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I was ten years old at the time; that Saturday morning, I had gone in to the Adelaide CBD with someone to help select a retirement present for our Scoutmaster (I was still in the Cubs then) and as we came out of the shop in Pulteney Street, just north of Hindmarsh Square, I remember seeing with disbelief the newspaper placards with the news of the assassination.
My mother (1927-2010) was born in Liepāja, and my father (1924-2002), although born in Warsaw, grew up in the village of Pilica in central Poland, with Polish as his first language. I've used the modern German flag for this userbox to reflect an interest in German culture and history, and to avoid reference to past nationalistic movements.
During the time I lived in London (1977-1984) I spent several years part-time at the Sir John Cass College of Arts and Science (then part of the City of London Polytechnic, which has since been amalgamated with other institutions and renamed), doing silversmithing, enamelling, engraving, and photography. Located at Whitechapel in the East End of London, it had strong links to the trade and an eclectic mix of international students, which made it an interesting place to be.
IMHO the Wikipedia articles on the series are not well written and serve their subject poorly. Compared with the British and American versions of the genre, Camilleri's characters have a richness and depth which make even classic film noir seem two-dimensional; and the location photography of the rugged Sicilian coast and the crumbling Baroque architecture of Ragusa is superb.
The National Library of Australia's Trove resource includes a project to digitise all Australian newspapers up to 1954, which are now free of copyright. It is an extremely useful resource for researching the early history of South Australia, and although the exercise of cleaning up the scanning errors may be somewhat tedious at times, I find that it is well worth the effort. I highly recommend it to anyone else who may be interested in contributing to the project.
After 5 years of editing Wikipedia, I've come to the conclusion that for a variety of reasons it doesn't scale down to the local level very well. With the assistance of an IT specialist, in May 2015 I set up the Port Adelaide Environment and Heritage Wiki.[dead link] It uses a number of templates imported from Wikipedia, including some "intricate" infoboxes, and it's been an interesting but rewarding challenge to get them to function properly in the new environment. For anyone interested in going down this path, there's a page on the new wiki, "bugs and fixes",[dead link] where there's a list of the problems encountered and solved so far. It's still a work in progress.
2024 update: Unfortunately, the wiki was hit by a spambot, and later by hosting issues - I didn't have the skills to maintain the back end, and was too reliant on others for their assistance. The wiki has been offline for a number of years, but a backup copy was made, and perhaps one day I'll get around to reinstalling it on a new platform.
