The Shorthand Entry

One of the entries in the autograph book is in shorthand. This is not surprising given that Minnie was a student at Newcastle Business College, shorthand was an elementary skill for many young ladies at the time.

In the modern world of online technology, voice recorders and touch typing we had initially thought translating something written in this little used script would prove difficult.

A call was put out to council staff, and we had a surprising number of positive responses from people who either had the skills themselves or knew somebody who could help. Thanks to their assistance, we can now share the translated shorthand entry. We discovered the amazing skill of shorthand is still alive and well, and not a "lost art" after all.

The writing has been identified as a hybrid of Teeline and Pitman scripts, and the text reads:

"'Brotherhood and Love and Honour!' is the motto for the world."

This is a quote from a Henry Lawson poem titled The Ghost.

This work by Lake Macquarie City Library is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License