I love history. My Bachelors degree is in history – a mix of medieval, early modern, and Australian history, with emphasis on social history. I’m fascinated by everyday life, and the experiences of ordinary people. <\/p>\n
So, Gordon’s new blog – Old news from Armidale and New England<\/a> – is definitely of interest to me, and has been the prompt for much discussion over the dinner table. He’s browsing through the National Library’s Historic Australian Newspapers site<\/a>, and finding amongst the scanned and digitised newspapers items related to the New England region. Each day he posts an article or two, and I enjoy reading what he’s found.<\/p>\n One of today’s stories<\/a> is from a newspaper dated 5 November 1905, and tells of the tragedy of a young woman who fell over a precipice – at a gorge that is not very far from our place. The young woman fell 900 hundred feet and sadly died. <\/p>\n On a more cheerful note, another story he’s reported today is the opening of radio station 2AD<\/a>, in February 1936, by David Drummond, a local man and also state Minister for Education. Radio 2AD is still going strong, seventy-three years later! (And David Drummond’s grandson, Jim Belshaw, now writes a blog<\/a> focusing on New England history and happenings.)<\/p>\n I could spend hours – days! – browsing through the newspaper archives myself, and yes, I did spend an evening a day or two ago reading the Maitland Mercury from 1843, but I’ll have to limit my time otherwise I might get lost forever… so maybe I’ll make do for a while with the snippets Gordon posts \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n (Oh, and yes, there possibly will be a historical novel sometime in my writing future.. but not for a while!)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I love history. My Bachelors degree is in history – a mix of medieval, early modern, and Australian history, with emphasis on social history. I’m fascinated by everyday life, and the experiences of ordinary people. So, Gordon’s new blog – … Continue reading