Please note that there will be no meeting or guest speaker on Saturday 18th November, when we would normally hold our monthly General Meeting.
We are looking forward to celebrating our 60th anniversary on the evening of Tuesday 21st November. If you have any queries, please contact khs@khs.org.au
Our guest speaker following our AGM will be Dr Judith Godden, professional historian, Secretary of Ku-ring-gai Historical Society, and honorary associate of the Department of History at the University of Sydney.
Judith will talk about the controversial subject of her first book, Lucy Osburn, a Lady Displaced: Florence Nightingale’s Envoy to Australia (Sydney University Press, 2006) which was short-listed for the National Biography Award.
Osburn learned her vocation at Florence Nightingale's school of nursing in London, but her relationship with Nightingale was not the smooth discourse of 'Victorian ladies'.
Celebrated as the founder of modern Australian nursing, Lucy Osburn (1836-91) was sent to Sydney by Florence Nightingale to reform nursing in Australia. After arriving here in 1868, followed by 16 tumultuous years at Sydney Hospital, Lucy Osburn eventually succeeded, thanks to her immense resilience – despite considerable mistakes that led to her being repudiated by Florence Nightingale.
In her enthralling and enlightening biography, Judith Godden has collected Lucy Osburn’s extensive and frank correspondence, which is used to build an intriguing picture of life for an independent middle-class woman.
Lucy Osburn also pioneered the employment of high status professional women in public institutions. Her triumphs and trials in NSW typify the struggles the colony faced in its relations with Britain, and with new roles in the workplace for women.
In this presentation, you'll find out about the tumultuous 16 years Lucy Osburn spent at Sydney Hospital, and why she is celebrated as the founder of modern Australian nursing - even though Florence Nightingale effectively disowned her!
Find out too, why Judith thinks we should all know her story.
As always, please keep an eye on our website in case of any last-minute changes.
The venue is Gordon Library Meeting Room No. 1, in the Old Gordon Public School, which adjoins the Gordon Library, 799 Pacific Highway, Gordon (corner Pacific Highway and Park Avenue).
It’s just a 5-minute walk from Gordon Station.
For a map and parking information, see our Contact page.
Our guest speaker will be award-winning author and professional historian, Dr Ian Hoskins.
In his most recent book, Australia and the Pacific: a History, Ian examines a timely subject – our place in the Pacific and our relations with the myriad Pacific island nations, as well as those with larger players – from our ties with Papua New Guinea and New Zealand to our complex connections with China, Japan and the United States.
This revealing, sweeping narrative history begins with the shifting of the continents to the coming of the first Australians and, thousands of years later, the Europeans who dispossessed them.
About Ian Hoskins
Ian has worked as an academic historian, a curator and a professional historian in Sydney for more than 30 years. He researches and writes when he is not working as the North Sydney Historian, where he researches and interprets the local area.
Ian is passionate about history (both local and broad) and landscapes (both cultural and natural) along with the architecture, modifications and plantings that make up those places — and the literature and artwork created to represent them.
As always, please keep an eye on our website in case of any last-minute changes.
The venue is Gordon Library Meeting Room No. 1, in the Old Gordon Public School, which adjoins the Gordon Library, 799 Pacific Highway, Gordon (corner Pacific Highway and Park Avenue).
It’s just a 5-minute walk from Gordon Station.
For a map and parking information, see our Contact page.
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Our guest speaker will be Warren Fahey - author, social historian and local legend.
Warren’s latest book is Dead and Buried: a curious history of Sydney’s earliest burial grounds, which looks at Sydney’s three earliest cemeteries.
Cemeteries hold so many fascinating stories. Sydney’s three main earliest cemeteries – The Old Burial Ground on George Street, Devonshire Street ‘Sandhill’s’ Cemetery and the grand Victorian Rookwood Necropolis – all document the social history of Sydney from the arrival of the First Fleet through to the present time. These are stories of notable and ordinary people, architecture, landscaping, and the ever-changing attitude to burial and remembrance.
This collection of stories attempts to explain how the three early cemeteries evolved and, considering Rookwood is the most significant Victorian necropolis in the southern hemisphere and one of the largest in the world, how it has serviced Sydney for over 150 years. These are not morbid stories but a reminder of the mortality we all face. Many of the stories are from newspaper accounts and obituaries. There are also many stories where the writer has diverted from the main story to reveal fascinating glimpses of yesteryear’s Sydney and society.
As a slice of Sydney past, the material concentrates on the earlier side of history with tales of colonial notables, sensational murders, tragedies, poets and politicians, artists and dreamers, gallant heroes and, because it is a Sydney history, a goodly number of eccentrics, ratbags and rabble-rousers. The collection also represents the religious, non-religious and ever-widening cultural diversity of Sydney.
In digging up Sydney’s early history Warren Fahey relates tales of notable burials and the good, bad and ugly of Sydney city. The illustrated talk also comments on changing attitudes to death, especially in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
About Warren Fahey
Warren is an Australian folklore collector, cultural historian, prolific author, actor, broadcaster, record and concert producer, visual artist, songwriter, performer of Australian traditional and historical music, and occasional ABC ‘talking head’.
Specialising in the ‘curious’ side of history, he is well-known as an informative and entertaining speaker. He has been honoured with the Order of Australia, Prime Minister’s Centennial Medal, Advance Australia Award and the nation’s highest award for lifetime achievement in music, The Don Banks Music Award. He prefers to say he is “a graduate of the Dingo University!”
Dead & Buried is 700 pages with rare photographs and illustrations, and copies will be available for $35. Credit/debit cards accepted.
As always, please keep an eye on our website in case of any last-minute changes.
The venue is Gordon Library Meeting Room No. 1, in the Old Gordon Public School, which adjoins the Gordon Library, 799 Pacific Highway, Gordon (corner Pacific Highway and Park Avenue).
It’s just a 5-minute walk from Gordon Station.
For a map and parking information, see our Contact page.
Phillip spent spent nearly 31 years writing the Historical Guide to New South Wales (Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2020). At 835 pages it is the first comprehensive guide to the location and history of every country town and village in the State. Never before has there been an attempt to succinctly record the location, history, industries, buildings, calamities and the population of over 9700 cities, towns, villages, hamlets and localities outside Sydney. It is the only place-by-place chronology of the settlement, history and development of Australia’s premier State, covering over 230 years and almost a third of the nation’s places.
Phillip's presentation will illustrate how he achieved this, and how the result will be indispensable to historians, geographers, librarians, heritage consultants, local historical societies, local councils, journalists and especially family historians, not to mention inquisitive tourists.
It will illustrate how and why towns came about; the amazing variety of industries in which people worked; the infrastructure that enabled people to move around; the churches that held many communities together; the schools; the public services including post, telegraph, water, sewerage, gas, electricity, fire brigades and ambulance services; law and order; and the range of calamities faced by so many, including epidemics, dust storms, pests, and numerous fires when there was no reticulated water and few fire brigades. The talk will be illustrated with actual examples from many towns.
About Phillip Simpson
Phillip is uniquely qualified for a task of this scope and magnitude, with several decades of experience in heritage and government in NSW, and postgraduate degrees in both Historical Archaeology and Public Administration from the University of Sydney. For a decade he was the Chairman of one of the National Trust’s principal research committees. In acknowledgement of his service to the recognition and preservation of our heritage and his contributions to industrial archaeology and the history of technology in particular, he was awarded the Trust’s silver medallion. More recently the Premier of NSW awarded him a medallion for meritorious long service to the State.
As always, please keep an eye on our website in case of any last-minute changes.
The venue is Gordon Library Meeting Room No. 1, in the Old Gordon Public School, which adjoins the Gordon Library, 799 Pacific Highway, Gordon (corner Pacific Highway and Park Avenue).
It’s just a 5-minute walk from Gordon Station.
For a map and parking information, see our Contact page.
Our guest speaker will be KHS member, author and renowned meteorologist, Dick Whitaker.
Always a popular guest speaker, Dick returns with a tale of the changing fortunes of this early inner suburb – from colonial farms and country estates to rapid overdevelopment, followed by a lengthy slump to slum status, and then a return to desirability over the past 50 years.
About Dick Whitaker
After graduating from Monash University in Science in 1968, Dick was conscripted and served two years in the Army, ending his military career as an infantry junior officer with 5th Battalion, the Royal Australian Regiment.
He joined the Bureau of Meteorology soon after and began a public service career that would last some thirty-one years. Dick left the Bureau in 2002, but never lost the “weather bug” and came out of retirement to begin his own meteorological consultancy business. He was Chief Meteorologist with Sky News Weather up until 2016 and appeared regularly on radio and television.
Dick is an experienced lecturer and has delivered numerous presentations on history and the weather to such groups as Probus, Rotary, Libraries, U3A, bushfire brigades, historical societies, schools and business groups.
Dick is very interested in history and meteorological education, particularly through television, radio, and books, and has been author, co-author and consultant editor of seventeen books about the weather, including publications for Time-Life and Reader’s Digest.
His latest book is From Gods to Gigabytes – A Brief History of Weather Forecasting. Signed copies will be available for $25 (cash only, so please try to bring the exact amount).
The venue is Gordon Library Meeting Room No. 1, in the Old Gordon Public School, which adjoins the Gordon Library, 799 Pacific Highway, Gordon (corner Pacific Highway and Park Avenue).
It’s just a 5-minute walk from Gordon Station.
For a map and parking information, see our Contact page.
On Saturday 20 May 2023 our guest speaker will be distinguished academic and public historian, Professor Paul Ashton PHA FRSN, author of The Accidental City: Planning Sydney Since 1788.
Paul will present Sydney's Planning History: from Go to Woe?
Sydney has been described as an 'accidental city', one with a planning history characterised by opportunistic development and disjointed or abortive attempts at holistic planning.
At the first Australian Town Planning Conference and Exhibition held in Adelaide in 1917, J.D. Fitzgerald – politician and leading town planning advocate – lamented that Sydney was 'a city without a plan, save whatever planning was due to the errant goat. Wherever this animal made a track through the bush', he observed, 'there are the streets of today'. Despite attempts by colonial governors back to Arthur Phillip to regulate urban growth, Sydney grew 'like Topsy'.
About Paul Ashton
Professor Paul Ashton PHA FRSN is an adjunct at the University of Technology Sydney, where he co-established the Australian Centre for Public History in 1999; at Macquarie University; and at the University of Canberra.
Co-founder and editor of the journal Public History Review, he has authored, co-authored and edited over forty books. These include a history of town planning in Sydney – The Accidental City: Planning Sydney Since 1788 (Hale & Iremonger); Once Upon a Time: Australian Writers on Using the Past (Australian Scholarly Publishing); and What is Public History Globally? Working with the Past in the Present (Bloomsbury).
As always, please keep an eye on our website in case of any last-minute changes.
The venue is Gordon Library Meeting Room No. 1, in the Old Gordon Public School, which adjoins the Gordon Library, 799 Pacific Highway, Gordon (corner Pacific Highway and Park Avenue).
It’s just a 5-minute walk from Gordon Station.
For a map and parking information, see our Contact page.
Denis' interest in Sunderland flying boats was through his uncle Percy Smith, who was in the RAAF from 1938. In 1939 just prior to WWII, his uncle was part of the RAAF 10 Squadron who went to England to fly nine brand new Sunderlands back to Australia, where they were to be stored at Rathmines near Newcastle.
War broke out just as they arrived in England, so Australia loaned all nine Sunderlands and their crews to RAF Coastal Command, where they would seek and destroy U-boats, mainly in the North Atlantic. Denis will show actual film footage of the crew arriving in England, flying Sunderlands and sinking U-boats.
In peace time, flying boats operated from Rose Bay. A trans-Tasman service began in April 1940 which, at its peak, saw a fleet of four Sandringhams making the seven hour crossing to Auckland. Services to Lord Howe Island, Fiji and Tahiti were introduced using Sandringhams, Hythes, Solents, Sunderlands and Catalinas.
The final commercial flight from Rose Bay – an Ansett service to Lord Howe Island – left on 10th September 1974, closing a brief but important chapter in Australia’s aviation history. The site of the Rose Bay flying boat terminal is today used by a company offering joy rides in a float plane.
As always, please keep an eye on our website in case of any last-minute changes.
The venue is Gordon Library Meeting Room No. 1, in the Old Gordon Public School, which adjoins the Gordon Library, 799 Pacific Highway, Gordon (corner Pacific Highway and Park Avenue).
It’s just a 5-minute walk from Gordon Station.
For a map and parking information, see our Contact page.
Remember finding out something during your history research… or reading and thinking OMG: Oh My Gosh, how amazing! Or hearing about others’ unexpected discoveries which surprised you as well? Our Members Forum is your chance to tell others about one of these ‘oh my gosh’ moments – as well as to share in others’ OMG moments!
Members will have 5 minutes to tell us about something you discovered that made it an OMG moment. If you wish, bring along a few illustrations on a USB stick or an item you want to talk about. The aim is for a short, relaxed chat about things of historical interest among friends. If it’s relevant to local Ku-ring-gai history, all the better!
To take part, email Judith at secretary@khs.org.au giving the title of your presentation. You can volunteer to talk on the day, but times will be allocated on a first in first served basis.
We look forward to hearing your ‘OMG’!
As always, please keep an eye on our website in case of any last-minute changes.
The venue is Gordon Library Meeting Room No. 1, in the Old Gordon Public School, which adjoins the Gordon Library, 799 Pacific Highway, Gordon (corner Pacific Highway and Park Avenue).
It’s just a 5-minute walk from Gordon Station.
For a map and parking information, see our Contact page.
Our guest speaker will be Em. Prof. John Ramsland, OAM, FACE, Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Newcastle.
John’s latest research examines the actor’s troubled formative years at Mosman and Greenwich Point, followed by his rapid rise to fame in radio drama, on stage and in feature films, and his later career as an international star.
About John Ramsland
John was born in Manly in 1942 and educated at Manly Boys High School, Bathurst Teachers College, and the Universities of New England, Sydney and Newcastle. He is the author of many historical books, book chapters, journal articles, conference papers and press features. In 2003, he became Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Newcastle after serving there as Dean of the Faculty of Education, and later, Dean of the Faculty of Arts.
John’s latest book is Rendezvous With Death – Anzac Stories of the Great War.
As always, please keep an eye on our website in case of any last-minute changes.
The venue is Gordon Library Meeting Room No. 1, in the Old Gordon Public School, which adjoins the Gordon Library, 799 Pacific Highway, Gordon (corner Pacific Highway and Park Avenue).
It’s just a 5-minute walk from Gordon Station.
For a map and parking information, see our Contact page.
Our guest speaker will be Jeff FitzGerald, Vice-President of the New South Wales Postcard Collectors Society.
Jeff has been collecting historic postcards since 1982, when quite by chance he stumbled across a bundle in an antique shop in Tokyo. His extensive collection reveals our social history, consisting of ‘postcard moments in time’ depicting a wide range of aspects such as socialising, working, recreation, rural life and industry; as well as depictions of Aboriginal people and what this tells us about mainstream Australia of the time. They also contain the work of noted artists who illustrated postcards in the early 1900s, including May Gibbs, Norman Lindsay, Ida Rentoul Outhwaite and more.
As always, please keep an eye on our website in case of any last-minute changes.
The venue is Gordon Library Meeting Room No. 1, in the Old Gordon Public School, which adjoins the Gordon Library, 799 Pacific Highway, Gordon (corner Pacific Highway and Park Avenue).
It’s just a 5-minute walk from Gordon Station.
For a map and parking information, see our Contact page.