(November 2020) I don’t get to read many books these days but here’s one that has captivated me and which I only managed to put down without reading it straight through by sheer force of will. It’s A Pound of Paper, Confessions of a Book Addict by John Baxter. Doctors seem to be taking a … More A Ramble on Books and Collecting after John Baxter
(A version of this piece originally appeared in ANZAPA Mailing 316, August 2020) My life is remarkably unexciting, sometimes in an interesting way. Take last Tuesday for example. I count it as a good start to the day when I sleep in to 7am, so the day began well. Other days I can be … More Tuesday
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
(May 2001) This month one of my tools has let me down so I haven’t completed a model. My compressor has finally decided that compressing air is just asking too much of it and can’t be bothered any more. It sits there going chug-chug-chug as usual, but only a little air comes out. I will attend to the … More A modeller’s life – my box of tools
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
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
Here are the Ditmar winners for 2018, announced last weekend at the national sf convention in Perth and lifted shamelessly from the Australian SF Foundation website. In my line of work these days I have little time to read fiction so I only read one novel and the first few paragraphs of a short story, … More Hurrah for Bruce Gillespie, Lewis Morley and Stephanie Lai
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
