Category

Places

People, Places

Digging a little deeper

28/02/2026
Photograph, headstone, bushland

Earlier this month, I had a delightfully unexpected and long overdue catch up with my aunty Moon, and my father at a local cafe. When rapport is easy and familiar, conversations have a habit of jumping quickly from subject to subject, and we found ourselves talking about graveyard real estate. My aunt mentioned she knew someone who had purchased one of the last remaining plots at the Melbourne General Cemetery, and I said we have ancestors buried there. She wanted to know who, so I regaled her with what I knew. On my walk home, I thought I should dig a little deeper …

Read more

Leave a comment
Places

A public service announcement

07/01/2026

On Saturday 13 December, a crowd gathered in the ‘people’s square’ protesting potential job cuts at the ‘People’s Library’ (State Library Victoria). I was there in my capacity as member of the Professional Historians Association (Vic & Tas), and as a newly minted ‘former’ public servant.

Read more

People, Places

The spirit lives on: Glenferrie oval

14/09/2025
Presentation with footballers lined up on an oval with a flag pole in the foreground and packed crowds lining the oval perimeter.

The Hawthorn Football Club has gone back to its roots in Glenferrie this season to honour its centenary. The club, in collaboration with the Patient Wolf Distilling Company, released a centenary gin featuring native Yellow Box Eucalyptus growing around the club’s spiritual home of Glenferrie Oval.

My father, a lifetime Hawthorn supporter and teetotaller, told me he wanted a bottle of this gin for the mantlepiece.

I laughed, ‘But Dad, you don’t drink, and you don’t have a fireplace’…

Read more

4 Comments
Places

The Great Hunger

11/08/2025
Historic two storey stone building with red trim details around windows and doors.

Buried in the Clonrush parish baptisms and marriages registry are minutes for a famine relief committee that bears witness to my paternal three-times great grandfather’s contribution to alleviate starvation during Ireland’s great famine, commonly referred to as An Gorta Mór. Would knowing what your ancestors did, influence you when history repeats?

Read more

2 Comments
People, Places

Nippers and Heroes

28/02/2023
Twin girls dressed in swimming bathers, kneeling on the ground with towels round their shoulders are looking directly at the camera and smiling.

Two open water swims taking place 145 km apart on Victoria’s coast on one of the hottest days in January 2023, heralded an unexpected communion of intergenerational Meagher family swimming. My late grandfather Jack – an ardent sporting enthusiast and proud patriarch – would have been tickled pink by this family conjunction.  Read more

2 Comments
People, Places

Rear Window Twist

29/01/2021
Illustration of a actor James Stewart peering over binoculars with the movie plotline reflected in the lenses and actress Grace Kelly in the background.

The lure of popcorn and a summer holiday matinee of my all-time favourite film, Rear Window (1954), playing at the Lido Cinema in Hawthorn proved irresistible a few weeks back. My dear friend Rebecca and her ten-year-old daughter, Anna, came along with me. They were seeing the movie for the first time.     Read more

5 Comments
Places

Ikerrin: Buying into the dream

26/08/2020

The ‘Great Australian Dream’ conjures a picture of a home of one’s own, suburban security, a three-bedroom brick veneer, trimmed lawns and backyard barbeques. This collectively held aspiration for home ownership gained traction in media and literature from the 1960s.

Read more

2 Comments
Places

Social distancing in 1929

15/04/2020

How are you coping with your isolation?

I started working from home on Tuesday 24th March 2020 in response to the coronavirus pandemic. I am not in quarantine or self-isolation, just socially –  more precisely physically – distancing from public spaces by staying at home.
Read more

2 Comments
Don't miss out!