In this blog, I have tried to record our family’s arrival and settlement in Australia in case they may be of interest, especially to to future member of the family. Some are tales told by my parents and some are from my own fallible memory. Perhaps some are a mixture of both.
1. Leaving Glasgow
I’m not sure if I remember trudging along the narrow bush tracks, hushed except for the buzzing of bush flies in the summer heat, or whether these weekly Sunday walks were etched into my mind by the memories of my mother. It was the early 1950’s and we walked for miles, or so it seemed.…
2. Into the Unknown
The unknown always seems sublime. Crossing the equator on board the SS Mooltan on the 14th January 1949 I was initiated as a Daughter of Neptune and given the freedom of the seas. All kippers, haddocks and other denizens of the deep were charged not to molest me in any way should I fall overboard.…
3. Antipodean Shock
Arrival in Australia, all felts and tweeds with the temperature one hundred and eleven degrees Fahrenheit, I wasn’t exactly daunted, just a bit knocked up. The open space I was nominated to was crowded with the biggest trees imaginable. They were beautiful, but I would gladly have exchanged them for the dirty smoky city I…
4. Heady Days
Better to die on your feet than to live forever on your knees. Inscription on the Spanish Civil War Memorial, Customs House, Strathclyde. During the first part of the 20th century, the world was in political and economic turmoil. Between the birth of my mother in 1918 and the onset of the Second World War…
5. Big Trees and Blowflies.
I have been a stranger in a strange land. Exodus 2.22 I’m not sure how we found our way to the farm in Manjimup. Partly by train from Fremantle to Bunbury, a journey held up by a fallen tree on the line. I can only imagine what that trip must have been like for the…
6. The Marron and Other Stories
Mum, tell us the one about the marron. There was so much to get used to in this new Australian life – and so much to be frighted of. One night, Mary and John sat in the farmhouse alone, the sky darkening with a brewing storm. On other nights, the birdcalls rose to a crescendo before…
7. Nyamup
It was time to move from the farm and strike out on our own with our meagre possessions. John’s treasure was his accordion and Mary’s was her sewing machine. My father got a job in the Nyamup mill, so he no longer had the twenty-mile pushbike ride from West Manjimup to Pemberton everyday. Here they were given…
8. Mount Barker
You can come and see the baby Any day you like to call It’s lying with its Mammy in its wee white shawl It looks so neat and swanky Like a dumpling in a hanky And we’re going to call it….. Eilean was born in Mt Barker when I was four. Dad had a job…
9. An Albany Childhood – part 1
Away to the westward, I’m longing to be Where the beauties of heaven’ unfold by the sea As Dad promised, our new house in Albany did go up fast. He had several mates who lent a hand. For Mum, the small primus stove continued to be the only means of cooking. Washing was done in…
10. An Albany Childhood – part 2.
Then let us pray that come it may, as come it will for a’ that … That man to man the warls o’er, Shall brothers be for a’ that My parents were drawn to Albany, on the south coast of…
An Albany Childhood Part 3
‘Albany will never change much – it is a pretty town, but vague. It seems to exist only in a somewhere-on-the-horizon sort of way; I like it all the better for that.’ Henry Lawson 1890 Lawson wrote for the Albany Observer newspaper in 1890 and he was right. Albany is a pretty little town. Snuggled…
An Albany Childhood – part 4
BATTLING For it is not death or hardship that is a fearful thing, but the fear of death and hardship. …
An Albany Childhood – part 5
A turning point in my life came in the last year of primary school. David Booth was different – a teacher who made school fun, who breathed life and excitement into works of such as Kipling, C.S. Forester and Shelley, who introduced us to the Australian classics of Patterson and Lawson and delighted us with…