Memory Lane…
I’ve just had the loveliest trip down memory lane.
Of all things, cleaning the silver.
Sometimes life is for escaping from.
Sometimes it’s for escaping to.
Today was the latter…
Very early this morning, the men decided to go fishing and being totally uninterested in the hunter-gatherer thing, I asked if they could drop me at Maria Island.
Apparently Napoleon once said ‘history is a myth that men agree to believe.’
Sometimes I go to bed and just want to read something warm and reassuring, something that lowers the heart rate and produces an unconscious smile. For the last twelve months, on and off, I have been reading this:
Not every night. Sometimes I don’t pick it up for a week or even a month. But when I do, it’s like an old friend and I dread that I’ve actually reached the last few pages within the book. I wouldn’t be adverse to beginning again, to see what I missed as my eyes shuttered down.
After writing the post on the Templar Commanderie in France with its beautiful old stone and woodwork, I was in the mood for ruins of all kinds.
It seems we have some of our own.
We bought our sheep property about twelve years ago and one of the things that attracted us to the place, apart from it’s excellent farm soil, its wonderful hills and views, house, shearing shed and machinery shed, dams, proximity to the coast and the city etc etc etc – was the apparent history right before our very eyes.
The day that truly personifies all that is Australian – mateship, bravery, selflessness and…
I attended the March a few years ago wearing my Great Uncle’s medals. He flew missions in Papua New Guinea and was the incentive for Dad joining the RAAF.
Welcome to the Historical Novelists’ Four Day Book Fair
How fantastic to be able to roam from one pavilion to another, all 50+ of them … all just FULL of hist.fict novels from every timeframe one can imagine. Load your kindles, your Nooks, your Kobos, your i-books. Or be a real devil and buy the print version of any novel you see if it’s available.
*This is a reprise of an article I was invited to post on English Historical Fiction Authors*
Convict carved milestone.
If, like me, the generations of one’s family in Tasmania can be traced back to Settlement, then it is a fair enough assumption to believe there exists a convict somewhere in the family tree. My great great grandfather was such a man.
Why the fascination with the Middle Ages?
It’s a question I was asked today and it’s something I’ve wondered about as well.
I think it began in secondary school. I fell in love with historical fiction the minute I had my own library card. At the same time, the beginning of the 60’s, TV had just begun in Australia and so I was beguiled by the black and white historical cinema of the time. I’ve just found a copious list of 300 movies online www.erasofelegance.com/entertainment/medievalmovies.html and went through to find the ones I remembered from my youth:
A couple of posts ago I mentioned the old Victorian scrapbook gifted to me by my great aunt when I was eight years old. There is a little bit of history behind the book. My parents moved whilst I was away at university (a long while ago) and all my books were placed in boxes and apparently moved with the housing contents.