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…After Margaret played a part in one of the club’s movies and Fred went to the Year 10 Form Party, Margaret and Fred started ‘going out’.…

…My first boyfriend, later husband, Fred, has been out of our lives for a long time.…

…Alfreda, our maternal grandmother was living in St Kilda and attending the Melbourne Continuation School in the early 1900s. While she was finishing her secondary education. Alfreda met her future husband Alf, who was recovering from rheumatic fever and had left his country teaching position and moved to…

…We remember little of our maternal grandmother as a person. She was rather a remote figure, tall, elegant, well dressed but she appeared to us to have little interest in her grandchildren as individuals. We have been able, after carefully listening to the tapes, to piece together a…

…Fred and Margaret 1967 Fred was sent an appointment for a medical.…

…This unusual friendship between my sister Margaret, her boyfriend at the time Fred and another girl, Rikki, provided just that, for which I will be forever grateful.…

…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…

…Letter writing is all but dead. When we were cleaning out our mother’s flat, after she had died, there was a collection of letters received over a lifetime. Love letters from our father, chatty missives from her sister in Sydney, even letters from us as teenagers.These two letters…

…These three young women are our grandmother Alfreda on the left, with her two younger sisters, Beatrice in the middle and Berta on the right.Alfreda’s set jaw and determined look reflect her independence and demand for an education. I fancy I can see both the rebel and the…

…Two years later, his mother, Martha, and brother Harry inserted this memorial in the local paper: In loving memory of dear Fred, who was killed in battle near Vryheld, South Africa, August 23, 1901; aged 19 years and 6 months.…

…Late July 2007, on a clear winters day in Chiltern, a small Northern Victorian town I found myself standing by my great aunt’s graveside. Alice Martha Coates died on the 8th of October 1906, aged eleven and a half. Thomas and Tessa had just been married at Nagambie…

…We introduced, in the previous blog entry, the recently unearthed visual chronicles from my first husband, Fred.…

…Suddenly, thanks to Fred’s generous gifts, there is the daily life of a much, much younger Margaret: walking, laughing, smoking a cigarette, absently patting a long past dog.…

…Sue and I both remember our grandparents’ Templestowe house. Sue even remembers walking from the house with our grandfather: down to the creek, across the bridge and up the other side.For me the most memorable thing for both of us is their neighbour, a farmer, a woman about…

…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…

…In our family it feels natural and right to hold, to debate and to act on political opinions: a thread that runs back to the kitchen table in Hewish Road, Croydon in the 1930s. ALF AND ALFREDAMarge and Alice in their family history tapes, discuss Alfreda’s political and…

…Our mother’s and aunt’s formative years were spent in Croydon. Alice was six and Marge nine when they moved. They remember the seven years at Croydon as very happy, despite the shortage of money.Their parents worked very hard but also had stimulating and interesting friends. Alice and Marge…

…Alcoholic drinks hardly ever entered our world. We were aware that the communion “wine” used by our own Presbyterian church was actually grape juice, which we approved of, and we knew that “Catholics” used real wine, which we didn’t approve of.It was clearly uncommon for anyone in our…

…MY COUNTRY By Dorothy MacKellar ‘I love a sunburnt country,A land of sweeping plains,Of ragged mountain ranges,Of droughts and flooding rains. I love her far horizons, I love her jewel sea.Her beauty and her terror, The wide brown land for me.Margaret and I learnt this iconic poem during…

…Our grandparents and parents had camped as young adults, so living in third world conditions in order to be able to enjoy ‘the bush’ was not a new pastime in our family. In January 1935, Alf and Alfreda, camping in the bush by the Yellingbow Creek in Woori…

…The whole two day event was beautifully photographed and filmed by Fred, as always.…

…These images have recently been sent to us, as Fred goes through his archives.…