Traces Edition 32, 2025

Hello and welcome to Edition 32 of Traces! Since our last edition, there have some interesting heritage developments. Among them was a momentous decision; the Murujuga Cultural Landscape, in Western Australia, was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List. Murujuga, home to more than one million pieces of Indigenous rock art, some as old as 50,000 years, has finally been recognised as a place of global heritage significance after two decades of campaigning by the Australian Government. It’s a reminder that persistence in preserving the past can be rewarded. Continuing that spirit, Traces again shines a light on some little-known stories from our collective past. In the Insight section on page 8, Shayne Breen explores the rediscovery of Kutalayna, an ancient Tasmanian site, and how it became a symbol of…

175,000 NEW HISTORICAL IRISH RECORDS RELEASED More than 175,000 new Irish historical records are now free to explore thanks to the Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland, 103 years after the 1922 Four Courts fire destroyed centuries of archives. Among the highlights are 60,000 names from lost 19th-century census returns, offering a rich resource for family historians. Launched by Trinity College Dublin, and with national and international partners, the project digitally recreates Ireland’s public record office, and now holds 350,000 documents and 250 million searchable words. New features include the Knowledge Graph Explorer, which links people and places for easier research. This major release strengthens efforts to preserve and share Ireland’s cultural memory worldwide. ICE AGE SHELTER DISCOVERED IN BLUE MOUNTAINS Archaeologists have discovered Australia’s earliest evidence of Ice Age high-altitude…

Hobart Savings Bank is often described as a social experiment in financial self-help. THEN In the century following Australia’s settlement, the absence of a formal monetary system created an unregulated financial environment. Banking in Australia – especially in the early colonies like Van Diemen’s Land – was limited, informal and often unstable. There was a lack of formal institutions, economic transactions were largely barter-based or conducted via IOUs, and rum was also used as a currency (especially in New South Wales). The first formal bank, the Bank of New South Wales (now Westpac) was established in 1817 in Sydney, followed by the Bank of Van Diemen’s Land in 1823. These formal institutions served wealthy customers, such as merchants and landowners; there was no such institution for the working class –…

Paywoota (long time ago), the creation ancestors lowered the seas and made new country. Sensing opportunity, a group of explorers walked across a narrow plain towards distant mountains. The country was much like the place they were leaving – grassy plains and few trees – though colder and windier, perhaps. It was more than familiar. As they made their way, they harvested shellfish, hunted wallaby and collected bush foods. At a place called Lungtalanana, now a small island (known as Clarke Island) off the north-east coast of Tasmania, they set fire to the grasslands. Time passed, the explorers became settlers, they adapted their living to the country and its resources, and they made homes for themselves, their children, and their children’s children in all parts of the ancestral country. In…

In the early hours of Thursday 2 May 1852, Augustus Calmut Waugh left his sister Elizabeth’s modest, white-washed brick house on the corner of William and Bourke streets, in Melbourne, and disappeared into the misty dawn. In the heady days of gold fever, precious little was made of the prospector’s disappearance, and no-one, evidently, felt it necessary to advise the police. Mystery surrounding Waugh’s whereabouts appeared to be resolved when Elizabeth advised his daughters that their father had been found dead, having fallen from his horse on the road between Dunsford and Kyneton. It was, perhaps, little surprise; death by horse happened with unbridled regularity. In 1872, 20 years after his disappearance, Waugh apparently materialised again. And he had quite a few things to say: ‘My death was caused by…

Hinchinbrook Island, in the Cassowary Coast region of Queensland, is so large that James Cook believed it to be part of the mainland. Today, its fame derives from an internationally renowned hiking track and a controversial, now defunct, ‘eco resort’. Its northern shadow is Goold Island. Less popular and more archetypal of islands along the Great Barrier Reef, Goold Island offers no gimmicks – only boggy beaches and good fishing. But hidden a few paces beyond its western beach, in a clearing sheltered by the tops of tall palm trees and bathed in the sounds of a nearby stream, is a monument to the memory of a nearly forgotten man. The monument was constructed by fisherman Geoff Crow in 2005 to replace the original ‘grave marker’ he saw during his…