Writing history is my profession. I’ve been doing it for about thirty years. Here is some of what I’ve done in the past and what I’m working on now.
(September 2021) INTRODUCTION Many modellers like to tell stories with their models and do it in the form of dioramas or vignettes which describe in model form a moment in time and the people, machines and places of that moment. In this way one model and its setting tell one story. I also like to … More Royal Australian Air Force Mirage IIIs, 1963 to 1989, in 1/72 by Frog.
(April 2021, originally in ANZAPA 320) For my sins – and they must have been serious infractions for me to be doing this – I’ve spent the past three or four weeks trawling the newszines that have been scanned and saved on the Fanac.org website. There are an awful lot of them. There … More Trawling old Newszines
While rummaging around in the hidden recesses of my computer I came across this article that I put together in June 2001. It is about how the Australian civil aviation industry came to have what was called the ‘Two Airline Policy’ which controlled the development of Australian air transport for four decades from the beginning … More For Whom the Cash Register Rings – the origins of Australia’s ‘Two Airline Policy’
(29 June 2021) I was asked to give an address as part of the ceremony to mark the centenary of government administration of civil aviation in Australia which took place on Sunday 28 March 2021. Other speakers at the ceremony were Jason Harfield, CEO of Airservices Australia, Greg Hood, Chief Commissioner of the ATSB, David … More Launching civil aviation in Australia
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.
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
This one is a paper I wrote for an Engineering Heritage conference, held in the Old Parliament House in Canberra. A lovely location and a good conference. It was published in the conference proceedings. It pulls together a lot of work I’d done on Main Roads Western Australia, the State Electricity Commission of Western Australia … More The Post War Project in Western Australia
At last year’s Melbourne convention we held a panel item about the history of fandom in Australia. On the panel were me (as moderator), Lee Harding, Dick Jenssen and Rob Gerrand. The panel discussed the beginnings of modern fandom, mainly in Melbourne, in the 1950s, including earlier exposure to science fiction, the public attitude to … More The history of Australian fandom at Continuum
In 2001 or thereabouts I was commissioned by the Victorian Department of Natural Resources to prepare a thematic study of the heritage of government and administration in Victoria. Part of that process was to write a history of the topic before going on to a more detailed study of the built environment associated with that … More A History of Government and Administration in Victoria
Continuing on with experimenting with putting some old writing on the www here is a piece that I probably wrote in the early 1990s, almost certainly while I was still doing my PhD. It was published in the newsletter of the Aviation Historical Society of Australia but I don’t know when. (A matter for later … More Norman Brearley Laughs Loudest
