In the seventeenth century the use of torture to extract confessions and the like was de rigeur. Everybody did it. The rack, thumb screws, weights on chest – you name it. You’ve all seen these things in the horror movies. In these more enlightened times we don’t do things like that, restricting ourselves to more…
Late autumn has arrived! It’s a lovely time of year here in Hervey Bay, with calm, warm days with maximums in the low to mid-twenties and cool to cold nights. The temperatures dip to ten degrees or less, time to pull out a light doona (duvet) for a few weeks, along with jeans and sweaters,…
When I was a kid growing up in the sixties and seventies of the previous century, life was good. But there was an ever-present background noise, like the rattle in an air conditioner on a hot day. I’m talking about the Cold War. We all believed that nuclear war could well be just around the…
It’s Australia Day here in Oz, the day back in 1788 that marked the official founding of the penal colony in New South Wales. It’s a Saturday, as it happens, but after a few years of celebrating the day itself (ie not having a public holiday if the 26th January was a weekend) we’re back…
Last year Peter and I had gone on a conducted tour of Kingston’s convict ruins with a descendant of the Christian family. I’d strongly suggest that anybody going to Norfolk for the first time attends the tours. The guides are mines of information, telling stories of convicts and jailers, painting a vivid picture of the…
It’s the 26th January, 2018. Today is the 230th anniversary of when Captain Arthur Phillip planted the British flag at the site of what became Sydney in the state of New South Wales. The place is New, it’s in the South, and it’s a bit weird, like Wales. Get it? The Dutch were even less…
Auschwitz. The very word is enough to send a shiver down my spine. It equates to unspeakable horror, monstrous crimes. Nazi Germany was the focus of my studies at university, so I can claim to know a little more than many people about the Holocaust. But the history degree was many years ago. Before we…
The thing about having done parts of this trip twice or three times is that sometimes I don’t have much more to say than I did in my previous blogs. That was the case with Rudesheim, where we visited the wonderful Siegfried’s Musical Kabinet in 2015, and the Germania monument (via chair lift over the…
It’s been a while since I wrote a Batavia post. It has also been a while since Beacon Island (Batavia’s Graveyard) has been vacated and the fishing shacks removed. With those impediments to a proper investigation out of the way, teams of archaeologists and anthropologists are getting down and dirty, excavating the island for more…
In 1963, the last resting place of the Dutch merchantman Batavia, which hit a reef on the Abrolhos islands off the coast of Western Australia in 1629, was finally found. 1963. It had taken three hundred and eighty-four years before the wreck was finally found. It wasn’t as if the incident hadn’t been recorded. It…