Many years ago, my aunt told me a story in which she remembered sitting in a car in a car park while her father visited someone in an adjoining building. She wondered why she could not go with him, but her father made it clear he was going alone. She learnt later that she was outside the Goodna Mental Asylum where her father was visiting his older brother William Alexander Dorsey Bell. This story lingered in my mind so a … Continue reading
Bell’s Picnic Party was the title of a small piece in The Worker in May 1908. It expressed the newspaper’s view of a trip my great uncle, Joshua Bell, who was Minister for Lands at the time, was taking along the Queensland coast in May 1908 on the Government steamer Lucinda. Mr. Bell, in the fostering atmosphere Ministerial authority, is developing a great gift of conviviality—at the country’s expense…taking with him a few chosen pals and political tuft hunters…[1] … Continue reading
I am always on the lookout for information about women that provides a fuller picture of their lives to add to the information which is usually available such as where they were born, how many children they had, what their husbands did and when they died. But this is often difficult as previously women were usually invisible with few or no signs that they had lived, and even the wives of ‘important’ men were often only recorded when they were … Continue reading
