Wowser
John Norton, the editor of the Sydney newspaper Truth from 1891–1916 claimed to have coined the term “wowser”, saying: I first gave it public utterance...
Category: Melbourne
Newsy Tattle
from the ‘Frankston and Somerville Standard’, 1912-36 Old hands tell me the roads were very bad on the Peninsula in the days when our grand...
Hanging Ronald Ryan
At 8am on 3 February 1967 I was 14 years old and hanging back anxiously at home so I could listen to the radio and...
A Bolte from the Blue
A 1970 Larry Pickering cartoon about the last Victorian Government Premier not to attend a university, Henry Bolte. (click on images to begin slide show)
The Red Plague – The Wowser’s Monstrous Pet
In 2017, data from the Melbourne Sexual Health Clinic (which has operated continuously since it opened in 1918) shows Melbourne is facing a rapid increase...
The Dunny
Growing up in the unsewered Melbourne suburbs of Bentleigh and later Moorabbin in the 1950s, I became accustomed to the delights of the outside lavatory –...
Sunbeams
TO ‘SUNBEAMERS’ Sunbeam Certificates will be awarded young readers for good puzzles, riddles, drawings or original stories or verses. The Purple Certificate equals...
The Glowing Demon
It was my 63rd birthday recently. The following article appeared in Melbourne’s Argus newspaper on the day I was born, in 1952. When do we see...
Bewitched, Hitched & Snitched
Ken Quennell was a ‘softgoods’ salesman who had travelled with his parents to England in 1933 on the ‘Esperence Bay’. After he returned to Australia, his engagement...
Judd scud rocks fox stocks
CHELTENHAM Market Gardeners and orchardists in the Moorabbin district are complaining bitterly of the depredations caused by the foxes rapidly multiplying in the shire, owing...