An unexpected gift. 1935.

I am going to have to bite the bullet and do bit of Xmas shopping for the boys soon. I hope that none of the presents I buy will conceal the kind of surprise that this gift did though.

Barrier Miner 14 Mar 1935 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article46685170

What kind of present was this from Miss Margaret Bignall’s parents back in 1935?

Surely if they had a plantation in the Solomon Islands as reported there would be many other interesting things that they could have bought home for their daughter as a gift rather than a crocodile egg, still full of crocodile.

I wonder what on earth she was really going to do with the egg anyway. Keeping a not-so-fresh egg in your wardrobe is probably not best practice and could only end in disaster couldn’t it? Stinky, gooey disaster…. Yuck.

I really think that finding a small crocodile hanging out with your frocks, while surprising, is the best case scenario here. 😛

Caterpillar attack. 1933.

The title of this article really caught my eye. Three miles of caterpillars. No  matter how big they are, that is a lot of caterpillars…

The Courier Mail 29 Dec 1933 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article1155254

Once I started reading I loved the description of them as ‘herds menacing the grass lands…’.

Naturally that immediately bought to mind huge, fast-moving beasts with wide, chomping mouths ravaging the countryside, crowds of farmers fleeing before them.

I expect the reality was smaller and slower. Much, much slower. Less screaming too.

I know that something like this is no laughing matter for farmers but the description of three miles of them creeping along the concrete pavement along the side of the Great Western Highway could have probably been responsible for a few car accidents!

Finally the sight of them covering the walls and floors of houses would probably be the only thing sending people fleeing in terror before them 🙂

Buried alive. 1901.

The theme of the week has apparently become buried alive. Here is another for you but this one has a less happy ending that the dancing corpse of yesterday’s tale.

If this story is true it is a dreadful way to go. Usually the ‘not quite dead’ stories I find are more along the lines of “and then there came an unexpected knocking from the inside of the coffin”. Even yesterdays almost-victim was an anomaly with his newly returned vigour.

Barrier Miner 29 Jul 1901 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article44293844

This report from 1901 details a terrible way to spend the last few hours of your life, shut away in a sealed vault after escaping your own coffin and with no hope of help coming.

The bodies interred in the Devonshire Street cemetery, Sydney, were removed in 1901 and sent to another cemetery.

Some workers opened a vault only to find one of the coffins turned on its side and a skeleton kneeling in the corner with one arm across its eyes. The assumption being that the person had only been in a trance and not awakened until the vault had been sealed.

This was clearly reported while the cemetery move was current news. I wonder if it was fact or fiction? I had a look on the internets and couldn’t find anything about this poor unfortunate. It does sound like the kind of tall story told in the pub after a hard week of digging up decaying bodies in the mud, doesn’t it?

“…and then we opened the vault…”

Crowd leans closer,

“…and we saw…”

Even closer….

“Geez, I’m dry.” Enthralled crowd rushes to immediately lubricate the storyteller. 🙂

I am hoping that one day someone will read this who has researched the history of this cemetery. If that person is you, please tell us if the tale of this terrible discovery is true or not!

A boy, a magnifying glass and fireworks. A recipe for disaster! 1936..

The Advertiser 28 Apr 1936 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article35427469

Some kids use a magnifying glass to investigate the world. Some use one to bring fiery death to ants. Others, like this kid, take their destruction to a higher level and use it to ignite the fuse of an explosive.

I expect this is something most boys are guilty of, only looking for entertainment and not really thinking things through. What did he really expect would happen? Did he not notice that he was standing on the other side of a large pane of glass? I think he and his friends were lucky that the glass was tougher than the back of the display.

I wasn’t sure what a basket bomb was and in my searches in the internets I was unable to find a picture of one, only the description of them being a ‘powerful cane-bound explosive’. I did find another news article dated 1937 titled ‘Fireworks Must Be Banned In The Future’, describing the destruction one was capable of. Apparently they were powerful enough to ‘rend a solidly framed iron letterbox to shreds’. Eeek! I wouldn’t want to be standing on the other side of the glass, that’s for sure!

Dead, eventually. 1906.

Barrier Miner 23 Jul 1906 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article44507175

Poor Mr Langdon. It certainly was a long and drawn-out death. Eighteen years. Doesn’t sound like he was on his deathbed the whole time though.

You can look at it from the angle where he could have died earlier from falling under a cart or being eaten by a shark or some other unexpected end that can befall any of us at any time, and say he had a pretty good life anyway.

Eighteen extra years of life, even if he was slowly losing his arm with each bit of surgery, is better than being a sharks dinner or falling down a mine shaft. I wonder what the recurring lump actually was?

Rackarock. 1909.

Northern Star 12 Oct 1909 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article72228455

Suicide as an ‘I’ll show all of you’ kind of thing is never going to succeed really, is it? You aren’t going to be around to get any benefit out of your tantrum.

I had never heard of rackarock before and although it was clearly some sort of poisonous substance with a name like that it could have been anything!

Rackarock is a kind of liquid explosive made up of potassium chlorate and mono-nitrobenzene, and should never be kept on the nightstand. Not really the type of nightcap anyone would recommend….