Amazing - no rain

 For the first time in what seems like ages we've had a week without rain, which has given me a chance to make a start clearing all the weeds that have sprouted  in our last few weeks of wet muggy warm weather.

There is of course a downside, we are forecast to get temperatures in the high thirties/low forties over the next few days which means a lot of watering not to mention early morning gardening before it gets too bloody hot.

Hopefully, once this burst of hot weather has passed, it will be cool enough in the mornings to let me out on my bike for an early morning ride.

Up at the Athenaeum, I've been doing some more work checking the quality of the data in the heritage book collection, and an hour or so's work has convinced me that the whole collection will have to be checked as there's quite a few incomplete entries, and while we can trace the books online, we still need to check whether we've identified the correct edition from the incomplete information.

There's also been some more work on the deconsecrated bibles and prayerbooks. No rude drawings this time but names to checked against a list of families known to be in the area in the 1860's after the community became formalised and ceased to be a mining camp with a floating  and often untraceable population, especially as the records of Miners Rights, ie mining licenses issued to individuals working on the goldfields, have largely been lost.

(It's an interesting little aside that while many of the prayerbook's owners' names are written in ink, most of the doodles are done in pencil - in the nineteenth century writing in ink required a dip pen and a bottle of ink - meanwhile pencil was much more spontaneous and didn't require anything special.)

We also have a little puzzle as to why a packet of Federal parliamentary papers dating from August 1980 was sent to the Athenaeum.

Trawling through the records of parliamentary business for August 1980, there's nothing that stands out other than some documents relating to the canned fruit industry, and even then there's no obvious link.

Given that included with the papers are committee reports on whale protection and regional television broadcasting my best guess so far is that someone who was particularly interested in these issues used the aegis of the Athenaeum to obtain copies of some documents they were particularly interested in.

Down at Lake View. I've been working on cataloguing some nineteenth century medical instruments, 

Like my work at Dow's it's a fairly mechanical process of pick an artefact, photograph it, generate a short description and also try to put some context around it, which is where Google Lens come in, as there's no real online reference guide to surgical instruments in the nineteenth century, which makes identification tricky.

I suspect that as surgical techniques have changed so much in the last one hundred and fifty years, any one without a knowledge of nineteenth century surgery would struggle ...