HistoriTISM

Now, that's a DOOR. 🍺🚪 Went to The White Lion Hotel for dinner in Maryborough tonight. Normal people take photos of people, and history nerds take photos of old cold room doors salvaged in renovations. 😅

Isn't it beautiful though!? I thought it was a modern prop at first and had to Google it because it was too good to be true. The original hotel was built in the 1860s, and it was rebuilt in the 1880s.

Stumbled upon this gem of a Bundaberg wartime photo on Ancestry. It's from 1942 and features teenage brothers, Reginald (17) and Vincent Clitheroe (19) digging out an air raid shelter in their parents' backyard at 21 Water Street.

This photo is supposedly facing towards number 23 next door which I believe are now the brick units. The photo was posted by Ancestry user, stevegilchrist25.

I wonder how many backyards in Bundy have filled in WWII air raid shelters!? 😮

[Source: Ancestry - originally posted by Ray Clitheroe]

I love adding ridiculous facts to relative profiles in my Ancestry family tree. 😂 This one says: Mar 1899, "Jailed after bar commotion: Told the proprietor of a bar he wants to put him in the ash-bucket."

[Source: British Newspaper Archives - Dundee Evening Telegraph - Monday 20 March 1899]

Asking on behalf of fam. Are there any descendants of the Maryborough, QLD Concannon family who would like this memorial card of Joseph Concannon (on the left)? It's been an heirloom in one of our family collections for about 119 years, so he must've had some connection to my own Maryborough family, although not related to us. 🤔

Joseph was born 1855 in Athlone, County Westmeath in Ireland. He moved to Salford in England where he married Delia May Hopkins before moving to Australia in 1884. 🚢 He arrived the same year as my Welsh side and was the uncle of famous soprano, Gertrude Concannon. Joseph and Delia went on to have a LOT of kids so I'd expect there to be someone floating around out there!

At the time of his death, Joseph was in the harbour pilot service; he was the lighthouse keeper in charge of the Mary River and Sandy Straits lights.

What a LEGEND.

In December 2025, a 430-year-old book quietly sold at auction in Norway for 1.3 million krone, around $134,000, the highest price ever paid for a Norwegian book. The buyer wasn't a museum, a collector, or a university. It was a 25-year-old footballer, Erling Haaland, the newest viral sensation.

Manchester City's record-breaking striker, had purchased the only known surviving copy of a 1594 edition of Snorri Sturluson's Sagas of the Kings, the oldest printed history of Norway. Written by an Icelandic poet in the 13th century and translated into Norwegian-Danish for the first time in 1594, it chronicles the lives of Norway's medieval kings, the country's Viking roots, and its conversion to Christianity. There was no printing press in Norway at the time, so it was printed in Copenhagen. The copy the Haalands bought was the only one left in private hands.

Haaland bought it with his father, former Norwegian international Alf-Inge Haaland, and from the start, keeping it was never the plan.

He donated the book to the library in Bryne, the small town in Time Municipality, southwestern Norway, where he grew up and took his first steps in football. His one condition: the book must always be left open so anyone can walk in and read it.
"I want the book to always lie open so that people can read about those who came from where I come from," Haaland said. "It's easier to feel drawn to reading when you can recognize yourself in the people and places being written about."

Then he added "I've never been much of a reader," he admitted. "But books give so many more people the chance to dream big, see new possibilities, and find their own path."

Night time in Queen Street, Brisbane (c. 1940). 🌃🌛

[Source: Trove - Brisbane: Old and New, Ferguson local history collection]