Random thoughts and observations
My wife Juliet is Afrikaans and her surname is Claassen. One of Juliet’s cousins, Johann, is a genealogist and he contacted me recently after discovering my family history website. Johann sent me a gedcom file, which I’ve now uploaded to show the Claassen family tree. Claassen is a Mennonite name that originated in the Netherlands. [...]
I don’t write many letters these days. Who does? I used to like writing and receiving letters in the time before email. I didn’t keep copies of my own letters, but my mother did. In uploading photos to a new website today I discovered scans she had made of letters I’d written. Here’s one, dated [...]
Thanks to an excellent article in The Age today by Gabriella Coslovich, I have discovered the wonderful photography of Roger Ballen. Born in New York, Ballen has lived in South Africa since the 1970s. He made a specialty of photographing everyday live in the dorps (villages) of the Transvaal. The pictures were controversial, because many [...]
I heard a sad story today. It shows the global economic crisis is really beginning to have an impact on Australian life. There has been a lot of bad news lately. BHP Billiton’s decision to close the Ravensthorpe nickel mine, a few months after opening the $2 billion project which employed 1800 people, was one [...]
This story has surprisingly received no coverage in the national or international media, so I’m posting it here in the hope someone picks it up. An Australian mine worker, Matthew Norman, was among the nine people killed in an accident at the South Deep gold mine operated by Gold Fields near Carletonville outside Johannesburg last [...]
