Tabla de contenidos para Edition 4 en Traces

THEN The photo opposite was taken in 1940, and shows Arthur Circus in Battery Point, Hobart. Seven children, probably residents of the modest cottages lining the circus, are gathered for games featuring an old tyre, a log, a doll in a pram and a broom. Battery Point was named after the battery of defensive cannons that once lined the coastline. The housing lots in Arthur Circus were sold in 1847, and homes were built on them for the garrison officers. They were humble dwellings in their day, and would probably once have consisted of just two rooms. Large, working-class families, whose breadwinners relied on the waterfront trades, occupied the Arthur Circus cottages for more than 100 years. NOW Today, Battery Point is one of the most prestigious suburbs in Hobart,…

The offensive against the emus became the only military operation of its kind to take place on Australian soil. Astoundingly, the Australian Government was forced to concede defeat when the avian adversary outplayed, outwitted and outlasted troops in several fateful battles. The story goes like this… In the years following World War I, a soldier settlement scheme was rolled out by the government to re-employ soldiers returned from war. Under this scheme, around 5030 ex-soldiers received plots of land. An arid, rural area some 300 kilometres outside of Perth became a popular spot for ex-soldiers to cultivate wheat and sheep. Having come straight from the frontline, most of the men had little to no farming experience, which made working the dry, unforgiving land all the more difficult. By 1932, farmers…

Established in the 1870s as a farming town, Farina grew into a lively township when the Great Central Railway – or the Old Ghan, as it is sometimes known – was extended from Adelaide to Marree in 1884, and then from Marree to Alice Springs not long afterwards. A copper and silver mine was founded, and the town became home to around 600 people, including Australian and Chinese construction workers and their families, and Afghan cameleers – men who had travelled thousands of kilometers to serve out long-term contracts in breeding stations and frontier towns. These mens’ camelhandling expertise was fundamental to the exploration of Australia’s interior, as horses and oxen were ill-suited to the harsh conditions of the desert. Despite the need for their knowledge and skills, however, the…

The year was 1928. Crouched low in an alleyway, looking out at Terry Street in Sydney’s Surry Hills, policewoman Lillian Armfield was ready to bring down notorious Sydney cocaine dealer May ‘Botany May’ Smith, who was stashing cocaine in her terrace. In an instant, Botany May was in her backyard, grabbing cocaine packages from the wall of the outhouse. Lillian hurried around to May’s front door. May answered the door, Lillian made the allegations, and May bolted to the back of the house. She came back screaming at Lillian, brandishing a flaming hot iron. Lillian lifted her skirts and took off down the street. The iron landed close to her, but it was a futile attack. May handed over the cocaine and the male detectives made their arrest. This was…

Vivid Recollection began when graphic designer James Walters digitised and restored a shoebox full of his family’s old photos and slides from South Australia. Nine years and hundreds of projects later, Vivid Recollection is a fully fledged imaging studio, working digital magic for clients around the country and some of the nation’s top public institutions. The company has ridden the wave of interest in family history. ‘Everything’s so mass-produced nowadays,’ says Walters. ‘People are craving real connections and personal things, and there are few things more personal than cherished photos and documents.’ Most restorations take one or two hours, but some of the more challenging ones need many hours of photorealistic painting over the traces of the original image. Vivid Recollection makes superb reproductions of the restored images, using archival…

In February 1886, widow Jessie Thorburn moved into a picturesque home named Meroogal, located in Nowra, New South Wales, with three of her four unmarried daughters, Belle, Kate and Georgie. Her youngest daughter, Kennina Fanny, who was known as Tot or Tottie, joined them in 1893. Meroogal stands today as a house museum, a time capsule that for 100 years was home to four generations of women: matriarch Jessie and her daughters, their Macgregor nieces and great-niece June Wallace. In 1985, it was purchased by the Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales (now Sydney Living Museums), including all the family possessions that remain inside. Meroogal is home to a rare collection of Victorian-era furniture, household goods and keepsakes, from handwritten recipes in cookbooks to walking sticks, golf clubs and…

Qantas Founders Museum restores historic Super Constellation plane Qantas Founders Museum completed an external restoration of the Super Constellation aircraft in July this year. The model is now in pristine condition thanks to a team of Qantas engineers, volunteer engineers and contractors who worked to restore the plane’s exterior over a period of 13 months. This work included reassembling the aircraft, replacing corroded and missing areas, and providing a new paint job in line with the original livery observed in 1950s Qantas drawings. The new addition to the museum’s aircraft collection plays an important part in commercial aviation history, and will be on display for museum visitors in late 2018. To find out more about the exhibit, visit qfom.com.au. Archaeologists uncover the first known human with parents of different species…

October 1922: Finke River, Central Australia. Fifty-year-old Carl Strehlow, a pastor at Hermannsburg Mission, is ill. Prayer won’t help, nor will calls to Adelaide. It soon becomes apparent to the local Arrernte (or Aranda) people, Carl’s wife, Frieda, and the youngest of their six children, 14-year-old Theodor, that drastic action is required to save the pastor. This is a story that might have been forgotten, if not for the superhuman, almost saint-like qualities of Carl Strehlow, who was suffering from pleurisy and dropsy (oedema) when he was strapped to an upholstered chair and carried through the desert, with Theodor travelling behind on a dray in a desperate attempt to save his father. Theodor went on to document this pilgrimage in what became an Australian literary classic, the 1969 Journey to…

Standing on one of Sydney’s ferries, it’s hard not to be jolted by the sights and sounds of the harbour. The throb of engines, the noise of crowds, and the whooshes of trains and traffic as the boat pulls out of Circular Quay can be overwhelming. The ferries stop at Mosman, Manly and Milsons Point, where fishers share the wharf with boats and commuters. Yet these places were occupied, named and fished long before ‘Sydney’ appeared on any charts or maps. It’s at one of these harbour places, once known at Kay-yemy (Manly Cove), Kiarabilli (Milsons Point), or perhaps Goram bullagong (Mosman Bay), that the stories of Sydney’s Eora women played out. The colonists who arrived in the late 18th and early 19th centuries described a harbour full of life,…

A ustralia had a population of less than five million in 1914, but by the end of the war 416,809 men had enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) – around eight per cent of the population! It is, therefore, quite likely that Anzacs are present in your family tree, and the discovery of family military memorabilia – such as photos, discharge papers, Anzac cap and collar badges, medals or medallions, and souvenir reunion menus – is often the first clue that your ancestor served. There are a number of resources available to help you find out more about their service and experiences. Discovering Anzacs The Australian Imperial Force and New Zealand Expeditionary Force service dossiers are now available at the Discovering Anzacs website (discoveringanzacs.naa.gov.au/). The website is special, because…

Shepherd, convicted sheep stealer, death-row convict, ticket-of-leave man, cattleman, station owner, eager husband, friend of bushrangers, victim of crime, loving father, generous donor, gentleman, occupier of an unmarked grave – I can’t work out for sure if all of these descriptions fit one man, or if there were two – or even three – Michaels. If these characters were one and the same person, then he certainly led an interesting life. Ireland was experiencing a fine, mild summer in 1817, when judges arrived in Wicklow to preside over the trials of an unusually large number of prisoners. It was not to be a fine day for Michael Walsh, who was convicted of stealing sheep and sentenced to death. Saunders’s News-Letter reported that sheep stealing was becoming common, and therefore the…

MyHeritage Australia • Queensland, Australia passenger and crew lists, 1852–1885: more than 103,000 records indexing inwards passenger and crew lists arriving in Brisbane and Moreton Bay Denmark • Denmark Census, 1840: more than 1.6 million records • Denmark Census, 1834: more than 1.1 million records United States • Connecticut newspapers, 1791–2009: more than 2.3 million pages across 23 newspaper titles • Maine newspapers, 1861–2008: more than 2.1 million pages across 16 newspaper titles • New Hampshire newspapers, 1869–2008: almost 650,000 pages across 7 newspaper titles • Rhode Island newspapers, 1778–1938: almost 600,000 pages across 26 newspaper titles • Delaware newspapers, 1880–2009: more than 126,000 pages across 3 newspaper titles • New Jersey Marriage Index, 1901–1914: almost 770,000 records • New Jersey Births and Christenings Index, 1901–1903: more than 270,000 records…

It sounds more like Victorian juvenile fiction than history, but as the true story of the Bells of Sunday Island shows, the thrilling South Sea adventures penned by some of the 19th century’s bestselling novelists – Robert Louis Stevenson, R. M. Ballantyne, and Johann David Wyss – owed more to reality than many modern readers realise. In 1878, Yorkshireman Thomas Bell and his family became voluntary Crusoes on Sunday Island – now called Raoul, or Rangit?hua in Maori. An archetypal patriarchal pioneer with an adventurous and restless spirit, Bell was only in his mid teens when he set sail from England for New Zealand, with dreams of the goldfields. He actually found his first job on an Otago sheep farm, and then worked his way up the country to Hawke’s…

In three world-changing voyages between 1768 and 1780, people from Europe and the Pacific met, often for the first time. Neither group was ever the same again. Captain James Cook and his crew travelled ‘farther than any other man’. Cook became famous in his lifetime, and his achievements as a navigator were widely acknowledged. It has been 250 years since the Endeavour set sail from Plymouth. A new exhibition tells the story of Cook and his epic voyages, through the original voyage journals, objects, and works of art and science, and asks the question, ‘What does James Cook mean to us now?’ The Cook story has long been part of Australia’s psyche, and has undergone change of late. The exhibition looks at the enigmatic, even divisive figure he has become…

We’d be willing to bet that quite a few of you guessed this edition’s thingamajig to be a portable toilet. Guess again! This interesting object is, in fact, a travel bath, circa 1852. This green-painted iron bath is complete with a lid, and was brought to Melbourne in 1852 by shoe manufacturer John Francis Davies and his wife Maria Bele, and their three daughters, Martha Jane, Emily Eleanor and Maria. The bath travelled with the family from England and was useful en route as both a bathtub and a trunk. It was still being used as a home bathtub in the 1920s by descendents of John and Maria. This travel bath is a rare object, and researchers at Museums Victoria have not been able to ascertain its exact origin or…

During both world wars, Australia was confronted with a most challenging problem on its home front; what should be done with the thousands of ‘enemy aliens’ living in Australia? That is, the people who had migrated to Australia from the nations with which Australia was at war. In World War I, it was those who came from Germany or Austria-Hungary; a generation later, in World War II, the list extended to those who came from Italy and Japan. Decisions made then had profound impacts on the lives of those who were interned, in most cases for the duration of the war and beyond, but also on the lives of their families, friends and even descendants. Following the fates of particular individuals can help to understand the much larger historical circumstances…