This week is the 25th anniversary of the Australian cinematic release of WarGames, which is mainly significant because I missed the anniversary of the US release a few weeks ago! There were a few retrospectives floating about then, which focused on the movie’s importance as an early popularisation of the hacking and phreaking subcultures, and […]
Recently, the National Library of Australia opened up Australian Newspapers Beta to the public, free of charge (though whether free as in speech or free as in beer is unclear). This is part of the Australian Newspapers Digitisation Program and promises to be a fantastic resource. They are digitising newspapers from every state from 1803
Here’s a question of terminology which has been bugging me for some time. The Munich crisis in September and October 1938 is a well-known historical event. But the name ‘Munich crisis’ is misleading, because the crisis was building long before the word Munich was ever associated with it. Munich had nothing to do with the
A bomb plunges through the floors of an office building: its denizens look on in astonishment, cower in terror or fall through the holes left in its wake. This is an illustration from a book published in March 1939 by the Tecton group of architects, Planned A.R.P., which described their plan for bomb-proofing the London
… to a wider audience! A few weeks back, I received an email from Robert Dudney, editor in chief of Air Force Magazine (published by the Air Force Association — that’s US Air Force, not Royal) seeking permission to reprint the text of Stanley Baldwin’s ‘the bomber will always get through’ speech, which I’d posted
Neil Hanson. First Blitz: The Secret German Plan to Raze London to the Ground in 1918. London: Doubleday, 2008. This is a thick, new narrative history of the German air raids on Britain in the First World War, concentrating mainly on the aeroplane raids in 1917-8. Although written for a popular audience, it’s based on
Something which continues to surprise me (but probably shouldn’t, by now) is the way that people were evidently still worried, well into the Blitz, that Germany had not yet unleashed its full aerial might against Britain. That is, that despite victory in the Battle of Britain, and at least enduring the first few months of
I’ve written before about some of the discoveries one can make while wandering around the ERC Library at Melbourne. (Which used to be the ‘Education Resource Centre Library’ but, after the renovations are complete, will be backronymed into the ‘Eastern Resource Centre’.) I’m sure lots of university libraries have a section like this — at
Here are a couple of photos I used in my AHA talk last week: This is a Lufthansa Ju 52/3m, one of the great airliners of the 1930s, at Croydon aerodrome, ca. 1936. Other operators included Swissair, Aeroflot, and British Airways (an ancestor of the current airline of the same name).
Anthony Burke. Fear of Security: Australia’s Invasion Anxiety. Port Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Britain isn’t the only country to go into periodic panics about its vulnerability to invasion, after all. This book ostensibly begins in 1788, but looks like it mostly deals with the Cold War and after. Andrew J. Rotter. Hiroshima: The World’s
