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

Of late I’ve been busy working on the third volume of the history of Australian civil aviation in Australia and neglecting other things that need doing.  One is the process of putting some of my previous research here. This one began as a paper I presented at an Australian Historical Association conference in Brisbane (maybe … More Creating Airmindedness

I’ve mentioned that I’m currently working on the third volume of a three volume history of Australian civil aviation in the 20th Century.  Here are the previous two volumes which have been published by BHS Publishing. They are available as ebooks on the Ballarat Heritage Services shop on their website, $20 for volume 1 and … More Australia’s Civil Aviation History

Here’s one which I probably write in 1995.  It was published in an American fanzine but the scan that I made of it some time later doesn’t tell me anything about which fanzine that might have been. There are some interesting insights here about what fandom was like in the mid 1990s, a period when … More Fanzine Fandom as Oral Tradition

For a change, something which has yet to see the light of day elsewhere.  I will be producing paper copies of this chronology for a panel session about ‘Australian SF Fandom in the 1960s’ to be held at the coming Melbourne Speculative Fiction, Continuum XIV, over the long weekend in June.  It will appear in … More An Annotated Chronology of Australian SF Fandom, version 2

Here’s a little piece based around some of the oral history interviews I conducted for the history of Main Roads Western Australia in the 1990s.  I guess this was written in the early 2000s but I have no idea why I wrote it or who for.  Still, it is an interesting read that hints at … More Road Makers of the North West

I’ve been working on this project since before I left the Public Service in 1987. While I was doing some research for my Honours Thesis in the Australian Archive (now National Australian Archive) I came across a shelf of folders which were photocopies of all the Cabinet decisions made by the various Commonwealth governments since … More Australian Government Decisions about Civil Aviation to 1923

THE DIMBOOLA COURT HOUSE1875 My father was an active member of the Dimboola and District Historical Society and, at his urging, I wrote a short history of the Dimboola Court House which the Society acquired and moved to its new location around 2002. The Society now uses the Court House as its meeting place and … More The Dimboola Court House

Here is a paper that I wrote for a short talk I gave at a recent Collaborative Research Center in Australian History research seminar at Federation University.  It’s more or less about the theoretical ideas behind the history of Australian civil aviation that I’m working on.  As it turned out, what is written here and … More Australian Aviation – A Technological System – A seminar paper