'Historian Extraordinaire' Addresses Grafton U3A

Extract from media release for Grafton U3A | April 12, 2010

An attentive and interested audience at Grafton U3A’s ‘Jabberfest’. on Monday, April 12, discovered what an ‘historian extraordinaire’ Nola Mackey really is. Nola was guest speaker at the gathering and her talk was entitled ‘Rescuing and saving our heritage – one day at a time’.

Her incredible knowledge and collection of Clarence Valley history has been put together over forty years of probing and researching and is possibly the largest private historical collection of its type in Australia. One of her major concerns has been irresponsible publication and recording of historical facts which are not entirely accurate and she, therefore, insists on proper documentation of all her material.

Nola has published over seventy books on Australian Colonial, Family and Local History, some thirty of which are about the Clarence Valley! A lot of her works have concentrated on the period up to 1850 but she is now working on more recent times.

Her enormous historical collection includes over 6000 dossiers on family histories (she’s traced her own family back to the Middle ages), many thousands of documents on microfilm, Government maps from Taree to the Queensland border, drawings, paintings, a huge quantity of old photographs and a large private library of Australian and European history.

Nola illustrated her talk with many old and interesting photographs – the original School of Arts, Gaol, Post Office, old Grafton and South Grafton retail businesses, hotels (including Roches, purported to be the oldest continuous licence, in one building, on the North Coast and possibly NSW), churches (including Christ Church Cathedral in the 1870s – it was not completed until 1934), rope and steam ferries, river boats, many old houses and much more.

It was an extraordinary journey through history with an extraordinary person!

Bob Cuming

President