Prison tats. We’ve all seen them. That dodgy tattoo with a prison vibe, obviously ‘home-made’ with improvised tattoo machines, or as they were also known by a few people, tattoo guns or ‘boob guns’ (‘boob’ being an old slang term for prison). My personal favourite was one I saw in Wynnum about ten years ago, a guy walking down the street with two words tattooed down the back of his calves, in amateurish gothic font. The left side had ‘Fuck’, and the right had ‘Jail’. Short and to the point. I became familiar with these contraptions when I was curating the Boggo Road Gaol Museum Collection, whi ..read more

Late in 2022 I initiated a project that had been on the drawing board for a couple of years - a Friends of South Brisbane Cemetery survey of the infrastructure within the South Brisbane Cemetery, recording any issues with footpaths, trees, drains, roads, seating, etc. In order to keep the workload focussed and manageable, the condition of the monuments was not recorded, but that might be a job for another day... The cemetery opened in 1870, and much of the current infrastructure within there (such as thoroughfares, navigational signage, plantings, drains and amenities) is at least half a cent ..read more

Was 1966 one of the greatest years in music history? The website nineteen sixty six: a classic year in 365 songs makes the case. It was the best of times, it was... Like most Englishmen of a certain age I have a certain fond regard for the year 1966, with its iconic image of Bobby Moore sitting atop the shoulders of his England team-mates, lifting the Jules Rimet trophy to the sky on a sun-drenched London afternoon in July. Fifty+ years of footballing pain later, this remains the high point in the entirety of English sporting history. The website nineteen sixty six: a cla ..read more

Wolston House, undated image. (State Library of Queensland) Wolston House, on Grindle Road, Wacol, is a heritage-listed historic home built during the 1850s and then expanded in the 1860s. In the context of non-Indigenous Queensland history, this is very early. The house now operates as a museum and tour site, managed by the National Trust of Queensland. A brief history of the place is provided on the Richlands Inala History Group website, and its listing in the Queensland Heritage Register can be seen here. In short, it is a significant place worthy of being treated with a lot of re ..read more

It has been a couple of months since I wrote about the decisions by the Ipswich City Council and the Goodna Cemetery Trust to allow commercial ghost hunting in the cemeteries they manage. They are the only cemetery authorities in the world to allow this (as far as I know). These hunts are banned in Brisbane cemeteries. So what has happened since then? The controversy was featured in an ABC news story and also in one on Channel 7. The petition against the ghost hunts is still picking up signatures. The event organiser is insisting the ghost hunts are fine. The 'ghost hunt ..read more

Ipswich General Cemetery (Wikimedia Commons). Do you have a loved one interred in the Goodna Cemetery or the Ipswich General Cemetery? Did you know that the Goodna Cemetery Trust and the Ipswich City Council are now allowing a small business to charge customers $70 each to play-act 'ghost hunting' on the graves in those cemeteries? Commercial ghost-hunts are run by people claiming to be 'professional paranormal investigators' (there is no such thing) and charging customers big money to use fake 'ghostometer' gadgets to locate ghosts. None of this has anything to do with science or se ..read more

The Brisbane flooding of 2022 might not have had a good effect on the South Brisbane Cemetery when it inundated the office and storage shed there, but it led to a surprising sequence of events that resulted in the rescue of several previously lost headstones that turned up about 20 km away. It started when the waters of Albany Creek, on the Brisbane/Moreton Bay council border, swelled up and washed away topsoil on the creek bank next to a private housing development. Some of the residents there were inspecting the area in the aftermath of the deluge and were stunned to find parts of headstone ..read more

In mid-2020, at the height of the coronavirus restrictions in Queensland, in-person public history events were few and far between. I had previously been scheduled to deliver a couple of history talks during that time but these were indefinitely postponed. The Friends of South Brisbane Cemetery were unable to present their regular tours, and unfortunately the 150th anniversary events we had lined up were also called off. The easing of the restrictions allowed us to run limited tours from late June, but many indoor history events were still cancelled due to virus concerns. This presented an opp ..read more

A regular problem when researching cemetery symbology is the proliferation of websites repeating the exact same assertions, often copied and pasted from one another, that this flower represents 'truth and beauty' and that flower symbolises 'fascination', and this other one means 'innocence', etc. These are of course rather vague qualities that have been in circulation for a long time, and while some flowers have folkloric and religious meanings going back to ancient civilisations, the 19th century 'Language of Flowers' seemed to demand that every single flower suddenly have some particular mea ..read more

Anastasia Dukova’s To Preserve and Protect: Policing Colonial Brisbane is a very readable look at law and order in 19th-century Queensland.  This is no straightforward ‘history of the police’ reference book because the story is told from several different perspectives, an approach which gives the reader a much broader view of colonial life.  Outside the Indigenous presence, colonial Queensland was a migrant society, and Dukova’s background (she holds a PhD in crime and policing history from the University of Dublin, Trinity College) means she is tuned into the direct personal and ..read more