This year is the 36th anniversary of the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardis Gras. The annual parade on 1 March marks the end of a month-long festival of events that many Sydneysiders today take for granted. But as Nicole and Tim discussed this morning, the parade has had a turbulent history. Over the years the parade has gone through a lot to become the exciting, famous and well-loved event it is today. It survived thanks to the determination of the city's gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered and queer inhabitants, who perceived its significance very early on. The first mardis gras parade in Sydney started as part of a worldwide International Gay Solidarity day to commemorate the Stonewall riots, a series of violent demonstrations by members of the gay community against a police raid that took place at Stonewall Inn in New York in 1969. Crowds gathered at Taylor Square in the evening of the 24 June, 1978. As the parade moved down Oxford Street toward Hyde Park, police intervened, confiscating the lead truck and arresting the driver. This angered the crowd who then marched up William St to Darlinghurst where they clashed with police reinforcements who had blocked the road. The Australian reported around 1,000 people singing and dancing down Oxford Street until they met with police. Then the mardi gras became 'a two-hour spree of screaming, bashing and arrests' with police violently arresting 53 people. The  heavy handed approach by the police sparked nationwide protests and demonstrations in the months that followed. Forced to act, the New South Wales Government repealed the Summary Offences Act a year later, removing restrictions on citizens wanting to assemble in a public space. It took a further six years before an act of parliament was passed decriminalising male homosexual acts for those above the age of 18.

Discriminatory and homophobic attitudes surrounded the parade in the early years but that gradually started to change in the early 1990s, as it became the largest celebration of its kind in the world. The parade started to be seen for its tourism value for the city with newspapers quoting academics who had calculated that the Mardi Gras was attracting millions of dollars of income from overseas visitors. Eventually, it also became an important facet of Sydney’s cultural life. You can read more about the history of the mardis gras in Garry Wotherspoon's essay for the Dictionary, Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras. Or you can listen to Diane Minnis, who attended the very first parade and described what happened on that historic night, in a moment of ‘mass defiance’. --- Many thanks to Nicole Cama for standing in for Lisa while she is away working hard on her book. Tune in again next week for more Sydney stories with the Dictionary of Sydney on 2SER Breakfast with Tim Higgins, on 107.9 FM.  

I'm not sure you could say we are romantics here at the Dictionary but we were taken by the story of Elizabeth Cook, shared by our guest historian, Nicole Cama, on 2SER Breakfast with Tim Higgins this morning. Elizabeth's story is largely unknown, having been eclipsed by the voyages and deeds of her world famous husband whose public persona has been memorialised beyond mention. Cook's history is woven tightly into the story of Sydney and the Australian nation. The Dictionary has two images of stained glass windows featuring Cook by the artist Douglass Baglin - one in the Sydney Town Hall and another at Cranbrook in Bellevue Hill. These windows show us the extent to which Cook's story has been mythologised - stained glass windows being a more familiar domain for saints and deities. Cook died on Valentines Day 1779 - 235 years ago. Elizabeth, at home in England, was reportedly working on a waistcoat for Cook - using material he had gathered from his previous voyage to Tahiti - when she heard this sad news. In her grief she set the work aside and never completed it. Very little is known about Elizabeth. She died at 94, outliving her husband and all of their six children, who themselves died without children. Some of her mementos of Cook are in the collection of the State Library of New South Wales. Any chance to know Cook the private man, and the story of his life with his wife Elizabeth, have been lost down the years. Elizabeth burned all of his letters, which must have been numerous considering how long he was away at sea. They were married for 17 years and she lived another 56 years after his death, wearing black for the rest of her life. Next time you pass by Cook's statue in Hyde Park - which itself has an interesting history - spare a thought for Elizabeth and the constant reminder she must have had of the loss of her husband each year as Valentines Day came around again. --- Join Nicole and Tim again next at 8:20am on 2SER Breakfast for another great Sydney story.    

This morning on 2SER Breakfast, historian Nicole Cama joined Tim for the Dictionary's weekly segment on all things Sydney. Being Chinese New Year, Nicole delved in to the history of Chinatown, once described as an 'acre of mystery'. Perhaps the first surprising fact to those of us who have grown up visiting Chinatown, is that it wasn't always called 'Chinatown' and it hasn't always been in Dixon Street! The first concentration of Chinese residences and shops were actually in The Rocks. That was because during the 1850s, Chinese men would arrive and buy supplies in The Rocks for their journey inland to the goldfields. By the 1870s, Chinese traders had moved to Campbell and Goulburn Streets. Eventually though, their focus turned to Haymarket because of the presence of fruit and vegetable market buildings before finally settling in Dixon Street, where it remains today. Chinese hawkers, common around the streets of Sydney, were viewed with a level of mistrust by locals who saw them as alien and threatening. For an already suspicious public, sensationalised reports of squalid opium and gambling dens did little to improve Chinatown's image. One report had the dramatic headline, ‘Police Declare War on Sydney’s Chinatown’. For the more adventurous, Chinatown was a place of mystery. One contemporary account from 1923, written under the alias ‘a Sydney girl’, describes:

"Slippers made of plaited straw, slippers made of felt, high slippers, low slippers, slippers old and new - so Chinatown shuffles. Life moves leisurely here - nods behind dark counters, glides like shadows in a phantom show in still darker and more remote interiors...Orientals, old, young, middle-aged, mysteriously come and go, out of everywhere into nowhere. Up and down passages that are labyrinthian they appear and fade with a facility that baffles the Western mind.”

It wasn’t until the 1940s that Sydneysiders decided to be adventurous and sample some of the food offerings that Chinatown had to offer. Which is amusing considering how fundamental Chinese cuisine is to life in Sydney today. An article in the Sunday Herald from 1949 noted the importance of this cultural centre in Sydney as a marker of the city’s sophistication, saying the Chinese are "a quiet-living, hard-working people, but in Chinatown they meet to dine and dance and play."

You can read Shirley Fitzgerald's account of Chinese in Sydney here and follow Nicole's links to these newspaper reports:

• Sydney Silhouettes, 24 November, 1923, The Brisbane Courier (Qld, 1864-1933), p 18
• SYDNEY'S CHINATOWN, 20 February 1923, Western Argus (Kalgoorlie, WA, 1916-1938), p 9
• SYDNEY CHINATOWN, 11 August 1930, Townsville Daily Bulletin (Qld, 1885- 954), p 6
• CHINATOWN, 29 May, 1949, The Sunday Herald Supplement (Sydney, NSW, 1949-1953), p 1

Don't forget to tune in to 107.9 again next Wednesday morning at 8:20 for more Sydney history from the Dictionary with Nicole and Tim.

Did you clean your house from top to bottom and pay off all debts before the end of last week? If you did, you've made a good start to welcoming in the Chinese lunar new year, which in 2014 is the Year of the Wooden Horse. Chinese New Year celebrations have become a major event in the city's calendar. The City of Sydney's Chinese New Year Festival is now the largest celebration of the Lunar New Year outside Asia. Chinese New Year hasn't always held the significance for the wider population that it has today. The celebration of traditional festivals in local communities were regarded with suspicion and prejudice by many non-Chinese Australians. On Saturday 7 February 1880, Sydney's Evening News, reported: "The Chinese new year will commence on Tuesday next. The Celestials are making preparations to celebrate the suspicious event with the barbaric splendour the subjects of the Children of the Sun are so fond of displaying" In April 1881, when a higher than usual number of Chinese arrivals in Sydney generated some anti-immigration sentiment, officials were quick to point out that this was just the usual upsurge of residents returning from Chinese New Year celebrations in China and South East Asia.

Celebrations often made it into mainstream press. The opening of the Chinese temples in Alexandria and Glebe were reported and older residents in Botony recalled lion dances up Botany Road until the 1930s.

The refurbishment of Chinatown as a tourist destination in the 1980s made the Chinese New Year a Sydney-wide event with festivities spreading to suburbs including Cabramatta, Parramatta and Hurstville. You can read Terri McCormack's article on Chinese New Year here in the Dictionary. Next week the Dictionary welcomes historian Nicole Cama to the chair, joining Tim for a slice of Sydney history on Breakfast with Tim Higgins on 2SER. Don't forget to tune in to 107.9 at 8:20am.

A photograph uncovered in the City of Sydney Archives recently appears to show frost or snow in Sydney in the 1870s. It got Lisa thinking coolly about snow in Sydney and this morning on 2SER breakfast with Tim Higgins, she shared some of her discoveries. One of the biggest falls was in June 1836, when it snowed in Sydney for half an hour in the morning. There was snow on the roof tops and the boys were making snow balls and fighting in the street. There was a slight snow fall in 1837, making some believe that snow falls in Sydney were an annual event. Sadly, this was not the case. The Blue Mountains reported snow in 1869; we shouldn't be surprised at this. It apparently snowed in Sydney again in 1896, but it was so incidental that very few people even noticed. Canley Vale received light snow in August 1902 when it was described as "resembling clusters of white feathers", and it snowed for a few minutes in Woollahra in 1905. Falls were reported in 1912, and in 1915 there was 10 inches (25 cm) of snow at Mount Victoria.

Sydney became a city of overcoats and radiators in February (!) 1941 when a freakish cold snap hit the city and snow was reported. Snow appeared again in January (!!) 1948 falling for moments at Wynyard! So Sydney is really a hot and cold city. Lisa has created a list of newspaper articles about snow in Trove on the National Library's website, so everyone can dream of snow in Sydney. If she come across more newspaper reports, she promises to add them to the list.

Anniversary day? What's that?! Well, if you tuned in to 2SER Breakfast with Tim Higgins this morning you would have heard Lisa explaining that Anniversary Day was the original name for Australia Day. Yes, that's right, 26 January - the date that the First Fleet settled into Sydney Cove and raised the flag. Our Aboriginal brothers and sisters call it Invasion Day or Survival Day. The Sydney Morning Herald declared in 1848:

Most countries and colonies have their peculiar annual rejoicings, but we know of none where a greater abandonment to pleasure and diversion is evinced than in Sydney on the 26th of January.

OK so this might be an exaggeration. But it does capture the spirit of how Sydneysiders celebrated Anniversary Day throughout the 19th century. The celebration has always been a bit fraught with evocations of the penal colony, convict origins, invasion. For the other Australian colonies, it was just the birthday of New South Wales, not the celebration of a nation. Despite these debates in the papers throughout the nineteenth century, the majority of Sydneysiders just enjoyed a public holiday in the summer. A day of relaxation and good times. The first regular official event was the Anniversary sailing regatta on Sydney Harbour. This started in 1837, and continues today. In time, enterprising publicans and pleasure ground proprietors provided a wide range of Anniversary entertainment, incidental to the regatta. Picnics around the harbour at pleasure grounds were popular, particularly group excursions. Anniversary Day horse races were held at Homebush in the 1840s. Interclub cricket matches and organised athletic sports were popular too. Thousands watched the hammer-throwing, and the foot, pony and velocipede [bicycle] races at the Albert Ground, Redfern, in January 1869. In the 1880s and 1890s Moore Park's Zoological Gardens also drew large Anniversary crowds. Federation in 1901 brought a more profound sense of nationhood, but it wasn't until 1935 that all the Australian states and territories use the name 'Australia Day' to mark the 26th January. And it was not until extremely recently, 1994, that the states and territories began to celebrate Australia Day consistently as a public holiday on that date. What are you doing on Anniversary Day? Lisa is going along to Yabun, or Survival Day celebrations in Victoria Park with the Aboriginal community. We all love a public holiday but this one has lots historical and cultural baggage. Whatever you do on the 26th January, spare a moment for the history of the day. Abandon yourself to "pleasure and diversion" but enjoy responsibly.

Continuing her talks about Sydney summer traditions and celebrations in January, Lisa took to the air this morning on 2SER with Tim Higgins with stories of Sydney's first balloon flights and a crazy event that happened 143 years ago. Nineteenth century Sydney loved spectacle - the more dangerous the better. In the 1870s, balloon flights were all the rage. International aeronauts transfixed crowds with their daring. Among those who attempted balloon flights were Henri L'estrange, Professor Rufus Wells and Thomas Gale. Sydneysiders could not get enough! You begin to have more respect for these men when you realise that the balloons were not filled with hot air, but will gas - which made them a lot more volatile. Mishaps were not uncommon and the very real chance of disaster added to the crowd's excitement. People paid real money to see an attempted balloon flight. British  aeronaut Thomas Gale made a number of celebrated attempts at the start of the 1870s. His first were over the Boxing Day/New Year period of 18696-70. Eventually he made a successful ascent from the Outer Domain on 5 January 1870 when he floated across to Glebe. Buoyed by his success, Gale sought the limelight once again in September 1870 during the Intercolonial Exhibition held at Prince Alfred Park. After several disappointments over consecutive weekends he made an ascent and floated precariously over Redfern and Waterloo. But the longest balloon flight of Thomas Gale took place on Saturday 7 January 1871, from Victoria Park outside Sydney University. This event took on a carnival atmosphere with the public paying an entrance fee to see the entertainment. Before the flight attempt there was music from the German Band, acrobatic feats, pony races and other sports. Over 3,000 people came along, but not all of them paid the entry fee. Many climbed the fences to be part of the action. The balloon itself had been constructed under Gale's supervision and was named the ' Young Australian'. According to the newspapers, the balloon was 'by far the largest machine of the kind that has ever been used in Australia, being 72 feet high and 112 feet in circumference at its widest part'. It took half an hour to inflate the balloon with gas. Gale, along with a passenger from the Sydney Morning Herald, hopped in the basket and the balloon released at 4.15pm. The balloon rose rapidly and at one stage reached an altitude of 2 and a half miles (approximately 4 kilometres). The flight was very crudely controlled by letting out gas through a valve to descend or throwing out ballast to lighten the load and gain altitude. The aeronauts went directly over the University, across Five Dock and Cockatoo Island, before drifting along the Parramatta River. After about 2 hours up in the air, Gale and his travel companion came down in the Parramatta River near Gladesville. They almost drowned, the basket stuck in the silty mud of the river bed, but the precious balloon was unharmed. The aeronauts returned to the city by steamer to great acclaim and the lucky passenger enthusiastically described the amazing birds eye view of the city he had witnessed. Descriptions of the balloon flight can be read in the digitised newspapers: BALLOON ASCENT. (1871, January 9). The Sydney Morning Herald, p. 4-5. Retrieved January 14, 2014, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article13215463 BALLOON ASCENT OF MR. THOMAS GALE PROM VICTORIA PARK. (1871, January 21). Illustrated Sydney News, p. 1. Retrieved January 14, 2014, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article63617957 The Dictionary has great images of balloon flights here. Don't forget to tune in again next Wednesday on 2SER at 8.20am for another history fix from the Dictionary of Sydney.

As you oohed and aahed at the magnificent display of fireworks on New Year's Eve, did you pause to wonder where it all began? There was debate amongst my friends - was it the turn of the millennium when it all took off, or the bicentennial? Well, the Dictionary of Sydney has all the answers! In fact, the celebration of New Year's Eve as we know it today - focussed around the harbour with fireworks - is (historically) a relatively recent event. Sydneysiders have celebrated the changing of the calendar year in a number of different ways over the past two centuries. We delved into the history of New Year's Eve celebrations on 2SER breakfast with Tim Higgins and you can listen to the interview here. Originally, New Year's Day was more important than the eve. Celebration of New Year's Day became part of the Australian cultural festivities via the Scottish festival, Hogmanay. New Year's Day had increased in prominence as a day of pleasure in the nineteenth century. Picnics were traditional, but public and commercial events were also important such as concerts and sports carnivals. The Scottish connection was evident in events like the Highland Gathering at the Sydney Cricket Ground. The first formal New Year's Eve celebration in Sydney ever was on 31 December 1896. On this evening, more people celebrated New Year's Eve in the streets of Sydney than ever before. It was the first time, according to newspaper reports, that night-time street revellers identified themselves as members of a crowd, cohesive and urban, belonging in the city for New Year's Eve.

Christmas tree in 2UW radio studio 24 December 1937, courtesy Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW (hood_17028 / Home & Away 17028)

Happy summer holidays and festive season to all our readers! The Dictionary team wishes you all a pleasant holiday season and a happy New Year. We have had over 200,000 unique visitors during the year and you have been one of them! We are looking forward to an exciting 2014. To finish the year we thought we would share some of our favourite reading from 2013 and new books by Dictionary authors and colleagues published this year. But first, thank you to our major government partner, the City of Sydney, our community partners including the team at 2SER, our Chair and board members, volunteers, supporters, authors, multimedia contributors and readers. You make the Dictionary the special resource that it is. Summer reading Summer is for catching up on reading. Why not start with these new works by Dictionary contributors and colleagues from 2013:

• Anna Clark and Paul Ashton (eds), Australian History Now, NewSouth Publishing
• Rennie Ellis, Decade: 1970-1980, Hardie Grant Books & State Library of Victoria
• Ian Hoskins, Coast: A History of the New South Wales Edge, Angus & Robertson
• Meredith Lake, Faith in Action: Hammondcare, NewSouth Publishing
• Iain McCalman, The Reef – Passionate History, Penguin Australia
• Garry Wotherspoon, The Sydney Mechanics School of Arts: A History, SMSA

Interior of Angus & Robertson booksellers, Castlereagh Street, Sydney, 1946. By Bradford Pty Ltd, courtesy Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales (SPF/1164)

Books, blogs and podcasts: Staff picks from 2013 Lisa Murray That Doctor Who Sound Dictionary Chair, Lisa Murray, recommends this radio documentary on the BBC radiophonic workshop that created the Doctor Who theme song (there are a few Whovians at the Dictionary who will enjoy this!) Public Sydney: Drawing the City by Philip Thalis and Peter John Cantrill, published by the Historic Houses Trust of NSW and UNSW in 2013. Says Lisa: "This gorgeous folio sized book is a must for urbanists, architects and historians." The book's essays include one by Lisa exploring how the City's architects contributed to the design of our public spaces, and how gender shapes the city's social spaces. Public Intimacies: The Royal Commission on Human Relationships Lisa also recommends this Hindsight documentary looks at the Royal Commission set up by the Whitlam Government into family life. It provoked fierce outrage and resistance at the time and started conversations that we’re still having today. Kim Hanna Then and Now: Historic Roads Around Sydney Ever the eclectic, Dictionary EO, Kim Hanna, recommends Historic Roads Around Sydney by John Fairfax, 1951. Kim: "Whilst very much of its day…[it]…is full of interesting facts such as the first recorded Spanish free settler to Sydney was Jean De Arrieta, who arrived in 1821". Available from discerning online booksellers and libraries of quality. Jacqueline Spedding The Dictionary of Sydney had me hooked from the start and I continue to be delighted and surprised by what I discover. It is impossible to pick favourites but a few that stick in my mind are: the transport of Irish orphan girls and workhouse women; the reformatory for girls on Cockatoo Island, the odd characters of the Cooks River including the Fighting Hen, Fred Maynard and the Australian Aborigines Progressive Association and the real story of Woollarawarre Bennelong. Not to mention Lisa's podcasts on Wonderland City, Sydney's first ice and a favourite of mine, Sydney Rock Oysters. Mirror Sydney was a great find. I love Vanessa Berry's blogspot, not the least for all the fond childhood memories it brought back including that wonder of the harbour - Flanagan's Afloat! Thanks Vanessa! The Recluse, Giramondo Publishing, 2012. Evelyn Juer's book is one of the few I had time to read this year. It plumbs the life of Eliza Donnithorne of Newtown, mythologised as the inspiration for Charles Dicken's character, Miss Havisham in Great Expectations. Linda Brainwood Bold Palates: Australia's Gastronomic Heritage by Barbara Santich is one of Linda Brainwood's favourites this year and - in her words "... not just for the great, well-cited illustrations" (Linda is our picture editor, after all) Published by Wakefield Press, Linda says "Every time we cook lamb now I think about its place in the Australian psyche." Sounds perfect for Christmas. FBI’s All the Best’s three part series ‘These Walls Have Ears'. Linda recommends this set of podcasts by talented people about aspects of the history of the Rocks for The Rocks Windmill festival in April/May this year. Garry Wotherspoon The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver is the favourite read of the year for our long-standing volunteer, Garry Wotherspoon, who is fond of historical fiction. Published by Harper, NY, 2009, Garry says it has a "wonderfully ambiguous ending". Set mainly in Mexico, it features "such ‘exotica’ as Diego Rivera, Frieda Karlo, Trotsky, and sundry other people, including the hero, Harrison Shepherd. It follows his life, and segues into the McCarthyist purges that occurred later in the USA". Catie Gilchrist Girt: The Unauthorised History of Australia by David Hunt is the pick of the bunch for our volunteer researcher and writer, Catie Gilchrist. Published by Penguin in 2013, if you enjoy "..the strange, the ridiculous and the frankly bizarre moments of our early history", as Catie does, then this history is for you! Steven Hayes Silences and Secrets: The Australian Experience of the Weintraubs Syncopators by Kay Drefus captured the interest of our technical project manager and all-round good Dictionary fellow, Steven Hayes. While tuned into Books and Arts on Radio National, Steven heard an interview with Kay Dreyfus talking about her new book, which details how the demise of a once popular Weimar Republic jazz band who relocated to Sydney at the end of the silent movie era. They were interned with other Germans during the war and this, combined with the hostility of the musician's union in WWII Australia, killed their careers. --- Happy reading and see you in 2014 for what promises to be an exciting year!

Lisa has been doing a bit of a summer theme over the last couple of weeks on 2SER Breakfast with Tim Higgins and this morning she is gave us another great piece of Sydney history - Sydney Rock Oysters. In 2004, the Sydney Morning Herald Good Food Guide noted that 'the little Sydney rock is loved for its unique flavour and long shelf life'. Not to be confused with Pacific oysters (their larger, less succulent, more rubbery cousins), the Sydney Rock is smaller, softer and has a more distinctive taste. It takes about three years to reach maturity, while the Pacific takes 12 to 18 months. Sydney lies in the centre of some of the best oyster-producing regions in the world, from Port Hacking and the Georges River to Broken Bay. The city's history is alive with references to the oyster and its culture – from the suburb named Oyster Bay, to the lime mortar in many early buildings, to the popularity of oyster bars in the late 19th century, the Sydney Rock Oyster has a special place in Sydney's history. The commercial cultivation of Sydney rock oysters began only in 1872. Early European settlers had taken to the local product with gusto, but they also burned the shells to produce lime for mortar. This depleted the natural population, so the government banned the burning of oysters for lime, leading to deliberate farming.

By the late nineteenth century, oyster bars were common in Sydney and often run by southern European migrants. They were a staple part of the diet, not a luxury, and it was due to their abundance. It's fair to say that oyster bars rivaled pubs in their spread and popularity across the city. During the twentieth century, tastes in eating changed and for a while, oysters went out of fashion. Oyster bars began to disappear and fish and chip shops began to replace them. Today, oyster bars have made a comeback, and Sydney rock oysters are back on the menu at many chic restaurants. Today Sydney rock oysters still account for 94 per cent of edible oyster production in New South Wales.