(February 2021) This is the story of how we moved from the place where we had lived for ten years to a new place that better suits our needs. It is not a pleasant tale so if you are averse to stress and unhappiness turn away now. At the end of 2018 we decided … More Don’t Try This At Home
February 2021 We’re all allowed to have our biases and to be truthful about it, I never liked the look of the Gloster Javelin very much. It was a big fat aeroplane with big fat wings that looked about as capable of doing anything useful in a military sense as a loaf of bread. … More Gloster Javelin in 1/72 by Frog
Among the oldest kits in my collection was this old 1970s Frog Gloster Javelin FAW.9 which I bought in 1977 or 1978. It’s only taken forty and bit years but, finally, here it is, made. It’s not a bad kit by the standards of the 1970s and, in fact, better than most kits published in … More Models for February 2021
Here is the latest issue of iOTA. This one is mainly about science fiction fandom in Sydney from the late 1940s to the early 1950s and includes a draft of my history written about that period.
The urge to paint aeroplanes Deep Sea Blue continues and this time goes to extremes with a model of a particularly interesting but flawed aeroplane, the Grumman XF10F. This was a variable geometry fighter designed for the US Navy which was worried that the new jet fighters were flying too fast to land on the … More Models for January 2021
(December 2020) It’s like this, I keep having these urges. It’s as if some strange alien entity has got into the back of my mind and keeps pushing and pushing, wanting me to do things that I don’t want to do. Dirty, crazy, unimaginable things. I think it might be an alien invasion, like the … More Confessions of an AMS Survivor
(December 2020) A Tale of two 1/72 XF5Us The year 1995 seems like several centuries ago and in one way it is. That year I finally managed to get my hands of the Hasegawa 1/72 kit of the Vought XF5U-1, probably lurking at the back of one of those old fashioned model shops that … More Please Tell Me I’m Getting Better at This
(November 2020) In November 2020 Qantas celebrates its centenary. As a tiny celebration of this remarkable event here are photos of all the models I’ve made that are associated with Qantas. This includes Qantas Empire Airways, Australia Asia, Australian, QantasLink and JetStar, and the Australian domestic airline Trans Australia Airlines that was later rebranded Australian … More A hundred years of Qantas
Here is the next issue of iOTA, my little fanzine about the project to research and write the history of fandom in Australia up until 1975. In includes a lot of Lee Harding’s early fannish writing and the first chapter in draft to be written for this history which tells the story of Melbourne fandom … More iOTA 18
