Archives for November 2019

They drank Champagne out of pint pots!

GLIMPSES of life in Coolgardie in those glamorous days when the “old camp” was a magnet to adventurous folk from far and wide, can be interestingly recalled by 89year old Mrs. Julie Kennedy, who resides in Stirling-street, Perth. Picture scions of wealthy English families rubbing shoulders with miners from the Bendigo diggings, thousands of gold […]

The Tonsorial Mickle Brothers:

The Mickle brothers have established a dynasty of Hairdressers (Tonsorial Artists) and tobacconists in Western Australia. Starting in the Murchison and Northern Goldfields the five brothers had premises in Menzies, Mt Magnet, Kookynie, Laverton and Wiluna and Meekatharra. They would also open a business in Narrogin in later years. Laverton Mercury (Laverton, WA : 1899 […]

The Man who Invented “The Old Pioneers” – a verse

They had to be born, for in early Coolgardie We had to appear to our folks in the East As patient explorers, courageous and hardy, Facing fortune and famine, wild blizzard and beast; We had to account in the pannikin papers, For whiskers that covered us well to the waist, And our penchant persistent for […]

Farther Afield – the Gaffney family

The following plaque was photographed in a cemetery in Clunes Victoria by Wendy Broomfield. What a wealth of information on one plaque for the Gaffney family, it even gives the mothers maiden name, MARK, which is rare. Elizabeth GAFFNEY When Elizabeth MARK was born in 1845 in Providence, Rhode Island, USA, her father, Edward, was […]

Brutal Butchery at ‘The Boulder’:

Fix this text ‘The Truth’  Saturday 11 April 1908, Westralia had hardly done ringing with the climax of the Day Dawn murder sensation of Harry Smith  of his crime of murdering his mate Clinton—the hanging only took place three weeks ago—when there occurs a tragedy in the very heart of a thickly populated centre. Boulder […]