History of Australia

Warning: William Chidley was a man with unusual views on sex and sexuality. As a result, in order to explain these views this episode of Terrible People from History uses somewhat more graphic language than you might normally expect from a…

Berrima in New South Wales was never a large town. Today its population is around six hundred people, and in the nineteenth century it was half that. One morning in February 1842 the citizens of Berrima made the discovery that it was now…

John Norton was born in Brighton in January 1858. His father was a stonemason who died before John was born, and his mother Mary remarried when he was a child to a silk weaver named Benjamin Herring. Herring was religious - the bad kind of…

James Crouch, who would go by half a dozen other names before he died, was probably born in London sometime in the 1830s. His mother died when he was young, around 1845, and his father abandoned him. He may have spent some time with his…

Amy Bock was born in the city of Hobart in Tasmania, the Australian island subsequently a state, in 1859. She was the second of six children. Her father, Alfred, was a photographer, a trade which kept the Bock family on the move through her…

January - you start the year off fine. And in the inaugural month under the Gregorian calendar, there's plenty of history, with the unavoidable temptation to start new things on New Year's Day. January has also been, since  1937, the month…

The woman who would become infamous as Minnie Dean was born on the 2nd October 1844 in Renfrewshire, Scotland . Her full name was Williamina McCulloch, but her unwieldy first name was soon shortened to Minnie. She was the fourth of…

The jolly scofflaw is a common figure of admiration in society. The outlaws of Sherwood Forest, the highwaymen of Regency England, the outlaws of the Wild West, the “apaches” of the Parisien underworld, all enjoyed the glory of living…