Category: History

Four Important Lessons I’ve Learned from Fairy Tales

Lesson 1:  Never Trust a Wolf. People like David Attenborough would have you believe that wolves are harmless creatures, wonderful examples of nature at its finest – strong, noble, dignified.  Well, he’s wrong.  Fairy Tales have taught me that wolves are evil, nasty and cunning beasts who will stop...

Behold the Art Deco glory of the Padua Theatre, Brunswick!

I’ve been doing some research on the great picture palaces of 1930s/1940s Melbourne. Recently, I stumbled across the wonderful Harold Paynting Collection at the State Library of Victoria and discovered these images of the long lost Padua Theatre, Brunswick, Victoria.  Thanks to people like photographer Lyle Fowler, we can gaze...

Ask the Professor

Recently, I was  cleaning out an old relative’s garage and I came across bundles of ancient magazines. One such stack was devoted to an obscure journal called The Australasian Sophist. Among articles about bush ballads, inland explorers and rough-hewn heroes of the past was a recurring column of surprising...

Using Real, Historical People in Fiction

Writers have many challenges. Getting a pencil to a perfect sharp point. Coming up with alternatives to ‘Once upon a time’ to start a story. Finding time to count our enormous sacks of money. Things like that. With The Extraordinaires, my most recently released series I encountered a challenge...

Five Great Historical Fantasy Novels

I’m happy enough with my Extraordinaires series being called Steampunk, but I’m more and more coming to think of it as Historical Fantasy. And by Historical Fantasy, I don’t mean Alternate History (stories in a world like our own that has taken a different historical path) or standard Fantasy...

Boy’s Own Paper

The Boy’s Own Paper was a long-running (1879-1967) magazine that, in some ways, helped to establish and perpetuate the essence of the British schoolboy. Originally, its purpose was educative and it never really lost this function. Science, history, sport and geography featured heavily in its stories and articles, but...

Names, names, names

If you’re writing Fantasy, names can be a real headache. You want names that are distinctive, evocative and resonant, without sounding ‘just made up’, and that put a real strain on the old creative gland. The answer lies, as it almost always does when writing Fantasy, in History. For ...

Gentle Flower Children and Petrol

Ah, the Internet and its wondrous offerings! I stumbled across some archival video and the memories came back. Believe it or not, younlings, there was a time when petrol companies successfully linked themselves with the back to nature movement, all in the days before unleaded fuel, too. Driving and...

The Empire Annual for Girls

Oh, how I love history. And books. And books from history. Here’s a real gem: the contents of the 1911 edition of The Empire Annual for Girls, which should tell you a thing or two from the title alone.   THE CHRISTMAS CHILD — MRS G. DE HORNE VAIZEY...

La Gazette du Bon Ton 1

I’ve been promising this for a while. It’s one of the things I stumbled across in my researching. How I love serendipity. La Gazette du Bon Ton was essentially what we’d call today a fashion/lifestyle magazine. It was published in Paris from 1912 to 1925, and offered a limpid...