A lot of folks collect memorabilia to have reminders around of what they love and what means a lot to them. (Even I have sports memorabilia! A Brisbane Bullets button-down shirt signed by the team from 2007 lol.) Even before I got rid of a ton of stuff to move out of Australia, I would keep ticket stubs, flyers, posters, museum guides.. tactile things that would be triggers for wonderful memories. I’ve used photos this way for so long, it’s not surprising that I started collecting this ephemera of my life. It’s personal and means something to me, and it centres on my experiences.
When I lived in Brisbane, seeing live music was something I did frequently and not everything had tickets/posters, but I loved grabbing ones that were meaningful to me out of a dingy bathroom at a venue or stapled to a pole outside. There’s a couple of non-Aus brands that appear in these posters I had up in my Brisbane house, but most are the wonderful group of local bands I came to love in the early 00s.
I could probably write a post just about my love of collecting/sending postcards, and this is my modest showing from the same Brisbane home as the posters above. In my Toronto apartment, I’ve got so many. They take up a decent amount of wall real estate because they are all little nuggets of memory about a person and/or a place.
It’s likely no surprise about a lot of the music ticket stubs below, but I’ve kept on tucking away ticket stubs as the years went on and I plodded about the world. This lot is from concerts, movies, sports, other sorts of events.. and the Zoltar fortune machine in Santa Monica hahaha. The museum stuff comes later, don’t worry lol.
A lot of these photos were taken recently as I journeyed down memory lane flipping through the travel journal I slapped stuff in between around 2008 to 2013 with a smattering after. When I was home in 2016 going through all of the stuff I’d left packed up at home, I found a ton of museum/historic site/attraction tickets and stuff – so here’s a bunch of it with some tickets and the like. And yes, the Royal College of Surgeons museum ticket is the best ever.
Lastly, these aren’t really ephemera as such, but artefacts from another Nicole Time. Some of the vinyl I had to leave behind rather than bring home, my absolutely terribly painted miniatures from back in the RPG days, a page of my University archaeology workbook (we had a faux site called the TARDIS, so it might help make Cybermen make more sense). And yeah, yeah I did a class project on gender and RPGs. I hope you enjoy this extremely niche post of peak nerd.
The Whole Nicole 
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