One of the fascinating, and at times frustrating, things about working at the Dictionary is that we receive so much content that it just isn't possible to publish everything that comes our way. But when we do a get a chance, it's a pleasure to be able to share it, like this lovely ambrotype sent to us by Tasmanian reader, John Paton. The image, now in the collections of the State Library of NSW,  shows John's great great grandfather, George Paton. Born 15 December 1800 in Largs Scotland, Paton was a master stonemason who worked on many significant buildings in New South Wales in the 1830s and 1840s including St Andrew's Scots Church, the Berrima Court House, the Australian Museum and the Hero of Waterloo Hotel - to name just a few. He was elected to Sydney City Council in 1847 as the member for Gipps Ward, serving a relatively short term of four years. His time in politics obviously brought unwelcome attention, as we can see from this rather rude piece published in Bell’s Life in Sydney and Sporting Reviewer on 9 March 1850:  

 NEW DICTIONARY. - We have been given to understand that Mr. Paton, finding it very difficult for his extremely strong vernacular and forcible expressions to be properly un derstood, both by those in the Council Chamber as well as other ignorant persons " out of doors," has resolved to publish a Dictionary. We subjoin specimens with illustrations (taken, from late meetings of the Solons): "Maister Boord, Haalderman Feesher's yoothful colligee.'' Trans lation in vulgar Saxon - Mr. Board, Alderman Fisher's youthful colleague. "He lickit to see  theongs sheep sharp on a plon." Saxon - He liked to see things ship shape on a plan. N.B ' Messrs. Neale and Jenkins are to find the Grammar.

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Picture This is the theme of History Week in New South Wales this year. If you are haven't joined in the fun yet there is plenty to enjoy. You can have a look at the program of events here.

Bringing the past into view through the frame of images History Week kicked off on the weekend with a host of great events. This year's theme, Picture This, looks at how images shape our world and the role they play in social change and historical research. In an image saturated culture it is perhaps hard to imagine just how much photography changed the way we see ourselves, capturing everyday life in a way that it had never been captured before. Artists have long manipulated that form and this week we will be revisiting some favourite photographs from the Dictionary and the stories they reveal. There is a bumper program of events all week in every part of New South Wales thanks to the History Council of NSW. Make sure you take a look at the program to see what is on in your area and get involved. In the city today you can visit our community partners, the State Library of NSW, who have put together a collection of images that question the role of truth in photography. Entry to Behind the Truth is free. At 12:30 you can pop down to Customs House to hear Yvonne Stewart from The Benevolent Society talk about how the Society uses History Pin to connect to its audience and share their stories as part of the celebration of the Society’s 200 year anniversary. Social Media for History Pin is also free. If you're in south western Sydney or fancy a visit to greener pastures, you can head to Camden Library for an exhibition of photographs by acclaimed photo journalist Jeff Carter (1928-2010), Beach, Bush and Battlers. And if you are comfortable right where you are, Camden Library is hosting an online exhibition of images from the region called Camden: How do we see ourselves? So that's just a few things to whet your appetite with plenty more coming this week. We hope you enjoy History Week.

Today on 2SER breakfast I chatted with Tim about the Yellow House, an artist's collective and hang-out that emerged in Kings Cross in the early 1970s. If you missed the segment, you can catch up with the podcast shortly. The reason I chose this topic is that the Yellow House is also being featured in History Week, which starts on Saturday. Sydney will be pumping with history related from 7-15 September 2013. The Yellow House is part of a long Sydney tradition of artists camps and collectives. A number of artists' camps flourished around Sydney Harbour in the late nineteenth century, for example, mainly around the Mosman area. Some of the acknowledged masterpieces of Australian art - works by Tom Roberts and Arthur Streeton - were created in these harbourside artists camps. Kings Cross had been a centre for bohemians and artists since the early twentieth century. Poets such as Mary Gilmore, Kenneth Slessor and Christopher Brennan all lived there. The artist William Dobell lived on the corner of Darlinghurst Road and Roslyn Street for a few years in the early 1940s, with Russell Drysdale and Donald Friend living nearby. The list goes on ... you can discover more about the bohemian scene in Mark Dunn's entry on Kings Cross. Later in the 1950s, the Terry Clune Gallery in Macleay Street continued the bohemian ideal with emerging 'radical' artists such as Russell Drysdale and John Olsen. As Mark Dunn in his entry on Kings Cross notes, the Clune Gallery was later transformed into an artists' collective by Martin Sharp in 1969/70. Based on Vincent Van Goh's ideal collective, Sharp and his artistic friends pained the exterior bright yellow (hence the name) and covered its internal walls with murals,  portraits and decoration. Artists such as Brett Whiteley, Bruce Goold and Peter Kingston turned the entire building into an artwork. Visiting bands and celebrities made it a regular fixture on the Sydney scene. As Martin Sharp said in 1971: "It's an artist community in the south, in the sun, and probably one of the greatest pieces of conceptual art ever achieved." With the theme for History Week being Picture This, it is no surprise that the Yellow House is featuring in the event calendar as a provocative, conceptual pop-up at David Jones, On Seven. How can the past be a muse for the present? How do artists portray themselves? And how can art tell our stories? The History Council of NSW has invited 5 contemporary artists to create a work inspired by a legendary artistic figure from Sydney's history. The artists and their historical muses are:

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Jane Gillings .... inspired by Dulcie Deamer Leo Robba .... Samuel Hood Jenny Sages ... Florence Broadhurst Wendy Sharpe ... Tracey Lee Reg Mombassa ... Martin Sharp The Yellow House, specially re-created by the History Council of NSW, will be open to the public at On Seven, David Jones from Sunday 8 - Sunday 15 September 2013, 10am - 4pm. Come along to experience a slice of Sydney's bohemia, learn about the history of the Yellow House, and be inspired by our artists both past and present. The artworks will be auctioned to raise money for the History Council of NSW. For this and more fantastic activities during History Week, head to the History Council's website. The Dictionary of Sydney is a proud community supporter of the History Council and History Week.  

This week on 2SER breakfast with Tim Higgins, Dictionary Chair Lisa Murray talked about Sydney's bohemian artists' balls, dating back to the 1880s. The balls caused all manner of outrage in Sydney, with blazing headlines often following the annual event.

One of the more notorious was the artists' ball of 1924, held at Sydney Town Hall. Thousands of party goers flocked to the city for a free-spirited event that Sydney's 'Queen of Bohemia', Dulcie Deamer, later described as a 'Night of Great Scandal'. The theme of the ball, 'Back to Childhood', was merrily embraced by artists such as George Finey who came dressed in a nappy that was secured with a safety pin and had a bottle of rum hidden in its folds. Another artist, Jack Lindsay hid whisky flasks in the habit of his friend who had dressed as Friar John. As Deborah Beck describes in her article for the Dictionary, the night became, if not into an orgy, then a veritable bacchanalia with the basement of the Town Hall floor covered in beer.

Fights erupted after gatecrashers climbed through the basement windows and extra police and the fire brigade were eventually called to clear the overcrowded basement which was littered with drunken semi-naked women, broken crockery and high spirited revellers. The Lord Mayor's orderly, Martin Carrick, reported that 'in one place I saw a helpless man and woman vomiting into each other's laps', and in the Ladies Rest Rooms 'men were entering with women and locking themselves in the compartments'.

80 years on, as part of History Week, the History Council of NSW is hosting its very own artists' ball at David Jones on Saturday 7 September, 2013. With a swing band, performers and 1930s inspired supper, tickets for this fabulous event are available at: The Artists’ Ball: A Fairy Tale Begins. Get in quickly before they sell out!

You can read more about the history of Sydney's artists' ball in Deborah Beck's engaging and colourful article Scandalous Nights: Sydney's Artists' Balls. Deborah's article features in issue 17 of Inside History magazine, which is on news stands now.

And don’t forget to join Lisa and Tim again next Wednesday at 8.20am on 2SER Breakfast 107.3FM with some more great stories about Sydney’s past, courtesy of the Dictionary of Sydney.

This week on 2SER breakfast with Tim Higgins we continued to explore some of the content from the Your Community Heritage Program: Cooks River Project. Today we explored the little traditional fishing village of Booralee, a small community on the northern shores of Botany Bay, where the Cooks River flows into the bay, that has all but disappeared. Booralee was the Aboriginal name for the area. The Kameygal people fished along a long beach of sand and mud flats that stretched far into the bay, and the shallow waters teemed with sea life. Middens dotted along the beach and banks of the Cooks River are tell-tale signs that this was a good fishing ground. By the 1820s Botany Bay mud oysters were taken to Sydney and fishermen had settled at the end of what is now Bay Street, Botany. Two of the early settlers were the Puckeridge borthers. William Puckeridge and his brother John Puckeridge were lime-burners and net fishermen in the Botany area from about 1830 to the 1880s, and was continued on by following generations. The family kept their boats on a wharf in the Cooks River, which became known as Puck's wharf. Another family closing connected with Booralee was the Cuthberts. The Cuthbert family fished at Booralee for four generations, leaving in 1979. In the 1930s there were about 200 inhabitants. There are some great photographs in the Dictionary showing the fishermen and their families at work and play around Booralee. Fish were abundant and the rich-pickings meant that for many years fishing practices did not consider sustainability of resources. Staked nets, sometimes a mile long, were set up on the mud flats inside the low water mark and when the tide fell the fish were trapped on the sand banks. Fishermen then just picked up the fish they wanted but left the rest to rot. Liming and dynamiting of fish in tidal waters also took place whereby the fish were poisoned or stunned for an easy catch. Fishing regulations in the 1880s and 1930s curtailed some of these practices, but hand netting continued into the twentieth century. The fishing town was a close-knit community that, to outsiders, seemed frozen in time with its traditional ways passed down through the generations. Booralee's demise in the 1960s and 1970s was caused by a mix of overfishing and industrial development. The major developments of Port Botany and Sydney Airport severed its close connection with the sea. Today the area has no direct access to Botany Bay or the Cooks River, the cornerstones of its livelihood. That's enough fishing through Sydney's history for this week. You can reel in the podcast and read more about this remarkable place in Joanne Sippel's fascinating article on Booralee fishing village. And don't forget to join us again next Wednesday at 8.20am on 2SER Breakfast 107.3FM as Tim and I haul in some more great stories about Sydney's past, courtesy of the Dictionary of Sydney.  

Last week on 2SER we celebrated the launch of the Cooks River project. We've been blogging and tweeting about this great project since its launch two weeks ago. If you haven't heard about it you can listen to a quick overview on last week's 2SER podcast or read about it in our blog. One of the things I love about the Dictionary of Sydney is the way Sydney's history gets connected and shared. I'm always learning something new about the history of this place. So on 2SER last week, rather than talking about a particular subject connected with the Cooks River, I just pulled out two little gems that really tickled my fancy when I was exploring all the content. One of my favourite images is the Steel Park River Patrol Lifesaving Club, proudly standing outside their little weatherboard clubhouse in 1932. The club was active in the late 1920s and 1930s, part of a long tradition of swimming in the Cooks River. Apparently famous swimmer Annette Kellerman used to swim at Undercliffe at the swimming baths. My "I DIDN'T KNOW THAT!!" fact was there was once a zoo at Canterbury Park Racecourse. For over sixty years patrons could marvel at Australian fauna, including kangaroos, wallabies, emus, curlews, pheasants and kookaburras, while the horses thundered past. You can read all about it in the article by Brian Madden and Lesley Muir and see the caretaker Jim Monk with some of his menagerie in 1897. You can discover all the content connected with the Cooks River Project by browsing through the project's contributor link, which lists all the research and articles that were made possible by the Your Community Heritage Grant received by the Dictionary of Sydney from the federal government.

We hope you have your questions about Sydney ready for our Chair, Lisa Murray, to answer tonight on her Expert Q&A panel with Inside History at 8.30pm. If you haven't already, you can email your questions for Lisa to: experts@insidehistory.com.au or you can post them in the comments on the Inside History facebook page. Like us, you'll be amazed by Lisa's seemingly endless knowledge of our favourite city. Lisa also has some tips for you on researching family history, so be sure to join in. Expert Q&As happen every Thursday night on the Inside History facebook page. When: NSW – ACT – VIC – TAS: 8:30-9:30pm AEDT | QLD: 7:30-8:30pm | WA: 5:30-6:30pm |NT: 7:00-8:00pm | SA: 8:00-9:00pm | Weekly on Thursdays nights

It is with great pleasure that we launch our ‘Fine stream, fine meadow’ Cooks River project. Made possible through a Federal Government Your Community Heritage grant, today marks the culmination of a 12 month partnership between the Dictionary of Sydney and Botany Bay City, Marrickville and Canterbury City councils, the Cooks River Alliance, and nine fine writer-historians whose collective works form the heart of this project. Through 14 essays, our authors trace the history of the Cooks River valley from its days as a pristine natural watercourse and lush hunting ground for the Eora people to the high density inner city suburbs and polluted river we know today. Along the way we encounter curious bareknuckle fighters, zoo keepers and weather-hardened fishermen - to name a few. But before any of these characters touch foot on Sydney’s shores, we meet the Aboriginal clans who lived here and who, through disease, destruction and conflict were forced away from lands that formed crossroads for trade, ceremonies and social networking for tens of thousands of years. The thick shell middens found on the floor of a shelter in today’s Earlwood demonstrates the strong and long term attachment of Aboriginal people to the Cooks River area – an attachment that continues to this day.

Some of the characters readers will encounter include ‘The Fighting Hen of the Cooks River‘ who, with her basket-weaving husband Joseph, moonlighted as a bareknuckle fighter in the woods by the Cooks River taking on anyone who was game for ‘a side’; Jim Monk, caretaker of Canterbury Park Racecourse, who looked after a zoo there for over sixty years so patrons could marvel at kangaroos, wallabies, emus, brolgas, curlews, pheasants and kookaburras while the horses sped past; and the English, Scottish and Welsh fisherman who took up residence on the northern foreshores of Botany Bay in the weather-beaten cottages of the village of Booralee, where they thrived for 100 years providing fish for an ever-hungry Sydney town. We hope you’ll enjoy building your own histories as you navigate through the images and hyperlinks. You will find all of the articles here as well as listed below. Over the coming weeks, we will focus in more detail on these and other entries that are new to the Dictionary.

• Aboriginal people of the Cooks River Valley by Lesley Muir
• Bark huts and country estates: European settlement along the Cooks River by Lesley Muir
• From a fine stream to an industrial watercourse: the transformation of the Cooks River Valley by Lesley Muir
• Urban growth in the Cooks River valley by Lesley Muir
• Industry in the Cooks River valley by Lesley Muir
• Canterbury Park Racecourse by Brian Madden and Lesley Muir
• Canterbury Sugarworks by Brian Madden and Lesley Muir
• The Prout’s Bridge incident by Brian Madden and Lesley Muir
• Booralee fishing town by Joanne Sippel
• Damming the Cooks River by Vanessa Witton
• First people of the Cooks River by Paul Irish
• From Sheas Creek to Alexandra Canal by Ron Ringer
• Managing the Cooks River today: The Cooks River Alliance
• Servicing Sydney’s thirst by MacLaren North

We’d like to thank our authors for engaging us so thoroughly in their research. Special thanks to Brian Madden and the Cooks River Alliance for allowing us to publish works by the late Lesley Muir. Lesley was a highly regarded historian and her essays are the centrepiece of this project. We would like to acknowledge the City of Sydney, who are our main sponsors, and our community partners who allow us to illustrate our text with such exceptional images. And last but not least, a big thank you to our hard-working team who have brought all of this marvelous content together, including our former editor Emma Grahame and Executive Office, Victoria Keighery and our tireless Chair, Dr Lisa Murray. The Dictionary is proud to have such talented and dedicated staff (past and present) who, among many talents, also make great cake! Thanks everyone.

It's Biography Week at the State Library of NSW and so today on 2SER Breakfast with Tim Higgins we delved into the Dictionary to reveal the extraordinary life of Florence Violet McKenzie, Australia's first female electrical engineer. You can listen to the podcast here. My first encounter with Violet McKenzie was through my retro Sydney cookery book collection. I was blown-away when I read about her life in the Dictionary of Sydney. Cookery was really just a small part of a wider agenda for this ambitious, driven woman. Born in 1890, Florence Violet McKenzie (nee Granville) became fascinated by electricity at a young age, playing with batteries and light globes. After graduating from Sydney Girls' High School, Florence tried to study for a diploma of electrical engineering at the Sydney Technical College at Ultimo, but was told she couldn't enrol unless she ws working in the trade. So she printed some business cards, scanned the newspapers for electrical jobs, scored a contract in Sydney's west, and returned to the college with the proof. She was duly enrolled and became Australai's first female electrical engineer when she graudated in December 1923. Her diploma is held in the collection of the Powerhouse Museum. In 1922 Violet, as she was know, opened The Wireless Shop in the Royal Arcade and later published The Wireless Weekly with three other collaborators. The Wireless Shop was the place to be for Sydney's radio experiments and hobbyists. At this time she also became the first Australian woman to take out an amateur radio operator's license, and she was also the first female member of the Wireless Institute of Australia. In the 1930s McKenzie turned her attention increasingly to teaching other women about electricity and radio. She embraced electricity whole-heartedly, believing that electricity could save women from domestic drudgery. To this end she founded the Electrical Association for Women in 1934. Two years later she compiled the first "all-electric cookbook" - a copy of which I have in my Sydney cook-book collection. A real classic! McKenzie is best known for her volunteer war effort. She set up a signal instruction school, the Women's Emergency Signalling Corps, initially for women to teach them telegraphy so that they could replace men in this reserved civilian occupation. But such were Mrs Mac's teaching skills, that during World War Two over 12,000 servicemen were also trained in morse code. The training of female telegraphists ultimately led to the establishment of the Women's Royal Australian Naval Service - the WRANS. We have a lot to thank Mrs Mac for. She was a talented and strong woman, who led by example, and used her abilities to transform the lives of thousands of people. While she would never have called herself a feminist, she worked tirelessly to educate and train women and improve their everyday domestic lives. To the end she was proud ot the contribution she made to women's technical education. Two days before she died in 1982 she told a friend: "it is finished, and I have proved to them all that women can be as good as, or better than, men." You can read more about Florence Violet McKenzie's life and view some great photographs and images in the entry written by Catherine Freyne. The Dictionary of Sydney collates and connects the stories of many fascinating Sydneysiders - why not browse through our list of people mentioned in the Dictionary and discover more about Sydney's communities. Happy Biography Week!

Koori Radio has been going strong for 20 years, broadcasting the news and views of Aboriginal Australia from its home in Redfern. In this week's slot on 2SER with Tim Higgins, we talked about the history of Koori Radio and its predecessor Radio Redfern. This discussion was inspired by an exhibition celebrating the twentieth anniversary of Koori Radio currently showing at Carriageworks. It's well worth a visit, but you better be quick. The multimedia exhibition Live and Deadly: 20 years of the Gadigal Information Service finishes up on Thursday 1 August 2013. It's free and open 10am - 6pm, so get on down there! So where did it all begin? Maureen Watson and her son Tiga Bayles laid the foundations for Radio Redfern in 1981, when they started broadcasting for 10 minutes each week on community radio station 2SER 107.3 FM. When Radio Skid Row (2RSR 88.9 FM) was allocated a community broadcasting license in 1984, it gave 10 hours of air time weekly to Radio Redfern. The station was initially broadcast from the University of Sydney, later moving to a terrace house on Cope Street in Redfern, still under the license of 2RSR. Radio Redfern was considered the voice of the Aboriginal community in Sydney, and played a vital role in coordinating political protests against the Bicentennial celebrations in 1988 and Aboriginal deaths in custody in the early 1990s. Radio Redfern grew to have 40 broadcast hours each week, with all the announcers contributing their time voluntarily. When Radio Redfern stopped broadcasting in the early 1990s, the gap was quickly filled. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander owned and operated organisation Gadigal Information Service was founded in 1993 by Cathy Craigie, Matthew Cook and Tim Bishop. It broadcasts a full-time radio station, Koori Radio (93.7FM 2LND), to the Sydney metropolitan region. Gadigal Information Service was originally based in a rented terrace on Cleveland Street on the edge of Redfern. It quickly gathered a groundswell of volunteer support across Sydney. Other First Nation communities that also call Sydney home, including many Maoris and Pacific Islands peoples, gave support and found a kindred voice in Koori Radio. The radio station was on a number of test transmissions until it finally qualified for a full-time community radio broadcasting license in May 2001. Gadigal Information Service and Koori Radio have been a strong voice for Aboriginal politics, social justice and, of course, music. They've been instrumental in organising Klub Kooris around the city and in 1999 Gadigal Information Services released the first compilation of Sydney-based Aboriginal musicians on a CD titled 'Yabun', a Sydney language word meaning 'music made by singing or beating time'. A few years later Gadigal Information Service presented the first Yabun festival at Waverly Oval at Bondi. Moving later to Redfern Park and more recently Victoria Park to accommodate the growing attendances, Yabun is an alternative celebration of survival held annually on 26 January and is an event of national significance. In 2005, the Indigenous Land Corporation acquired the buildings on Cope Street that had been occupied by Radio Redfern and the National Black Theatre. A new building to house the recording studios and offices of the Gadigal Information Service was designed by the architectural firm Tonkin Zulaikha Greer, with exterior artwork by Aboriginal artist Adam Hill. The building was opened here in 2008. We don't have a lot about Koori Radio in the Dictionary of Sydney yet (although it does get a shout out in our article on Maori life in Sydney) but we'll work with Gadigal Information Service to get something in there soon! This history is drawn from the following sources: Gadigal Information Service Barani: Sydney's Aboriginal History website, presented by the City of Sydney, especially entries on Radio Redfern and Gadigal Information Service. All this and more was discussed on Breakfast with Tim Higgins. Catch up with the podcast here. And don't forget to tune into 2SER 107.3FM next Wednesday morning when we once again talk Sydney's history with Tim and uncover some gems in the Dictionary of Sydney.