Kept in the margins
How do we know any of this?
Every date in this notebook was checked twice before it was inked in. This page is the shelf we checked against — ranked from most trusted to handled-with-gloves — and a way to run the same checks without us.
Four families, in order of trust
First
Statutes and gazettes
The law says what it says. An act such as New South Wales's Gambling (Two-Up) Act can be read verbatim, current and dated. When a statute and a summary disagree, the statute wins.
Second
Digitised newspaper archives
Contemporaneous and searchable by the day in a national library's digitised runs. A paper printed in November 1861 does not know what the Melbourne Cup will become — exactly why we trust it on the first running.
Third
Etymological dictionaries
And where does memory go wrong most often? On the words themselves. Open a dictionary rather than trusting a story, and the small house is right there at the root, the diminutive doing its ordinary work long before anyone attached a licence to the building.
Fourth
Civic and institutional histories
Rich in texture and usually written with a purpose. We use them for colour, and cross-check every date and figure against the first two families before it enters our margins.
Enthusiasm is not evidence.
Which is why we handle three kinds with gloves: memoirs, which compress decades into a good story; promotional house histories, written to flatter the house; and undated web pages, which cannot be checked against anything. We read them. We never let them stand alone.
Check us yourself
You do not need our shelf to audit this notebook. Two habits are enough.
- Take any date we print — 1638 for the Ridotto, 1861 for the Melbourne Cup, 1863 for Monte Carlo — and test it against two references that do not cite each other.
- Where we describe a law, read the statute's current text yourself rather than anyone's summary of it — ours included.
The standing offer
Any claim on this site can be challenged by email. Send us the sentence you doubt and we will answer with our sources — or correct the page and say so.