Nic's Blog
On the trail of Hooky Jack, Portuguese ossie digger
Old Hooky was no new chum— All his life he’d chased the gold. And judging by his ‘skiting’ Won—and squandered—wealth untold. He’d chased it in the Yukon, In Alaska’s ice and snow, And north from hot Coolgardie Where the toughest only go.[1] The toughest also...
Osmiridium and anonymity, or Jewelled nights and gender identity
In November 1922 Nineteen Mile Creek osmiridium digger Charlie Prouse slapped a record-breaking lump of metal on the bar of Bischoff Hotel in Waratah, the nearest town. Prouse’s sale of his father Tom’s all-time-Tasmanian-record nugget probably brought them much...
Big Jim Wilkinson leaves a lover grieving
A heartbreaking dedication is inscribed on a ceramic vase on one of the four marked graves in the Balfour Cemetery: To Jim good night love may the night be short that parts we two Alma Big Jim Wilkinson stood almost 200 cm tall—6 foot 5 inches in the old measure. He...
Josiah Rabling and the Carn Brea tin mine, Heemskirk
A lode tin mining boom in western Tasmania followed Inspector of Mines Gustav Thureau’s poorly considered 1881 claim that ‘the Mount Heemskirk and Mount Agnew tin deposits appear to be … of grave importance to the Colony at large’ and that ‘their permanence has...
Attack of the ‘platypus motor’
They don’t make Citröens like that anymore. Gustav Weindorfer of Waldheim Chalet, the highland resort at Cradle Valley, beat the snow by shooting for meat on skis when he began living there in isolation in 1912.[1] At around the same time, Tsar Nicholas II of Russia...
To Lake St Clair with car and camera
It was the first motor trip to Lake St Clair. In 1915 pioneering motor tourers Ray and Edith McClinton mounted a two-week expedition from Launceston to the highland lake, with ‘Nina’, social pages and women’s editor of the Weekly Courier newspaper, as their guest. The...
‘Take her with you!’: Lucy King, the lady in the sidecar
The young Herb (HJ) King was a rev-head with an artist’s eye, a man beguiled by cameras and carburettors. The frontage of his father’s motorcycle shop, John King and Sons, which he eventually took over, remains a landmark of the Kingsway, off Brisbane Street,...
Dogging in the snow near Lake St Clair
In 1906 a newspaper contributor calling himself ‘The Rover’ wrote an account of four months’ hunting in a mountain valley near Lake St Clair. The party of four was from Queenstown. They started for the lake through heavy rain in April, each member bearing a pack...
A tale of two headstones: part two, Sylvia McArthur, Balfour correspondent
The story of Balfour is told by two graves in a highland cemetery in north-western Tasmania. For more than a century, lying side by side, William Murray and Sylvia McArthur have been fixed silently in their interlocking roles in what historian Geoffrey Blainey called...