Where we find our archives often shapes how we think about their meaning. Preserving context is both a key tenet for archivists and an interpretive challenge for historians. This is why we should always be alert to the oddities: items that seem out of place in an otherwise coherent collection.
Consider Sir Thomas Gordon’s 1946 letter describing an airline flight from Sydney to the small town of Hurn in England. Costing £375, or $28,000 today, the trip represented a huge investment in a business that directly threatened his own empire. So, why did he fly?
Sir Thomas was an Australian shipping magnate. The son of a successful farmer, he was born in Ardrossan, South Australia, in 1882. At the age of 18, Tom began work in the shipping
