Six years after the Wright Brothers made the world’s first controlled, sustained flight of an engine-powered aircraft in the US, Harry Houdini—yes, that Houdini, the famous Hungarian-American escape artist and stunt performer—set a similarly impressive record in the small town of Diggers Rest, Victoria.
Diggers Rest is now considered an outer Melbourne suburb, at about…
If you ask a local, they’ll tell you the way to pronounce the first ‘a’ in Castlemaine is short and staccato, like a pouncing ‘cat’. But if you put the question to a different local, they may swear sideways that in fact the ‘a’ is longer and posher, as in ‘glass’.
Sitting pretty on Dja…