Open your eyes to Australia
© Jim Low
It was the last day of 2008. I was enjoying a leisurely stroll around the historic township of Windsor, one of ‘Macquarie’s Five Towns’, in the New South Wales Hawkesbury region. While stopping to explore a second-hand shop which reclaimed the ample space of a lost congregation in their old church, I came across a cardboard box full of photographs.
I am always intrigued by the various ways people are remembered through their association with certain places.
A couple of years ago my attention was drawn to a ten centimetre square, metal plaque on a sandstone rock face. Engraved on the plaque are the words,
Continue reading “In Memory of Joe and Mary”It would be interesting to know how many convicts transported to Australia had any geographic knowledge of where they had been sent. Perhaps most would have had limited or no idea at all, except that the long sea voyage made it apparent that they were far from their homeland.
The belief that some convicts accepted about China being within reasonable reach of the penal settlement was therefore not as delusional as it may have seemed. The convicts travelled a large part of the journey to Australia below deck. This would surely have reduced their sense of distance and direction. Maps of the ‘great south land’ were rudimentary and in some cases based on conjecture.
Continue reading “No Place For John Place”I first came across the name Tilly Aston in an exhibition on Vision Impairment at the Victorian Museum in 2012. I later learnt more about this remarkable and inspiring woman by reading her Memoirs, as well as some of her poetry from her published collections.
