Category Archive: HISTORY
Perth Mint
(November, 2025) Australia’s official bullion mint (est. 1899) is at 310 Hay Street (conveniently near the Grosvenor Hotel), built in a style known as Federation Romanesque. Established to handle the West’s gold rush by refining gold nuggets and producing gold sovereigns for the Empire, the Mint continues a roaring trade, as gold continues to out-perform tech stocks and U.S. Bonds. There is a venerable coin press, and visitors taking the organised tour can strike their own token: The Mint is the oldest still producing coins of legal tender, along with collection-pieces, such as the Australian Lunar Silver Series II (2010)…
Continue Reading →Australia: A History
Mr. Abbott at the launch
(By Tony Abbott) (2025) Many, many years ago, Mark Twain wrote: “Australian history is .. picturesque; It does not read like history, but like the most beautiful lies & all of a fresh new sort, no mouldy old stale ones. Full of surprises, & adventures, & incongruities *& contradictions, and incredibilities; but they are all true!” Australia’s 28th Prime Minister has written a history of Australia, explaining that he did so to try, not to counter, but to balance-correct, the currently prevailing ‘black armband’ narrative of those determining that the ancient evil of colonisation can and should be redressed now,…
Continue Reading →Season of Life (Jeff Janoda, 2022)
"Hancock at Gettysburg" by Thure de Thulstrup, showing Pickett's Charge
Jeff Janoda is a Canadian teacher, historian and writer whose ability to research and vitalise historical events disparate in time and space is admirable. His terrific 2005 novel Saga takes us into the world of old Nordic stories. Sundog (2019) is a gripping yarn set in the last days of World War Two. His third novel, Season of Life pulls the reader into the Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863. The American Civil War was known to The Varnished Culture through that historical textbook, Gone With the Wind and a few episodes of an interminable, sepia-coloured documentary tv series. Now…
Continue Reading →Coonardoo (Katharine Susannah Prichard)
(First published 1929; 2013 edition published by Angus & Robertson) In two of the three forewords* to the 2013 A&R Australian Classics edition of “Coonardoo”, we are told that Prichard, in both her own (the third) foreword and the novel that follows, uses terms and makes assumptions that, while widespread in the nineteen-twenties, are not so popular now. Prichard is not criticised for that, nor should she be. Those were the words and the beliefs of the time. Some of them should be readopted by us, even in our woke wisdom. Naturally we should no longer tolerate the genital mutilation…
Continue Reading →Egypt (Part Three): Farewell
24 April to 1 May 2025 The Nile River The Nile Valley has been sustaining life since Paleolithic times and for the last 6,000 years or more, has become Monument Valley to the World. The river stretches the entire length of Egypt (and more), a country crossing of some 1,600 kilometres, providing irrigation, agriculture, transport, settlement and even galvanising civilisation itself, before branching out in the flat alluvial Delta and emptying into the Mediterranean. After an evening at the markets in Aswan, we clambered aboard the M.S. Grand Rose, a venerable Nile cruiser which, while showing its age, was nevertheless…
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