HERITAGE, Newsletter of BMACHO - Jan-Feb 2014

Governor to open Locomotive Depot museum at Valley Heights 

 

by John Leary, OAM 

LONG GONE is the excitement of the steam train, like a great steel monster white steam gushing from its nostrils, as it pulls out of Sydney Central, quickly passing the back yards of another generation’s dwellings of the western suburbs, then racing at what in those days was considered a break-neck speed across the Cumberland Plains much of it then still farmland until the noisy loco and its train reached Penrith, then a small country town soon to develop as the hub of a satellite city with new suburbs housing a considerable population.
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‘For the cricket tragics’  
By John Leary, OAM

 

ANY of our readers have probably spent considerable time during the 2013 - 14 festive season, watching grown men throw a usually red leather covered ball at three sticks, which another player seems to protect, while others on the field stand by in silly mid on and in slips seemingly with little to do.

It seems there have been five tests this summer between England and Australia and the uninitiated must wonder why so many examinations for what seemingly is a simple sport. 
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Lesser known accounts of early and mid-19th Century journeys over the Blue Mountains

by Peter Rickwood

Introduction

 
The diaries of Blaxland, Lawson and Wentworth relating to their discovery of a route over the Blue Mountains in 1813, of Evans in extending that route to Bathurst in 1814, and of Cox in building the road, all predate the type of journey that is of concern here.
Well known, and often cited, are the descriptions of journeys over the Blue Mountains road that were collated by Mackaness in his “Fourteen Journeys”1. Amongst these are accounts of travel on the ‘road’ by Antill (1815), Macquarie (1815), Quoy, Guadichaud and Pellion (1819), Hawkins (1822), Field (1822), Lesson (1824), Dumaresq (1827), Backhouse (1835), Darwin (1836), Meredith (1839) and Stanger (1841) - many published long after the year of their journey. Accounts by ‘celebrities’ such as Louisa Meredith2 and Rachel Henning3 have recently been followed by John Low’s discussion of the travels of Mrs Mary Elizabeth Martindale.4 
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