Old Emerald Road Joy Southall

MEMOIR Emerald Messenger, August 2019 ALONG ‘OLD EMERALD’ ROAD – JOY SOUTHALL Emerald U3A laments the recent loss of Joy Southall at 93 years of age, after delighting her friends with her enjoyment of literature and poetry over the years. Her courage and endurance,...
Along Old Emerald Road

Along Old Emerald Road

HISTORY Emerald Messenger, May 2019 ALONG ‘OLD EMERALD’ ROAD ​Recent bushfire warnings included some unusual place names. Who was ‘Peter the Swede’? It was one ‘Pete the Swede’ who partnered with Big Pat O’Hannigan in the discovery of gold on the Emerald Creek that...

The Skull in the Mountain Stream

It was William Hand who found a skull back in 1891 in a stream not far from his Silvan property: a European skull with a hole battered in it. Identification was impossible,. A local assumption was that it belonged to a man who had mysteriously disappeared in 1884,...

The Research Journey: The Problem of Proof

In 1990 I joined the Australian Rare Fauna Research Association (ARFRA),founded in 1984 by Peter Chapple (1958-2002) following an encounter with a big cat in the Dandenong Ranges, after viewing some of the evidence gathered by the association. I participated as driver...

The Dandenongs Goldfields: Early Signs

From the earliest days of settlement, rumours of gold abounded. Throughout the 1840s, as squatters and their shepherds spread over the colony, followed by explorers, splitters, surveyors and stock assessors, scattered finds were made all over Victoria. But squatters...