By Victoria MacGregor. I enjoy writing. Short stories, essays, even the odd birthday card can have a deep and meaningful diddy penned by yours truly attached to the salutation. I’m certainly no novelist that’s for sure, well not yet anyway. But I do like to tell a story. If the subject has a humorous side, or maybe something a bit scary, or as we all can relate to, a family mystery, I like it even better. A few years back … Continue reading
By Meg Carney. Whenever Irish food is mentioned, I immediately think of the potato. I think of poverty, famine, hunger, and reliance on one food – the potato. I then think of my own family history which is intrinsically linked to the potato because a significant number of my ancestors came to Australia during the Famine of 1846 – 1851 or in the aftermath of that famine in the 1850s and 1860s. That famine is referred to as The Great … Continue reading
by Peter Cass Well, this is the third in a row, so I guess that makes it a series! Last year’s piece was a bit big picture, what is the world coming to. This year is more family focused. My father’s father, Augustus Theodore (Gus) Cass (born 1886), joined the Melbourne and Metropolitan Fire Board (MMFB) as a fireman in about 1907. This undated photo of him, resplendent in his full uniform, must have been taken very early in his … Continue reading
by Christine Leonard. My father died when I was sixteen. At the time I was in my seventh year of boarding school in Australia as my parents lived in Papua New Guinea, where I was born. Dad’s death was a shock, completely unexpected; he was tall, lean, strong and fit. We, as in my brother and I, assumed Mum would go first; she was the one with a heart condition. There again, Dad smoked up to 80 cigarettes a day, … Continue reading
By Marg Doherty. My family history is full of Scottish immigrants who came to Queensland in the mid-nineteenth century and stayed in Queensland. With that in mind, I wondered why my grandfather’s brother, Robert James Porter, had a daughter buried in the Rookwood Cemetery in Sydney.[1] Robert married Annie McIntosh in 1907 in Pittsworth, and their daughter Gladys Ann was born ten months later on 10 June 1908.[2] Gladys died at age nine months on 6 March 1909 in Sydney. … Continue reading
