While missing out on a Clio may have been entirely predictable, having a post included in On Line Opinion/Club Troppo’s exhibition of the best Australian blog posts of 2007 was completely unforeseen! It’s a very pleasant surprise, and the exposure is nice too (On Line Opinion has something like 145,000 readers a week, according to […]
Yesterday (New Year’s Eve), the temperature here in Melbourne reached 41 degrees Celsius (that’s just under 106 Fahrenheit for those of you in the United States and Belize) — the hottest day of 2007, as it happens. The overnight minimum was 30 degrees (86 for those of you etc), which I think is higher than
I spotted this ironic fusion of a peace symbol and a B-52 in the city1 earlier in the year, and luckily it was still there when I went back with a camera this week. That’s Melbourne, not London … [↩]
No, really. You have sat here too long for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go! Leo Amery (paraphrasing Oliver Cromwell’s dismissal of the Rump Parliament), in reference to Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, 7 May 1940.
The grave of Pte John Joseph Mulqueeney, in Courcelette British Cemetery, Somme, France. He was killed on 17 August 1916 near Mouquet Farm. I am extremely grateful to Steve John for providing me with this photograph.
This week I attended the bi-annual departmental Work in Progress Day, where postgrads give talks on their research. I wasn’t presenting this time around (I did earlier this year) but it turns out that two of my fellow students are also fellow bloggers! (Which, as far as I know, makes a total of three for
WHAT AUSTRALIA WOULD BE LIKE UNDER HUN RULE. — An original recruiting poster which was used with great success in South Australia. Tasmania, it will be noted, becomes Kaisermania, and the idols of the Huns have provided other place-names. This is from the Daily Mail, 3 July 1917, p. 8, and would appear to be
Songs of Australia: the landscape, the country and the city. Icehouse, “Great Southern Land”. Standing at the limit of an endless ocean Stranded like a runaway, lost at sea City on a rainy day down in the harbour Watching as the grey clouds shadow the bay
In my recent post on the Imperial War Museum I remarked upon the commemorative function of the museum, or rather the apparent lack of it. So I was interested to come across this comment made in 1922 by Major-General Sir Frederick Maurice (he of the Maurice Affair), explaining what he thought the true value of
[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.] One interesting minor theme of my recent museum visits here in London has been, I suppose, the popular origins of wargames (as opposed to the intellectual origins): I’ve been coming across a number of games, produced in the first half of the twentieth century and aimed presumably at children, which
