by Rachel Franks | Jul 8, 2020 | Blog, Entries
John Rae is, perhaps, my favourite dead white male. On the surface, he’s really rather ordinary. An administrator who was meticulous and ambitious, he was a career public servant. He woke up, got dressed, went to work and came home again. He married and had six...
by Rachel Franks | Jun 10, 2020 | Blog
In the mid-eighteenth century, the famous London magazine Punch published a short piece on the ever-increasing popularity of true crime stories: We are a trading community—a commercial people. Murder is, doubtless, a very shocking offence; nevertheless, as what is...
by Rachel Franks | Jun 1, 2020 | Book Reviews
Mark Dunn, The Convict Valley: the bloody struggle on Australia’s early frontier Allen & Unwin, 294 pp., ISBN: 9781760528645, p/bk, AUS$32.99 Mark Dunn opens his history of the Hunter Valley, The Convict Valley, with an observation from Lieutenant John Shortland....
by Rachel Franks | May 13, 2020 | Blog
The State Library of New South Wales holds a very lovely painting of the first Government House in Sydney. The oil painting, by George Edwards Peacock, was done in 1845, just before the building (where the Museum of Sydney now stands) was demolished. The scene is of a...
by Rachel Franks | Apr 29, 2020 | Blog
These days we’re all talking about social distancing, or, more accurately, physical distancing but how far should we be staying away from each other? Some advice is 1.5 meters, some is 2 meters. People working in the old scale are saying 6 feet. What does it all mean?...
