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Sunday/Thursday Talks  

8 August 2010

Simon Smith: The Governor General, the Entertainer
and a tale of two vexatious litigants

Size: 6.25M

15 July 2010

Anna Griffiths: The Triangle Campaign

Size: 4.51M

Images presented during Anna's Talk: Power Point Presentation (562K pdf)

17 June 2010

Robin Grow: ART DECO IN ST KILDA

Size: 5.8M

Powerpoint Presentation (3.02M PDF)

23 April 2010

Maureen Walker: THE HOME FRONT IN WORLD WAR 1

Size: 8.5M

SKHS member, Maureen Walker, who is currently undertaking a Master‘s degree in Public History, talks about her research into the homefront activities of: St Kilda Municipal Council,  St Kilda Patriotic League (incl. local Red Cross, Australian Comforts Fund) Organised Sport. YMCA The Diggers’ Rest – Soldiers’ Lounge, St Kilda Anti-Conscriptionists Anti-German sentiment and internments Vida Goldstein and the Women’s Peace Movement The Churches Mourning and Memory.

See Powerpoint Presentation (32K PDF) (See also Flyer (34K)

14 March 2010

Sam Everingham: WILD RIDE BEHIND THE LEGEND of COBB & CO

Size: 7.66M

History detective Sam Everingham (who lives in Port Melbourne) author of Wild Ride – The Rise & Fall of Cobb & Co
brings us Freeman Cobb and the men who ran the coaching empire (incl. the colourful Prince of Starters, Geo John Watson, Burnett St, St Kilda); the larger than life personalities and their private tragedies; the drivers who
made the firm famous and the incredible hardships endured by passengers.

See: Presentation (5.6M)

14 June 2009

17 May 2009
Kerry Greenwood: Phryne's St. Kilda
Size: 7.01M

Local writer Kerry Greenwood is an acclaimed author of detective novels. Many set in St Kilda include a score of books featuring Phryne Fisher, a fabulous jazz era heroine. Kerry talks about her books and their researched St Kilda settings.

9 November 2008

Aaron Eidelson: 35TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE YOM KIPPUR WAR

Size: 3.98M

Aaron Eidelson, a lawyer residing in Elwood recounts the complex political and social events surrounding the tragic and violent Yom Kippur War in 1973 and his own very personal involvement.
The war was part of the Arab Israeli conflict an ongoing dispute which has included many battles and wars since 1948 when the state of Israel was formed.It started with a devastating surprise attack by Egyptian and Syrian forces on Israel at a time when Israel was participating in the religious celebrations associated with their holiest day of the year.
In 1972 Aaron Eidelson was a 17 year old student at Melbourne High School before he immigrated to to live on a communal kibbutz in the Negev desert. At the age of 18 he began military training in the Israeli defense force. He had completed a six-month squad commander’s course in the Paratroop Brigades 50th Regiment when war broke out at 2.00 pm on Saturday, 6th October 1973.
He recalls:
Early on the morning on the 16th October 1973 my paratroop company walked through the dark across the Suez Canal from the Sinai Desert into Northern Africa . We were part of Operation Valiant - an attempt by the Israeli army to encircle the Egyptian 3rd Army and force a surrender.
The exquisite beauty of our surroundings stood in remarkable contrast to the insanity of the circumstance that had brought us there. As I stepped onto the soil of Egypt I felt reassured by the groves of tall gum trees sprouting from the sand. It was a typical Australian bush scene. The sun shone through the branches and we knelt down in the warm sand and the eerie quiet. I then heard cats crying. There was a brood of four kittens playing in the sand under a gum tree. They were tabby cats like Benji, our family cat in South Yarra . I thought about adopting one kitten for a pet but where would I keep it in the middle of a war?
Soon after his foxhole on the Suez canal with six soldiers received a direct hit by a Katyusha rocket. Aaron was one of the only three survivors. Injured by shrapnel below the knee, he was evacuated to a field hospital set up in a storageshed 25 kms behind the lines. Aaron says after he was wounded his first thought was: “If Mum knew where I was she’d kill me.”
The following morning, wearing the same blood-soaked clothes, he limped out of the hospital and hitchhiked back to his unit which was camped near Ismailia . He was given a (Russian) Kalachnikov AK 47 assault rifle to replace his submachine gun.
Not long afterwards he was part of a handful of Israelis caught in an ambush by several hundred Egyptian Commandos under heavy fire from rifles, mortars and grenade throwers.
He survived later returning to Australia to study law, education and music.

12 October 2008

Students in Dissent - Forty Years Later
Size: 7.78M

 This public event celebrates the fortieth anniversary of ‘Students in Dissent’ whose members distributed underground newspapers in secondary schools from 1968. Former students from the underground are invited to attend and tell their stories of these events. There will be the launch of a small booklet on the history, an exhibition of some of the original underground newspapers and a multimedia presentation documenting SID events in 1968. 1968 was one of the most tumultuous years of the twentieth century. It was the year of the assassination of both Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy and the crushing of the Prague Spring. It was the year of the Paris Uprising involving ten million worker and students. The TET offensive changed the tide of war against the American and allies in Vietnam. The Mai Lai massacre destroyed American credibility. There was a youth revolution fed by growing a growing counterculture in the western world. In Australia the antiwar movement was on the rise. At universities students were engaged in sit-ins strikes and demonstrations. Male high school students faced a conscription ballot the year after they finished school, potentially sending them to fight in the jungles of South East Asia. Many secondary school students were keen to be involved in influencing these events. In 1968 Dr Jim Cairns (later deputy Prime Minister) convened a youth action forum to capture this interest. Some of the young people split off to form their independent groups such as Students in Dissent (SID) or later Secondary School Students for Democracy (SSDS). These students were loosely allied and many edited underground newspapers in their respective schools, sometimes using the press owned by the Monash Labour Club at a house in Shirley Grove, St Kilda. Some used the pseudonym of Fabian Willmore the non-existent spokesperson for SID. This was part of the rebel humor having a spokesman who was everywhere yet nowhere. There was even a ‘Felicity Wilmore’.

 This came to a head in September 1968 when underground student editor, Michael (today Meyer) Eidelson, was suspended from Melbourne High School for printing Sentinel Underground (the school paper was Sentinel). On 4 October the Herald Sun headlined the event on its front page. Over the next month a debate erupted in the media in which participated secondary strident, teachers, principals, politicians, cartoonist and journalists. A teacher resigned in protest from Melbourne High School.  An MP was suspended from the house during debate on the ‘Eidelson Case’. Teachers signed petitions. High School students demonstrated in the city square. The Liberal Party attacked Cairns. The Labour party attacked the Minister for Education. Today Meyer Eidelson is an historian, writer and the president of the St Kilda Historical Society. He says: "It was a very traumatic to be expelled from school as a seventeen year old. However I learnt an enormous amount from the experience, which has served me well in public life. We defied the status quo and established in the public mind for the first time that young people would participate in the politics of protest. The secondary school system like the wider society was a very conservative place and I am proud we shook it up a little."

Forty years after he was suspended, Meyer returned to Melbourne High School on 10 September 2008 to address hundreds of students at school assembly.

 ‘It was astonishing to say the least to sit in the same principal’s office where exactly forty years ago to the day, I had to been ordered to collect my books and get out immediately. Now I was being served cups of tea. Once again Sentinel Underground was being printed but now it was by the vice principal so that copies could be framed to hang on the walls of the school. Once again I was singled out in the assembly hall but this time it was to the applause of students and teachers who seemed delighted to see the old articles and cartoons highlighting another era at Melbourne High presented on a giant screen.’

10 August 2008

Mackenzie Gregory: Centenary of Great White Fleet visit to Melbourne.

Size: 4.6M

In 1908, the U.S. White Fleet was sent by President Teddy Roosevelt to the Pacific Ocean to demonstrate U.S. strength. En route from the Atlantic, via Cape Horn, the fleet was invited to visit Australia by the Prime Minister Alfred Deakin. The fleet visited Sydney, Melbourne and Albany. The talk will cover the visit of the Great White Fleet to Melbourne, in the context of the development of the Victorian Navy, prior to, and just after Federation.

See Notes (47K) and Presentation (6.3M)

15 June 2008

Robin Grow: 150th Anniversary of 1^st Game of Modified Football Rules, 3 June 1858, AND 130th Anniversary of the formation of the St Kilda Football Club in 1878.

Size: 7.5M

Robin Grow is a SKHS member, president of the Art Deco Society, raconteur and one of the authors of More Than a Game: An Unauthorised History of Australian Rules Football (1998) and the recently published The Australian Game of Football.

See Notes (38K) here.

13 April 2008
David Golightly: THE GREAT ST KILDA CANOE MISSIONS:  1877

Size: 4.9M

In 1877 the Reverend Fairey of St Kilda assembled Australia’s first sea kayak from an English model. He launched his boat from St Kilda Pier to undertake an amazing journey of 200 kilometres. It was named ‘The Evangelist’. The reverend built his boat as a sportsman and to assist him to undertake his missionary activities and visit his parishioners by sea. His astonishing journey took him through the Port Phillip Heads to the Barwon River. 130 years later the Victorian Sea Kayak Club Sea Kayak re-enacted this remarkable journey to honour their founding member.

See Presentation (5.9M) here.

16 March 2008
Pat Grainger: ‘They Can Carry Me Out’

Size: 5.9M
She arrived in Melbourne in 1961 from Los Angeles intending only to stay a short time. Pat was a founding member of the Port Melbourne Historical and Preservation Society in 1993.  A former Citizen of the Year of Port Melbourne, Pat is also a prolific and prize-winning editor, graphic artist and author. In 2001 she produced ‘Linking Us Together’ detailing how changing transport developed the cities of Port Melbourne, South Melbourne and St Kilda. ‘The Story of Excelsior Hall’ described how an iconic building served Port Melbourne and was the third in a series of booklets following the earlier publication of ‘Railway Rockeries’ and ‘Port Melbourne Town Hall’. ‘Walks Around Vintage Port’ detailed six self-guided walks around old Port Melbourne. Her prodigious output continues today despite major health challenges in recent years. In 2007 she produced ‘Chartered Scoundrels - a brief history of Port Melbourne Hotels’.
 

17 February 2008

Michael Lawriwsky: Author of Hard Jacka, the Story of a Gallipoli Legend

Size: 6.3M

See the link to Hard Jacka for more details.

10 June 2007

Wayne Murdoch & Graham Willett

Size: 7.3M

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