Finding the extraordinary in the ordinary.

I'm a historian living and working on Gadigal Country in Inner Sydney, and I love my job. As a researcher of history it's so easy to get side-tracked: so many amazing stories, so many haunting images of anonymous people inhabiting an old city that’s all but gone. I spend so much time in archives for a specific purpose, and I’m constantly forced to cast aside these tantalising images that threaten to pull me away from the job at hand. But then something about these images started to niggle away at me: I found it hard to just walk away and leave them unlabelled, unknown.

I started saving some of these images, determined to return when I had the time and find out more about them. Soon I was heading back to the archives in a deliberate search for more of these ephemeral traces of people and places long gone.  I found, surprisingly, that many of the houses photographed still exist and form a continuous link between past and present, with the photograph providing a substantial bond to their previous occupants.

There are a seemingly endless number of blogs and pages dedicated to republishing these images for their beauty and history alone: I'm a fan of all of them. As an archival researcher I know there are more unlabelled images than labelled; more people unidentified than not. The vast majority will unfortunately stay that way, but some images grab the imagination, offering alluring clues as to the identities of their subjects.

The aim of this blog is to explore these images of houses which still exist, peopled by figures long gone: to find out who they were, what they did, how they lived and died. I'm not related to these people, nor do I know their descendants. Hopefully, though, I can shed some light on the often anonymous images which fill archives throughout the city, add a little knowledge to the collective stores, and add some pieces to other's family history, if and when they decide to go looking for themselves.

In addition to this blog I also perform research on a contract basis, as well as regularly publishing book chapters, books and articles on Australian History.