Poodle vs shark. 1911.

I don’t think we need to speculate on the possibility of any poodle ever winning the poodle versus shark deathmatch, do we?

The Advertiser 31 Mar 1911 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article5262531

In 1911 two off-duty* coppers from Prahran went fishing off St Kilda pier and caught a small, but very active shark. As it lay on the pier each of its death flops wiggles was accompanied by a strange tinkling sound.

The men decided to investigate and, opening the shark, found a small bell such as those which were popularly attached to the collar of small poodles.

It was surmised that the bell was the only part of a missing Fluffy which had resisted the sharks digestive juices.

The foremost question I had about this article was this; when do you think the paths of the shark and a tinkly-bell wearing dog collided? There are lots of things that are found inside sharks, not all of them make sense. Wouldn’t you love to know where sharks find some of those things!! (Some other posts I have done have bombs, cats, goats and kangaroos and more cats inside sharks.)

I wonder if the annoying tinkling of Fluffy’s bell caused a husband to finally crack, the pooch meeting its end when it was taken on a late night stroll by the pier….. 😉

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And, using a thread so thin as to be almost invisible to connect this deathmatch to another equally unlikely deathmatch, here is a clip that makes me laugh, Celebrity Deathmatch: Men in Black vs The X Files.

Unnecessary use of dismembered play dough body parts warning…. 😉

*I say off-duty, but it was a Thursday afternoon. If it was a sunny Autumn day the chances are they were just fishing instead of working detaining the shark to help with their enquiries….

Dying to be fashionable. 1911.

We all know that people will do anything to be fashionable don’t we, and each of us has probably been guilty of wearing something silly in the name of fashion.

Generally, the worst case scenario in these silly fashionable choices is a twisted ankle or unpleasant chafing. Unfortunately for the girls in this article from 1911 their choice of clothing resulted in death.

The Advertiser 18 Sep 1911 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article5313338

During a holiday at a summer resort in Russia the two sisters were boating with a student just a few yards off the shore when they capsized.

The other person in the boat made it to shore, but despite being good swimmers and so close to safety both of the girls drowned.

What was this deadly fashion you ask? Belted-below-the-knee hobble skirts. Not really suitable boating attire is it?

I wonder if anything else contributed to their drowning. I mean, if you really are a good swimmer surely you could channel the Little Mermaid and swim a few yards to shore. Maybe the hobble skirts were made from fast sinking wool from extra heavy sheep?

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I have done a post about the perils of the hobble skirt before, in 1910 a woman made the mistake of getting dressed in her hobble skirt while she was upstairs. Yeah, you know what happened next… (Go on, have a look at the post, she wasn’t the only member of her family to die unexpectedly…)

The terror of Kurnell. 1911.

Since finding that first article about the snake man Frederick Fox, (i, ii) who was often referred to as the Snake King, I have been doing my best to find more information about him, specifically his age. I have had little luck with that but I have found a few other old articles about his snaky exploits.

Clarence and Richmond Examiner 7 Jan 1911 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article61601945

In the early 1900’s he would do an open air snake show at La Perouse in Sydney*, and this article reports a time in 1911 when he was challenged during a display to remove a notorious scaly resident from a nearby fishing spot.

On his second visit to the location he was successful in removing the Terror of Kurnell, a 7ft black snake, but only after falling headlong into “a morass infested with black snakes”. Yikes!

During the hunt for the beast he was obviously not just lying around in the sun waiting for it to show up; he also came home with 9 snake-filled bags containing 59 tiger snakes, 19 brown snakes, and 11 black snakes.

That fishing hole would definitely be a safer place for a while!

Apparently Mr. Fox didn’t sell the snakes he caught but kept them all at home (eeek!) and sold the venom.

I was very interested to find this tiny reference below to a film shown in 1911 called “Snake King Fox at Work”, apparently “the presentment of some of his captures” by Southern Cross pictures. Finding a clip of Fox capturing some snakes on youtube would have made my day!

The Sydney Morning Herald 9 Jan 1911 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article15216874

I have been doing my best to find this film but no luck…. 😦

If any of you future readers have seen it, or even heard whisper of it, please leave a comment, I would be extremely grateful! 😀

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*This snake show was taken over by the Cann family who operated the it until the last performance by a family member in 2010.

Saving it for later. 1911.

The first thing I thought of when I read this article was that old joke “Do you like rabbits?” “Yes, but I couldn’t eat a whole one”.

Kalgoorlie Miner 15 Jul 1911 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article91304244

Well, the joke really goes “Do you like children?”….. but of course the alligator would have no problem eating a stray child 😉

This article reports the strange friendship of an alligator living in the Southport Zoo in England, and a white rabbit.

The rabbit was not an exhibit, nor a member of staff, but intended as part of the menu.

Strangely, the alligator rejected this fluffy meal and at the time of this report both were living peacefully together.

I wonder if the rabbit really won over the cold saurian heart as suggested by this article, or if the rabbit just had an overdeveloped sense of self-preservation and stayed away from the end with teeth?

Many, many children. 1911.

Morning Bulletin 13 May 1911 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article53232072

Mr. Walehhofer must have been quite a husband. Either that or his wives didn’t know what they were getting themselves into.

I wonder if this guy ever changed a nappy. Married three times and 28 children. Wow. I wonder how many people lived in the town of Radstadt, Austria? If this man had 121 direct descendants that single family is quite enough to populate a town all on its own!

Imagine having that many children. I know that when you have a multitude of kids not all of them will be living in the family home at the same time but still….. That is a lot of hormonal teenagers to get through.

What an age spread too, sixteen to sixty-seven. That leaves open the possibility that the eldest childs siblings were younger than their own grandchildren.

I suppose that the parents would be doing less and less work themselves with that many helping hands, although there is no information on what happened to the first two wives. Maybe they died from overwork?

Victorian earthquake. Then and now.

This one is for Meeks who, like me, experienced the 5.4 earthquake felt over most of Victoria on Tuesday night.

The Brisbane Courier 28 Nov 1913 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article19916296

It sounds scarier that it really was, floor and windows shook and it sounded like a truck was going past the house, but that was about it. In fact, it could easily have been mistaken for a particularly violent washing machine cycle.

Meeka mentioned the fact that we rarely have noticeable earthquakes here in Australia so I thought I would post these articles for her.

A quick look through the old newspapers made me realize that this is pretty much how earthquakes are in Australia, after all, we don’t generally have tall buildings or apartment blocks waiting to be shaken down, we mostly live on the ground around here.

Western Mail 14 May 1897 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article33135473

Some woman was on the telly explaining how her goldfish acted strangely, and we were subjected to regular replays of security camera footage of things falling off shelves in a supermarket.

The next morning at school drop-off a small friend of number 2 son, whose mum and dad own the local pub, excitedly told me the story of the glasses falling off the shelves and smashing on the floor but that was about as dramatic as it got. I’m not saying that earthquakes are not scary, far from it. It just makes me glad we spread out, not up!

Northern Star 10 Jan 1911 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article72266712

I have added this last small one because it amused me, not because it was particularly interesting or funny. I just loved the way its wavy lines look as though it was printed during the earthquake it is reporting.