by Kathryn Spurling | May 1, 2022 | Blogs - Kathryn Spurling
It came in the post, and it was wonderful, a pretty lace postcard from a terrible war. ‘A Kiss from France’ for a mother. He remembered her birthday but given the irregular mail and distance the card had to journey around the world Sapper Horace Mervyn Herrod (6672)...
by Kathryn Spurling | Apr 30, 2022 | Blogs - Kathryn Spurling
Victor Charles Friberg was born to Anders and Amelia Friberg of ‘Mootala’, Locksley Road, Ivanhoe, Melbourne, Victoria. The family enjoyed a stable middle-class lifestyle thanks to the furniture manufacturing business Anders had established. Victor entered the family...
by Kathryn Spurling | Apr 24, 2022 | Blogs - Kathryn Spurling
It was a Midshipmen and Cadet Mess Dinner at the Australian Defence Force Academy in the late 1990s. I was teaching History and Strategic Studies at UNSW at ADFA so was asked to attend as a guest with my husband. These mess dinners were to instruct aspiring Australian...
by Kathryn Spurling | Apr 17, 2022 | Blogs - Kathryn Spurling
It was in the blood, the military heritage thing. She had been raised on the stories; khaki uniforms had filled her home. Her father was born in Ireland in 1876 with the grand name of Harry Lort Spencer Balfour-Ogilvy. From a very prominent Renmark family he was a...
by Kathryn Spurling | Feb 23, 2022 | Blogs - Kathryn Spurling
It all started with a rather beaten up discarded painting. It was a brown pen and ink painting of a mine shaft, with the signature W.Carter 1979. No one in the auction paid any interest but history attracts historians. What was more architectural artworks are complex...