Czechoslovakia. My late father Moshe Ben Yona died at an early age in 1922. He was a pupil...
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The Cultural and Literary History of Rectories
In a topic close to my heart, I wrote that village rectories, the traditional family homes of Anglican ministers, have a sad history. Although rectories and vicarages have had their ups and downs since...
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Australians at the Western Front - Fromelles 1916
Fromelles: the Final Chapters was written by police officer Tim Lycett and genealogist Sandra Playle, and published by Penguin in 2013.On 19th July 1916 Australian lads "went over the top" in Fromelles...
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European town planning in a modern Indian city - Chandigarh
Edwin Lutyens was invited by India’s colonial masters to lay out the central administrative area of New Delhi in the 1920s and 1930s. All of the important public buildings (old Viceroy's House, the...
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Red Lion Brewery (gone), Red Lion Hotel (extant)
Ever since writing and lecturing about The Festival of Britain in 1951, I feel I have to go back to see what architecture had been lost (as well as examining what architecture had been gained). We know...
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Saving an Ottoman-era railway station in Jerusalem
The German Colony in Jerusalem was established by members of the Temple Society which was founded in Germany in 1858. They soon moved to Palestine to escape religious persecution at home, and to put...
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Daniel Libeskind's museum in San Francisco
It was important for me to read Celebrating the Contemporary Jewish Museum, written by Connie Wolf and published by Rizzoli in 2008. This book tells the story of how the Jessie Street Pacific Gas &...
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World Fair, London 1862
A few articles have drawn my mind back to The Second London Exhibition of 1862. The International Exhibition of 1862 was cited by The Victorianist and Alexandra Palace London. And my post references...
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Piguenit and the Australian landscape
William Charles Piguenit (1836-1914) might have had a grim life in Australia since he was born in Hobart Town to a convict-father who had been transported to the Tasmanian penal colony. Instead, young...
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Chagall - memory, magic and symbolism
I lived in London for a few years in the mid 1970s and have revisited every second year for only four weeks at a time. So now it is time to return to the UK!! I need to put my husband back on the...
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Australian and New Zealand light horsemen in Beersheba, 1917
When I did my Gap Year in Israel in 1966, my rather elderly landlord had WW1 photos of triumphant Australian soldiers all across the walls of his dining room. Since the landlord had been a young child...
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Lascivious artists' balls, 1900-1939
Although the annual Artists' Balls may have started and flourished in Belle Epoque Montmartre in Paris, I eventually came across Sydney’s Artists’ Balls... via a circuitous route. Dulcie Deamer was a...
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The Panama Canal Scandal: 1880-1892
For the Soul of France: Culture Wars in the Age of Dreyfus by Frederick Brown (published by Knopf in 2010) discussed the aftermath of the 1870–71 Franco-Prussian War. This was when a defeated and...
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Museum of the Missing Art
In the book Museum of the Missing, Simon Houpt discussed many art crimes over the centuries, including the thefts from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990, the Iraq National Museum in 2003...
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Melbourne's stunning State Library: 1853-1913
Melbourne was first settled in 1835, a young city with a rapidly growing population of newly arrived citizens. Clearly the city wanted a lot, and soon: a cultural identity that would compare favourably...
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Yiddish songs to tug the heart strings
At my parents' retirement home, there were many Hebrew and Yiddish songs at the concert last week, but no song was as emotional and as meaningful to the residents as Oyfn Pripetchik/On the Hearth....
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German Bride Schools 1937-44
Katy Waldman wrote in The Age (5/10/2013) the following story. The New Yorker reports that training academies for Reich wives-to-be cropped up throughout the late 1930s, to usher young maidens towards...
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Colonial India in photographs: Crown and Camera
The book Crown and Camera: The Royal Family and Photography 1842-1910 was written by Frances Dimand and Roger Taylor, and published by Penguin in 1987. The book displayed photographs from the Royal...
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Edward Steichen: photography in high fashion
Edward J Steichen (1879–1973) was born in Luxembourg and immigrated to the USA with his parents when he was a toddler. When he was still an adolescent, Steichen began a four-year lithography...
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