Yesterday we spent much of the morning doing some prep-work at the house before plasterers, tilers, painters, and cabinet-makers start doing their thing.

This involved ripping out the old carpet in some rooms, and below the underlay there were some great old-time newspapers dating back to 1970 that were put down when the house was built.

It's great having a look over the old papers and seeing the articles and ads from the time. In going over them, one particularly relevant article caught my eye (see inset): titled 'The deluge that almost submerged Brisbane', it's an article about the 1893 flood in the Telegraph from 26 May 1970. See the full article here (apologies for the scanning quality and stitching, my scanner's on the way out...).

Only four years before the great 1974 flood, its an interesting read, especially the first paragraph which implies the public perception that Somerset Dam was keeping the city safe from similar floods. Isn't it funny how history has repeated itself barely 40 years on! The irony!

I really loved the last few sentences: "But even the city's greatest pessimists today do not really expect to see boats making their way up Queen St again. Or children swimming in water as high as city shop awnings - much as the youngsters might like it". I bet he was eating his words four years later.

I've also scanned the top of the Courier Mail from 8 June 1970, which you can see here.

It's really interesting how times change. In that same Courier Mail, the news of two Australian soldiers killed in Vietnam was only a three sentence blurb down the bottom of a page, and we all know how those type of things are reported in the media these days.