what they call a photo du...

...mp

I just liked seeing all the maths on my banh mi. 

Gorilla in the mist

Community. 

This led to an unfortunate argument about whether Marmalade was just shitty jam. 

Someone from Jet lives in that house.* 

 * true

mrs ely - I

Thanks again to the remarkable research of the person I previously referred to as 'reader Kim', more information has come to light on the person we have come to know as Honore Bowlby-Gledhill or Honore Cecilia Paget if you prefer. Perhaps you prefer a few other of her names, and perhaps you like Mrs. Ely the best, in which case you are roughly as up to speed as Kim and I. 

I said in the post linked above that I had found a vague Australian link - that Honore's grandfather was governor of Queensland. There's a lot more connection than that, I have to tell you. She was here in the late 1930s, and she called herself Mrs. Ely, though what she meant precisely by this I don't know, as it does not seem there was a Mr. Ely (or at least, he wasn't with her, if he existed). 

I will go into greater detail of what I know about her activities as Mrs Ely in due course. In the meantime I just want to mention that I made time today to go to the Public Records Office to investigate the will of Ambrie Martin, a woman who was born in Brunswick in 1913 and died in Prahran in 1997 leaving $120 000 to her one son Peter. What has Ambrie (what an amazingly great name) got to do with anything? Well her husband (another Peter) left her for Mrs Ely in 1938 and while this presumably did not last Ambrie divorced him in 1941 and from what I can tell they did not see each other again, though I can't be sure of that. 

I will go into this more comprehensively soon. Right now I have other things to think about as my electricity has gone off with the dishwasher in mid-cycle so you can imagine how I feel. Not as happy as Ambrie did in 1941 (see below). 

toppa the world

You might remember in 2006 I reminisced about how fond my feelings were towards the Toppa Ice Cream company. Perhaps my affection is linked to the fact that, as of 1966, the company was owned by British Tobacco - might also explain why I still get a slight yearn when I smell cigarette smoke (I've never smoked). What I don't really understand is why, when that company was doing such great guns in 1966 when (according to the Bulletin, anyway, which I suppose might have had some rationale to promote something that wasn't as hot as it seemed, though surely the Bulletin wanted cred) 'several... firms would welcome the Toppa fold under their wings', it basically disappeared in the early 70s.*  One of the things Toppa did in the mid-60s was move its factory from Brunswick to Preston...

Melbourne Age 12 May 1971 

and then wait five years to sell the old one, or something. That space is now, I gather, occupied by these townhouses, although there might have been something else in-between:

This is where they were at in 1970, looking for a mature man. Perhaps immaturity was a problem they faced? Hard to tell. Branching into diary products might have been a mistake as well. 

Toppa disappears from the pages of the Age in the mid-70s, and I gather at some point in there they were bought by Paul's, who always pissed me off because I assumed they were named in response to Peters, which didn't seem fair. But there was a two-hour moment in early 1972 when Toppa really got into the groove:

The Age 16 December 1971

How rad would that be? Yeah, I reckon they used words like 'rad' then. 

Anyway, if I can think of any other avenues to find out what happened to Toppa I will go down those avenues, though possibly what happened to them is they were bought by another company which shut them down, that's the end. 

* 'Expansion in the food industry' The Bulletin 8 January 1966 pp. 48-49

obscene language of the vilest kind

 

slacks

Today is going to be a much better temperature although admittedly still a little too hot for comfort (30). When it cooled down last night it was grouse. I am on a tram in Sydney Road and I am once again the unwilling eavesdropper into a very public telephone conversation about some idiot’s legal case which is obviously of concern to him therefore he has to make a really loud performance of it in public to make him feel better about ‘he’s gonna come off in court like a real bully which is what they’re accusing me of being, right?’ and lots of confirmations of meetings and where he has to be at particular times i.e. showing how in control he is of his appointments diary. Now he is talking about the trousers he can get to wear in court, he’s just I think repeated the word ‘slacks’ like he’s never heard it before. He probably feels it’s a little too much of a laidback term for something to do with acting really straight.

Melbourne’s history surrounds one on the Sydney road tram. A few minutes ago we stopped and I looked up and I was looking straight at a lawyer’s office with the surname Cilauro, obviously Santo Cilauro’s father and I think the same office used as the lawyer’s office in The Castle. Then we stopped again (dickhead got off by the way – I mean he got off the tram) to see the Brunswick Mechanics Institute, where local people met one auspicious night in the 1870s I can’t remember exactly when to demand the government build the Outer Circle line or was it just that the government build a rail line in the northern suburbs (there was one two minutes’ walk from the Mechanics Inst by the end of the century) I can’t remember. That’s the problem with history, it’s everywhere but you have to remember it or otherwise know it. Right now I can see the Sarah Sands Hotel of which I know little except geez it’s old, or some of it is. Geez.