Is it because I am a slightly bitter cynic that I don’t believe this? Would a slightly bitter cynic actually keep four tags before deciding to put on her research hat?

It struck a chord with me, because during the research for my book on stamps, Blue Mauritius, I came across similar stories dating back to the nineteenth century, which promised to build a hospital/ward for sick children if the [insert your local hospital here] could get a million stamps (or variations of this theme). Just search the wonderful Trove database of digitised Australian newspapers on million stamps hospital and you’ll see ample evidence of this, back to at least the 1890s.

This current tea bag thing sounds similar. Sure enough, a Google search on tea bag label tag wheelchair turns up a scan in Google News from the Connecticut Sunday Herald, dated 15 October 1972, ‘Tea Bag Mystery’, reading:

Can’t get any confirmation on those reports concerning a drive to collect tea bag tags for wheelchairs. Readers tell us many in town collecting the tags with the understanding it will help the handicapped. Rehabilitation Center knows nothing about it nor do the local hospitals. Sounds like the old cigarette package drive that fooled so many people a few years back.

So that’s almost forty years ago, referring to another even older scam, with antecedents pre-1900.

The only other thing of note I found was a comment on an article about raising funds for wheelchairs through Rotary, dated 15 May 2011, asking ‘Our Croquet Club is collecting tea bag labels for the purpose of buying wheelchairs, how does this work, where do the labels go, and how many are needed to buy a chair. Our contact says they are collect at Dandenong hospital, more info please.’ It seems a few other people/groups have collected tea bag tags over the years, but right now there is nothing concrete on the web to verify this collecting drive in Melbourne, Australia.

Fascinating, don’t you think?

Images, history and invention – that’s the title of an event coming up on Monday 14 July at the National Library of Australia in Canberra, and I have been invited to speak at it in my capacity as a Flickr photographer, archivist and contributor to Picture Australia.

“Join image makers and picture curators in conversation on their passion for image collections. View a DVD of works produced by creative Australians and from the collections of museums, galleries, libraries and archives across the country. Find out about the collective image network that makes up Picture Australia and the opportunities for you to contribute.”

6.30 pm, Monday 14 July 2008
National Library of Australia
Screening: LG1 Theatre
Parkes Place, Canberra

Free entry
Bookings essential: 02 6262 1271

The event is part of the Vivid National Photography Festival. Once I’ve given the talk I hope to reflect on things in writing here (reader, live in hope).

The Evangelists of Empire online journal, part of the History Conference and Seminar series from the School of Historical Studies at the University of Melbourne (deep breath, still with me?) was launched today. I worked on it with my colleagues at the eScholarship Research Centre, James Williams and Eve Young, and the lovely editors from History, Amanda Barry and Joanna Cruickshank.

All that wonderful research, freely available to the public and much more easily accessible (through Google) than it would have been pre-Web. Not to mention a print version of the entire journal finished and available at the same time.

We used Open Journal Systems for the content management system, and are pretty pleased with the results – although I tore my hair out at times working with it (and I really did tear my hair out – a bad habit developed since having a baby). Deferring to the blurb, “Open Journal Systems (OJS) is a journal management and publishing system that has been developed by the Public Knowledge Project through its federally funded efforts to expand and improve access to research.”

Making the journal look different to so many of the other journals using OJS involved much tinkering with the css and the templates (and unfortunately having to resort to hard coding content into the about template :( – ah well) – that’s the good thing about open source. But I really should give some feed back to the developers about what improvements would have made my life easier – that’s the other thing about open source – finding the time to contribute when the next project beckons…