By Cheryl Griffin. “E’s been once wounded, somewhere in the leg…” 6906 Private Lawrence Joseph Smith enlisted on 18 July 1918 and served with the 22nd Infantry Battalion. His parents were William Smith, an overseer, and Letitia Josephine McLoughlin. He’d been born in Coburg, lived with his parents and siblings in Coke Street (later Cope […]
Author: moreland
Adela Pankhurst, the anti-conscription movement and Pentridge Prison
By Cheryl Griffin. Not long ago, my attention was drawn to several articles relating to a crowd of ‘no conscriptionists’ who had gathered outside the Women’s Prison at Pentridge to protest the imprisonment of Adela Pankhurst, daughter of English suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst and sister of Christabel and Sylvia. Estranged from her family, she had arrived […]
Dyke Books
How did Dyke Books come about? Jean Taylor had written a book and couldn’t get it published so it was decided to set up a not-for-profit community-based feminist publishing house to publish books by, for and about lesbians, based on Jean’s previous experience with self-publishing. In 1984, after publishing four of her own books, 1976 […]
Phoenix Street, 1933 Free speech fight
By Iain McIntyre. Unemployed activists across Victoria were severely repressed by police and right-wing paramilitaries from the beginning of the Great Depression. The head of police General Thomas Blamey, who was also the leader of the quasi-fascist White Army, used the Political Squad to violently break up street meetings and protests. Forced out of speaking […]
Pentridge Prison: Draft Resisters Protest, 1971
By Iain McIntyre. With anti-conscription sentiment and opposition to the Vietnam War reaching an all-time high, 7,775 men were balloted in and made subject to prosecution for failing to register during 1971. At the same time the Federal Government’s will to deal with draft resistance begins to falter, with only 1,089 being prosecuted in any […]
The extraordinary in the ordinary: the story of Piera Street
From a talk given at the Brunswick Community History Group in 2011 by Cheryl Griffin. A bit about Piera Street Piera Street is located on the east side of Lygon Street, Brunswick East, off 132 Lygon Street. It’s two streets south of Glenlyon Road and on the corner with Lygon Street is one of my […]
Raising Fund for the Glenroy Military Hospital
By Cheryl Griffin. To begin with, in November 1915, Linda Davis organised a bazaar and garden party at her home, ‘Moreland Hall’, and managed to secure Senator Pearce, the Minister of Defence, to open it. It was at this event that Senator Pearce spoke about the reason for the establishment of the Glenroy Military Hospital […]
Glenroy Military Hospital – nurse Alice Prichard
Portrait of Miss A. M. Prichard RRC, matron of 42nd British General Hospital which was one of the four hospitals at Salonika staffed by the AIF. (Image Courtesy AWM. Image A01891) Alice Prichard hailed from the north of Victoria and had been the Matron of Mildura Hospital prior to enlistment. Her sister Florence also served […]
Patients at the Glenroy Military Hospital
By Cheryl Griffin. Portrait of Isolation Camp, rear of Army Medical Corps Base. Army Medical Corps, Isolation Camp, Ascot vale. C 1916. (Image courtesy Australian War Memorial. Image DAX1070) Once again, the story of the men who were treated at the Glenroy Hospital has begun to emerge from that wonderful online newspaper collection found at […]
Staff of the Glenroy Military Hospital
By Cheryl Griffin. I was interested to know who worked at the Glenroy Military Hospital. Again, it hasn’t been an easy task and it has been soldiers’ attestation papers and newspaper reports that have given me most of my information. It seems that most of the nurses, orderlies and doctors who worked there had yet […]