Welcome

to the Ratbag Encyclopedia.

Latest research:

  • Grave Matters

    Grave Matters

    Help save the grave of James Dyson and his two wives in East Perth Cemetery The bodies of James Dyson and his wives Fanny and Jane lie in the old East Perth Cemetery. The three were united only briefly together under the same roof in life, and when they died many years apart, they were not …

  • Won’t you think of the children?

    Won't you think of the children?

    A reference list for the children of James, Fanny and Jane Dyson

  • Boom time.

    Boom time.

    During the early 1840s, Western Australia experienced its first modern economic boom. This both contributed to and was fed by a sudden expansion in the white settler population. Between 1837 and 1843 the European population doubled. While that sounds impressive, consider this: The total population in 1837 was only 2,025 men, women and children. There might …

  • Alias Hoffington

    Alias Hoffington

    I believe I have successfully reconstructed the baroque, Byzantine story of the first Mrs Dyson. I’m now prepared to state my theory and die on this hill if that be my fate. (Hint: I’m probably entirely wrong!)

  • Rename Canning Bridge

    Rename Canning Bridge

    The unspeakable horror of Canning Bridge

  • Choose your own Adventure

    Choose your own Adventure

    This is the tale of two convicts in Van Diemen’s Land. Their story does not have an end yet: happy, sad or otherwise. Can you help?  

  • A Trial on Trial

    A Trial on Trial

    A man killed his wife. When the powerful find themselves on trial, discussions happen about the justice system that don’t happen when the powerless are similarly ensnared.

  • Pavement Archaeology

    Pavement Archaeology

    On the pavements of around where I live in a southern suburb of Perth in Western Australia, are many concrete slabs of various shapes, sizes, and marked with various esoteric designs. Show me anything with two or more variations on a basic pattern of anything and I’m going to want to understand why, or more …

  • Dyson’s hat

    Dyson's hat

    Kings Meadows Convict Station discovery finds artefacts, convict hat

  • A Tale of Three Cities

    A Tale of Three Cities

    Albany, Fremantle and Perth: The three oldest cities in Western Australia: At each other’s throats.

All the articles:

This here is a quokka,
extinct on the mainland,
you shouldn’t kick it like a football,
or feed it by the hand.