by Jenny Coates | 18 Dec 2021 | North East Victoria, Trove Tuesday, Wangaratta
Before women in Victoria gained the right to vote in Commonwealth elections in 1902, there were few ways that they could exercise any democratic right. They were yet to be granted the same rights as men in state elections despite a huge push in 1891 with the...
by Jenny Coates | 16 Dec 2021 | First Nations people, Homes and Properties, Wangaratta
I recently stumbled upon a photo of the beautiful home below. This image was scanned by the State Library of Victoria but the cataloguers had not identified the house, the title being merely “House brick with porch and gabled roof, Wangaratta.” I asked the...
by Jenny Coates | 11 Dec 2021 | Dubious Old Dudes, Melbourne, Trove Tuesday
On the 30th November I had the pleasure of joining historian Robyn Annear on a guided walk around the north-western corner of Hoddle’s grid in Melbourne as part of the soft launch of her new book of seven walking tours titled “Adrift in Melbourne”....
by Jenny Coates | 24 Oct 2021 | Ada Cambridge, Wangaratta
Continuing on a study of the personal memoir of novelist Ada Cambridge titled Thirty Years in Australia we come to the young couple’s housing in Wangaratta. When Ada Cambridge and her husband George Cross arrived in Wangaratta they had been married for several...
by Jenny Coates | 29 Jun 2020 | Surnames I am Researching, Wangaratta
No one really knows how William Moore died. In the dust, noise and confusion that erupted around the movement of a mob of horses from the Wangaratta Sale Yards through Ovens Street to the railway station, no one actually saw the event that caused his death. On that...
by Jenny Coates | 3 Jan 2020 | Family Tree, North East Victoria, Surnames I am Researching, Wangaratta
On the 3rd January 1826, Jonathan Harris (alias Alcorn) arrived in Sydney Cove as a convict aboard the Marquis of Hastings. Lucky to have survived the penal system involving a stay on the hulks and the long sea voyage, Harris had actually used up not two, but three of...
by Jenny Coates | 19 Jul 2019 | Ada Cambridge, Wangaratta
As we saw in Part 6 and 7 of this study, life in Wangaratta agreed very well with Ada Cambridge. However in her memoir she hinted at a disappointment that wounded deeply, but which she could not elaborate on. … we still found nothing to disagree with us –...
by Rod Martin | 11 Jul 2019 | North East Victoria, Wangaratta, World War One
By guest blogger Rod Martin A question about the 1909 photograph shown above led to an unlikely coincidence as a blogger attempted to discover the real story behind it. The Albury Library and the State Library of New South Wales had both captioned it as being a...
by Jenny Coates | 28 Jun 2019 | Ada Cambridge, North East Victoria, Wangaratta
After Ada Cambridge wrote about the people who became her closest friends during her short residence in Wangaratta, she took to observing the community and comparing it to life in England. And as for the cottage people – the marked thing about them was that they...
by Jenny Coates | 14 Jun 2019 | Ada Cambridge, North East Victoria, Wangaratta
As we saw in Part 5 of this series, Ada Cambridge remarked on the egalitarian nature of early 1870s Wangaratta society, and mentioned a few friends who were from the “tradesfolk” class. After recalling the wife of a stationer – identified as Anne...