Did you know?

Amy Johnson is well-remembered as the first woman to fly solo from Britain to Australia in 1930. We have largely forgotten the first woman to fly solo from Europe to Australia. Few Queenslanders recall that she made two stopovers here on her flight from Darwin to Sydney.

In 1932 the glamorous twenty-five-year-old German aviatrix Elly Beinhorn (1907-2007) flew her Klemm monoplane solo from Berlin to Sydney, touching down on the way in exotic places like Persia, Mount Everest, Bali and Darwin.

In Queensland Elly landed her plane at Charleville and Brisbane’s Archerfield Aerodrome. Evidence of these visits was recently found in photographs from Picture Queensland.  They showed Elly being welcomed at Charleville by host and proprietor of the Corones Hotel, Harry Corones, and a delegation of local residents. The Brisbane Courier snapped her at the opening of the William Jolly Bridge on 30 March 1932.

Harry Corones (far right) with Elly Beinhorn at the Corones Hotel, Charleville, 1934.  John Oxley Library Image No: 48430

 Elly Beinhorn with Charleville locals outside the Corones Hotel, 1934. John Oxley Library Image No: 49950

Elly Beinhorn at the opening of the William Jolly Bridge in 1932.  John Oxley Library Image No: 102624

When Elly arrived in Sydney her plane was dismantled and transported via New Zealand to Panama. From there she set off again, flying down the west coast of South America and attempting to cross the Andes.

Such feats made Elly a national heroine in Germany. In 1936 she married racing car driver Bernd Rosemeyer and they became the celebrity couple of Nazi Germany. However tragedy struck in late 1937 when Bernd was killed attempting to break a speed record.

Elly kept flying and only turned in her pilot’s licence in 1979 at the age of 72. She passed away in 2007 aged 100 years.  You can find a tribute to her life and achievements on line at www.youtube.com/watch?v=74IUv4X-1NI

Do you know anything about Elly’s visit to Charleville or Brisbane?

Do you know any of the people with her in these photographs from Picture Queensland?

Please blog us any information. We’d love to hear from you.

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Professor Anna Haebich, a Research Intensive Professor from Griffith University, is presently Historian in Residence at the State Library of Queensland. Anna will be posting a regular Do You Know section on the John Oxley Library blog with news and questions from her research in the collections.

Anna is known for her contributions to multi-disciplinary and cross-cultural approaches to research. Her career brings together university teaching and research, museum curatorship, visual art practice and her on-going involvement with Indigenous communities. Anna’s research interests include Indigenous history, community and family history, environmental history, art history and the history of the body.

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In 1953, the Deen family lost nearly all of their possessions, including family photographs, when a fire destroyed their home.

Recently, in the John Oxley Library Reading Room, whilst seeking images and newspaper clippings of the Holland Park Mosque for a display to be held at the Mosque, Janeth Deen was elated to discover photographs of her family, including her late father Wazir Deen who passed away in 1957.

These images, filed under the category “Muslims in Queensland”, preserved memories of Mrs Deen’s childhood and are a valuable photographic record of the Muslim community in Brisbane.

Janeth, a member of the Mt. Gravatt Historical Society, worked as a history and economics teacher until her retirement but continues to do supply teaching at Springwood State High. She recently helped Mustafa Ally research his book 100 Years of History: The Holland Park Mosque 1908-2008 which will be launched at the Mosque Fair this Saturday, 30 August 2008.

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The State Library of Queensland is pleased to announce its new database - Convict Transportation Registers (http://www.slq.qld.gov.au/info/fh/convicts) compiled from British Home Office (HO) records available on microfilm as part of the Australian Joint Copying Project (AJCP). The HO 11 Criminal - Convict Transportation Registers series has been indexed by the State Library and contains the following information:

• name of convict, including any known aliases.
• place of trial.
• term of sentence.
• name of ship and date of departure.
• place of arrival.
• miscellaneous notes, for instance died at sea, ticket of leave issued and similar information. 

Approximately 123,000 out of the estimated 160,000 convicts transported to Australia are recorded in this database. These include prisoners sent to New South Wales, Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), Moreton Bay (Brisbane), Western Australia and Norfolk Island. Also recorded are some ships which were bound for Gibraltar. The records cover the period of 1787 to 1867.

These records mainly include those convicted in England and Scotland with only a small number of Irish convicts appearing in this series of the Home Office records. The database also includes soldiers who had been court-martialled and sentenced to transportation. These “soldier convicts” may have been convicted in various British colonies including the West Indies, India, Pakistan and Canada.

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Raymond Evans recently published book A History of Queensland has been included in the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards for 2008.

These awards intend to recognise the major contribution of Australian literature to the nation’s cultural and intellectural life.

This book is now a valuable addition to the John Oxley Library’s collection and is in high demand by library users as an authoritative source on Queensland’s history and development.  

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The Australian Newspapers Digitisation program, coordinated by the National Library of Australia, has launched a Beta service which has been made publicly accessible. This provides an opportunity to anyone who uses newspapers for any purpose, to have an unprecedented level of search capacity of a digital version of content relating to every day Queensland and Australian history.

The Courier Mail 1846-1899 and 1933-34 is the Queensland content being made available as the first stage of the project. The BETA service is freely available to the public and currently contains 73,000 out of copyright newspaper pages with approximately 730,000 individual articles. In order to expand the available content approximately 20,000 digitised newspaper pages will be added each week to the Beta service.

 The link to the BETA version of the new release of digitised retrospective Australian newspapers is at http://ndpbeta.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/home.

Feel free to review the service with focus on its useability and user friendliness.  Once having navigated the service, anyone can comment directly in the comments field at http://ndpbeta.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/about. Beta will have additional functionality and changes based on consideration of your feedback.

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With the Ekka being held this week at the Exhibition Grounds in Herston, its timely to look briefly at the history of this inner Brisbane suburb.

In 1859, Robert Herbert, Queensland’s first premier and his friend and colleague John Bramston, a lawyer who later became Attorney-General, bought land on a ridge to the west of Bowen Bridge Road, on the town side of the creek.  They built a stone house and established a farm, which was to give that area bounded by Bowen Bridge Road, Breakfast Creek, Herston Road, L’estrange Terrace, Victoria Park Road and Gilchrist Avenue the name of Herston.  Herston is the combination of the first and last parts of their surnames – Herbert and Bramston.

Herston, 1869.  John Oxley Library Image no. 64478

Bowen Bridge Road and Bowen Park are both named in honour of the first Governor of Queensland, Sir George Ferguson Bowen (10 December 1859 – 4 January 1868).

Butterfield Street, Herston honours William Edward Butterfield, who was an early schoolmaster and journalist.

Hetherington Street, previously called Herbert Street is named after John William Hetherington who was prominent in the coal industry and local government.

Ballymore, Moore and Bally Streets all derive their names from the Ballimore Estate of James Campbell & Sons Pty. Ltd.

Garrick Terrace is named after James Francis Garrick, who purchased the residence Herston from Herbert and Bramston.

One of the main landmarks in the suburb is the Royal Brisbane Hospital.  In January 1867 Brisbane’s hospital was moved from its former site in North Brisbane (today’s central business district) to its present location in Herston.  Sister Kenny, famous for her treatment of polio, operated from Ward 7 of the Brisbane Hospital.  A surviving building from the hospital’s early days is the old Wardsmen’s Building which was originally used as the fever hospital.

Royal Brisbane Hospital, 1883. John Oxley Library Image no. APO-040-0001-0001

Another prominent landmark in the area is the Exhibition Grounds.  The site was originally used by the Queensland Acclimatisation Society and then by the Agricultural and Industrial Association of Queensland, from 1875.  The first show was held in 1876, as the Queensland Intercolonial Exhibition.

Admission prices to this first show were:

5/- Judging Day
2/6 Opening Ceremony
1/-  General Admission

Aerial view of the exhibition grounds, ca. 1925. John Oxley Library Image no. 65552

A fragment of the original Acclimatisation Society gardens survives as Bowen Park

Some significant dates in Herston’s history and development include:

• 1859 – John and George Harris first purchased land in the area (three lots as a deed of grant).  Four years later they subdivided this into blocks of various sizes for re-sale.
• 1880s – Land purchases and subdivisions increase as the demand for residential housing grows.
• 1910s – a further period of expansion with the increasing subdivision of land into smaller allotments

Find more photographs of Herston in the State Library’s collection.

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It’s that time of year again…and the State Library of Queensland will again be capturing and archiving the website of the Royal Queensland Show – the Ekka.

For the past few years the State Library has captured a copy of the Ekka website.  This is achieved through the State Library’s participation in the PANDORA – Australia’s web archive.  PANDORA (Preserving and Accessing Networked DOcumentary Resources of Australia) is a collaborative undertaking, with ten Australian cultural collecting organisations contributing to the archive.  The State Library has been an active participant in PANDORA since 2002, each year adding hundreds of Queensland online publications and websites to the archive.

How does this work?  Web-based software is used, which enables the download and storage of websites in PANDORA.  The copies of the websites are as far as is technically possible identical to the live version at the time of the capture.  Thus they exist as a snapshot of the website in time.

Each year of course, the Ekka website changes, and snapshots of the Ekka website have been successfully archived for 2002, 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007.  Once the 2008 site is captured, it too will be added to the archive.  The preserved Ekka websites are freely available to anyone with access to the internet at http://nla.gov.au/nla.arc-32558

The Ekka has a long and proud past, and the Ekka website forms part of its documentary history.  It’s reassuring to know that through the State Library’s efforts, the Ekka web presence, an important part of Australia’s web heritage, is being preserved for posterity and will be available for future generations of researchers.

Grand parade, 1948.  John Oxley Library image no. 74938

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An original scrapbook/photograph album compiled by Sergeant Lewis M. Miller who served as a cook in the 71^st Squadron, 38^th Bomber Group, U.S. 5^th Army Air Force, 1941-1944 was recently acquired for the collection.  This album contains original photographs, postcards, greeting cards, menus, tourist brochures, V-Mails, original pen and ink cartoons, military insignia, souvenir bookmarks and U.S. propaganda leaflets all from the period of the Second World War.

Sketches and an American Red Cross Service Club dinner menu from Sergeant Lewis M. Miller’s World War II scrapbook

Sergeant Miller, of Reading, Pennsylvania, began his U.S. Army career in the early 1930s when he served as a Private at Fort Amador in the Panama Canal Zone.  He entered the 38^th Bomber Group in February 1941 undertaking basic training at Langley Field, Virginia, and then at Jackson Army Air Base, Mississippi.  He was sent to Australia as part of the ground echelon of his unit in January 1942, and until October of that year was stationed at various airfields in Queensland. From late 1942 until January 1945 he served in New Guinea at various bases including Port Moresby and Biak.

Photo of an airplane from the Miller scrapbook

The album contains a wonderful assemblage of memorabilia relating to his entire army service, particularly his time in Queensland.  Most notable is a unique collection of thirty photographs and fourteen small format tourist postcards and view folders of places and local people in Mackay, many of whom are identified with names and addresses.  The album also contains:

• 23 photographs and related pieces of ephemera of Langley Field, Virginia, and Jackson Air Base, Mississippi.
• a set of seven ‘Australian Scenes’ coloured postcards, and a small collection of Australian military theme postcards.
• approximately thirty New Guinea theatre of war photographs, 1943-1944, including downed Japanese ‘Zeros’, New Guinea natives, Japanese prisoners, B-25 Bombers in the air and the strafing and bombing of Japanese ships and airfields.
• two photographs of members of the Jack Benny USO Troupe, New Guinea, 1944 -  one of Jean Brummer, Martha Tilton and movie star Carol Landis and another of Carol Landis meeting a New Guinea local.
• two original V-mails from Miller to his mother at Christmas 1943 and 1944.
• an American Red Cross Service Club menu 3 June 1944.
• two superb photographs of the burial service for four U.S. airmen in Townsville.
• four topless ‘girlie’ photographs.
• two U.S. propaganda leaflets in Japanese, one showing the progression of the Allies to Japan as the hands of a clock moving towards midnight.
• three rare U.S. 5^th Air Force cloth service insignia.
• four U.S 5^th Air Force and New Guinea felt souvenir bookmarks
• three large format photographs of officers of the 5^th Air Force.
• fifteen outstanding large format photographs, all stamped on reverse ‘Passed by US Army Examiner’, of U.S. military airfields in Queensland and New Guinea, showing U.S. bombers (B-25s) and fighters (‘Thunderbolts’ and ‘Lightnings’), camp layouts, and surrounding landscapes and vegetation.

This is an important acquisition which will form a valuable addition to the library’s collections.

  US military ephemera, preserved in Sergeant Miller’s scrapbook

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In July the John Oxley Library, in conjunction with the National Archives of Australia and the Queensland State Archives held a public research seminar at Noosa Junction.

  Simon Farley presenting at the Heritage research seminar at Noosa Junction, July 2008

63 participants from the Sunshine Coast region, including members of various local history and genealogy societies, enjoyed overview presentations on collections and services by Simon Farley from the State Library’s Heritage Collections, Mairi Popplewell from the National Archives of Australia’s Brisbane office, and Niles Elvery from the Queensland State Archives.

  Mairi Popplewell from the National Archives of Australia presenting at the seminar

The seminar was followed by a meeting of Queensland’s Public Records Review Committee. Special thanks to Niles Elvery for organizing this event and to all who attended for their interesting questions and contributions.

  Niles Elvery from Queensland State Archives presenting at the Noosa seminar

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