Australia

A peaceful riverside scene with a palm tree in the foreground and a steamship on the river.
1900s, 1910s, Australia, Contemporary, Phantom airships, mystery aeroplanes, and other panics, Pictures

Looking for the mothership

The current drone panic on the eastern US seaboard – which started out in New Jersey about a month ago, but has spread to Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Pennsylvania, and even US bases in the UK and Germany – is, of course, hardly unprecedented. Not only does it bear obvious similarities to the 2019 […]

"yes23" inside a stylised outline of Australia
Australia, Contemporary, Other, Pictures

Why I’m voting for the Voice #yes23

On 14 October, Australians will be voting in a referendum on the following question: A Proposed Law: to alter the Constitution to recognise the First Peoples of Australia by establishing an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice. Do you approve this proposed alteration? The proposed alteration is: I’ll be voting yes. Here’s why.

Postcard showing Zeppelin LVI bombing Leige, 6 August 1914
1900s, 1910s, 1940s, Australia, Blogging, tweeting and podcasting, Interviews, Phantom airships, mystery aeroplanes, and other panics, Pictures, Sounds

Phantom airship tales from Rat City

I’m featured in the latest episode of the podcast Tales from Rat City, which is focused on unusual and sometimes bizarre aspects of the history of Ballarat, Victoria’s third largest city (if you’ve heard of the Eureka Stockade, well, that’s where that was). It’s run by David Waldron (a historian at Federation University who co-authored

1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, After 1950, Australia, Before 1900, Periodicals, Pictures, Plots and tables, Tools and methods

Breaking the tyranny of distance revisited — II

One thing we were curious to try with hota-time is to see whether the idea and the code could be applied beyond looking at London-Sydney travel times. And it can! Here is the output for Melbourne-Sydney travel times, in hours rather than days: Lots of data points, roughly the same as for the London-Sydney plot.

Queenslander, 8 March 1928, cover
1910s, 1920s, Australia, Periodicals, Phantom airships, mystery aeroplanes, and other panics

A miscellany of Australian mystery aircraft, 1903-1940 — II

Continuing this miscellany, on 23 August 1913 the Maitland Daily Mercury published a letter from the Reverend G. W. Payne reporting that he, his wife, and a Mr and Mrs Preston had seen ‘an aeroplane with searchlight hovering fairly high over Newcastle and the Hunter Valley‘.1 This was just before 4am on 22 August 1913,

Australia, Blogging, tweeting and podcasting, Periodicals, Publications, Tools and methods

Publication and self-archive: ‘@TroveAirRaidBot, a 24/7/365 research assistant’

I have a short, non-peer-reviewed article about Trove bots coming out in History Australia as part of a special issue on Trove; the advanced access version has just been published. Here’s the abstract: Like many other historians I use Trove for both targeted searches and exploratory ones, which in itself has revolutionised my historical research

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