A weathered sandstone plaque in the modern boundary wall facing the road at 71 Bay Street is one of the few reminders that this block – labelled Lot 43 in Mosman Council’s 1917 Building Register – was home to six weatherboard cottages built by the Mosman branch of the Voluntary Workers Association for disabled servicemen and war widows.

It has been rewarding in these early stages of the project to have made contact with the children and family of Mosman’s service men and women. As you would expect, many no longer live in the suburb but have found material in our collection by searching the web.

The first was Angus Lang, grandson of Arthur William Houstoun (Bill) Lang, who came across his grandfather’s photo on our Flickr stream.

Harefield, England. Eight patients from Ward 40, No 1 Australian Auxiliary Hospital, photographed in the grounds of the hospital with Sister Ruby Dickinson. AWM H16039

What did WWI military nurses do?

Dr Kirsty Harris gave us an insight at Mosman Library in September. Her book More Than Bombs and Bandages is a history of their medical practice, and we were fortunate to benefit from her extensive research.

A man – Hilda Rix Nicholas, 1921 AWM ART19613

A few weeks ago I joined in the Mosman Library Buildathon to see what a local council library might get up to in starting up their own digital humanities project. This post reports on the experience of a small team (2 of us! Virginia – a freelance historian, and myself, an information professional) trawling through online databases to ‘see what we could see’.

A Local Studies exhibition in 2009 – Mosman Headliners – revealed some of the great scandals and crimes that lie behind Mosman’s apparent tranquility. One of the most significant came to a positive conclusion thanks in part to the WWI poets.