Table of contents for Edition 20, 2022 in Traces

Then Built in 1882, Dimora’s design and construction was commissioned by one of Adelaide’s most prominent socialites of the time, Harry Lockett Ayers. Son of Sir Henry Ayers, the eighth premier of South Australia who served five terms between 1863 and 1873, Harry Ayers and his brother, Arthur Ernest Ayers, were part of Adelaide’s elite. Harry was a founding member of the Adelaide Club in 1863 – an exclusive gentleman’s club that was part of a wider network of high-profile social clubs, known as the Adelaide Establishment. After the founding of Adelaide by European settlers in 1836, the city became a hub for wealthy English migrant families, who soon took over the young city, securing land and commissioning buildings for themselves. This no doubt meant that up until the significant…

Growing up, my friends and family would actively avoid studying, embracing or investigating Australia’s past in any way at all. This made me all the more determined to know what I was missing out on – and, boy, was I missing out on plenty! We all were. In preparation for my 2020 biography of Melbourne gangster Squizzy Taylor, I found it difficult to strip away my preconceived ideas about 1920s gangsters with flashy cars, pinstriped suits, cigars and fedora hats. As I approach the publication of Dolly: Madam of Melbourne, I am excited because this will be the first of my 11 books in which I’ve been able to paint a picture of the worlds the characters lived in, in dirty, gritty detail. At the centre of Melbourne’s early 20th-century…

Chain letters usually follow a similar format: one person writes a letter and sends copies of it to other people. They might ask the recipients to send money or mention a charity that requires financial assistance. The final request is always the same: to make copies of the letter and to send it to several friends. Many letters preyed upon the superstitious and often stated that failing to pass it on would result in bad luck. While they may seem harmless, chain letters could quickly spiral out of control, which was why they were also known as ‘snowballs’. Once started, they were hard to stop. The perfect example of a chain letter snowballing out of control occurred in Hurstville, New South Wales. Alderman John Griffin was part of the Committee…

MyHeritage Australia • Adelaide Burials: 282,623 records• Brisbane Burials and Cremations: 279,593 records. Austria • Vienna, Jewish Emigrant Applications, 1938–1939: 228,241 records. Brazil • Sao Paulo Immigration Cards: 4,756,768 records. Canada • Quebec, Catholic Parish Baptisms, 1783–1876: 50,486 records• Quebec, Persons Incarcerated in 19th Century Prisons: 63,553 records. Chile • Civil Registration: 10,618,507 records. England • Birmingham Burials: 103,914 records• 1939 Register of England and Wales: 34,414,430 records. France • Protesant Church Marriages: 173,006 records. Germany • Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp Prisoners: 29,097 records• Hesse, Deaths: 8,491,890 records. Italy • Naples, Monte di Procida, Civil Registration of Births, 1817–1910: 30,241 records• Teramo, Civil Registration of Marriages: 144,101 records. New Zealand • Auckland Burials: 394,295 records• Canterbury, Christchurch Burials: 151,887 records. Norway • Emigration Registers, 1867–1959: 250,427 records. www.myheritage.com. FamilySearch Australia •…

Where we find our archives often shapes how we think about their meaning. Preserving context is both a key tenet for archivists and an interpretive challenge for historians. This is why we should always be alert to the oddities: items that seem out of place in an otherwise coherent collection. Consider Sir Thomas Gordon’s 1946 letter describing an airline flight from Sydney to the small town of Hurn in England. Costing £375, or $28,000 today, the trip represented a huge investment in a business that directly threatened his own empire. So, why did he fly? Sir Thomas was an Australian shipping magnate. The son of a successful farmer, he was born in Ardrossan, South Australia, in 1882. At the age of 18, Tom began work in the shipping industry, soon…

Mourning jewellery is most often associated with the Victorian period, popularised by Queen Victoria’s very public mourning after the death of Prince Albert in 1861. For the next 40 years until her own death, Queen Victoria wore nothing but black, and commissioned special jewellery pieces to commemorate Albert, as well as other beloved family members who had died, such as her mother and her daughter, Alice. Many of these pieces were made from black stones like jet and onyx, and some incorporated a lock of hair or a photograph of the deceased, which were all design elements that became popular among the masses, though many opted for cheaper black materials like black glass (‘French jet’), enamel or vulcanite. Well-dressed mourners in the Victorian era would not feel completely dressed without…

Family heirlooms offer a fragile, precious link to our ancestors. They are imbued with meaning through stories of love, loss and success, and they ensure that family legacies live on. Heirlooms connect generations in a deeply personal way, while providing insight into the lives of those who lived before us, and a more complete understanding of our family’s history. The following is a small selection of reader submissions. Look out for more in the next edition. Great-great-grandmother’s locket This locket belonged to my great-great-grandmother, Adelaide Grace Craft. We believe it was given to her on her 21st birthday, and it has a curl of her hair in it. There is a tradition in our family that the first girl of each generation born on a Tuesday is given the middle…

What was once the largest psychiatric hospital in Victoria is now one of the country’s most haunting locations. Giulia Heppell dives into the asylum’s bleak past. Keeping watch over the Victorian country town of Beechworth, Mayday Hills – built in 1867 as the Beechworth ‘Lunatic’ Asylum – comprises 67 buildings that once housed more than 1200 male and female patients, and 500 staff members at its peak. Its position on a hill above the town was reportedly chosen because it was believed that altitude would ‘cleanse the patients of their illnesses’. Looking at it today, you wouldn’t think much of it; while it has been declared a significant place by the National Trust of Victoria, the cream-coloured main building and surrounding gardens definitely don’t give away the horrors that were…

Virtual public record office goes live In June this year, the Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland was launched, allowing visitors to explore a virtual recreation of the Public Record Office of Ireland and its collections as they were on the eve of their destruction at Dublin’s Four Courts at the outset of the Civil War. The Public Record Office of Ireland was destroyed by fire on 30 June 1922, and hundreds of thousands of historical documents were lost. This new virtual treasury is a collection of replacement and newly discovered documents that have been accumulated in partner archives around the world. The archive is free and permanent, and offers seven centuries of Irish history, in tens of thousands of searchable documents. There are 50 million words of text, 150,000 records,…

The first time my wife and I visited Queenstown, in December 2016, we were on our honeymoon. We stayed one night and then continued on to Stanley and its iconic Nut – exactly the sort of place honeymooners in Tasmania like to go. I didn’t plan on ever returning to Queenstown. Five years later, flying direct from Perth to Hobart, the plane crossed the west coast. Down amid the greenery, I spied a grey scar on the landscape that could only be Queenstown. My intention had been to spend time in southern Tasmania before travelling up the east coast and looping back around via Launceston. No doubt that’s exactly what most visitors to Tasmania do, eschewing the west coast entirely. But my wife, who wasn’t accompanying me on this trip,…

In May 1813, Gregory Blaxland, William Charles Wentworth and William Lawson crossed the Blue Mountains with servants and dogs, guided by an emancipist whose name sounded like ‘James Byrne’. A year later, the same man gave initial assistance to Lieutenant William Cox in the development of the road across the Blue Mountains. From the accounts and documents associated with these two expeditions, we know that the guide was a resident in the Nepean area and had spent time in the Blue Mountains, hunting kangaroos and building relationships with the Dharug people, from whom he learnt the route through the difficult terrain. He was rewarded for his part in the 1813 expedition with a total of £15 and 100 acres, and is revealed to be illiterate by the signature on the…

Answer: a glove pattern This strange-looking, flat, tin device is a glove pattern, used at Simpson’s Gloves Pty Ltd in Melbourne during the 1950s and 1960s. Looking at the object, it’s hard to imagine how it would have assisted in making a pair of gloves; however, when aligned and folded together, this clever apparatus forms both the front and the back of a glove. Simpson’s Gloves would have used this particular glove pattern to form the fingers and palm of a single glove, while the bottom left half of the glove pattern would have featured a hole for a thumb section to be made separately. Simpson’s Gloves operated from 1924 to 1988 in the Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy, before relocating to Richmond. In 1988, the business was sold and relocated…