A belated Anzac Day post. Willunga is a small town in South Australia, not far south of Adelaide, not far from the coast. It was settled by Europeans in 1839, only a couple of years after the colony itself was established. It was a farming area, cattle mostly, and slate quarrying soon became an important […]
The Royal Australian Air Force turns 90 today. It was officially formed as an independent service out of the old Australian Flying Corps on 31 March 1921 (making it three years less one day younger than the Royal Air Force). At first it was just the Australian Air Force: it didn’t get the Royal prefix
So, THATCamp Melbourne is over. It was pretty much as I expected, which is to say it was excellent. I’m not going to write a conference report (you should have been following #thatcamp on Twitter for that!) but two sessions did give me ideas for digital history projects I might like to do. One day.
Later this week I’m going to THATCamp Melbourne. What’s THATCamp, you ask? THATCamp stands for The Humanities and Technology Camp. It’s an unconference devoted to exploring the ways in which the humanities and digital technology can work together. It is informal and collegial: attendees vote on the programme on the first morning. It’s practical and
By recapturing from Italian forces Berbera, the capital of British Somaliland, a small part of the British Empire has been restored. Royal Navy warships landed Army troops at the port, suffering ‘negligible’ (Glasgow Herald, 5) casualties. RAF armoured cars assisted too. This adds to the Allied offensive against Addis Ababa: ‘British Empire troops are now
Though Bardia has not yet fallen, Australian infantry and British troops have broken through its perimeter and taken 5000 Italian soldiers prisoner in a dawn attack (The Times, 4). The Australians, who hitherto had taken part only in small-scale raids, had the honour of leading the way through gaps caused first by our guns and
According to the Daily Express, the ‘ever-increasing power behind Air Marshal Sir Charles Portal’s master-plan for crippling Hitler’s war industries’ is beginning to yield results (1). The giant Krupp factory (nearly always rendered as ‘Krupps’ in the British press) at Essen had three ‘sections […] put out of commission’, which must be considered especially impressive
I’ve recently been reading Peter Ewer’s Wounded Eagle: The Bombing of Darwin and Australia’s Air Defence Scandal, which I found to be unexpectedly interesting, but not always in a good way. Wounded Eagle has much less about the Second World War than I’d thought: much of the early part of the book is taken up
Phantom airships come and go, but sometimes they come again. According to the scattered accounts of the 1909 Australian wave I’ve seen (meaning Bill Chalker’s The Oz Files and random internet sites), there was a late airship sighting on 25 October 1909 at Minderoo station in Western Australia. But I couldn’t find that event in
What did the phantom airships mean to people at the time? One thing is clear. The press very early on referred to the mysterious lights as airships, and it does seem that this was probably the most popular theory among those who saw them. But it was very far from a universal view. The 5
