Blog
Happy Dance! Photo courtesy Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW ref: hood_16041/ Home & Away 16041
As you may know, we’ve been having technical trouble with the display and functioning of the site when viewed through Internet Explorer 8 and earlier versions.
We’re very pleased to announce that, thanks to the hard work and perseverance of our colleagues at University of Sydney Arts eResearch, we’ve resolved these problems, and the site now works in IE 8. It’s not quite as good as it looks in Chrome, Safari, Firefox or IE 9, but it’s functional.
Thanks for your patience, as we worked on fixing the problem. We look forward to lots more feedback from those of you with IE 8 (which is still very common in corporate environments).
If you can upgrade to a newer browser, you’ll have a better experience with the Dictionary. You can do that for free: Firefox, Safari, Chrome.
We are all breathing a sigh of relief, and we can now get on with the hard work of getting ready for next month’s regeneration of the site, with 20 new articles, and hundreds of new entities, images, captions and links.
Stay tuned!
More...
The new issue of Inside History magazine is out, and it’s a beauty, with a fascinating theme of cemetery research, how to do it, and where to find help.
Lots of people are fascinated with cemeteries, even if they aren’t into family history, including our Chair, Lisa Murray, who wrote her doctoral thesis on ‘Cemeteries in 19th century New South Wales: Landscapes of memory and history‘. Lisa, who is also Sydney’s City Historian, has an article in the new Inside History, focussing on cemetery design, and how it evolved, along with town planning, from the churchyards of the early 19th century into the general cemeteries of today.
Inside History issue 10 out now!
The magazine is running an offer for Mother’s Day, of 18 months for the price of 12, via their Facebook page here. You’ll have to get in quickly though, as the offer ends on Monday.
Inside History also has a killer iPad app, which looks so beautiful it’s almost distracting! If you have an iPad, I’d definitely recommend getting it.
More...
The Dictionary team is very sad to hear about the unexpected death of Peter Tyler, one of our authors, and a stalwart of Sydney history circles for many years. He wrote our article on the Royal Society of NSW, and cleared up a number of confusing overlapping organisations for us.
Peter J Tyler, historian
Peter was the historian for the Royal Society of NSW, and had a list of publications in the fields of administrative, scientific and medical history, most recently a history of State Records.
He was also active in and a past president of the Professional Historians Association of NSW, and a generous and supportive colleague to historians in Sydney.
His funeral will be held at Northern Suburbs Crematorium Southern chapel on Friday 11 May at 1 pm.
Our sympathies go out to his family and friends.
More...
The most recent upload to the Dictionary has quite an educational theme, with articles addressing three very different strands of Sydney’s pedagogical history.
Kate Matthew’s piece on Governesses outlines the culture and practices of the education that most middle-class children, especially girls, received for the first century or so of European settlement. Governesses occupied an awkward spot in the class structure of the colony, not quite servants, but not quite ladies either. As one of the few forms of relatively respectable employment for middle-class women, governessing was the only option for many women who found themselves unsupported or alone.
Samantha Frappell’s articles on the Garcia School of Music (part of St Vincent’s College, a Catholic girls’ school in central Sydney) and its founder, Mary Christian, later Sister Mary Paul of the Cross, examines the kind of private school education that largely replaced governess-based teaching in the city by the end of the nineteenth century. Sister Mary Paul’s eventful life reveals that some women managed to regain their lost respectability, by heroic measures.
And Mark Dunn has a piece in the latest upload on the Waterloo Tanning School, part of the push for technical education in the late nineteenth century, when factory owners and reformers alike clamoured for technical training as a way of making Sydney’s workers more productive and competitive.
Bootmaking class in the pattern cutting and clicking room, Erskineville Bootmaking School 1909
If you haven’t already seen them, you might also want to have a look at the Dictionary’s articles on:
These education-themed articles, among others, have been made possible by the generous sponsorship of our project partners, the Sydney Mechanics’ School of Arts, itself one of the oldest educational organisations in Sydney, and still going strong.
More...
