S.T. Gill. Road in Black Forest, 1852. Gold Museum We recently took the little one for a pleasant, safe drive up the Calder Highway past Mount Macedon. However this wasn’t always a safe strerch of road. During the 1850s gold miners trekking to the fields at Castlemaine, Bendigo etc, found this area a dangerous location, [...]
Madam Strachan’s Maids, Creswick, about 1890 On the weekend we drove through Creswick, a town near Ballarat. Creswick was the birth place of ALP Prime Minister John Curtin, as well as being one of the sites in the late 19th century where Australian unionism developed. The miners in Creswick being a well organised group of [...]
Many of us would be unaware of who Ted Findley was. He was a member of Victoria’s United Labor Party, an organisation which was the predecesor of the Victorian Branch of the Australian Labor Party. Findley won the state seat of Melbourne in the 1900 elections. Such was the horror of conservatives, that their financial [...]
In Victoria the current unemployment rate is around 5.5%, which is compounded by the Bailiar government’s slashing of over 4,600 public sector jobs. But where are the organisations acting on behalf of the unemployed? Back in the 1970s and 80s, as an unemployed person I was involved in groups such as Work For Today, and [...]
Recently I went back to where much of my family have resided, the Riverina region of NSW. I popped over to Morgans Lookout, between Walbundrie and Walla Walla, 1/2 hour north of Albury. Who ? What? OK, allow me to expand. Morgans Lookout is named after the bushranger, Dan ‘mad dog’ Morgan, who roamed that [...]
People often hear the mantra, ‘Sport and Politics don’t mix’, but oh yes they do. The Olympics are a classic example, both in negatives and positive way. But let’s look at a positive example from the world of Rugby League. Back in 1941, when the then socialist Soviet Union was our ally in the war [...]
