My mother was adopted, so our family tree is a bit complicated. On her side, the biological family branch was at a dead end for a long time, until a late-life DNA test by my mother unearthed some results.| Photo Time Tunnel
In various parts of Australia in 2021, people are searching for information about a photographer named Herbert John Pardey. Some facts are known about him. It seems, for example, that he was born in Hackney (London) in 1875 and came to Australia via Melbourne (apparently on medical advice) in 1895. He is understood to have worked for a year as a jackaroo. It appears he married Susan Crowell in West Maitland in 1900. Susan was one of eight siblings and their family, having come out from Englan...| Photo Time Tunnel
White accounts of the lives of Australian Indigenous people are usually condescending, especially those written while the ethnic cleansing of Aboriginal people was in its later stages. I don’t intend to offend with that choice of words, incidentally. I hope that fair-minded and objective white readers will understand my meaning: that whatever motives any particular white people may have had, the overall effect of the takeover of the country easily met modern definitions of genocide.| Photo Time Tunnel
I feel terribly sorry for the young men of my great grandfather’s generation: told to keep their hands above their waists on pain of a thousand terrible tortures. Not only were many young men of that era warned that “self-abuse” was immoral and likely to consign them to hellfire after death, they were also assured […]| Photo Time Tunnel
In decades past, many Australian households had little pocket-sized albums in which were stuck hundreds of tiny stamp-like coupons. These were diligently saved until the books were full and then traded for items at special stores that were operated by the companies that issued the stamps. A number of these loyalty schemes existed, but for […]| Photo Time Tunnel
Purchase Photos & Photo Books featuring historical images of Newcastle & the Hunter and other areas of interest. Subscribe free to our Newsletter.| Photo Time Tunnel
Bots and large language models are clogging the web and crowding out humans. AI is consuming lakes of fresh water and gigawatts of electricity. It is chewing up hundreds of billions of dollars with no sign of profit in sight. Tell me again why this is a good thing. Exhibit #1: I had realised that […] The post AI is a pain in the neck appeared first on Photo Time Tunnel.| Photo Time Tunnel
Many afternoons, as I remember it, my mother would get a headache, take a Vincent’s powder and retire to her room for a lie down. Vincent’s, wrapped in flat papers in their trademark blue and yellow box, were a fixture in our home for a number of years – along with a red-labelled bottles of […]| Photo Time Tunnel
OPINION BY GREG RAY To be insulted by a man credibly accused of fraud and war crimes is a badge of honour. To hear Israel’s widely loathed prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, assert with a straight face that history will harshly judge his Australian counterpart, Anthony Albanese, is frankly surreal. This piece of Trumpian drivel was […] The post Does Palestine have a right to exist? appeared first on Photo Time Tunnel.| Photo Time Tunnel
In the 1950s Britain was upset that the USA wouldn’t share its atomic bomb secrets. The Brits decided to build their own bombs and they chose to test them in Australia. Nobody will ever know how much sickness and premature death of Australians in the years that followed can be attributed to exposure to radiation […] The post Radioactive bomber at RAAF Williamtown appeared first on Photo Time Tunnel.| Photo Time Tunnel
An unusual photograph album, featuring images of the making of the film Eureka Stockade near Singleton in 1947, has prompted me to do some research into the interesting production. The album of photos, credited to photographer Ronald Fuller, was owned by Mrs Doris Parsons and provided by her grand-daughter, Krys Eyre. After World War 2 […]| Photo Time Tunnel
OPINION BY GREG RAY Well, as expected and dreaded, the attack on Iran has materialised and now the dice of war are rolling in a new direction. As always they are heavily loaded, but the element of uncertainty is always present. No matter how the dice fall many more innocent people must suffer and die. […]| Photo Time Tunnel
Popular Newcastle bookseller David McLean came to Australia from the US with his parents in 1963, fleeing the shadows cast by the Cuban missile crisis. Here are some of David’s recollections: David McLean was in his second-last year of high school in Lincoln, Nebraska, when then US President John F. Kennedy appeared on television to […]| Photo Time Tunnel
COMMENT BY GREG RAY Suddenly something changed. The first big sign came when the conservative English media outlet, the Financial Times, published an editorial under the heading: “The West’s Shameful Silence on Gaza”. And just like that, it was suddenly acceptable to criticise Israel’s ethnic cleansing campaign of territorial expansion in occupied Palestine. Up until […] The post What is the West’s game plan on Gaza? appeared first on Photo Time Tunnel.| Photo Time Tunnel
Joan Dawson is losing count of the people who’ve made a point of telling her they now believe she was right after all. She says it’s nice to hear them say it, but it’s small consolation to the woman who was, for years, the face of local resistance to the State-sponsored juggernaut intent on removing […] The post Any regrets? Joan Dawson looks back on rail fight. appeared first on Photo Time Tunnel.| Photo Time Tunnel