Are You Related to the McCormacks?
08 11 23 14:24 Filed in: Jim
Over the years Sue and I have been writing our family stories, we have developed our own little tradition of excursions. We spent a day at Croydon visiting our mother’s childhood haunts; we parked outside our own childhood home and retraced our walk to school; and we spent a day driving between the Pakenham Bourke’s properties.
Now, after months of piecing together the McCormack and Hamilton backgrounds, marvelling at the story of three McCormack boys marrying three Hamilton girls, we were going to visit the actual sites. Very conveniently, we could stay at Sue and Jono’s property nearby. We roughed out an itinerary, and a food and wine list. The forecast was dubious, but we would mostly be in the car. Jono offered himself as designated driver.
On the first morning, we pulled into Molesworth, familiar as the second last town before Sue and Jono’s road. I looked at the hall, right on the main road. We took pictures, and peered in the dirty windows.
It wasn’t until I walked down the side of the building that the significance of it all hit me. There, on a hill behind the town strip, sat Balham Hill, the red brick house our grandmother grew up in. Her father had donated the land for the hall. We noted that the hill was much too steep for young ladies to navigate.
The right turn into Whanregarwen Road was very near. We parked in the clearing next to the Rail Trail, and Sue and I climbed a rough cutting until we could see Balham Hill again, in its home paddock.
We turned to look out across the river to the hills beyond. What a view they had had. Not even the great 1870 flood would have reached the house perched right up there. And how close to the homestead the train line had been! The twice daily trains would have made their presence felt.
I thought about Grace, our grandmother growing up here, in this grand house, going to primary school in Molesworth, a short walk away. Her father, John, was an important man in the district, a Justice of the Peace and on the Yea council. When Grace was seven, the house had been extended and rebuilt.
A little further on we came across Balham Hill’s proper driveway, and a different view of the house. With her knowledgable eye, Sue noted the quality of the the land itself, and of the farming techniques, where many trees were left in the pastures.
With an eye on Google Maps, we drove on. The property up the road a bit had belonged to the previous generation: our great, great grandparents, James and Bridget Hamilton. We knew that they had selected the property, “Cremona” estate, 1220 acres, in 1866. It was “situated on the southern concave side of a great sweeping arc of the Goulburn River … rising to high ground in the south where it fronts the Whanregarwen Road.”
The "great sweeping arc” is still there, in spite of 150 years of floods and droughts. It means that the river leaves Whanregarwen Road at right angles. We stopped at that spot, looking out over the river flats. “This would have been Cremona land”, said Sue.
A farm bike pulled up alongside us. We can’t remember exactly what the man said, but it was something like “Can I help you?” but tinged with suspicion. As we wound down our windows, I thought of Chris’s quip about being ready to bail us out when we were picked up for loitering
After some explanations, Jono mentioned his and Sue’s nearby property on the Gobur Road, and it emerged that this young man, Matt Ridd, owned the business, Murrindindi Kitchens, who had put in their kitchen. The atmosphere warmed immediately, and Matt told us what he remembered of the old house at Cremona. His family, too, went back many generations in that area.
He was full of stories. The old house was gone before he was born, but he used to play around there, by the area known as the “old Cremona Drive”, where there were old bricks and things. There was an old brick lined well, down near the river, full of snakes. There had been a communal sheep wash at Balham Hill. We drank it all in eagerly.
Eventually he turned his bike around and led us up the road, around the corner to an unmarked farm gate. We took photos, and pointed to twin lines of deciduous trees that could well have flanked Cremona’s driveway.
Off in the distance the river seemed a long way down. We had read the story of the 1870 flood surrounding and isolating the original house, and of James rescuing the family in the middle of the night, by crossing a flooded creek with horse and dray. Afterwards he rebuilt the house on much higher ground. Matt left us and we drove off in the other direction towards Alexandra.
As we drove, I pictured James driving his family to Sunday Mass along this road. The story goes that he would hurry up his daughters, complaining that his “Presbyterian horses couldn’t wait all day for lazy Catholics.”
The winding road down the hill into Alexandra from Cremona, is a familiar route for Jono and me. As we arrived in Alexandra, we were looking at the town with different eyes. We passed the impressive Shire Hall and Library and wondered whether any of the Hamiltons had graced the steps of either building. Charles Hamilton, James’s only son, and heir to Cremona was Shire president three times, so he may have even been involved in their creation.
The people with the answers are now in Alexandra Cemetery, our next destination.
We easily found the Catholic section with its assortment of Celtic Crosses, the tallest belonging to Charles’s wife Hannah, who died quite young, leaving two young children and a baby.
We did not find Charles or his parents in this section, so we decided to have Margaret’s salad rolls and a cup of tea in the sun and continue the search after lunch.
In the Protestant section, we did find more Hamiltons. Agnes, James’s mother, who emigrated with him, and James himself is also on the headstone. You may remember from our previous post, that they were both Protestants. Very fitting and buried in the correct section. Buried with them, is Brigid, who chose not to be buried in the Catholic section but here with her husband and mother in law. Their daughter Sara, who died at twenty-three, is also buried here. We did not find Charles although we do know he is buried at Alexandra too. Our excuse is that this was our first graveyard and we were not yet expert headstone hunters. I will return on my next trip into Alex with my new found expertise.
That night, in front of the fire at Sue and Jono’s house, as Jono cooked our Spanikopita dinner, Sue and I poured over our notes. I opened up and reread the 2006 article we had found in the journal “Eureka Street”, where Peter Hamilton, great grandson of the original Hamiltons of Cremona, describes his own visit to Alexandra cemetery, and the site of Cremona. Right there, in the article, was the name Les Ridd.
Matt Ridd, perched on his motorbike on the side of Whanregarwen Road, had described his dad’s recent illness, and here was a story about him taking Peter around Cremona in 2005.
Matt had given Sue his mobile number, and she texted him the link. Matt immediately rang back. Sue and Matt shared more stories. It was exciting to find that real world link with our past.
Later, on the strength of our interaction with Matt, I reached out to Peter Hamilton, author of the article. More about that in a later post.
The next morning, our first destination was Landscape at Tallarook. As we drove via Yea on the same route the young Hamilton girls would have taken, we again wondered how the three young ladies travelled to the Tallarook railhead and how long it took them. It took us fifty minutes on a good bitumen road.
Originally John McCormack Snr, of Red Barn, had bought the property, then called Tallarook House. Some of his sons had lived there, and, eventually one of them, James, became its long term owner.
After they were married, James and Grace changed the name of the property from Tallarook House to ‘Landscape.’ Archbishop Little in his small family history waxes lyrical about the property and the life there.
…….’Landscape’ a more fitting name for the unique and pleasant vistas of scenery viewed from its open wide verandahs.
After settling in at “Landscape”, husband and wife took a prominent part in the social, civic, charitable ,religious, and sporting life of the community and continued to do so throughout their lives. Landscape with its gracious hostess was a perfect setting…….
It is still is a beautiful, prime pastoral property. When it sold most recently in 2017, as a much reduced holding, it still boasted three kilometres of Goulburn River frontage.
Landscape today still looks very much the gracious country house. It still sits amidst a cluster of small houses and large stone stables. The lovely old house overlooks the Goulburn and is set in a large well tended garden dominated by old stately trees. We wondered if James and Grace had planted the trees.
We wanted to stop and have a really good look, but the security cameras and the gentleman trimming the hedge were a little off putting. We settled for another drive past. On one side of the house Landscape now has its own vineyard, a more recent addition we think. Not so Tennis Court Paddock, on the other side of the house. No longer a tennis court, but we could imagine in days past it would have been a well used addition.
It was a short drive from Landscape to Tallarook. The old railway line, now a rail trail, had followed the road. It culminated in the Tallarook Railway Station, which is still in operation, on the main Melbourne to Sydney line. Back when James McCormack was establishing himself in the district, it was the railhead. Although much reduced in capacity and importance, it still has the feeling of a substantial, permanent structure. What had been high wide doors have been bricked in. There are a few historical signs, but it was hard to get a sense of the bustling, smelly, noisy place it once would have been. We took photos and moved on.
We drove into the grassy grounds of St Joseph’s. There is very little information about this church. It was blessed in July 3rd 1887 by Archbishop Carr.
It is sad to realise that this beautiful bluestone building is now virtually unused. It is not listed on the Diocese website.
Jono had sent an email to the Seymour parish priest the day before, in the hope that we might get a peek inside, but there was no reply.
The slate roof looked sound, and all the windows were intact, thanks to heavy wire screens on the outside of them. Archbishop Little tells us that “The memory of Grace and James McCormack has been retained in the Catholic community of Tallarook by the erection in St. Joseph's Church of ornate stained glass windows…”
We couldn’t really see the windows very well from the outside, but they looked substantial.
The only other buildings on the block were two little ramshackle outdoor dunnies, tucked under the trees on the outskirts of the cleared area.”
James and Grace had been dominating our thoughts in Tallarook, and now we drove on the the Seymour cemetery to find their graves.
Far from finding a quiet country cemetery, we found ourselves over the road from the busy midweek races at the Seymour Racetrack. Dodging horse floats, we turned right and parked in the cemetery grounds. We huddled quietly by the car, hoping that we weren’t intruding on a funeral still in progress. The land around Seymour is dry and stony, and heavy grey skies reminded us that rain had been forecast.
The sections in the cemetery were clearly labelled, and we headed toward the forest of Celtic Crosses in the Catholic section.
There were McCormacks everywhere. But the largest marble Celtic cross marked the graves of Grace, aged 56 and James JP (Justin of the Peace), aged 78.
We drove through Seymour. I tried to see it as it had been when James was president of the Council, but the church has been rebuilt, the town has grown, and the sad, unkempt, crowded together little houses and struggling small businesses overpower any sense of history.
Rain was still threatening, and the wind was cold, as we pulled up at the Tourist Park alongside the river in Euroa. Parked a few cars away, was Janet, who Sue and Jono knew from Trust for Nature. Janet is a local landowner, active in all local environmental organisations and activities. She was cleaning up, after running a morning water-quality training session in the river.
When we explained our mission, she exclaimed, in her larger-than-life voice,
“Oh! Are you related to the McCormacks?”
“Yes, our grandmother was a McCormack.”
It felt real. We did belong to these people: men who had dominated four local councils and been part of all the important local infrastructure decisions for the second half of the nineteenth century, and the beginning of the twentieth. Families whose weddings were written up in the local papers, whose names were on the stained glass windows in the churches, whose memorials dominated the cemeteries.
We ate our egg sandwiches and drank tea from the thermos huddled in a shelter by the river. Euroa felt older, more solid and prosperous than Seymour.
The Euroa McCormack was Thomas, the eldest of John and Jane’s children, born at Red Barn in Beveridge. We hadn’t spent much time exploring Thomas’s story, because we had been so taken by the romance of his younger brothers, James, John and Michael who had married the three Hamilton sisters. But here, in Euroa, it felt important to fit him into the story.
We had a few notes, (and a bit of subsequent expert input, to be explained later) and spent a bit of time pulling his story together.
Thomas was the eldest son of John and Jane McCormack of Red Barn Beveridge. He was born in 1851.
After living with his brothers James and Michael at Landscape, Thomas purchased a property in Mooroopna, near Shepparton, in 1882.
The property was called “The Desert”, and was in Toolamba Road. Like the other family properties, Thomas’s was along the Goulburn River, but much further north.
Soon after moving to Mooroopna, Thomas married Bridget Agnes Cooke, of Pyalong. There’s more to find our about this, but we think that Bridget’s brother John might have also invested in this property. Over time, it seems that the property developed into a “fine property” called May Park Estate.
Thomas and Bridget were active community members. In particular, Thomas was very involved with the Mooroopna Hospital Board. They had four sons and two daughters.
In 1908, Thomas and Bridget sold up in Mooroopna and bought “Springside” in Gooram, near Euroa. Thomas was 57, and Bridget, 55. It seems they immediately became involved in their new community.
In 1912, Bridget became sick with colon cancer. After a difficult two years, she died. She was 61.
Thomas remarried two years later, in 1916. We don’t know much about his second wife, Elizabeth. She was the daughter of Patrick and Elizabeth O’Connor of “Parkview”, Kilmore.
Then, in 1918, further tragedy struck. Daughter Mary, who lived with Thomas and Elizabeth at Gooram, died, aged thirty.
We can only speculate about Thomas’s motives, but, quite soon, he sold up and they moved into town. His new house was “Marengo” in Anderson St.
Thomas and Elizabeth had thirteen years together. It seems they built a busy, community-focussed life in Euroa. Among other things, Thomas was involved in the District Racing Club, the Agricultural Society, the Band, the Swimming Club and the Bush Nursing Hospital.
Thomas died in 1929, aged 78.
Elizabeth, who is buried alongside him in Euroa, lived in Hawthorn for a further fourteen years. She died in 1943.
Euroa Cemetery, like Seymour Cemetery, is in a rather uninspiring location. Separated from the town by the Hume Freeway, it sits amongst flat empty paddocks.
It was still cold and raining a little, as we approached the rows of graves, looking for the Catholic section and the telltale sign of the Celtic Crosses. Well practised now, we headed for the tallest cross.
Sure enough, we found the McCormack’s lichen encrusted, but still readable, very large granite Celtic Cross. Buried here are Thomas McCormack and Brigid, his first wife, and mother of his children, who died fourteen years before him. Only four years later, Mary their daughter also died, and is buried with her parents. Many years later, in 1943, Elizabeth, Thomas’s second wife, was also interred in this plot. She had lived in Hawthorn after Thomas’s death, but chose to be buried here with him.
We were also fascinated to see, crowded in next to the McCormack plot, the priests and nuns of Euroa. Notably, the nuns' graves were a little smaller.
Having found Thomas’s grave we set off to find his property, Springside, at Gooram.
We drove into the Strathbogie Ranges on the beautiful Euroa-Merton Road for seventeen kilometres, and then turned right, onto a long straight road that followed the valley.
It was a lovely tree-lined road with only one or two properties along it. It seemed very remote to us. What must it have been like when Thomas and Brigid lived here?
The first indication that we were there, was a large new sign, ‘Springside’ at the beginning of a long drive that disappeared over the hill.
Of great interest though was the very large Banksia marginata on the road verge, right opposite the gate. There are very few original Banksia marginata left in the Strathbogie Ranges, and we had never seen such a large one. We wondered how old it was and if it had been growing there, as Thomas and family drove and rode past.
As no house was obvious here, we drove on. Almost at the end of the road, there was the house, sitting quietly in its old garden. It is not as grand a house as Landscape, but it looks substantial and comfortable. Thomas’s white, weatherboard house is surrounded on three sides by a wide verandah and we could imagine Thomas sitting on the verandah, looking across the lush paddocks to the distant hills, fires roaring in the fireplaces inside. It was certainly a lovely spot.
Our last day of graveyard hopping dawned cold and wet again. Very appropriate and atmospheric weather, and Yea Cemetery did not disappoint.
The old cemetery, surrounded by bushland, was tucked away on the hill, behind Yea township. The newer section of the cemetery, lies bland, uninteresting and uninspiring, out of sight.
Unlike all the other cemeteries that have been in flat and open expanses, Yea is set in a hilly spot. We arrived and walked up the small, treed hill, looking once again for the Catholic section. Not as many Celtic Crosses to guide us here and no clear signage. Near the top of the hill we began to see the Irish surnames, so the hunt for our great grandparents began in earnest. It was raining more heavily now, and we thought we were to be disappointed, but Jono saved the day.
Not a Celtic Cross, but a large impressive slab, with all that we sought buried here. It was sobering to think that our grandmother, Grace had stood here, as the bodies of John and Joan (previously called Johanna) McCormack, her parents, were interred. Maybe our father as a four year old child had been there too.
Also on the stone were John’s and Joan’s infant son Aloysius who died aged ten months and Cyril, Grace’s brother and his wife Judith. Quite a family plot.
What a beautiful little cemetery in which to end our journey around Central Victoria and how fitting to end it with the resting place of our great grandparents.
Now, after months of piecing together the McCormack and Hamilton backgrounds, marvelling at the story of three McCormack boys marrying three Hamilton girls, we were going to visit the actual sites. Very conveniently, we could stay at Sue and Jono’s property nearby. We roughed out an itinerary, and a food and wine list. The forecast was dubious, but we would mostly be in the car. Jono offered himself as designated driver.
On the first morning, we pulled into Molesworth, familiar as the second last town before Sue and Jono’s road. I looked at the hall, right on the main road. We took pictures, and peered in the dirty windows.
It wasn’t until I walked down the side of the building that the significance of it all hit me. There, on a hill behind the town strip, sat Balham Hill, the red brick house our grandmother grew up in. Her father had donated the land for the hall. We noted that the hill was much too steep for young ladies to navigate.
The right turn into Whanregarwen Road was very near. We parked in the clearing next to the Rail Trail, and Sue and I climbed a rough cutting until we could see Balham Hill again, in its home paddock.
We turned to look out across the river to the hills beyond. What a view they had had. Not even the great 1870 flood would have reached the house perched right up there. And how close to the homestead the train line had been! The twice daily trains would have made their presence felt.
I thought about Grace, our grandmother growing up here, in this grand house, going to primary school in Molesworth, a short walk away. Her father, John, was an important man in the district, a Justice of the Peace and on the Yea council. When Grace was seven, the house had been extended and rebuilt.
A little further on we came across Balham Hill’s proper driveway, and a different view of the house. With her knowledgable eye, Sue noted the quality of the the land itself, and of the farming techniques, where many trees were left in the pastures.
With an eye on Google Maps, we drove on. The property up the road a bit had belonged to the previous generation: our great, great grandparents, James and Bridget Hamilton. We knew that they had selected the property, “Cremona” estate, 1220 acres, in 1866. It was “situated on the southern concave side of a great sweeping arc of the Goulburn River … rising to high ground in the south where it fronts the Whanregarwen Road.”
The "great sweeping arc” is still there, in spite of 150 years of floods and droughts. It means that the river leaves Whanregarwen Road at right angles. We stopped at that spot, looking out over the river flats. “This would have been Cremona land”, said Sue.
A farm bike pulled up alongside us. We can’t remember exactly what the man said, but it was something like “Can I help you?” but tinged with suspicion. As we wound down our windows, I thought of Chris’s quip about being ready to bail us out when we were picked up for loitering
After some explanations, Jono mentioned his and Sue’s nearby property on the Gobur Road, and it emerged that this young man, Matt Ridd, owned the business, Murrindindi Kitchens, who had put in their kitchen. The atmosphere warmed immediately, and Matt told us what he remembered of the old house at Cremona. His family, too, went back many generations in that area.
He was full of stories. The old house was gone before he was born, but he used to play around there, by the area known as the “old Cremona Drive”, where there were old bricks and things. There was an old brick lined well, down near the river, full of snakes. There had been a communal sheep wash at Balham Hill. We drank it all in eagerly.
Eventually he turned his bike around and led us up the road, around the corner to an unmarked farm gate. We took photos, and pointed to twin lines of deciduous trees that could well have flanked Cremona’s driveway.
Off in the distance the river seemed a long way down. We had read the story of the 1870 flood surrounding and isolating the original house, and of James rescuing the family in the middle of the night, by crossing a flooded creek with horse and dray. Afterwards he rebuilt the house on much higher ground. Matt left us and we drove off in the other direction towards Alexandra.
As we drove, I pictured James driving his family to Sunday Mass along this road. The story goes that he would hurry up his daughters, complaining that his “Presbyterian horses couldn’t wait all day for lazy Catholics.”
The winding road down the hill into Alexandra from Cremona, is a familiar route for Jono and me. As we arrived in Alexandra, we were looking at the town with different eyes. We passed the impressive Shire Hall and Library and wondered whether any of the Hamiltons had graced the steps of either building. Charles Hamilton, James’s only son, and heir to Cremona was Shire president three times, so he may have even been involved in their creation.
The people with the answers are now in Alexandra Cemetery, our next destination.
We easily found the Catholic section with its assortment of Celtic Crosses, the tallest belonging to Charles’s wife Hannah, who died quite young, leaving two young children and a baby.
We did not find Charles or his parents in this section, so we decided to have Margaret’s salad rolls and a cup of tea in the sun and continue the search after lunch.
In the Protestant section, we did find more Hamiltons. Agnes, James’s mother, who emigrated with him, and James himself is also on the headstone. You may remember from our previous post, that they were both Protestants. Very fitting and buried in the correct section. Buried with them, is Brigid, who chose not to be buried in the Catholic section but here with her husband and mother in law. Their daughter Sara, who died at twenty-three, is also buried here. We did not find Charles although we do know he is buried at Alexandra too. Our excuse is that this was our first graveyard and we were not yet expert headstone hunters. I will return on my next trip into Alex with my new found expertise.
That night, in front of the fire at Sue and Jono’s house, as Jono cooked our Spanikopita dinner, Sue and I poured over our notes. I opened up and reread the 2006 article we had found in the journal “Eureka Street”, where Peter Hamilton, great grandson of the original Hamiltons of Cremona, describes his own visit to Alexandra cemetery, and the site of Cremona. Right there, in the article, was the name Les Ridd.
Matt Ridd, perched on his motorbike on the side of Whanregarwen Road, had described his dad’s recent illness, and here was a story about him taking Peter around Cremona in 2005.
Matt had given Sue his mobile number, and she texted him the link. Matt immediately rang back. Sue and Matt shared more stories. It was exciting to find that real world link with our past.
Later, on the strength of our interaction with Matt, I reached out to Peter Hamilton, author of the article. More about that in a later post.
The next morning, our first destination was Landscape at Tallarook. As we drove via Yea on the same route the young Hamilton girls would have taken, we again wondered how the three young ladies travelled to the Tallarook railhead and how long it took them. It took us fifty minutes on a good bitumen road.
Originally John McCormack Snr, of Red Barn, had bought the property, then called Tallarook House. Some of his sons had lived there, and, eventually one of them, James, became its long term owner.
After they were married, James and Grace changed the name of the property from Tallarook House to ‘Landscape.’ Archbishop Little in his small family history waxes lyrical about the property and the life there.
…….’Landscape’ a more fitting name for the unique and pleasant vistas of scenery viewed from its open wide verandahs.
After settling in at “Landscape”, husband and wife took a prominent part in the social, civic, charitable ,religious, and sporting life of the community and continued to do so throughout their lives. Landscape with its gracious hostess was a perfect setting…….
It is still is a beautiful, prime pastoral property. When it sold most recently in 2017, as a much reduced holding, it still boasted three kilometres of Goulburn River frontage.
Landscape today still looks very much the gracious country house. It still sits amidst a cluster of small houses and large stone stables. The lovely old house overlooks the Goulburn and is set in a large well tended garden dominated by old stately trees. We wondered if James and Grace had planted the trees.
We wanted to stop and have a really good look, but the security cameras and the gentleman trimming the hedge were a little off putting. We settled for another drive past. On one side of the house Landscape now has its own vineyard, a more recent addition we think. Not so Tennis Court Paddock, on the other side of the house. No longer a tennis court, but we could imagine in days past it would have been a well used addition.
It was a short drive from Landscape to Tallarook. The old railway line, now a rail trail, had followed the road. It culminated in the Tallarook Railway Station, which is still in operation, on the main Melbourne to Sydney line. Back when James McCormack was establishing himself in the district, it was the railhead. Although much reduced in capacity and importance, it still has the feeling of a substantial, permanent structure. What had been high wide doors have been bricked in. There are a few historical signs, but it was hard to get a sense of the bustling, smelly, noisy place it once would have been. We took photos and moved on.
We drove into the grassy grounds of St Joseph’s. There is very little information about this church. It was blessed in July 3rd 1887 by Archbishop Carr.
It is sad to realise that this beautiful bluestone building is now virtually unused. It is not listed on the Diocese website.
Jono had sent an email to the Seymour parish priest the day before, in the hope that we might get a peek inside, but there was no reply.
The slate roof looked sound, and all the windows were intact, thanks to heavy wire screens on the outside of them. Archbishop Little tells us that “The memory of Grace and James McCormack has been retained in the Catholic community of Tallarook by the erection in St. Joseph's Church of ornate stained glass windows…”
We couldn’t really see the windows very well from the outside, but they looked substantial.
The only other buildings on the block were two little ramshackle outdoor dunnies, tucked under the trees on the outskirts of the cleared area.”
James and Grace had been dominating our thoughts in Tallarook, and now we drove on the the Seymour cemetery to find their graves.
Far from finding a quiet country cemetery, we found ourselves over the road from the busy midweek races at the Seymour Racetrack. Dodging horse floats, we turned right and parked in the cemetery grounds. We huddled quietly by the car, hoping that we weren’t intruding on a funeral still in progress. The land around Seymour is dry and stony, and heavy grey skies reminded us that rain had been forecast.
The sections in the cemetery were clearly labelled, and we headed toward the forest of Celtic Crosses in the Catholic section.
There were McCormacks everywhere. But the largest marble Celtic cross marked the graves of Grace, aged 56 and James JP (Justin of the Peace), aged 78.
We drove through Seymour. I tried to see it as it had been when James was president of the Council, but the church has been rebuilt, the town has grown, and the sad, unkempt, crowded together little houses and struggling small businesses overpower any sense of history.
Rain was still threatening, and the wind was cold, as we pulled up at the Tourist Park alongside the river in Euroa. Parked a few cars away, was Janet, who Sue and Jono knew from Trust for Nature. Janet is a local landowner, active in all local environmental organisations and activities. She was cleaning up, after running a morning water-quality training session in the river.
When we explained our mission, she exclaimed, in her larger-than-life voice,
“Oh! Are you related to the McCormacks?”
“Yes, our grandmother was a McCormack.”
It felt real. We did belong to these people: men who had dominated four local councils and been part of all the important local infrastructure decisions for the second half of the nineteenth century, and the beginning of the twentieth. Families whose weddings were written up in the local papers, whose names were on the stained glass windows in the churches, whose memorials dominated the cemeteries.
We ate our egg sandwiches and drank tea from the thermos huddled in a shelter by the river. Euroa felt older, more solid and prosperous than Seymour.
The Euroa McCormack was Thomas, the eldest of John and Jane’s children, born at Red Barn in Beveridge. We hadn’t spent much time exploring Thomas’s story, because we had been so taken by the romance of his younger brothers, James, John and Michael who had married the three Hamilton sisters. But here, in Euroa, it felt important to fit him into the story.
We had a few notes, (and a bit of subsequent expert input, to be explained later) and spent a bit of time pulling his story together.
Thomas was the eldest son of John and Jane McCormack of Red Barn Beveridge. He was born in 1851.
After living with his brothers James and Michael at Landscape, Thomas purchased a property in Mooroopna, near Shepparton, in 1882.
The property was called “The Desert”, and was in Toolamba Road. Like the other family properties, Thomas’s was along the Goulburn River, but much further north.
Soon after moving to Mooroopna, Thomas married Bridget Agnes Cooke, of Pyalong. There’s more to find our about this, but we think that Bridget’s brother John might have also invested in this property. Over time, it seems that the property developed into a “fine property” called May Park Estate.
Thomas and Bridget were active community members. In particular, Thomas was very involved with the Mooroopna Hospital Board. They had four sons and two daughters.
In 1908, Thomas and Bridget sold up in Mooroopna and bought “Springside” in Gooram, near Euroa. Thomas was 57, and Bridget, 55. It seems they immediately became involved in their new community.
In 1912, Bridget became sick with colon cancer. After a difficult two years, she died. She was 61.
Thomas remarried two years later, in 1916. We don’t know much about his second wife, Elizabeth. She was the daughter of Patrick and Elizabeth O’Connor of “Parkview”, Kilmore.
Then, in 1918, further tragedy struck. Daughter Mary, who lived with Thomas and Elizabeth at Gooram, died, aged thirty.
We can only speculate about Thomas’s motives, but, quite soon, he sold up and they moved into town. His new house was “Marengo” in Anderson St.
Thomas and Elizabeth had thirteen years together. It seems they built a busy, community-focussed life in Euroa. Among other things, Thomas was involved in the District Racing Club, the Agricultural Society, the Band, the Swimming Club and the Bush Nursing Hospital.
Thomas died in 1929, aged 78.
Elizabeth, who is buried alongside him in Euroa, lived in Hawthorn for a further fourteen years. She died in 1943.
Euroa Cemetery, like Seymour Cemetery, is in a rather uninspiring location. Separated from the town by the Hume Freeway, it sits amongst flat empty paddocks.
It was still cold and raining a little, as we approached the rows of graves, looking for the Catholic section and the telltale sign of the Celtic Crosses. Well practised now, we headed for the tallest cross.
Sure enough, we found the McCormack’s lichen encrusted, but still readable, very large granite Celtic Cross. Buried here are Thomas McCormack and Brigid, his first wife, and mother of his children, who died fourteen years before him. Only four years later, Mary their daughter also died, and is buried with her parents. Many years later, in 1943, Elizabeth, Thomas’s second wife, was also interred in this plot. She had lived in Hawthorn after Thomas’s death, but chose to be buried here with him.
We were also fascinated to see, crowded in next to the McCormack plot, the priests and nuns of Euroa. Notably, the nuns' graves were a little smaller.
Having found Thomas’s grave we set off to find his property, Springside, at Gooram.
We drove into the Strathbogie Ranges on the beautiful Euroa-Merton Road for seventeen kilometres, and then turned right, onto a long straight road that followed the valley.
It was a lovely tree-lined road with only one or two properties along it. It seemed very remote to us. What must it have been like when Thomas and Brigid lived here?
The first indication that we were there, was a large new sign, ‘Springside’ at the beginning of a long drive that disappeared over the hill.
Of great interest though was the very large Banksia marginata on the road verge, right opposite the gate. There are very few original Banksia marginata left in the Strathbogie Ranges, and we had never seen such a large one. We wondered how old it was and if it had been growing there, as Thomas and family drove and rode past.
As no house was obvious here, we drove on. Almost at the end of the road, there was the house, sitting quietly in its old garden. It is not as grand a house as Landscape, but it looks substantial and comfortable. Thomas’s white, weatherboard house is surrounded on three sides by a wide verandah and we could imagine Thomas sitting on the verandah, looking across the lush paddocks to the distant hills, fires roaring in the fireplaces inside. It was certainly a lovely spot.
Our last day of graveyard hopping dawned cold and wet again. Very appropriate and atmospheric weather, and Yea Cemetery did not disappoint.
The old cemetery, surrounded by bushland, was tucked away on the hill, behind Yea township. The newer section of the cemetery, lies bland, uninteresting and uninspiring, out of sight.
Unlike all the other cemeteries that have been in flat and open expanses, Yea is set in a hilly spot. We arrived and walked up the small, treed hill, looking once again for the Catholic section. Not as many Celtic Crosses to guide us here and no clear signage. Near the top of the hill we began to see the Irish surnames, so the hunt for our great grandparents began in earnest. It was raining more heavily now, and we thought we were to be disappointed, but Jono saved the day.
Not a Celtic Cross, but a large impressive slab, with all that we sought buried here. It was sobering to think that our grandmother, Grace had stood here, as the bodies of John and Joan (previously called Johanna) McCormack, her parents, were interred. Maybe our father as a four year old child had been there too.
Also on the stone were John’s and Joan’s infant son Aloysius who died aged ten months and Cyril, Grace’s brother and his wife Judith. Quite a family plot.
What a beautiful little cemetery in which to end our journey around Central Victoria and how fitting to end it with the resting place of our great grandparents.
Comments
Families Along the Goulburn
19 07 23 14:00 Filed in: Jim
Recently we discovered a bit more about the Molesworth branch of our dad’s family. Down the rabbit hole we went.
It took weeks to piece together the snippets of information we had. We doubled checked information, discarded red herrings, created a timeline. We complained about the way names appeared and reappeared in different generations. We cut and pasted a colour coded chart. Finally, gradually, the stories came into focus in our minds.
Our story begins in Ireland.
Four families: McCormacks, Fords, Hamiltons and Ryans
Three of the families, the McCormacks. the Fords and the Ryans, all Catholics, all emigrated about 1848 from Southern Ireland: Limerick, Galway and Tipperary
The fourth family, the Hamiltons, were Protestants, of Scottish Irish heritage. They emigrated from Antrim, Northern Ireland, also in 1848.
The Northern Irish Hamiltons arrived with some money, ready to buy land. But
our Southern IrIsh were probably driven out by the general economic turmoil and devastation caused by the Irish Potato Famine of 1845-1852.
At that time, the vast majority of the Irish Catholic population had little or no access to land ownership and many lived in appalling poverty.
Ninety percent of the land in Ireland was owned by Protestant landowners, who rented it out in small parcels to Irish tenant farmers. Already poor and dependent on the potato crop, Irish families starved when successive harvests failed, due to Potato Blight. As a result, Irish people emigrated in large numbers, land hungry and ready to and make their fortunes.
The colony the McCormacks, Fords, Hamiltons and Ryans arrived and settled in, had been ‘opened up’ by the squatters coming down from north of the Murray and inland from Portland. The Aboriginal tribes had been largely dispossessed, vast fortunes had been made, and the landed aristocracy had emerged as a powerful force in the burgeoning colony.
It is both expected and fascinating to see our Irish immigrant forbears’ land acquisition and prosperity mirrored, in the opening up of land for settlement in Victoria. This took place over several decades, primarily through a series of land acts, designed to break up the vast holdings of the squatters and encourage agricultural development, population growth, and the establishment of communities.
Between 1865 and 1890 Land Acts enabled land to be acquired at a fair price, and paid off in instalments. Specified improvements had to be made such as fencing, clearing and cultivation.
As we will see, our Irish families also benefitted from the growth and prosperity stemming from the Gold Rush. In 1851 gold was discovered in Ballarat, leading to the 1850s Gold Rush, a transformative event in Victorian history.
The colony grew rapidly in both population and economic power and our families, among others, took full advantage of the opportunities offered.
They set about the serious business of acquiring property supplying the new, lucrative, growing market with their produce. Country towns around them grew and with increased wealth, substantial civic buildings and churches were built. Railways and roads were constructed providing quicker and easier access to markets and facilitating social and family connections.
It would have been an exciting time for our four families, as they bought and developed their land holdings and participated in the civic life of the Colony of Victoria, with its own Lieutenant-Governor and elected Victorian Legislative Council.
During the first fifteen years after arriving in the colony, our four Irish Families became two couples.
1 James Hamilton and Bridget Ryan
The protestant Hamilton family from Northern Ireland comprised only a mother and son. We know that James Hamilton’s father had recently died. James was in his late teens, when he and his mother emigrated to Port Phillip, with enough capital to acquire a property in the colony. They chose Upper Plenty, which at that time was a rural area.
The Ryan family also emigrated about 1848.
About seven years later, in 1855, James Hamilton married Bridget Ryan. Bridget was a Catholic. Sue and I know something of this quandary, being daughters of a similar “mixed marriage”. The wedding was held on a property “Richland” near the Hamilton’s place at Upper Plenty. The property belonged to Mr David Johnston
Archbishop Little, who is also related to these four families and has written about them, has a bit to say about this marriage:
“… the marriage of James and Bridget was a truly valid Catholic marriage in the eyes of the Church.”
What he means here is that James would have agreed to the children of the marriage being brought up Catholics. He certainly followed through with this, even driving his wife and children to church on Sundays. Two of their daughters later became nuns.
James and Bridget stayed on for a further twelve years in Upper Plenty, where the first six of their children were born. These children included Charles, Grace, Johanna and Kate. Johanna was our Great Grandmother.
Then, in 1866, they acquired “Cremona Estate”, near present day Molesworth. They ran dairy and beef cattle and grew cereals on the rich
river flats.
Cremona homestead was "situated on the southern concave side of a great sweeping arc of the Goulburn river ….. it fronts the Whanregarwen road distant some three miles east from the present township of Molesworth" 1866:
Six further children, another five of them girls, were born at Cremona, before Bridget’s death, at the age of 56, in 1889.
Archbishop Little writes glowingly of life at Cremona, and of the three eldest Hamilton girls in particular. He describes them as “charming, refined, eligible and capable young ladies.” He describes the children’s education. An in-house private tutor taught them Art, Music and Painting, as well as academic subjects. But they all helped out on the farm as well, including the older girls, Grace, Johanna and Kate.
2 John McCormack Snr and Jane Ford
We don’t know the initial activities of the McCormack and Ford families, until, in 1850, two years after landing in Port Phillip, John McCormack (Senior) married Jane Ford at St Francis Church on the corner of Lonsdale and Elizabeth streets in Melbourne. Both had been in their late twenties and unmarried when they emigrated.
St Francis church today, the oldest still operating Catholic church in Victoria:
The couple settled near present day Beveridge, renting a property “Red Barn”. The property was very near the main road from Melbourne to Sydney. The family worked hard and developed a dairy herd, specialising in cheese, which they initially sold to passing diggers on their way to the goldfields.
Red Barn Lane today:
There was money to be made, so much, that the couple were later able to settle their sons on properties along the Goulburn River.
The first, of these, in 1876, was the eldest, James McCormack, then aged 18. The property, called Tallarook House, (later renamed Landscape), was at Tallarook, a hundred kilometres from Mebourne. James was unmarried at this stage and Tallarook House remained without a mistress for a further twelve years. Clearly, James was very involved in the community. He was elected as a councillor for the Shire of Seymour in 1887.
"Landscape" today:
"Landscape" interior:
The second McCormack to be settled along the Goulburn River, was John Jnr. That property, acquired in 1886, called Balham Hill, was near Molesworth. John also became a councillor, for Yea Shire.
Balham Hill:
Balham Hill property:
The Big Romance
So now we have three properties along the Goulburn. James and Bridget Hamilton’s Cremona and John McCormack’s Balham Hill, both near Molesworth, and James McCormack’s Tallarook House, twelve miles away.
The Hamilton girls, Grace, Johanna and Kate probably had met the McCormack boys, James, John Jnr and their brother Michael, at church. They were all Catholics.
The Hamiltons and McCormacks were a natural social fit: all pasturalists and Catholics of Irish extraction.
Archbishop Little tells us that the “Hamilton girls” stabled their horses at Tallarook House when catching or meeting the trains, and “made eyes at the McCormack boys”.
The roads between the Upper Goulburn and the railhead at Tallarook, had been completed by 1880, and the railway from Tallarook to Yea was being built from 1883. So we suppose that the road from the Upper Goulburn to Tallarook would have been a substantial one, about the time the girls were using it. Tallarook was where farm produce, etc was taken to put on the train for the markets in Melbourne.
But it’s a long way from Molesworth to Tallarook. Were they driven in a carriage of some sort, accompanied by workers from Cremona? Did they ride their own horses all that way? It was too far for a day trip. Where did they stay? And had the Hamilton girls’ parents met the McCormack boys’ parents, who lived quite a long way away, at Beveridge?
It’s a love story we can only speculate about.
But, ultimately, three Hamilton girls married three McCormack boys.
The most important to us, was Johanna Hamilton, later called Joan, our great grandmother, who married John McCormack Jnr of Balham Hill, in 1888.
Her sister, Grace, married James McCormack of Tallarook House in 1890
And Kate was the third sister, who married Michael McCormack. They settled initially in Berwick, and later Benalla.
It took weeks to piece together the snippets of information we had. We doubled checked information, discarded red herrings, created a timeline. We complained about the way names appeared and reappeared in different generations. We cut and pasted a colour coded chart. Finally, gradually, the stories came into focus in our minds.
Our story begins in Ireland.
Four families: McCormacks, Fords, Hamiltons and Ryans
Three of the families, the McCormacks. the Fords and the Ryans, all Catholics, all emigrated about 1848 from Southern Ireland: Limerick, Galway and Tipperary
The fourth family, the Hamiltons, were Protestants, of Scottish Irish heritage. They emigrated from Antrim, Northern Ireland, also in 1848.
The Northern Irish Hamiltons arrived with some money, ready to buy land. But
our Southern IrIsh were probably driven out by the general economic turmoil and devastation caused by the Irish Potato Famine of 1845-1852.
At that time, the vast majority of the Irish Catholic population had little or no access to land ownership and many lived in appalling poverty.
Ninety percent of the land in Ireland was owned by Protestant landowners, who rented it out in small parcels to Irish tenant farmers. Already poor and dependent on the potato crop, Irish families starved when successive harvests failed, due to Potato Blight. As a result, Irish people emigrated in large numbers, land hungry and ready to and make their fortunes.
The colony the McCormacks, Fords, Hamiltons and Ryans arrived and settled in, had been ‘opened up’ by the squatters coming down from north of the Murray and inland from Portland. The Aboriginal tribes had been largely dispossessed, vast fortunes had been made, and the landed aristocracy had emerged as a powerful force in the burgeoning colony.
It is both expected and fascinating to see our Irish immigrant forbears’ land acquisition and prosperity mirrored, in the opening up of land for settlement in Victoria. This took place over several decades, primarily through a series of land acts, designed to break up the vast holdings of the squatters and encourage agricultural development, population growth, and the establishment of communities.
Between 1865 and 1890 Land Acts enabled land to be acquired at a fair price, and paid off in instalments. Specified improvements had to be made such as fencing, clearing and cultivation.
As we will see, our Irish families also benefitted from the growth and prosperity stemming from the Gold Rush. In 1851 gold was discovered in Ballarat, leading to the 1850s Gold Rush, a transformative event in Victorian history.
The colony grew rapidly in both population and economic power and our families, among others, took full advantage of the opportunities offered.
They set about the serious business of acquiring property supplying the new, lucrative, growing market with their produce. Country towns around them grew and with increased wealth, substantial civic buildings and churches were built. Railways and roads were constructed providing quicker and easier access to markets and facilitating social and family connections.
It would have been an exciting time for our four families, as they bought and developed their land holdings and participated in the civic life of the Colony of Victoria, with its own Lieutenant-Governor and elected Victorian Legislative Council.
During the first fifteen years after arriving in the colony, our four Irish Families became two couples.
1 James Hamilton and Bridget Ryan
The protestant Hamilton family from Northern Ireland comprised only a mother and son. We know that James Hamilton’s father had recently died. James was in his late teens, when he and his mother emigrated to Port Phillip, with enough capital to acquire a property in the colony. They chose Upper Plenty, which at that time was a rural area.
The Ryan family also emigrated about 1848.
About seven years later, in 1855, James Hamilton married Bridget Ryan. Bridget was a Catholic. Sue and I know something of this quandary, being daughters of a similar “mixed marriage”. The wedding was held on a property “Richland” near the Hamilton’s place at Upper Plenty. The property belonged to Mr David Johnston
Archbishop Little, who is also related to these four families and has written about them, has a bit to say about this marriage:
“… the marriage of James and Bridget was a truly valid Catholic marriage in the eyes of the Church.”
What he means here is that James would have agreed to the children of the marriage being brought up Catholics. He certainly followed through with this, even driving his wife and children to church on Sundays. Two of their daughters later became nuns.
James and Bridget stayed on for a further twelve years in Upper Plenty, where the first six of their children were born. These children included Charles, Grace, Johanna and Kate. Johanna was our Great Grandmother.
Then, in 1866, they acquired “Cremona Estate”, near present day Molesworth. They ran dairy and beef cattle and grew cereals on the rich
river flats.
Cremona homestead was "situated on the southern concave side of a great sweeping arc of the Goulburn river ….. it fronts the Whanregarwen road distant some three miles east from the present township of Molesworth" 1866:
Six further children, another five of them girls, were born at Cremona, before Bridget’s death, at the age of 56, in 1889.
Archbishop Little writes glowingly of life at Cremona, and of the three eldest Hamilton girls in particular. He describes them as “charming, refined, eligible and capable young ladies.” He describes the children’s education. An in-house private tutor taught them Art, Music and Painting, as well as academic subjects. But they all helped out on the farm as well, including the older girls, Grace, Johanna and Kate.
2 John McCormack Snr and Jane Ford
We don’t know the initial activities of the McCormack and Ford families, until, in 1850, two years after landing in Port Phillip, John McCormack (Senior) married Jane Ford at St Francis Church on the corner of Lonsdale and Elizabeth streets in Melbourne. Both had been in their late twenties and unmarried when they emigrated.
St Francis church today, the oldest still operating Catholic church in Victoria:
The couple settled near present day Beveridge, renting a property “Red Barn”. The property was very near the main road from Melbourne to Sydney. The family worked hard and developed a dairy herd, specialising in cheese, which they initially sold to passing diggers on their way to the goldfields.
Red Barn Lane today:
There was money to be made, so much, that the couple were later able to settle their sons on properties along the Goulburn River.
The first, of these, in 1876, was the eldest, James McCormack, then aged 18. The property, called Tallarook House, (later renamed Landscape), was at Tallarook, a hundred kilometres from Mebourne. James was unmarried at this stage and Tallarook House remained without a mistress for a further twelve years. Clearly, James was very involved in the community. He was elected as a councillor for the Shire of Seymour in 1887.
"Landscape" today:
"Landscape" interior:
The second McCormack to be settled along the Goulburn River, was John Jnr. That property, acquired in 1886, called Balham Hill, was near Molesworth. John also became a councillor, for Yea Shire.
Balham Hill:
Balham Hill property:
The Big Romance
So now we have three properties along the Goulburn. James and Bridget Hamilton’s Cremona and John McCormack’s Balham Hill, both near Molesworth, and James McCormack’s Tallarook House, twelve miles away.
The Hamilton girls, Grace, Johanna and Kate probably had met the McCormack boys, James, John Jnr and their brother Michael, at church. They were all Catholics.
The Hamiltons and McCormacks were a natural social fit: all pasturalists and Catholics of Irish extraction.
Archbishop Little tells us that the “Hamilton girls” stabled their horses at Tallarook House when catching or meeting the trains, and “made eyes at the McCormack boys”.
The roads between the Upper Goulburn and the railhead at Tallarook, had been completed by 1880, and the railway from Tallarook to Yea was being built from 1883. So we suppose that the road from the Upper Goulburn to Tallarook would have been a substantial one, about the time the girls were using it. Tallarook was where farm produce, etc was taken to put on the train for the markets in Melbourne.
But it’s a long way from Molesworth to Tallarook. Were they driven in a carriage of some sort, accompanied by workers from Cremona? Did they ride their own horses all that way? It was too far for a day trip. Where did they stay? And had the Hamilton girls’ parents met the McCormack boys’ parents, who lived quite a long way away, at Beveridge?
It’s a love story we can only speculate about.
But, ultimately, three Hamilton girls married three McCormack boys.
The most important to us, was Johanna Hamilton, later called Joan, our great grandmother, who married John McCormack Jnr of Balham Hill, in 1888.
Her sister, Grace, married James McCormack of Tallarook House in 1890
And Kate was the third sister, who married Michael McCormack. They settled initially in Berwick, and later Benalla.
Hair
08 02 23 13:08 Filed in: Alice
Our plan was to write about hairstyles. Many of our family photos feature the hairstyles that were popular at the time, so we spent a long time gazing at the photos. Soon we found ourselves discussing particular people: their lives, their relationships, the circumstances of particular photos.
This post therefore is about hairstyles, but we have allowed ourselves a much broader scope.
ALFRED JOHN COATES
Alfred John Coates, born in 1857, was probably in his late twenties when this photo was taken. He was our maternal great grandfather and was a Methodist Pastor for most of his working life. In this photograph Alfred is a young man in prime of life, dressed in formal dress and sporting the fashion of the day: mutton chop whiskers, carefully manicured to join artfully with the moustache. A man of destiny, the misty ‘bush’ behind him, he stands erect, eyes on the future. At this time Alfred was apparently a boiler maker in Ballarat.
Men’s facial hair trends were changing rapidly in the late 1800s. Long beards were out and clean chins and cheeks and a well-manicured moustache were in. To achieve this look men would need to go to a barber two to three times a week or shave themselves.
Shaving oneself may have been a financial necessity at times but it could also be a dangerous procedure. Shaving was done with a straight steel razor that required care and expertise, not only in the act of shaving the gentleman, but also in the care of the blade. To keep it sharp, the blade was rubbed against a leather or canvas strap before each new shave. As well as the blade, shaving soap, shaving brushes, combs, oils and wax were essential items to achieve the desired effect.
Having a photograph taken in a studio was a special occasion and a relatively expensive exercise. One can imagine that Alfred may have had a trip to the barber to ensure that he looked his best.
Safety steel razor blades that made shaving much easier were not invented until 1895 by an American business man with French heritage.
King C. Gillette invented a low cost blade that was easily replaceable and gave men safety and the freedom to achieve the look desired themselves.
EMMA ELIZABETH DAU
Alfred married Emma Elizabeth Dau in 1888. He was thirty-two and she was twenty Maybe this photo was taken at this time:
Emma is dressed in the style of the day, hourglass figure no doubt with a corseted waist as she gazes into her future with a determined tilt of her chin. Her hair is tightly curled at the front and pulled back into either a bun or pinned up plait.
Unlike the men who had barbers to attend to their needs, there don’t appear to be many ladies' hairdressers. Women had many home implements and potions and maybe sisters and mothers helped each other with their hair.
Young Emma’s tight curls may have been created with curling irons. A curling iron consisted of a metal rod that was held over a flame or burning alcohol to heat it, before wrapping the hair around it. Hey presto, curls!
Later in life, Emma wore her hair in a more relaxed style, loosely pulled back from her face and pinned up into a bun at the back:
When this photo was taken, the height of fashion for women was to wear their hair with more volume at the sides. This was created by using clumps of hair leftover in combs and brushes, to pad out the sides. Emma would not have gone to these lengths in later life, but on her dressing table she would have had a brush, comb, hand mirror and china box, with a lid for the collection of hair caught in brushes or combs. We can remember our grandmother, Alfreda, also having these items on her dressing table. She wore her hair long all her life. During the day it was loosely tied back in a bun, brushed out at night, and the ‘ratts’ collected from the brush and placed in the china box. She then plaited her hair into a loose, single long plait and was ready for bed.
NINE DAU SISTERS
Emma Coates, was born Emma Dau. She was one of seventeen. The first nine of these were girls.
We have three amazing little photos of some of the Dau children. We have spent a long time staring at these images, noticing little details, wondering about the lives of these nine little girls.
The first question we had was, "Were the three photos taken at the same time?". There is such a family resemblance, we weren’t sure at first whether they were different people in the three photos. The carpet gives away that they were taken in the same studio. On the back of one of the playing card sized photos, we see “one shilling per copy”. For context, at that time, a shilling was more than a day’s wage for a working man.
It seems most likely that the three photos were taken on the same day, and they are the nine oldest children, all daughters, of Joachim and Martha Dau, our great, great grandparents.
The photo of the three eldest has writing on the back:
The fact that Martha is misspelt as “marther”, and that no capital letters are used, might be a clue. It was not our mother Alice, nor her parents. None of them would have made such a basic spelling error! The surname is listed as “Dow”.
If those names are correct, then these are the three eldest Dau children. Standing is Sarah, the eldest. the other two are Martha, known as Mishi, and Emma, our great grandmother.
Thanks to the Wandong Historical group, we have the details of nearly all the Dau children.
The next three girls are Bella, Jane and Sophia, followed by Alice, and two others, possibly Annie and Nance, although some sources have Annie and Nance as the same person.
There is no date on these photos, but there are nine girls. The nine first Dau children, all girls were born between 1866 and about 1878. This puts the date of the photos at about 1880, with Sarah, the eldest, aged 14 and the youngest aged 2.
The girls’ father, Joachim, had spelt his surname, Dau. We don’t know the exact date they changed it to Dow, but Frederick enlisted to fight in the Boer War as Dow in 1901, and Arthur, who became a professional soldier, changed his name by deed poll to Dow. The same anti German sentiment that caused the British Royals to change their surname to Windsor from Saax Coburg was no doubt responsible. And yet the Dau spelling persists alongside the Dow spelling, right up until 1929, when Sarah, the eldest wrote about her childhood. Our mother and aunt did not even know about the Dau spelling.
The photographer is listed on the back as Burman, 209 Bourke St Melbourne. The building is still there. This is what it looks like today:
There are a number of old photos by Burman available on line, with that tell-tale carpet visible in some. This one, “Portrait of a Lady”, which uses the same chair as two of our photos, is from C1865.
We picture the little farm girls, in their new dresses, in the big noisy city. They would have come on the train, to Flinders Street from Wallan, and walked the three city blocks to the studio.
The city streets would have looked like this:
Their hair would had been in rags overnight. The curls in Sarah, Martha and Emma’s hair have been successful; the others less so. All of them have a ribbon holding their hair back from their face.
The dresses are interesting. The same fabric and pattern seems to have been used for the three eldest girls. Who made them? The next three also have a similar style. All have sturdy boots and frilly pantaloons. These outfits would have been worn to church on Sundays. Did they wear them for the train journey, or change at the studio?
The only other girl, born in 1887, preceded and followed by the seven boys, was Ethel. She wrote diary entries, still held by the Wandong Historical group. Ethel wrote about the boots, which are such a feature of these little girls’ photos. “the rough track across the paddocks and hills, two miles to the little school at Wandong. In wintertime, we had to cross many flooded gullies. We wore strong boots and I was often peeved, as I compared my strong shoes with the dainty ones worn by the other girls at school.”
It was quite an expense to provide boots for so many children.
Our appetite for finding out more about this family is well and truly whetted. We plan further exploration, including an excursion to Wandong.
THREE HOLM SISTERS
These three young women, probably photographed just before the first world war are (left to right) Alfreda, Beatrice and Berta Holm. Alfreda, our maternal grandmother, was the oldest of the three, perhaps just twenty at the time. The three sisters have their long hair swept back in gentle waves, to a loose bun or twist at the back.
We wonder whether they did the white work on their shirts? We know that Beatrice and Berta spent time working in Finders Lane, doing the white embroidery known at the time as “white work”. So much we can only guess at.
They all gaze into the distance: Alfreda with a determined steely gaze, Beat with a quizzical half smile and Bert’s beautiful eyes not quite hiding her vulnerability. We can only guess, as they gaze into a future where world war is imminent.
Alfreda wore her hair long all her life. We can remember her brushing her hair at night and putting it into a long plait.
TWO COATES SISTERS
It’s hard to be a younger sister, but our mother Alice, was the fairly plain younger sister of an extraordinary beauty.
She didn’t have to deal with social media, but, when she was growing up in the 1930s, feminine beauty was important for girls.
Alice was an intelligent and able scholar, and, thank goodness, this was highly valued in her family. Her mother, Alfreda, had made sacrifices and fought for her own education. For their later secondary school, the girls were sent, at huge expense, to a city based secondary school, all the way from Croydon.
Only the wealthiest or most determined families sent their girls to school, after the age of fourteen. At McRobinson Girls’ High School, Marge and Alice were taught by, and shared classes with, the very brightest and best: future women scientists, lawyers and doctors, who would pave the way for our own generation.
But, from her school reports, we see that, while she held her own on the whole, Alice was not exceptional in that auspicious company. And she was crippled, probably her whole life, by a sense of inferiority.
And it is in their respective hair cuts from that time, that we see how the contrast between the two girls was accentuated.
When I stare at those grainy old photos, at Marge’s lush locks, and Alice’s blunt, unfashionable short bob, and straight fringe, I cannot help but ask “Why?”. Why did Alfreda allow her younger daughter to wear such an unflattering style. Why was the difference in feminine beauty accentuated and underlined so prominently by the two hairstyles? How might Alice’s life have been different, had she been encouraged to make the most of her looks, as well as her brains?
Even as they began working life, both at Maribyrnong Munitions Factory, in 1939, the difference remained. Here Marge is on the far right, and Alice on the far left. Alice is nineteen and Marge twenty-one. But the choice of hairstyle reflects very different attitudes about their appearance:
THE VICTORY ROLL
These two studio photographs of Marge are portraits of a beautiful young woman, but what does the hair tell us?
Here, a younger Marge still has very long hair, worn up now, as befitted a young woman who was no longer a child. Pretty curls and barrel curls were the look, and Marge had beautiful, wavy, very cooperative hair and was able to construct ‘the look’ very successfully.
An older Marge, maybe just twenty, posed for this studio photograph as a young woman of the war years, in the “hottest” style of the time. This photograph shows a confident young woman with a job, and presumably many admirers.
During the war, particularly during the Battle of Britain, the ‘Victory Roll’ evolved as a very popular and flattering hairstyle. The style was based on an aerobatic manoeuvre performed by pilots to signify victory. The planes would spin horizontally in celebration. The ‘Victory Roll’ hairstyle would have been difficult to execute, so hours of practice and experimentation was required. The style has stood the test of time, as it is still popular today in ‘retro’ dressing. There are many YouTube videos available with full and detailed instructions.
‘THE SET ‘
After the second world war, women’s hair fashion was dominated by ‘the set’, often a weekly set. Some women did their own at home, but others, such as our mother Alice, went to their local hairdresser.
The set involved a headful of rollers, tightly wound on wet hair, then dried under a hood dryer. This often took almost an hour, so there was time to read or chat.
Through the ages, and the generations of our family, both sexes’ hair styles have been influenced by the fashion of the day. We have all had cuts, or not. We have curled and permed and coloured and bleached, with varied results.
Today, people are not rigidly restricted to one style, as they were in the past, but have any options.
The lyrics from the musical Hair says it all: .
This post therefore is about hairstyles, but we have allowed ourselves a much broader scope.
ALFRED JOHN COATES
Alfred John Coates, born in 1857, was probably in his late twenties when this photo was taken. He was our maternal great grandfather and was a Methodist Pastor for most of his working life. In this photograph Alfred is a young man in prime of life, dressed in formal dress and sporting the fashion of the day: mutton chop whiskers, carefully manicured to join artfully with the moustache. A man of destiny, the misty ‘bush’ behind him, he stands erect, eyes on the future. At this time Alfred was apparently a boiler maker in Ballarat.
Men’s facial hair trends were changing rapidly in the late 1800s. Long beards were out and clean chins and cheeks and a well-manicured moustache were in. To achieve this look men would need to go to a barber two to three times a week or shave themselves.
Shaving oneself may have been a financial necessity at times but it could also be a dangerous procedure. Shaving was done with a straight steel razor that required care and expertise, not only in the act of shaving the gentleman, but also in the care of the blade. To keep it sharp, the blade was rubbed against a leather or canvas strap before each new shave. As well as the blade, shaving soap, shaving brushes, combs, oils and wax were essential items to achieve the desired effect.
Having a photograph taken in a studio was a special occasion and a relatively expensive exercise. One can imagine that Alfred may have had a trip to the barber to ensure that he looked his best.
Safety steel razor blades that made shaving much easier were not invented until 1895 by an American business man with French heritage.
King C. Gillette invented a low cost blade that was easily replaceable and gave men safety and the freedom to achieve the look desired themselves.
EMMA ELIZABETH DAU
Alfred married Emma Elizabeth Dau in 1888. He was thirty-two and she was twenty Maybe this photo was taken at this time:
Emma is dressed in the style of the day, hourglass figure no doubt with a corseted waist as she gazes into her future with a determined tilt of her chin. Her hair is tightly curled at the front and pulled back into either a bun or pinned up plait.
Unlike the men who had barbers to attend to their needs, there don’t appear to be many ladies' hairdressers. Women had many home implements and potions and maybe sisters and mothers helped each other with their hair.
Young Emma’s tight curls may have been created with curling irons. A curling iron consisted of a metal rod that was held over a flame or burning alcohol to heat it, before wrapping the hair around it. Hey presto, curls!
Later in life, Emma wore her hair in a more relaxed style, loosely pulled back from her face and pinned up into a bun at the back:
When this photo was taken, the height of fashion for women was to wear their hair with more volume at the sides. This was created by using clumps of hair leftover in combs and brushes, to pad out the sides. Emma would not have gone to these lengths in later life, but on her dressing table she would have had a brush, comb, hand mirror and china box, with a lid for the collection of hair caught in brushes or combs. We can remember our grandmother, Alfreda, also having these items on her dressing table. She wore her hair long all her life. During the day it was loosely tied back in a bun, brushed out at night, and the ‘ratts’ collected from the brush and placed in the china box. She then plaited her hair into a loose, single long plait and was ready for bed.
NINE DAU SISTERS
Emma Coates, was born Emma Dau. She was one of seventeen. The first nine of these were girls.
We have three amazing little photos of some of the Dau children. We have spent a long time staring at these images, noticing little details, wondering about the lives of these nine little girls.
The first question we had was, "Were the three photos taken at the same time?". There is such a family resemblance, we weren’t sure at first whether they were different people in the three photos. The carpet gives away that they were taken in the same studio. On the back of one of the playing card sized photos, we see “one shilling per copy”. For context, at that time, a shilling was more than a day’s wage for a working man.
It seems most likely that the three photos were taken on the same day, and they are the nine oldest children, all daughters, of Joachim and Martha Dau, our great, great grandparents.
The photo of the three eldest has writing on the back:
The fact that Martha is misspelt as “marther”, and that no capital letters are used, might be a clue. It was not our mother Alice, nor her parents. None of them would have made such a basic spelling error! The surname is listed as “Dow”.
If those names are correct, then these are the three eldest Dau children. Standing is Sarah, the eldest. the other two are Martha, known as Mishi, and Emma, our great grandmother.
Thanks to the Wandong Historical group, we have the details of nearly all the Dau children.
The next three girls are Bella, Jane and Sophia, followed by Alice, and two others, possibly Annie and Nance, although some sources have Annie and Nance as the same person.
There is no date on these photos, but there are nine girls. The nine first Dau children, all girls were born between 1866 and about 1878. This puts the date of the photos at about 1880, with Sarah, the eldest, aged 14 and the youngest aged 2.
The girls’ father, Joachim, had spelt his surname, Dau. We don’t know the exact date they changed it to Dow, but Frederick enlisted to fight in the Boer War as Dow in 1901, and Arthur, who became a professional soldier, changed his name by deed poll to Dow. The same anti German sentiment that caused the British Royals to change their surname to Windsor from Saax Coburg was no doubt responsible. And yet the Dau spelling persists alongside the Dow spelling, right up until 1929, when Sarah, the eldest wrote about her childhood. Our mother and aunt did not even know about the Dau spelling.
The photographer is listed on the back as Burman, 209 Bourke St Melbourne. The building is still there. This is what it looks like today:
There are a number of old photos by Burman available on line, with that tell-tale carpet visible in some. This one, “Portrait of a Lady”, which uses the same chair as two of our photos, is from C1865.
We picture the little farm girls, in their new dresses, in the big noisy city. They would have come on the train, to Flinders Street from Wallan, and walked the three city blocks to the studio.
The city streets would have looked like this:
Their hair would had been in rags overnight. The curls in Sarah, Martha and Emma’s hair have been successful; the others less so. All of them have a ribbon holding their hair back from their face.
The dresses are interesting. The same fabric and pattern seems to have been used for the three eldest girls. Who made them? The next three also have a similar style. All have sturdy boots and frilly pantaloons. These outfits would have been worn to church on Sundays. Did they wear them for the train journey, or change at the studio?
The only other girl, born in 1887, preceded and followed by the seven boys, was Ethel. She wrote diary entries, still held by the Wandong Historical group. Ethel wrote about the boots, which are such a feature of these little girls’ photos. “the rough track across the paddocks and hills, two miles to the little school at Wandong. In wintertime, we had to cross many flooded gullies. We wore strong boots and I was often peeved, as I compared my strong shoes with the dainty ones worn by the other girls at school.”
It was quite an expense to provide boots for so many children.
Our appetite for finding out more about this family is well and truly whetted. We plan further exploration, including an excursion to Wandong.
THREE HOLM SISTERS
These three young women, probably photographed just before the first world war are (left to right) Alfreda, Beatrice and Berta Holm. Alfreda, our maternal grandmother, was the oldest of the three, perhaps just twenty at the time. The three sisters have their long hair swept back in gentle waves, to a loose bun or twist at the back.
We wonder whether they did the white work on their shirts? We know that Beatrice and Berta spent time working in Finders Lane, doing the white embroidery known at the time as “white work”. So much we can only guess at.
They all gaze into the distance: Alfreda with a determined steely gaze, Beat with a quizzical half smile and Bert’s beautiful eyes not quite hiding her vulnerability. We can only guess, as they gaze into a future where world war is imminent.
Alfreda wore her hair long all her life. We can remember her brushing her hair at night and putting it into a long plait.
TWO COATES SISTERS
It’s hard to be a younger sister, but our mother Alice, was the fairly plain younger sister of an extraordinary beauty.
She didn’t have to deal with social media, but, when she was growing up in the 1930s, feminine beauty was important for girls.
Alice was an intelligent and able scholar, and, thank goodness, this was highly valued in her family. Her mother, Alfreda, had made sacrifices and fought for her own education. For their later secondary school, the girls were sent, at huge expense, to a city based secondary school, all the way from Croydon.
Only the wealthiest or most determined families sent their girls to school, after the age of fourteen. At McRobinson Girls’ High School, Marge and Alice were taught by, and shared classes with, the very brightest and best: future women scientists, lawyers and doctors, who would pave the way for our own generation.
But, from her school reports, we see that, while she held her own on the whole, Alice was not exceptional in that auspicious company. And she was crippled, probably her whole life, by a sense of inferiority.
And it is in their respective hair cuts from that time, that we see how the contrast between the two girls was accentuated.
When I stare at those grainy old photos, at Marge’s lush locks, and Alice’s blunt, unfashionable short bob, and straight fringe, I cannot help but ask “Why?”. Why did Alfreda allow her younger daughter to wear such an unflattering style. Why was the difference in feminine beauty accentuated and underlined so prominently by the two hairstyles? How might Alice’s life have been different, had she been encouraged to make the most of her looks, as well as her brains?
Even as they began working life, both at Maribyrnong Munitions Factory, in 1939, the difference remained. Here Marge is on the far right, and Alice on the far left. Alice is nineteen and Marge twenty-one. But the choice of hairstyle reflects very different attitudes about their appearance:
THE VICTORY ROLL
These two studio photographs of Marge are portraits of a beautiful young woman, but what does the hair tell us?
Here, a younger Marge still has very long hair, worn up now, as befitted a young woman who was no longer a child. Pretty curls and barrel curls were the look, and Marge had beautiful, wavy, very cooperative hair and was able to construct ‘the look’ very successfully.
An older Marge, maybe just twenty, posed for this studio photograph as a young woman of the war years, in the “hottest” style of the time. This photograph shows a confident young woman with a job, and presumably many admirers.
During the war, particularly during the Battle of Britain, the ‘Victory Roll’ evolved as a very popular and flattering hairstyle. The style was based on an aerobatic manoeuvre performed by pilots to signify victory. The planes would spin horizontally in celebration. The ‘Victory Roll’ hairstyle would have been difficult to execute, so hours of practice and experimentation was required. The style has stood the test of time, as it is still popular today in ‘retro’ dressing. There are many YouTube videos available with full and detailed instructions.
‘THE SET ‘
After the second world war, women’s hair fashion was dominated by ‘the set’, often a weekly set. Some women did their own at home, but others, such as our mother Alice, went to their local hairdresser.
The set involved a headful of rollers, tightly wound on wet hair, then dried under a hood dryer. This often took almost an hour, so there was time to read or chat.
Through the ages, and the generations of our family, both sexes’ hair styles have been influenced by the fashion of the day. We have all had cuts, or not. We have curled and permed and coloured and bleached, with varied results.
Today, people are not rigidly restricted to one style, as they were in the past, but have any options.
The lyrics from the musical Hair says it all: .
‘Gimme a head with hair
Long beautiful hair
Shining, gleaming,
Streaming, flaxen, waxen’
Women's Work
Like women throughout history, most of the women in our family have had the primary job of parent and homemaker. Those homes range from simple pioneer cottages to majestic residences with grand staircases and sweeping verandahs. Nearly all of those women have also done paid work. And some of those who have not been specifically employed, have had supporting roles in their husband’s careers. Some jobs have been done by different family members across different generations.
None of our women have had traditional men’s careers, but, across the generations, we have covered a wide range:
AGRICULTURE (Dairy maid, Famers’ wives)
HEALTHWORK (Doctors’ wives, Aide, Occupational Therapy Assistant)
HOSPITALITY/TOURISM (Publican, Office Administraion, Horse Trail Guide)
RELIGIOUS SERVICE (Lay Preaching and other good works, Nun)
ADMINISTRATION (Postmistress, Sales Administration Supervisor, Office Administrator)
THE ARTS/CRAFT/DRAFTING (Whitework, Semco and Dressmaking, Drafting and Drawing Office, Drafting, Drawing and Card production, Art and Craft Activities for At Risk Children, Set Design and Construction, An Artist in the Hills)
RETAIL (Grocer, Checkout Chick)
SCIENCE (Laboratory Work)
EDUCATION (Teacher)
AGRICULTURE
Dairy Maid
Our paternal great, great grandmother, Catherine Bourke, née Kelly, worked as a dairy maid in Limerick before marrying Michael Bourke, and emigrating to Australia, in 1839. When they arrived in Melbourne, their first job was managing a dairy farm in Moonee Ponds. Catherine’s knowledge and skills no doubt influenced this decision.
The “famers’ wives”
A recent (2022) Guardian article tells us that, until 1994, women could not list “farmer” as their occupation on the census form. Instead they were viewed as “non-productive silent partners”. Even today, when 49% of real farm income is contributed by women, our image of an Australian farmer is almost entirely male. This puts “farmers’ wife” in this exploration in a particular light.
Another interesting aspect of these women from our family history is the divide between the wealthy squatters and the ordinary people of the land.
Martha Rye, the “poor little thing”, whose story we told in the June 2016 post, was a “farmer’s wife”, as was her mother, Elizabeth. Both of these women had very large families.
Elizabeth, our great great great grandmother, had eleven children. We can work out quite a bit about Elizabeth from a newspaper story, written about her husband, Adam’s life. She had worked in service, as a housekeeper, before she and Adam emigrated to Australia, in 1848. She could read, but not write.
They grew potatoes and onions, first on a rented farm near Geelong, then on two acres in Broadmeadows. The whole family would have been involved in the farm work, especially at harvest and market times.
We know that Adam not only worked as a labourer on neighbouring farms, but also spent time away trying his luck on the goldfields. It would have fallen on Elizabeth and the children to keep things going on the farm.
Martha, Elizabeth’s daughter, was married to Joachim. They would have had long days on the dairy farm, Heather Farm, near Kilmore. We learned a bit about her from her daughter Sarah, born in 1866. We wrote about this in August 2016. Sarah wrote with sentimental nostalgia about milking the cows, Blossom, Peggy and Strawberry; feeding poddy calves; working the separator; and rearing seventeen children. But between the lines, one can see the massive workload.
Around the same time, our paternal great great grandparents, John and Johanna McCormack, (later called Joan) acquired their 15,000 acre grazing property, Balham Hill, fifty kilometres to the west. So, in a sense, Johanna was also a “farmer’s wife”. But what a different life! John, a Justice of the Peace, and community leader, had staff to attend to the farm. Their four surviving children all went to boarding school in the city, for their secondary education.
Two generations on, Johanna’s granddaughter, our Auntie Tish, also married a farmer, near Warrnambool. Matt Rae was probably more of a hands on farmer than John McCormick, but he, too, was considered a grazier, and Tish’s life did not run to milking cows and feeding poddy calves.
Around 1950, close to the time Tish became a “farmer’s wife”, our mother’s aunt, Beat, and her husband Bill, sold their Surrey Hills grocery and bought land for a dairy farm in Cockatoo. The activities on this farm were similar to those at Heather Farm, a hundred years earlier: milking, feeding calves, working the separator. The difference in their lives is technological. An electric milking machine and separator, tractors, hay bailers, meant that they ran a dozen cows instead of three. And they had three grown children instead of seventeen. Nevertheless, they all had to work hard to make the farm pay enough to support them all. We wrote in detail, in our November 2017 post, about our childhood visits to this farm. There we described Beat’s pigs. This was her major farming contribution. She was not just a “farmer’s wife”, but actively involved in the decision making and physical work of the farm.
Auntie Beat
HEALTHWORK
Health work does not feature much among the women in our family. There are no doctors or nurses, that we know of.
Doctors’ wives
Our grandmother, Grace, and her daughter in law, Joan, were “Doctor’s Wives”. Wealthy, well connected, pillars of society, these women had no real job. In both cases, their husband’s surgery was within their house, but they were not required to deal with actual patients.
Among the women in our family, there are a few cases of unskilled health work.
Aide
Like so many women, our mother, Alice, “went back to work” when her youngest child was about ten years old, in 1966.
The only job she had had, since leaving school aged seventeen, was the wartime munitions work she had done at Maribynong, which today would have been called Lab Technician.
What skills did she have to draw on, apart from housework and parenting?
So her job as an “aide” at Lady Herring Spastic Centre was a low paid, unskilled one. She was assigned, with one other carer, to a “class” of Cerebral Palsied kids roughly the same age, none of whom had the ability to speak, and many of whom could not feed themselves. This was before the days of Communication Boards, so even the most able kids could not communicate much.
I, too, had a job at Lady Herring, after I finished school, and before I began the university year.
The centre was in Malvern, and Alice, and I, for the few weeks I was there, travelled by tram, along a very familiar route, down Riversdale Road.
There were a few qualified staff at the centre, physiotherapists, occupational therapists, but the program, such as it was, seemed to be up to people like Alice to devise. With the exception of the bus drivers, the whole staff, including the boss, was female.
The kids commuted on a special bus, and spent the whole day at the centre. Much of the time was filled with dealing with their physical needs, but there were excursions, shopping trips, walks around the neighbourhood, music sessions, and a memorable overnight “camp”. Although low status and poorly paid, it was stimulating, challenging work.
Alice with her "class"
Occupational Therapy Assistant
On the strength of my experience at Lady Herring, I did two other holiday stints as an OT assistant.
I worked with our OT friend Rikki, at Fairfield Infectious Diseases hospital for a little while. This was before HIV made it such an important place. My memories of Fairfield include the beautiful historic buildings; dozens of beds in a row, in the children’s Hepatitis ward; and the iron lung ward: people who had contracted polio as children and spent their life lying inside huge metal chambers that helped them breathe.
My job was mostly helping tidy up the activity room, and working in the ward with the Hepatitis kids: mostly bringing them things to do.
Fairfield Infectious Diseases Hospital
And then, during another long uni holiday, I worked at Montefiore (Jewish) Aged Care in St Kilda. It was perhaps 1970. Most of the Occupational Therapy “workers” there were volunteers: generally well off middle aged Jewish women doing their bit. One of those volunteers, who I remembered just as Mrs Hayman, later became Sue’s mother in law.
In my memory, the whole staff, except the doctors, were women.
In our centre, where the patients came to us, we ran activities like singalongs, bingo, games etc.
Many of our patients were post war immigrants from Europe, and some had been in Nazi concentration camps. It was the year that Melbourne emergency vehicles changed from sirens to “nee naw nee naw”, the same sound the SS vehicles had used in wartime Europe. When we heard the distant sounds approaching along St Kilda Road, we needed to be aware of some patients’ reaction.
I remember being told that that gentleman with his trousers barely held up with string, had been one of Melbourne’s top barristers. I still have the book called “Favourite Jewish Songs”, piano accompaniments I used for the singalongs I accompanied.
HOSPITALITY/TOURISM
Publican
Catherine Bourke, in her new home near Pakenham from 1844, helped with the establishment of Minton’s Creek Run, the farm in the Toomuc Valley, that they bought with another family. But in 1850, they bought the Latrobe Inn, on the main Gippsland Road, in current day Pakenham. Catherine moved out of the slab hut up the Valley, with her seven children, and became a publican. The inn became known as Bourke’s Hotel. Michael was still very involved with the family, and they had another eight children, but it was Catherine who ran the hotel.
As well as a stopping place for travellers, Bourke’s hotel was the local post office, and a hub for the community.
Catherine Bourke
Horse Trail Guide
Catherine’s great, great, great, great, great niece Eliza, one hundred and seventy years later, also moved to the country to start a new job in tourism. Seeking a change from office work, Eliza moved to Mansfield to work for Hidden Trails by Horseback. This company runs trails in the Victorian High Country and also at El Questro Station in the Kimberly.
In Eliza’s own words her job entailed the following:
Up at the crack of dawn. Run the horses in. Feed the ones we are working that day. Brush and saddle the horses needed for the rides.
Determine the guests riding experience, match to a horse. Sign indemnity forms, Go through basics (stop start turn etc) and then lead the ride out, float in the middle of a big group, or tail the group at the back.
We go out on four rides a day:
*AM 2 hour ride (around the station)
*Kids intro ride (around the paddock)
*1 hour loop (around a different part of the station which includes the deep moonshine creek crossing)
*PM 2 hour ride (incorporation of the 1 hour loop with a look out stop where we would take a pack horse with drinks and nibbles and tie the horses up and have a sit down)
In between those rides we feed lunch to the horses working. Then back to the stables in the afternoon, Unsaddle, wash down and tip out the horses. And then do it all again the next day. Shuffling them around in different paddocks so we could keep them all in work.
There was 40 horses total.
Long days. Great experience.
Eliza at El Questro
RELIGIOUS SERVICE
Lay Preaching and other good works
Both our mother Alice and her maternal grandmother Emma Coates (née Dau) were staunch protestants and indulged in a little lay preaching and good works.
Emma Dau, one of seventeen children, was married to Alfred Coates, who was a Wesleyan Methodist Pastor. Emma’s married life consisted of raising a family, and her duties as the Pastor’s wife. Family stories tell of her devotion to these duties and of her riding around the parish on a push bike.
At some stage in her life, when our mother was still a child, Emma also became a Home Mission Sister and was known as Sister Bessie. As a Home Mission Sister, Emma wore an impressive uniform, that is described vividly by our mother and Auntie Marge, who as children were very impressed by this formidable woman. Here they are discussing her:
Sister Bessie
Sister Bessie worked at the Methodist Home Mission in Brunswick Street Fitzroy, in the 1920s and 30s. Sister Bessie’s work with the ‘fallen women’ and the poor, in the slums of Fitzroy was also vividly remembered by Marge and Alice. Sister Bessie’s good works involved anything from delivering babies to rescuing unmarried mothers. All of this was carried out ‘in the slums’ and in ‘poor, dirty houses’. One story has it that Sister Bessie once took off her own petticoat to give to a poor woman who did not have enough clothing.
The slums of Fitzroy were indeed slums, with a reputation for dirt, filth, disease and crime, a fearsome place. Streets were unpaved, there was no running water in many of the crowded and small weatherboard houses and children often ran barefoot.
So bad were the Fitzroy slums, that in the 1950’s they were demolished and the population was moved to the Housing Commission Towers, still standing in Brunswick Street.
Slums in Melbourne
Sister Bessie also travelled within Victoria and Tasmania. She was lay preaching, called ‘deputation work’ and raising money for the Home Mission. Apparently she was a very good story teller and must have not only impressed her young grand daughters but also her audiences, as she regaled them with stories from ‘the slums’. So impressed was one small child, that she gave up her doll ,to be given to the poor children who had no toys.
Half a century later Alice stood in her grandmother’s shoes at the same pulpit of a small, now Uniting Church, at Jung in the Wimmera.
Alice was also doing ‘deputation work’ in a fashion, preaching about world poverty and inequality. She was also raising money for the Uniting Church’s fight against poverty. Alice mentioned that her grandmother, Sister Bessie, may also have preached here. Incredibly a member of the congregation remembered as a small child listening to Sister Bessie preaching and telling stories. She said,“She was a wonderful story teller.”
Jung Methodist Church
The Nun
We grew up with stories of a nun in the family but knew no details. With the assistance of Google, we now know that Frances Bourke, [1883-1964] Jim’s Great Aunt, joined the Presentation Sisters, probably as a young woman, and became Sister Magdalen.
Presentation Convent was founded in Windsor in 1873, after a request by the Parish Priest for sorely needed teaching staff at St Mary’s school.
We are intrigued about Sister Magdalen and her role. Was she a teaching Sister or did she have another role at the Windsor Convent? Did she spend her life in the Order? Watch this space, hopefully more to come.
Presentation Sisters
ADMINISTRATION
Administration is part of many jobs, often the least pleasant part; writing reports, managing co workers, attending meetings, communication, ordering supplies, keeping records. These tasks are familiar to many workers.
Postmistress
In 1859 Bourke’s Hotel in Pakenham also became the community post office, ten years after Michael had bought the license. He became the founding post master of Pakenham. After his death, in 1877, Catherine became the Pakenham postmistress.
Up until 1901, each of the colonies operated their own postal service. After Federation, they all merged to become the Postmaster Generals Department (PMG).
Cecelia,(Cissy), Catherine’s youngest child, who never married, continued the role after Catherine’s death in 1910.
The job of postmistress would have involved taking sacks of mail to and from the Cobb and Co coach, later the train, and sorting it for people, who would come in to collect their mail.
Over time, the job of post mistress also included a savings’ bank, money order office and telegraph station; quite an important role in the local community.
Sales Administration Supervisor
But for a proper administration job, Tessa is our woman. Her job at Kenworth Trucks is to project manage the outfitting of each truck. She manages a team of people who put 22 trucks per day together, to the specifications of each customer. Keeping all the balls in the air, making sure everyone is gainfully employed, smoothing relationships with customers and between workers, maintaining records, supervising departments. It’s a very large and stressful job.
Office Administrator
Another organised young woman is Eliza who has also worked in office administration, at Nautilus Training and Curriculum, the company founded by her dad, Ian.
THE ARTS/CRAFT/DRAFTING
Whitework, Semco and Dressmaking
Three of our women worked in the textile industry, a generation apart. Both Great Aunts Bert and Beat and our Auntie Marge were involved in the embellishment of textiles with embroidery, and in dressmaking.
In our post on Auntie Bert, ‘A Sterling Character’, in March 2019 we explored ‘Whitework’. Whitework embroidery is the general term for hand embroidery worked with white thread on white fabric. It was used on many household items from babies’ bibs and tea towels to under clothes. Bert and Beat who, as young women, worked in this industry, probably worked in Flinders Lane. At this time it was the centre of the “rag trade”.
Auntie Bert, being unmarried, needed to continue in the workforce, but also be available to help her elderly parents with whom she lived. A talented and resourceful woman, she started a dressmaking business, working from home. Although self taught, her reputation for fine tailoring and expertly fitted ladies’ wear soon spread amongst the ladies of Camberwell and Surrey Hills. As her clientele increased and business grew, she had to move to bigger premises, and Bert leased space for a workroom and office in Riversdale Road Camberwell. This business is also described in our post ‘ A Sterling Character”
Drafting and Drawing Office
Our Auntie Marge worked in a number of drafting and drawing offices during her working life. After her short stint teaching, Marge began work in a drawing office in Collins Street, and then, during the war, moved to the drawing office at Maribyrnong Munitions Factory where Alice also worked. In 1941 Marge moved again, this time to the drawing office at ICI.
Later in life, Marge used her artistic talents at Semco, designing patterns for embroidery transfers. The designs were created as line drawings and printed onto tissue paper transfers, to be sold to women to embroider for items for the home, or as gifts. The transfers were ironed onto cloth after which the item could be embroidered accurately following the design. Margaret and I can remember embarking on an Semco embroidery project that I don’t think we finished.
Semco Workroom
Typical Semco Embroidery
Design subjects were flowers and animals, both European and Australian, cute houses, toys and even landscape scenes. Amongst the many items destined for embroidery were doilies, tablecloths and serviettes, tray cloths, handkerchiefs, babies’ outfits and children’s clothing.
Margaret and I can also remember visiting Auntie Marge at Black Rock and seeing her designs on a big drawing board. A working mother was a novelty for us, as our mother did not work outside the home.
The Semco factory and workshops located in Semco Park, Black Rock, was quite a progressive company and treated its employees well. They paid award wages to women, and provided recreation facilities for the staff, including six and a half acres of garden and lawn for their enjoyment. It was a large employer, as not only were the designs created and printed, but the embroidery cottons were also spun and dyed.
Marge worked for Semco as a part time employee, and at the same time studied Interior Design at RMIT. Both were unusual. For many women of her era, part time work outside the home was difficult to find, even once children were at school. Marge was fortunate to have Semco in her area and for it to be accessible on public transport. This allowed her to work there for many years, while pursuing her life long interest in further study.
Drafting, Drawing and Card production
Marge worked in a number of drafting and drawing offices during her working life. After her short stint teaching, Marge began work in a drawing office in Collins Street and then, during the war, moved to the drawing office at Maribyrnong Munitions Factory where Alice also worked. In 1941 Marge moved again, this time to the drawing office at ICI.
In between jobs outside the home Marge, like her Aunt Bert, started a business from home. Using her artistic skills and her design experience at Semco, Marge launched a greeting card business. She designed and screen printed the cards, packaged them and sold them to shops specialising in handmade original work.
Art and Craft Activities for At Risk Children
From this heading, it is obvious that this position could be fraught with difficulties. As a nineteen year old I was blissfully unaware of the worlds these children came from. Orana was a Uniting Church children’s home for at risk children and ‘orphans’. I remember mostly a group of cardigan and jumper clad children in skirts and shorts, traipsing into a linoleum floored space to participate in whatever I decided to do. I don’t remember anyone checking the activities, or that I had to run them past any of the staff. Some of the activities were very, very messy, but the children willingly helped me clean up. The confronting and difficult part of this job was not the behaviour of the children, but the heavy prevailing air of sadness in that place.
Set Design and Construction
Lois learnt woodworking from her dad. Together with her design and craft skills, she developed her “Top Props” business, designing and creating stage props. For instance, Deirdre’s Tappers’ concerts would not have been the amazing spectacle they were, without Lois’s colourful props.
An Artist in the Hills
Through her meticulous fine drawings and paintings Katherine explores a fantasy world inhabited by little creatures and characters, who are at home with spiderwebs and toadstools or nestled under gnarled old trees . Working from her house and studio in the Dandenongs, she is pursuing her interest in children’s book illustration.
RETAIL
Grocer
Our Great Aunt, our grandmother’s sister, Beatrice Morris (nee: Holm) owned a grocer’s shop in Maling Road, Canterbury, for a number of years. Bill Morris had previously worked at Lawson’s Grocer in Middle Camberwell , so having experience, this was a logical move. We are not sure how long they were in Maling Road but presumably Auntie Beat helped in the shop as well as raising a family of three boys. It must have been reasonably profitable, as during this time they built a house in Balwyn, and then sold the business to buy the farm, Sefton Park.
“Checkout Chick”
Anna, Beatrice’s great, great niece, is the only other woman in the family who has worked in retail, and this too was in grocery shop: the Renaissance Supermarket, Hawthorn, in the 1990’s: it was a supermarket of course. At sixteen Anna was keen to have a part time job and earn her own money. Her position was ‘checkout chick’, working on the register, before scanning of prices using barcodes was all entirely automatic. For instance, the checkout chicks had to memorise the PLU code for all the individual fruit and vegetable items, and this had to be entered on the register, manually.
SCIENCE
Laboratory Work
After the horrific use of chemical warfare (gas), on the European battlefields during the 1914-18 war, many countries began to work on ways to protect their populations from gas warfare.
Australia began its own “Chemical Defence” research program in 1926 at the Munitions Supply Laboratories, in conjunction with Melbourne Uni. They developed and assembled “respirators”.
By the time the second world war began in 1939, scientists were well advanced in this work. In 1940, over half a million respirators were manufactured at Maribyrnong Munitions Factory, and more than 500 people were employed there.
Our mother, Alice worked there, in the microscope section, testing the penetration of gas that came through the filters. When she would describe this work, she would indicate tapping and counting as she stared down the microscope. She had studied Year 11 Chemistry the year before she started.
Alice, left, working at Maribrynong
EDUCATION
Teachers
At least five of the women, in four generations of our family, have been teachers, some primary, some secondary.
The earliest we know of is our Nana, Alfreda, who taught primary school, before marrying Alfred in 1916.
She had fought for a chance to continue her education after secondary school. There was not enough money for university, and so she went to Melbourne Continuation School, which later became Melbourne High School. Its focus was teacher training and thus, after two years, Alfreda became a teacher. Presumably she taught for about four years. Women had to resign from teaching when they married.
Our Auntie Marge, Alfreda’s eldest daughter worked as a teacher for a year, straight from school. She taught 50 five year olds at Balwyn North, as a “junior teacher’. She also went to RMIT three nights a week dong Fine Art, her real passion. She only lasted one year, having decided that she was not suited to teaching. Our mother, Alice, while not actually teaching, worked as a school librarian assistant for the last years leading up to her retirement.
The next generation is ours, and at least four of us worked as secondary teachers: Pauline for a few years, and Sue, Anne and I until our retirements. All three of us did our initial tertiary education, including teacher training, on “Studentships”, which provided free education and a small wage, in return for three years service, usually in the country. Sue went to Sale, Pauline to Portland, and Margaret to Moe. Sue and and I wrote about our first year teaching experiences in a post on October 28, 2015, filed under “Young Adults 1970s”
Sale High School
Of our own daughters and nieces, only Anna has taken on the mantle of teaching. She even completed most of a PHD in Education. Recently, in her mid forties, she has gone back to the English classroom in a secondary school, where she is thriving!
Such a lot of different job experiences, and yet, within relatively narrow parameters. No astronauts, truck drivers or plumbers.
And, it must be stressed, the most important job for almost all these women, over six generations and nearly a century, is that of parent and homemaker.
Corona Virus - an annotated vocabulary
27 04 22 14:35 Filed in: Other
“Where were you when the world changed?” we wrote, a year ago, under the heading “The Year of Covid”.
The world did indeed change, and the “year of Covid” is entering its third year. Turns out, Global pandemics don’t magically melt away, even when we triple vaccinate the wealthy nations.
So Sue and I are taking a new approach to our documentation of this chapter of our lives. Extended periods of shared experiences tend to generate their own vocabulary.
Here then is our annotated vocabulary of the Covid-19 pandemic in Victoria, Australia.
5/10 km limit
During Melbourne lockdowns 5 and 10 kilometre limits were introduced to reduce mobility and therefore the spread of the virus. Online tools were published to allow people to work out their permitted radius and movement from their home address.
Active cases
People with Covid who are still infectious.
Aerosol Transmission
Refers to the transmission of the virus by small liquid droplets carried in the air, in a cloud. Governments around the world and even the WHO were slow to accept expert opinion that Covid 19 was primarily spread by airborne transmission, as this had expensive ramifications for attempts to control spread of the virus.
Anti Masker
This refers to people who refused to wear masks. They saw it as an infringement of their personal freedom and often part of a bigger conspiracy by the State to wrest control from individuals. Exemptions for health reasons were available from GPs but only for a very limited range of conditions. Fines were imposed for non mask wearing.
Armchair Epidemiologist
There has been no shortage of ‘experts’ who have no expertise, experience or training, offering up their pearls of wisdom to anyone who will listen.
AstraZeneca (AZ)
The AstraZeneca vaccine was developed in the UK by an Oxford research team in 2020. It uses a weakened animal virus , chimpanzee adenovirus, called a viral vector, that contains the genetic code for the spike protein. Once it enters the body, it tells the cells to make copies of the spike protein. The immune cells recognise the spike protein as a threat and begin building a response to it.
AstraZeneca has been a very successful and useful vaccine, despite the bad press it received, due to a rare clotting side effect. Immunity does wane over time but it still protects from severe disease.
ATAGI
The Australian Technical Group on Immunisation is a Federal Government body that provides expert advice and recommendations to the Health Minister and the TGA (Therapeutic Goods Administration). ATAGI, probably not a household word pre pandemic, was now spilling from the mouths of politicians and very much in the public eye. Their role in determining which vaccines were safe was now of vital interest to young and old.
Booster
The vaccines we are currently using in Australia, all need a third dose, and even fourth, to avoid failing effectiveness over time. This has become known as being boosted.
Border Bubble
States with differing levels of infection have closed their borders to each other at different times. Border communities that share facilities have been allowed to cross State borders within a defined area called a Border Bubble.
Border Checkpoint
Police and Defence Force personnel checked people’s passes during times of Border closure. Lines of cars and trucks and ad hoc overnight camping spots, became the norm.
Bubble buddy
During the long second wave lockdown, the mental health of people who lived alone became a concern. To ease the isolation, people were allowed to nominate a bubble buddy, with whom they could spend time, albeit within strict guidelines. When this began to include life partners who lived in different houses, the Premier tied himself in hilarious verbal knots trying to explain the rules.
Casual Contact
Strangers who have the possibility of infecting each other, just by being in the same place, at the same time.
Check in
The technology of QR codes became the solution for knowing who could have been infected in a particular time and place. “Checking in”, using a government developed app on one’s smart phone, became an act of community minded altruism, and, later, a quick way of demonstrating one’s vaccination status.
Chief Health Officer
Professor Brett Sutton has been Victoria’s Chief Health Officer since March 2019. By the time he had appeared at a few Covid Press Conferences, he became very well known to Victorians. Quite quickly, the title became shortened to the “CHO”. CHOs of other states were also very public figures.
In Victoria, from the beginning of the pandemic until later 2021, when the powers were curtailed, the CHO had the legal power to order all sorts of restrictions.
CHOttie
Brett Sutton is an attractive man. He generated a lot of swooning, a lot of memes, a Facebook fan club and even some ‘merch’.
Click and Collect
Business and customers adapted quickly to commerce during a pandemic. After ordering online, shoppers could choose home delivery, or the new “click and collect”, where their purchases were waiting for them at the front desk, or even put straight into their car boot.
Close contact
People designated ‘close contacts’ of a ‘case’ were required to self isolate for a set period of time. What it took to be a close contact, and how long they needed to isolate, varied between States, and changed over time.
Cluster
In major towns and cities, groups of cases tend to develop in particular areas. Epidemiologists call these ‘clusters’, which, along with a lot of other specialist words, became part of the common vernacular. Thus, in Victoria, there was the Shepparton cluster, the Black Rock cluster etc.
Community Transmission
While States of Australia were trying to eradicate the virus, there was a distinction drawn between people who caught the virus overseas, interstate, or whilst in quarantine, and those who caught it out in the community.
Contact Tracers
An army of specially trained communicators interviewed, often multiple times, people who had caught covid, to trace their movements and alert possible contacts. The development of QR codes and “checking in’ made this role less critical.
Contactless Delivery
A selling point for some businesses, was the ability to home deliver goods that had been purchased on line, without entering houses or being face to face with people. This became known as ‘contactless delivery’.
Coronacast
Dr Norman Swan, long term Medical Journalist with the ABC, began a daily podcast he called “Coronacast” during the first weeks of the pandemic. In it he answered questions, explained medical terminology, and provided commentary on the pandemic. It became essential daily listening.
Coronavirus
Sars stands for Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome. Sars-Cov-2 is the virus that causes the disease Covid-19. The ‘corona’ refers to the halo of spike proteins that surrounds the virus.
Covid Response Commander
Jeroen Weimar had transformed Melbourne’s public transport system, as its Chief Executive. As the ‘test and trace’ processes in Victoria struggled during its first wave, Premier Dan Andrews turned to this no nonsense logistics expert. Jeroen brought ten of his trusted colleagues from Public Transport and fixed Victoria’s Covid Response processes. He became a popular public figure by fronting many press conferences and answering questions in his rapid fire, no nonsense style.
Covid Normal
Always just around the corner, and, so far, always stymied by yet another new variant, a “Covid Normal” life is the precursor to “living with the virus”. It meant not being officially locked down, but having some legal restrictions on normal life.
Covidiot
Those who behave idiotically during the pandemic, especially flouting the restrictions. The term was largely replaced by “antivaxxer”, once the vaccines were available.
Curfew
At the height of its fight to reach Covid Zero, in order to help police restrictions, and limit movement, the Victorian government imposed a 9pm curfew on all but essential workers. Other parts of the world had used this measure successfully. It made Melbourne a very, very quiet place.
Dan-stans
The “stans” are the countries of Central Asia that were mostly part of the Soviet Union, and remained under Russian influence after independence. Using the term with Dan in front of it links Victoria, under Premier Dan Andrews, with these near dictatorships. It suggests that Victoria is a dictatorship. “Dictator Dan” became a term of abuse levelled at the Premier during pandemic lockdowns.
Deep Cleaning
Early on in the pandemic, it was thought that, like colds and flu, the Covid virus was transmitted through droplets, which could settle in a room and remain a source of contagion for days. When transmission had occurred in a venue it was ‘deep cleaned’ to remove any traces of virus.
Diamond Princess
This cruise ship was the source of Australia’s first wave of infections. Passengers were allowed to disembark at Sydney, and travel on to all parts of Australia, taking the virus with them. There were questions about who made this decision, and an inquiry was held. Cruise ships, with their closely quartered populations, and inadequate air flow, turn out to be perfect breeding grounds for this virus.
Doomscrolling
The 2020 Macquarie Dictionary word of the year, Doomscrolling refers to the practice of continuing to read news feeds online, even though it is depressing, and endlessly negative.
Donut Day, Double Donuts (put on emojis)
During the early waves of the pandemic, in Victoria, we watched with interest, the daily infection numbers. For a long time, the first place go find them out was the daily Press Conference. And then, magically, they began to be a lower number each day. We waited for the magic zero cases. When it happened, it came known as donut day. Cafes across Melbourne sold out of donuts. and no new cases, no new deaths became a "double donut day”.
Double Vaxxed/Triple Vaxxed/Fully Vaxxed
Having had two, and later three vaccination doses, which allowed people to access some elements of the community, closed to the unvaccinated. eg “I’m fully vaxxed”, cited as a badge of honour in some circles.
Effective Reproduction Number
The Basic Reproduction Number (R) refers to the transmission potential of a virus in a population with no immunity. It is used in the calculation of the Effective Reproduction Number (Reff ) The Reff refers to the average number of secondary cases per infectious case in the current population, where there will be some immunity. This is a more complicated calculation, but is important as it tells the Health Department, in real time, how many people are likely to be infected by each positive case of Covid-19. When the number is high, the virus spreads faster. If the Reff is 1, case numbers will remain stable and if it is less than 1, the case numbers will drop.This is important information that assists Government in planning a response to any infectious disease outbreak, not just Covid-19.
Epidemiology
Epidemiology is the scientific study and analysis of the distribution patterns of a disease ( how when and where). World wide epidemiologists have been an integral part of the fight against the Covid 19 Pandemic. Using data and analysis, they have informed and advised governments, influenced policy and made recommendations on preventative measures.
The term Epidemiology of the Day also entered the lexicon at the daily Victorian press conferences, during the first and second waves. It referred to the distribution and case numbers and then morphed to include hospitalisations and eventually vaccination rates.
Essential Workers
Essential workers are those deemed by the government to be vital for the continued safety and care of the population. It included workers involved in food production, processing and distribution, and workers required to keep supply chains functioning. It also included anyone involved in healthcare, from the hospital administration and doctors and nurses, to the cleaners and orderlies. The role of truck drivers was also appreciated and they received toots and waves from a grateful population at the height of the first wave, as the importance of their role became obvious.
Exposure site
Exposure site refers to any site, other than a private dwelling, where there has been infections reported. It could include work places, schools, public transport, shops etc.
Flatten the Curve
We became very used to looking at graphs of infection rates, especially during the early stages of the various waves of infection. During periods of exponential growth the graph headed skywards in an almost vertical line. Each day we looked anxiously for signs of a more gradual increase in the number of cases. This created a flatter curve, as the graph eventually headed down.
Fleeting contact/transmission
This term refers to fleeting non physical contact that can result in transmission of the virus. The term became an issue during the Delta wave as the virus had become more transmissible but it was difficult to validate. The conservative press and Opposition were keen to use it as a political football in order to discredit the CHO and Victorian Government’s handling of the crisis.
Flexible working
During the pandemic one of the health orders imposed to limit movement and contact was, ‘if you can work from home you must work from home’. Despite some unfortunate consequences, such as social isolation and difficulties for working parents also coping with home schooling, working from home was popular. Long term changes in how, where and when work is done are emerging, as flexible working is embraced. In the future, fewer hours will be spent in the office and more meetings and conferences will be on Zoom. The ramifications are already evident in empty CBD office towers, less traffic at peak hour, fewer interstate flights, and in an outer suburb, country and coastal real estate boom. People are realising they do not need to live close to work.
Freedom Day
Freedom Day was a term coined by UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Monday, July 19th 2021, was the day Boris invited citizens to ‘take back their freedoms’. It was the end of laws mandating wearing of masks and enforcement of social distancing. All businesses re-opened, including nightclubs and at midnight parties erupted all over the country and many partied all night.
Fully Vaxxed
Fully vaxxed refers to what is deemed at the time, to be the optimum dosage of Covid vaccine. At first it was two doses, but as more real life data emerges as well as new very transmissible variants, three doses is becoming the recommended dose, as it is in Victoria now.
Genomic Sequencing
This term is not specific to the pandemic of course, but we grew to learn all about it, as different variants of the virus began to appear. It does, of course, refer to the scientific process whereby the genetic makeup of a living thing can be determined. During the pandemic it has been the means of charting the major and minor genetic changes to the virus.
Get on the beers
When restrictions came into force, and people were getting used to the restricted life, an illegal dinner party was discussed at the daily press conference. Premier Dan Andrews admonished people for having mates around for drinking parties. His words were made into hilarious remix by a Brisbane duo, Mashd N Kutcher, which became one of 2020’s hottest 100 hits.
Being able to finally get on the beers, became a special Victorian celebratory phrase.on the first donut day, although Dan did say at his press conference that day, that he “might be going a bit higher up the shelf”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hOK5JF5XGA
Hard Border
In a pre pandemic world, defence forces manning border outposts at state borders seemed impossible. We grew used to it: long lines of vehicles at the Murray River bridge, Border passes, exemptions, police number plate checks were all part of our ‘hard borders’. In 2020, we even had hard borders separating the Melbourne metropolitan area from regional Victoria.
Health Care Workers (HCW)
Of course we had nurses, doctors, ambulance drivers (‘ambos&rsquo
etc before the pandemic, but, suddenly their work became the coal face. There was world wide focus on hospitals. During the first wave, as cases mounted, it became customary in many cities around the world to come outside at a set time, on balconies and streets, and bang pots and pans in recognition of their work, and to applaud new shifts on their way into the hospital. These ones are in Madrid:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MIjynl6nYc
Herd Immunity
This is a term long used in epidemiology. It’s how most vaccines usually work. Enough of the population have antibodies protecting them from a disease, to protect the vulnerable: the young, the old and the immunocompromised. There is some evidence now that this may remain an epidemic disease where we never actually reach herd immunity, but have waves of infection, and variants remain a constant threat.
Home/Hotel Quarantine
People in quarantine isolate either at home, or at a “quarantine hotel”, which were repurposed, empty city hotels. Early on in the pandemic, people coming into the country had to quarantine for fourteen days at a special hotel. Victoria’s “first wave” happened because of a leak from a quarantine hotel. It was a huge scandal, and became very political.
Hotspot
An area where there was a lot of Covid was known as a “hotspot”. It could be as small as a shopping centre and as large as a group of suburbs. They were publicised so that people could be alert to symptoms, if had they been nearby, and keep away from them in future.
Household Contact
The most likely place people might catch Covid is from people they live with. If you had a “positive” member of your household, you automatically became a "household contact”, and thus had to be tested, and isolate for a set period of time.
Howard Springs
This area of Darwin had been an army base. It has many stand alone little huts, perfect for keeping a lot of people separated from each other, and from the general public. It has been used extensively for people coming from overseas, and it became the model for other new quarantine centres.
Hydroxychloroquine
This was an older longstanding treatment for malaria. In early 2020 it was trialed, unsuccessfully as a treatment for Covid 19. The reporting around its use was unskilful and it became politicised especially in Trump’s America. Hydroxychloroquine slipped into the revamped culture wars and their conspiracy theories, where it remains to this day.
ICU
This stands for Intensive Care Unit. The number of patients in hospital, in ICU and on a ventilator has become a measure of how problematic a covid wave is.
Index Case
This is an epidemiological term. An outbreak in a given area begins somewhere. Extensive contact tracing enables outbreaks to be traced back to the first person to catch it. This is the “index case”. It became a political blame game to find the index case and what led to their catching it.
Infectious Period
A medical and epidemiological term. It refers to the days during which a case can pass the virus on to others.
Intimate Partner
During Lockdown, the plight of partners (friends with benefits) who do not live together needed to be dealt with. It became grounds for home visits, that were otherwise disallowed. A hilarious Press Conference where Premier Dan Andrews explained the rules, led to his reflection that he never considered that this conversation would be part of his job.
Intubated/Ventilated
The really horrible truth about severe Covid is that people are treated by having a machine breath for them. They have to be sedated for this and usually lie on their fronts. The tube down into their lungs often caused lasting damage to their throat or vocal folds. A daily number of people in each State in this situation has been reported as a measure of the severity of an outbreak.
Iso
There is a particularly Australian propensity for shortening and lengthening familiar words and names. Thus “isolation” becomes “iso”, as in “He’s in iso at home”.
It’s Not a Race
Prime Minister Scott Morrison did not order enough vaccines, nor did he have a usable plan for mass vaccination. He excused his inadequacy with this oft repeated phrase “It’s not a race, it’s not a competition”. It came back to haunt him when the Delta wave hit, and there was a rush to get vaccinated. Especially when it became clear that he had favoured NSW with vaccines and vaccination places, over the other States.
Ivermectin
Ivermectin is a veterinary worming medicine given to horses. Its use against Covid began in South Africa and many third world countries, in spite of evidence that it is not effective. Once the FDA in America and ATAGI in Australia warned against its use, it became adopted, like Hydroxychloroquine before it, as the darling of right wing conspirators.
Jab, jabbed, double jabbed, triple jabbed
Shorthand for having had the vaccine. Interchangeable with “vaxxed”.
Job Keeper, Job Seeker
During the first Lockdown, when so many people lost their jobs, or had much reduced hours, government assistance was provided. Job Keeper was given via employers which maintained employer/employee relationships, so that, when the economy “bounced back”, those jobs were still there.
Job Seeker replaced unemployment benefits for a while. The requirements to work as a volunteer, or apply for a set number of jobs per week, were dropped.
Karen
Wikipedia says “Karen is a pejorative term for a white woman perceived as entitled or demanding what is above the scope of what is normal”. Its use grew during the early months of the pandemic. In Victoria, it first came to general attention with a woman from Brighton, a wealthy suburb, complaining about being confined to the five kilometre limit because she had already walked around all the streets of Brighton. The label grew with a woman refusing to wear a mask in a Bunnings store and filmed arguing with a hapless employee.
Let it Rip
This has become synonymous with a government policy of not having any restrictions on movement, gathering, mask wearing etc. The sentiment presupposes that a particular population will eventually acquire herd immunity through most people becoming infected with the virus.
LGAs of Concern
This term is part of Sydney’s Covid history. During their Delta wave, the least wealthy Local Government Areas had the most infections. The kind of jobs people in those areas had couldn’t be done at home, and poverty made continuing to work essential. The LGAs of Concern suffered more Police patrols, curfews and greater lockdowns than the rest of Sydney.
Locally-acquired cases
In the beginning of the pandemic in Australia, the only source of infection were visitors from overseas. Eventually there was “community transmission”, people in the community catching it from other people in the community. These became known as “locally acquired cases”.
Lockdown
We first saw legally enforced stay at home orders in our News Bulletins, when people in the Chinese city of Wuhan, where the virus was first discovered, had their doors welded shut to keep them in. This was followed quite soon with footage of deserted Italian cities, and people forced to stay inside their homes. Little did we know! We are completely acclimatised to “lockdown” now, even though it has become very politicised, and may never be used in Australia again.
Lockdown Light (Lite)
This term grew out of the rivalry between Victoria and NSW. The NSW government did not introduce the strict lockdowns we saw here in Victoria. Their limited restrictions were contemptuously ridiculed.
Lockout
After vaccinations became widespread, and eventually compulsory in certain industries, only those who were fully vaccinated could participate fully in the opened up economy. These were known as vaccine mandates. The Premier’s message became, “We’re not going to “lockdown” the economy, we’re going to “lockout” those who refuse to get vaccinated.”
Long Covid
Over time it became obvious that a sizeable proportion of those who had even mild disease, still had symptoms long after the acute phase had passed. “Brain fog”, fatigue, and a range of other symptoms last months and even years. This has become known as “long Covid”.
N95
An N95 mask is a mask that has 3 layers and fits securely around the face. If properly fitted, it filters 95% of airborne particles. During the Omicron outbreak they became widely available to the public as this variant was so transmissible. N95 masks are also worn by frontline workers and, in this scenario, have to be specially expertly fitted.
National Cabinet
National Cabinet was established in March 2020 in response to the pandemic, and replaced COAG for the duration of the crisis. It was composed of the State Premiers, the Chief Ministers and Prime Minister. Initially, National Cabinet was able to work collaboratively on crisis management, but unfortunately, politics and individual agendas made the group less effective and able to make good decisions.
Negative Result
Negative result became the term we all wanted to hear after a PCR or RAT test. It became shorthand for, “I don’t have COVID”.
New Normal
Towards the end of 2020 and Victoria’s first big wave the Premier Daniel Andrews, began to talk of opening up at Christmas. He warned the life would not return to normal, but that it would be a “Covid normal”. This term morphed into “new normal” and was widely used.
North Face
During Victoria’s longest and strictest lockdown in 2020 Premier Danial Andrews held daily Press conferences where he often wore his North Face jacket. Our lives had shrunk so much and the daily press conference was such a feature of our day, that the appearance of the North Face jacket prompted much hilarious activity on Twitter and, in the Press, speculation on its symbolism.
Online Learning
During the lockdowns when schools were closed, remote learning of course meant on line learning. There was great discrepancy, mostly socio economic based, between different schools. Many teachers worked very hard to not only teach content, but also to help their students cope with the isolation. The Victorian Government provided IPads to disadvantaged children, in an attempt to level the playing field. Inevitably, some children emerged with gaps in their learning, that was addressed by employing extra tutors.
Pandemic
A pandemic is a disease that is prevalent world wide, rather than an epidemic that is restricted to a region or one area.
PCR Test
PCR means polymerase chain reaction. It is a test to detect genetic material from a specific organism, such as the SARS-CoV-2 virus. PCR testing stations were established and run by State Governments. As such large numbers of tests were required drive through testing stations appeared in many suburbs and during the height of the waves long queues of cars were very evident.
Pfizer
Pfizer is a world wide pharmaceutical company. Pfizer was amongst a number of companies who used RNA technology in the Covid vaccine.This technology uses a piece of genetic code of the virus to give instructions to cells in the body to make antigens and trigger an immune response. The advantage of this technology in vaccine manufacture, is that it can be easily adapted for changes in the Covid virus or indeed for other viruses that may emerge. In real world use, it has proven to also protect against severe disease.
PPE
PPE refers to the personal protective equipment usually associated with operating theatres. During the pandemic it was worn by anyone on the front line, in contact with infected people. N 95 masks, face shields, surgical gloves and plastic gowns were now commonplace.
Presser
This is shorthand for Press Conference. The Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews and his daily Presser, during Victoria’s waves of infection, became an essential part of our lives during lockdown. These Press Conferences differed from the norm as they were important information sessions using the experts involved in decision making, including of course the Chief Health Officer.. Another new aspect was the extent of the audience. The daily presser for us, was a shared experience with much communication by text.
Public Health Orders
These are legally enforceable orders made by the CHO and signed by the Premier. They included items such as mandatory mask wearing, density limits and curfews.
QR Code
QR stands for Quick Response Code and consists of a black pattern of squares on a white background that can be read by a camera. It was used during the pandemic to track people to facilitate tracing and the TTIQ strategy (test, trace, isolate, quarantine). It was also used to check vaccination status that was required for access to some venues, for instance inside dining and non essential retail.
RATS
Rapid Antigen Tests (Rats) are what Australians call Lateral Flow tests. The acronym has slipped so quickly into our vocabulary, that we hardly stop to think what the letters stand for. When the “Omicron wave” first hit, and numbers of cases rose very rapidly, there was a shortage of Rats, and huge demand on the PCR testing facilities. Eventually the supply increased, and the Government accepted notification of a positive Rat as evidence of infection. Most of the community pays for their own Rats, but schools and many businesses have a temporary program of handing them out for regular testing.
Remote Learning
During the lockdowns, schools used the internet to continue schooling for kids. This is different from “home schooling’, where parents are responsible for the curriculum and its delivery. However, many parents, trying to work from home, and supervise their children’s lessons at the same time, found it just as much work.
Ring of Steel
During Victoria’s biggest lockdown, Greater Melbourne was separated out from the rest of Victoria, which had fewer restrictions. This “ring of steel” around Melbourne was maintained through Police checkpoints on major highways, demands from rural businesses to see customers' addresses, spot checks on number plates and pleas from the premier to protect regional Victoria.
Scomicron/Domicron
Prime Minister Scott Morrison (Scomo) wore a lot of blame for various aspects of the pandemic: not ordering enough vaccines, the state of Aged Care facilities, opposing State based regulations etc. At heightened times of blame during the “Omicron” wave, he was dubbed “Scomicron”.
When Dominic Perrottet replaced Gladys Berejiklian as NSW Premier, and he was held responsible for the huge wave of Omicron infections in his own and neighbouring states, Domicron as a nickname was impossible to resist.
Self Isolation
The act of putting oneself in home quarantine, without being forced to and without being monitored by the authorities. This term also covers people who have chosen not to go back to participating in normal society while the chance of infection remains.
Singles Bubble
During the long lockdowns, it became obvious that people who lived alone were suffering greatly from the isolation. The rules were tweaked so that people could meet one other under strict conditions, to ease the loneliness. This became known as forming a “singles bubble”.
Social Distancing
This term has become synonymous with keeping oneself separated from other people. For instance, the official advice might suggest that masks should be worn, “when you can’t socially distance”. The practice of shaking hands, or hugging, transformed into touching elbows in some circles. This became an ostentatious way of “being careful”.
Super Spreader Event
Quite early on in the pandemic, it became obvious that not everyone who caught Covid, passed it on, but that a few people passed it on prolifically. They were called “super spreaders”, who had a large “viral load”. Events where many people caught it from one infected individual became known as Super Spreader events.
Travel Bubble
As numbers eased at various times, it became possible to allow limited travel between states and even countries. For instance, a Trans-Tasman bubble allowed tourists to travel between New Zealand and Australia.
TTIQ
Once a specialised epidemiological phrase, TTIQ stands for test, trace, isolate, quarantine
V shaped recovery
During the pandemic we became very adept at reading lists of figures, graphs, etc. In most of Australia, chasing “Covid Zero”, we were always looking forward to the end of particular waves. “Recovery” meant case numbers dropping. When they grew and dropped very fast, the graph looked like an inverted V.
Vaccine Efficacy
When the vaccines were first appearing, there was much discussion and argument about them. People who had never asked questions about the origin, manufacturing process, duration of their vaccines before, became “experts”. One of the catch phrases that became part of our new vocabulary was “vaccine efficacy”.
Vaccine Hesitancy
Some people decided the vaccine wasn’t for them. Others decided to wait for a particular brand, Novavax, with old, well tried technology. It became, over time, a very divisive issue. We learnt to distinguish between anti vaxxers, many of whom embraced a variety of conspiracy theories, and those just wary of new vaccines: the hesitant.
Vaccine Hub
The State Governments took on much of the mass vaccination program, which became known as the “vaccine rollout”. A specially trained workforce was skilled up for this program. They established huge facilities, many of them drive through, for people to have their first, second and later on, third vaccine injections. These were often tent sites, in large car parks, municipal facilities, churches, schools, even football clubrooms. The larger sites were known as “vaccine hubs”.
Vaccine Passport
Once all sectors of the community had had the opportunity to be vaccinated, it became mandatory to be fully vaccinated, to participate fully in various activities. To help the people who had to police this, a mostly digital certificate was created, and attached to an app. So, once it was set up, all one had to do to show one's “vaccine passport” to a restaurant or shopkeeper, was to bring it up on one’s phone and show the big green tick.
Variants
Many of the virus’ variants came from mutations in the virus' spike protein.
The first variant was initially detected in the UK in November 2020. The WHO decided to name the new mutations using the letters of the Greek alphabet to avoid stigmatising the country of origin. Thus this “UK variant” became Alpha. During the second half of 2021, we had global waves of the Delta variant, which was more infectious again and far more virulent. The 2022 variant, Omicron, has increased infectivity, but not severity of illness.
Viral Shedding
Over time we have learnt a lot about viruses. One of the terms we have learnt, along with “viral load”, is “viral shedding”. Once someone has recovered, and no longer infectious, there might still be dead viruses that trigger the various tests. They might still be “shedding” the virus for weeks, after recovering.
Wastewater Testing
The “shed” viruses, including broken up ones, or “viral fragments”, along with live, active viruses can be detected in all bodily fluids. Governments can monitor the presence or absence if Covid 19 in particular communities, by testing their sewage systems. Reporting the findings of such tests became part of daily information sessions. For example the residents of a particular area were advised to monitor symptoms more vigilantly, if virus was detected in their wastewater.
WHO, World Health Organisation
The WHO is a specialised agency of the United Nations responsible for international public health. They make statements, and run programs relating to global health matters. For instance they administer COVAX, a program aimed at vaccinating all peoples of the world against Covid 19.
Work from Home
“Those who can work from home, must work from home” was part of the lockdown orders. As people “returned to the office”, many chose to spend at least part of the week continuing to work from home. The social and economic implications remained: people had to be coax “back to the CBD”, many decided to move out of addresses closer in to the city, and adopted outer suburban and regional lifestyles.
Zoom
An app that allows groups of people to “meet” remotely, to see and hear each other. It was a perfectly placed product as the world locked down. Zoom was used for everything from “viewing parties”, family get togethers, work meetings, classes and rehearsals to grannies reading a story to a child. Zoom meetings took on their own special culture. “You’re on mute”, “mute yourself”, “she’s in the waiting room”, The image that comes to mind is a computer screen divided into little squares, each with a badly lit head and shoulders sitting at a desk.
April 2022
With the Omicron wave reaching its peak in Australia, we have high vaccination rates and are now well and truly ‘living with the virus’. This means that, except for the vulnerable, and that include us over seventies, the general population are more or less living normal lives. There are still restrictions for the unvaccinated. They still cannot enter restaurants or theatres for instance. Isolation and stay at home orders now only apply to close contacts of a positive case, the definition of which is four hours or more close contact. Although mask wearing is no longer universal, masks are still required on public transport, and in aged care and hospitals. Retail staff, teachers and students are also still required to wear masks indoors.
As we end this post, we live in a changed world. Some adults and children have been left with mental and emotional scars and many people of all ages are living with long Covid, that is still little understood. Many families are also mourning their dead, and hospital wards remain under stress. The “work from home” phenomenon has been embraced by many and empty offices are still commonplace in the CBD.
The SARS-CoV-2 virus is probably here to stay. It will continue to evolve and we will continue to adapt.
Watch this space.
The world did indeed change, and the “year of Covid” is entering its third year. Turns out, Global pandemics don’t magically melt away, even when we triple vaccinate the wealthy nations.
So Sue and I are taking a new approach to our documentation of this chapter of our lives. Extended periods of shared experiences tend to generate their own vocabulary.
Here then is our annotated vocabulary of the Covid-19 pandemic in Victoria, Australia.
5/10 km limit
During Melbourne lockdowns 5 and 10 kilometre limits were introduced to reduce mobility and therefore the spread of the virus. Online tools were published to allow people to work out their permitted radius and movement from their home address.
Active cases
People with Covid who are still infectious.
Aerosol Transmission
Refers to the transmission of the virus by small liquid droplets carried in the air, in a cloud. Governments around the world and even the WHO were slow to accept expert opinion that Covid 19 was primarily spread by airborne transmission, as this had expensive ramifications for attempts to control spread of the virus.
Anti Masker
This refers to people who refused to wear masks. They saw it as an infringement of their personal freedom and often part of a bigger conspiracy by the State to wrest control from individuals. Exemptions for health reasons were available from GPs but only for a very limited range of conditions. Fines were imposed for non mask wearing.
Armchair Epidemiologist
There has been no shortage of ‘experts’ who have no expertise, experience or training, offering up their pearls of wisdom to anyone who will listen.
AstraZeneca (AZ)
The AstraZeneca vaccine was developed in the UK by an Oxford research team in 2020. It uses a weakened animal virus , chimpanzee adenovirus, called a viral vector, that contains the genetic code for the spike protein. Once it enters the body, it tells the cells to make copies of the spike protein. The immune cells recognise the spike protein as a threat and begin building a response to it.
AstraZeneca has been a very successful and useful vaccine, despite the bad press it received, due to a rare clotting side effect. Immunity does wane over time but it still protects from severe disease.
ATAGI
The Australian Technical Group on Immunisation is a Federal Government body that provides expert advice and recommendations to the Health Minister and the TGA (Therapeutic Goods Administration). ATAGI, probably not a household word pre pandemic, was now spilling from the mouths of politicians and very much in the public eye. Their role in determining which vaccines were safe was now of vital interest to young and old.
Booster
The vaccines we are currently using in Australia, all need a third dose, and even fourth, to avoid failing effectiveness over time. This has become known as being boosted.
Border Bubble
States with differing levels of infection have closed their borders to each other at different times. Border communities that share facilities have been allowed to cross State borders within a defined area called a Border Bubble.
Border Checkpoint
Police and Defence Force personnel checked people’s passes during times of Border closure. Lines of cars and trucks and ad hoc overnight camping spots, became the norm.
Bubble buddy
During the long second wave lockdown, the mental health of people who lived alone became a concern. To ease the isolation, people were allowed to nominate a bubble buddy, with whom they could spend time, albeit within strict guidelines. When this began to include life partners who lived in different houses, the Premier tied himself in hilarious verbal knots trying to explain the rules.
Casual Contact
Strangers who have the possibility of infecting each other, just by being in the same place, at the same time.
Check in
The technology of QR codes became the solution for knowing who could have been infected in a particular time and place. “Checking in”, using a government developed app on one’s smart phone, became an act of community minded altruism, and, later, a quick way of demonstrating one’s vaccination status.
Chief Health Officer
Professor Brett Sutton has been Victoria’s Chief Health Officer since March 2019. By the time he had appeared at a few Covid Press Conferences, he became very well known to Victorians. Quite quickly, the title became shortened to the “CHO”. CHOs of other states were also very public figures.
In Victoria, from the beginning of the pandemic until later 2021, when the powers were curtailed, the CHO had the legal power to order all sorts of restrictions.
CHOttie
Brett Sutton is an attractive man. He generated a lot of swooning, a lot of memes, a Facebook fan club and even some ‘merch’.
Click and Collect
Business and customers adapted quickly to commerce during a pandemic. After ordering online, shoppers could choose home delivery, or the new “click and collect”, where their purchases were waiting for them at the front desk, or even put straight into their car boot.
Close contact
People designated ‘close contacts’ of a ‘case’ were required to self isolate for a set period of time. What it took to be a close contact, and how long they needed to isolate, varied between States, and changed over time.
Cluster
In major towns and cities, groups of cases tend to develop in particular areas. Epidemiologists call these ‘clusters’, which, along with a lot of other specialist words, became part of the common vernacular. Thus, in Victoria, there was the Shepparton cluster, the Black Rock cluster etc.
Community Transmission
While States of Australia were trying to eradicate the virus, there was a distinction drawn between people who caught the virus overseas, interstate, or whilst in quarantine, and those who caught it out in the community.
Contact Tracers
An army of specially trained communicators interviewed, often multiple times, people who had caught covid, to trace their movements and alert possible contacts. The development of QR codes and “checking in’ made this role less critical.
Contactless Delivery
A selling point for some businesses, was the ability to home deliver goods that had been purchased on line, without entering houses or being face to face with people. This became known as ‘contactless delivery’.
Coronacast
Dr Norman Swan, long term Medical Journalist with the ABC, began a daily podcast he called “Coronacast” during the first weeks of the pandemic. In it he answered questions, explained medical terminology, and provided commentary on the pandemic. It became essential daily listening.
Coronavirus
Sars stands for Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome. Sars-Cov-2 is the virus that causes the disease Covid-19. The ‘corona’ refers to the halo of spike proteins that surrounds the virus.
Covid Response Commander
Jeroen Weimar had transformed Melbourne’s public transport system, as its Chief Executive. As the ‘test and trace’ processes in Victoria struggled during its first wave, Premier Dan Andrews turned to this no nonsense logistics expert. Jeroen brought ten of his trusted colleagues from Public Transport and fixed Victoria’s Covid Response processes. He became a popular public figure by fronting many press conferences and answering questions in his rapid fire, no nonsense style.
Covid Normal
Always just around the corner, and, so far, always stymied by yet another new variant, a “Covid Normal” life is the precursor to “living with the virus”. It meant not being officially locked down, but having some legal restrictions on normal life.
Covidiot
Those who behave idiotically during the pandemic, especially flouting the restrictions. The term was largely replaced by “antivaxxer”, once the vaccines were available.
Curfew
At the height of its fight to reach Covid Zero, in order to help police restrictions, and limit movement, the Victorian government imposed a 9pm curfew on all but essential workers. Other parts of the world had used this measure successfully. It made Melbourne a very, very quiet place.
Dan-stans
The “stans” are the countries of Central Asia that were mostly part of the Soviet Union, and remained under Russian influence after independence. Using the term with Dan in front of it links Victoria, under Premier Dan Andrews, with these near dictatorships. It suggests that Victoria is a dictatorship. “Dictator Dan” became a term of abuse levelled at the Premier during pandemic lockdowns.
Deep Cleaning
Early on in the pandemic, it was thought that, like colds and flu, the Covid virus was transmitted through droplets, which could settle in a room and remain a source of contagion for days. When transmission had occurred in a venue it was ‘deep cleaned’ to remove any traces of virus.
Diamond Princess
This cruise ship was the source of Australia’s first wave of infections. Passengers were allowed to disembark at Sydney, and travel on to all parts of Australia, taking the virus with them. There were questions about who made this decision, and an inquiry was held. Cruise ships, with their closely quartered populations, and inadequate air flow, turn out to be perfect breeding grounds for this virus.
Doomscrolling
The 2020 Macquarie Dictionary word of the year, Doomscrolling refers to the practice of continuing to read news feeds online, even though it is depressing, and endlessly negative.
Donut Day, Double Donuts (put on emojis)
During the early waves of the pandemic, in Victoria, we watched with interest, the daily infection numbers. For a long time, the first place go find them out was the daily Press Conference. And then, magically, they began to be a lower number each day. We waited for the magic zero cases. When it happened, it came known as donut day. Cafes across Melbourne sold out of donuts. and no new cases, no new deaths became a "double donut day”.
Double Vaxxed/Triple Vaxxed/Fully Vaxxed
Having had two, and later three vaccination doses, which allowed people to access some elements of the community, closed to the unvaccinated. eg “I’m fully vaxxed”, cited as a badge of honour in some circles.
Effective Reproduction Number
The Basic Reproduction Number (R) refers to the transmission potential of a virus in a population with no immunity. It is used in the calculation of the Effective Reproduction Number (Reff ) The Reff refers to the average number of secondary cases per infectious case in the current population, where there will be some immunity. This is a more complicated calculation, but is important as it tells the Health Department, in real time, how many people are likely to be infected by each positive case of Covid-19. When the number is high, the virus spreads faster. If the Reff is 1, case numbers will remain stable and if it is less than 1, the case numbers will drop.This is important information that assists Government in planning a response to any infectious disease outbreak, not just Covid-19.
Epidemiology
Epidemiology is the scientific study and analysis of the distribution patterns of a disease ( how when and where). World wide epidemiologists have been an integral part of the fight against the Covid 19 Pandemic. Using data and analysis, they have informed and advised governments, influenced policy and made recommendations on preventative measures.
The term Epidemiology of the Day also entered the lexicon at the daily Victorian press conferences, during the first and second waves. It referred to the distribution and case numbers and then morphed to include hospitalisations and eventually vaccination rates.
Essential Workers
Essential workers are those deemed by the government to be vital for the continued safety and care of the population. It included workers involved in food production, processing and distribution, and workers required to keep supply chains functioning. It also included anyone involved in healthcare, from the hospital administration and doctors and nurses, to the cleaners and orderlies. The role of truck drivers was also appreciated and they received toots and waves from a grateful population at the height of the first wave, as the importance of their role became obvious.
Exposure site
Exposure site refers to any site, other than a private dwelling, where there has been infections reported. It could include work places, schools, public transport, shops etc.
Flatten the Curve
We became very used to looking at graphs of infection rates, especially during the early stages of the various waves of infection. During periods of exponential growth the graph headed skywards in an almost vertical line. Each day we looked anxiously for signs of a more gradual increase in the number of cases. This created a flatter curve, as the graph eventually headed down.
Fleeting contact/transmission
This term refers to fleeting non physical contact that can result in transmission of the virus. The term became an issue during the Delta wave as the virus had become more transmissible but it was difficult to validate. The conservative press and Opposition were keen to use it as a political football in order to discredit the CHO and Victorian Government’s handling of the crisis.
Flexible working
During the pandemic one of the health orders imposed to limit movement and contact was, ‘if you can work from home you must work from home’. Despite some unfortunate consequences, such as social isolation and difficulties for working parents also coping with home schooling, working from home was popular. Long term changes in how, where and when work is done are emerging, as flexible working is embraced. In the future, fewer hours will be spent in the office and more meetings and conferences will be on Zoom. The ramifications are already evident in empty CBD office towers, less traffic at peak hour, fewer interstate flights, and in an outer suburb, country and coastal real estate boom. People are realising they do not need to live close to work.
Freedom Day
Freedom Day was a term coined by UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Monday, July 19th 2021, was the day Boris invited citizens to ‘take back their freedoms’. It was the end of laws mandating wearing of masks and enforcement of social distancing. All businesses re-opened, including nightclubs and at midnight parties erupted all over the country and many partied all night.
Fully Vaxxed
Fully vaxxed refers to what is deemed at the time, to be the optimum dosage of Covid vaccine. At first it was two doses, but as more real life data emerges as well as new very transmissible variants, three doses is becoming the recommended dose, as it is in Victoria now.
Genomic Sequencing
This term is not specific to the pandemic of course, but we grew to learn all about it, as different variants of the virus began to appear. It does, of course, refer to the scientific process whereby the genetic makeup of a living thing can be determined. During the pandemic it has been the means of charting the major and minor genetic changes to the virus.
Get on the beers
When restrictions came into force, and people were getting used to the restricted life, an illegal dinner party was discussed at the daily press conference. Premier Dan Andrews admonished people for having mates around for drinking parties. His words were made into hilarious remix by a Brisbane duo, Mashd N Kutcher, which became one of 2020’s hottest 100 hits.
Being able to finally get on the beers, became a special Victorian celebratory phrase.on the first donut day, although Dan did say at his press conference that day, that he “might be going a bit higher up the shelf”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hOK5JF5XGA
Hard Border
In a pre pandemic world, defence forces manning border outposts at state borders seemed impossible. We grew used to it: long lines of vehicles at the Murray River bridge, Border passes, exemptions, police number plate checks were all part of our ‘hard borders’. In 2020, we even had hard borders separating the Melbourne metropolitan area from regional Victoria.
Health Care Workers (HCW)
Of course we had nurses, doctors, ambulance drivers (‘ambos&rsquo
etc before the pandemic, but, suddenly their work became the coal face. There was world wide focus on hospitals. During the first wave, as cases mounted, it became customary in many cities around the world to come outside at a set time, on balconies and streets, and bang pots and pans in recognition of their work, and to applaud new shifts on their way into the hospital. These ones are in Madrid:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MIjynl6nYc
Herd Immunity
This is a term long used in epidemiology. It’s how most vaccines usually work. Enough of the population have antibodies protecting them from a disease, to protect the vulnerable: the young, the old and the immunocompromised. There is some evidence now that this may remain an epidemic disease where we never actually reach herd immunity, but have waves of infection, and variants remain a constant threat.
Home/Hotel Quarantine
People in quarantine isolate either at home, or at a “quarantine hotel”, which were repurposed, empty city hotels. Early on in the pandemic, people coming into the country had to quarantine for fourteen days at a special hotel. Victoria’s “first wave” happened because of a leak from a quarantine hotel. It was a huge scandal, and became very political.
Hotspot
An area where there was a lot of Covid was known as a “hotspot”. It could be as small as a shopping centre and as large as a group of suburbs. They were publicised so that people could be alert to symptoms, if had they been nearby, and keep away from them in future.
Household Contact
The most likely place people might catch Covid is from people they live with. If you had a “positive” member of your household, you automatically became a "household contact”, and thus had to be tested, and isolate for a set period of time.
Howard Springs
This area of Darwin had been an army base. It has many stand alone little huts, perfect for keeping a lot of people separated from each other, and from the general public. It has been used extensively for people coming from overseas, and it became the model for other new quarantine centres.
Hydroxychloroquine
This was an older longstanding treatment for malaria. In early 2020 it was trialed, unsuccessfully as a treatment for Covid 19. The reporting around its use was unskilful and it became politicised especially in Trump’s America. Hydroxychloroquine slipped into the revamped culture wars and their conspiracy theories, where it remains to this day.
ICU
This stands for Intensive Care Unit. The number of patients in hospital, in ICU and on a ventilator has become a measure of how problematic a covid wave is.
Index Case
This is an epidemiological term. An outbreak in a given area begins somewhere. Extensive contact tracing enables outbreaks to be traced back to the first person to catch it. This is the “index case”. It became a political blame game to find the index case and what led to their catching it.
Infectious Period
A medical and epidemiological term. It refers to the days during which a case can pass the virus on to others.
Intimate Partner
During Lockdown, the plight of partners (friends with benefits) who do not live together needed to be dealt with. It became grounds for home visits, that were otherwise disallowed. A hilarious Press Conference where Premier Dan Andrews explained the rules, led to his reflection that he never considered that this conversation would be part of his job.
Intubated/Ventilated
The really horrible truth about severe Covid is that people are treated by having a machine breath for them. They have to be sedated for this and usually lie on their fronts. The tube down into their lungs often caused lasting damage to their throat or vocal folds. A daily number of people in each State in this situation has been reported as a measure of the severity of an outbreak.
Iso
There is a particularly Australian propensity for shortening and lengthening familiar words and names. Thus “isolation” becomes “iso”, as in “He’s in iso at home”.
It’s Not a Race
Prime Minister Scott Morrison did not order enough vaccines, nor did he have a usable plan for mass vaccination. He excused his inadequacy with this oft repeated phrase “It’s not a race, it’s not a competition”. It came back to haunt him when the Delta wave hit, and there was a rush to get vaccinated. Especially when it became clear that he had favoured NSW with vaccines and vaccination places, over the other States.
Ivermectin
Ivermectin is a veterinary worming medicine given to horses. Its use against Covid began in South Africa and many third world countries, in spite of evidence that it is not effective. Once the FDA in America and ATAGI in Australia warned against its use, it became adopted, like Hydroxychloroquine before it, as the darling of right wing conspirators.
Jab, jabbed, double jabbed, triple jabbed
Shorthand for having had the vaccine. Interchangeable with “vaxxed”.
Job Keeper, Job Seeker
During the first Lockdown, when so many people lost their jobs, or had much reduced hours, government assistance was provided. Job Keeper was given via employers which maintained employer/employee relationships, so that, when the economy “bounced back”, those jobs were still there.
Job Seeker replaced unemployment benefits for a while. The requirements to work as a volunteer, or apply for a set number of jobs per week, were dropped.
Karen
Wikipedia says “Karen is a pejorative term for a white woman perceived as entitled or demanding what is above the scope of what is normal”. Its use grew during the early months of the pandemic. In Victoria, it first came to general attention with a woman from Brighton, a wealthy suburb, complaining about being confined to the five kilometre limit because she had already walked around all the streets of Brighton. The label grew with a woman refusing to wear a mask in a Bunnings store and filmed arguing with a hapless employee.
Let it Rip
This has become synonymous with a government policy of not having any restrictions on movement, gathering, mask wearing etc. The sentiment presupposes that a particular population will eventually acquire herd immunity through most people becoming infected with the virus.
LGAs of Concern
This term is part of Sydney’s Covid history. During their Delta wave, the least wealthy Local Government Areas had the most infections. The kind of jobs people in those areas had couldn’t be done at home, and poverty made continuing to work essential. The LGAs of Concern suffered more Police patrols, curfews and greater lockdowns than the rest of Sydney.
Locally-acquired cases
In the beginning of the pandemic in Australia, the only source of infection were visitors from overseas. Eventually there was “community transmission”, people in the community catching it from other people in the community. These became known as “locally acquired cases”.
Lockdown
We first saw legally enforced stay at home orders in our News Bulletins, when people in the Chinese city of Wuhan, where the virus was first discovered, had their doors welded shut to keep them in. This was followed quite soon with footage of deserted Italian cities, and people forced to stay inside their homes. Little did we know! We are completely acclimatised to “lockdown” now, even though it has become very politicised, and may never be used in Australia again.
Lockdown Light (Lite)
This term grew out of the rivalry between Victoria and NSW. The NSW government did not introduce the strict lockdowns we saw here in Victoria. Their limited restrictions were contemptuously ridiculed.
Lockout
After vaccinations became widespread, and eventually compulsory in certain industries, only those who were fully vaccinated could participate fully in the opened up economy. These were known as vaccine mandates. The Premier’s message became, “We’re not going to “lockdown” the economy, we’re going to “lockout” those who refuse to get vaccinated.”
Long Covid
Over time it became obvious that a sizeable proportion of those who had even mild disease, still had symptoms long after the acute phase had passed. “Brain fog”, fatigue, and a range of other symptoms last months and even years. This has become known as “long Covid”.
N95
An N95 mask is a mask that has 3 layers and fits securely around the face. If properly fitted, it filters 95% of airborne particles. During the Omicron outbreak they became widely available to the public as this variant was so transmissible. N95 masks are also worn by frontline workers and, in this scenario, have to be specially expertly fitted.
National Cabinet
National Cabinet was established in March 2020 in response to the pandemic, and replaced COAG for the duration of the crisis. It was composed of the State Premiers, the Chief Ministers and Prime Minister. Initially, National Cabinet was able to work collaboratively on crisis management, but unfortunately, politics and individual agendas made the group less effective and able to make good decisions.
Negative Result
Negative result became the term we all wanted to hear after a PCR or RAT test. It became shorthand for, “I don’t have COVID”.
New Normal
Towards the end of 2020 and Victoria’s first big wave the Premier Daniel Andrews, began to talk of opening up at Christmas. He warned the life would not return to normal, but that it would be a “Covid normal”. This term morphed into “new normal” and was widely used.
North Face
During Victoria’s longest and strictest lockdown in 2020 Premier Danial Andrews held daily Press conferences where he often wore his North Face jacket. Our lives had shrunk so much and the daily press conference was such a feature of our day, that the appearance of the North Face jacket prompted much hilarious activity on Twitter and, in the Press, speculation on its symbolism.
Online Learning
During the lockdowns when schools were closed, remote learning of course meant on line learning. There was great discrepancy, mostly socio economic based, between different schools. Many teachers worked very hard to not only teach content, but also to help their students cope with the isolation. The Victorian Government provided IPads to disadvantaged children, in an attempt to level the playing field. Inevitably, some children emerged with gaps in their learning, that was addressed by employing extra tutors.
Pandemic
A pandemic is a disease that is prevalent world wide, rather than an epidemic that is restricted to a region or one area.
PCR Test
PCR means polymerase chain reaction. It is a test to detect genetic material from a specific organism, such as the SARS-CoV-2 virus. PCR testing stations were established and run by State Governments. As such large numbers of tests were required drive through testing stations appeared in many suburbs and during the height of the waves long queues of cars were very evident.
Pfizer
Pfizer is a world wide pharmaceutical company. Pfizer was amongst a number of companies who used RNA technology in the Covid vaccine.This technology uses a piece of genetic code of the virus to give instructions to cells in the body to make antigens and trigger an immune response. The advantage of this technology in vaccine manufacture, is that it can be easily adapted for changes in the Covid virus or indeed for other viruses that may emerge. In real world use, it has proven to also protect against severe disease.
PPE
PPE refers to the personal protective equipment usually associated with operating theatres. During the pandemic it was worn by anyone on the front line, in contact with infected people. N 95 masks, face shields, surgical gloves and plastic gowns were now commonplace.
Presser
This is shorthand for Press Conference. The Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews and his daily Presser, during Victoria’s waves of infection, became an essential part of our lives during lockdown. These Press Conferences differed from the norm as they were important information sessions using the experts involved in decision making, including of course the Chief Health Officer.. Another new aspect was the extent of the audience. The daily presser for us, was a shared experience with much communication by text.
Public Health Orders
These are legally enforceable orders made by the CHO and signed by the Premier. They included items such as mandatory mask wearing, density limits and curfews.
QR Code
QR stands for Quick Response Code and consists of a black pattern of squares on a white background that can be read by a camera. It was used during the pandemic to track people to facilitate tracing and the TTIQ strategy (test, trace, isolate, quarantine). It was also used to check vaccination status that was required for access to some venues, for instance inside dining and non essential retail.
RATS
Rapid Antigen Tests (Rats) are what Australians call Lateral Flow tests. The acronym has slipped so quickly into our vocabulary, that we hardly stop to think what the letters stand for. When the “Omicron wave” first hit, and numbers of cases rose very rapidly, there was a shortage of Rats, and huge demand on the PCR testing facilities. Eventually the supply increased, and the Government accepted notification of a positive Rat as evidence of infection. Most of the community pays for their own Rats, but schools and many businesses have a temporary program of handing them out for regular testing.
Remote Learning
During the lockdowns, schools used the internet to continue schooling for kids. This is different from “home schooling’, where parents are responsible for the curriculum and its delivery. However, many parents, trying to work from home, and supervise their children’s lessons at the same time, found it just as much work.
Ring of Steel
During Victoria’s biggest lockdown, Greater Melbourne was separated out from the rest of Victoria, which had fewer restrictions. This “ring of steel” around Melbourne was maintained through Police checkpoints on major highways, demands from rural businesses to see customers' addresses, spot checks on number plates and pleas from the premier to protect regional Victoria.
Scomicron/Domicron
Prime Minister Scott Morrison (Scomo) wore a lot of blame for various aspects of the pandemic: not ordering enough vaccines, the state of Aged Care facilities, opposing State based regulations etc. At heightened times of blame during the “Omicron” wave, he was dubbed “Scomicron”.
When Dominic Perrottet replaced Gladys Berejiklian as NSW Premier, and he was held responsible for the huge wave of Omicron infections in his own and neighbouring states, Domicron as a nickname was impossible to resist.
Self Isolation
The act of putting oneself in home quarantine, without being forced to and without being monitored by the authorities. This term also covers people who have chosen not to go back to participating in normal society while the chance of infection remains.
Singles Bubble
During the long lockdowns, it became obvious that people who lived alone were suffering greatly from the isolation. The rules were tweaked so that people could meet one other under strict conditions, to ease the loneliness. This became known as forming a “singles bubble”.
Social Distancing
This term has become synonymous with keeping oneself separated from other people. For instance, the official advice might suggest that masks should be worn, “when you can’t socially distance”. The practice of shaking hands, or hugging, transformed into touching elbows in some circles. This became an ostentatious way of “being careful”.
Super Spreader Event
Quite early on in the pandemic, it became obvious that not everyone who caught Covid, passed it on, but that a few people passed it on prolifically. They were called “super spreaders”, who had a large “viral load”. Events where many people caught it from one infected individual became known as Super Spreader events.
Travel Bubble
As numbers eased at various times, it became possible to allow limited travel between states and even countries. For instance, a Trans-Tasman bubble allowed tourists to travel between New Zealand and Australia.
TTIQ
Once a specialised epidemiological phrase, TTIQ stands for test, trace, isolate, quarantine
V shaped recovery
During the pandemic we became very adept at reading lists of figures, graphs, etc. In most of Australia, chasing “Covid Zero”, we were always looking forward to the end of particular waves. “Recovery” meant case numbers dropping. When they grew and dropped very fast, the graph looked like an inverted V.
Vaccine Efficacy
When the vaccines were first appearing, there was much discussion and argument about them. People who had never asked questions about the origin, manufacturing process, duration of their vaccines before, became “experts”. One of the catch phrases that became part of our new vocabulary was “vaccine efficacy”.
Vaccine Hesitancy
Some people decided the vaccine wasn’t for them. Others decided to wait for a particular brand, Novavax, with old, well tried technology. It became, over time, a very divisive issue. We learnt to distinguish between anti vaxxers, many of whom embraced a variety of conspiracy theories, and those just wary of new vaccines: the hesitant.
Vaccine Hub
The State Governments took on much of the mass vaccination program, which became known as the “vaccine rollout”. A specially trained workforce was skilled up for this program. They established huge facilities, many of them drive through, for people to have their first, second and later on, third vaccine injections. These were often tent sites, in large car parks, municipal facilities, churches, schools, even football clubrooms. The larger sites were known as “vaccine hubs”.
Vaccine Passport
Once all sectors of the community had had the opportunity to be vaccinated, it became mandatory to be fully vaccinated, to participate fully in various activities. To help the people who had to police this, a mostly digital certificate was created, and attached to an app. So, once it was set up, all one had to do to show one's “vaccine passport” to a restaurant or shopkeeper, was to bring it up on one’s phone and show the big green tick.
Variants
Many of the virus’ variants came from mutations in the virus' spike protein.
The first variant was initially detected in the UK in November 2020. The WHO decided to name the new mutations using the letters of the Greek alphabet to avoid stigmatising the country of origin. Thus this “UK variant” became Alpha. During the second half of 2021, we had global waves of the Delta variant, which was more infectious again and far more virulent. The 2022 variant, Omicron, has increased infectivity, but not severity of illness.
Viral Shedding
Over time we have learnt a lot about viruses. One of the terms we have learnt, along with “viral load”, is “viral shedding”. Once someone has recovered, and no longer infectious, there might still be dead viruses that trigger the various tests. They might still be “shedding” the virus for weeks, after recovering.
Wastewater Testing
The “shed” viruses, including broken up ones, or “viral fragments”, along with live, active viruses can be detected in all bodily fluids. Governments can monitor the presence or absence if Covid 19 in particular communities, by testing their sewage systems. Reporting the findings of such tests became part of daily information sessions. For example the residents of a particular area were advised to monitor symptoms more vigilantly, if virus was detected in their wastewater.
WHO, World Health Organisation
The WHO is a specialised agency of the United Nations responsible for international public health. They make statements, and run programs relating to global health matters. For instance they administer COVAX, a program aimed at vaccinating all peoples of the world against Covid 19.
Work from Home
“Those who can work from home, must work from home” was part of the lockdown orders. As people “returned to the office”, many chose to spend at least part of the week continuing to work from home. The social and economic implications remained: people had to be coax “back to the CBD”, many decided to move out of addresses closer in to the city, and adopted outer suburban and regional lifestyles.
Zoom
An app that allows groups of people to “meet” remotely, to see and hear each other. It was a perfectly placed product as the world locked down. Zoom was used for everything from “viewing parties”, family get togethers, work meetings, classes and rehearsals to grannies reading a story to a child. Zoom meetings took on their own special culture. “You’re on mute”, “mute yourself”, “she’s in the waiting room”, The image that comes to mind is a computer screen divided into little squares, each with a badly lit head and shoulders sitting at a desk.
April 2022
With the Omicron wave reaching its peak in Australia, we have high vaccination rates and are now well and truly ‘living with the virus’. This means that, except for the vulnerable, and that include us over seventies, the general population are more or less living normal lives. There are still restrictions for the unvaccinated. They still cannot enter restaurants or theatres for instance. Isolation and stay at home orders now only apply to close contacts of a positive case, the definition of which is four hours or more close contact. Although mask wearing is no longer universal, masks are still required on public transport, and in aged care and hospitals. Retail staff, teachers and students are also still required to wear masks indoors.
As we end this post, we live in a changed world. Some adults and children have been left with mental and emotional scars and many people of all ages are living with long Covid, that is still little understood. Many families are also mourning their dead, and hospital wards remain under stress. The “work from home” phenomenon has been embraced by many and empty offices are still commonplace in the CBD.
The SARS-CoV-2 virus is probably here to stay. It will continue to evolve and we will continue to adapt.
Watch this space.
