Childhood

Return to the Source

My Writer’s Voice Linked to A Childhood Spent in the NSW Clarence Valley

The following historical photograph of my hometown, with the Clarence River and Susan Island across the water, bring me back to long-forgotten memories of childhood evenings underneath a balmy star-spangled sky in South Grafton next to the water’s edge. I wonder now whether this is the source of my writer’s voice: the places and storytellers from childhood that I carry within till this day? And for me, nature played—and still plays—a large part.

Grafton on the Clarence. State Archives NSW

Is it the past that gives birth to the special voice within all of us, the one that reappears when narrating stories in written form? This throws up other questions for me, to do with the the relationship of voice to person, character and narration, and how “written voice” touches vicariously on an assumed reader and an assumed listener.

December 1, 2016 10 comments

Childhood Writing

The Grafton Jacaranda Festival of Yesteryear

I’m remembering the Jacaranda Festivals of my childhood at Grafton in northern New South Wales, with a certain nostalgia. Did such a time of innocence really exist? Is this celebration different today?

Below is a photo from my sister’s album of her, Susan, and our little sister, Jill, folk dancing with school friends at the Grafton Jacaranda Festival in the fifties.

jill-susan-dancing-jacaranda-festival

This annual spring-time celebration begins at the end of October and lasts until the first week in November. It has gone on since nineteen thirty-four, and was the first such folk festival in the country.

The Grafton Jacaranda Festival is in full swing in my hometown as I write this post. It is a spring celebration that is held every year during the first week in November. At this time, the jacaranda trees are in full bloom.

Some childhood memories are golden. Or, in this case, mauve, lilac, purple, and, as Dad once said, “heliotrope”. It’s hard to pin down the actual colour of the flowers that bloom on the jacaranda trees, and form carpets of blossoms on the surface of the roads and avenues. Sometimes they seem lighter hued, mauve in my memory, at other times, darkly purple.

November 7, 2016 4 comments

Australia Childhood

Flame Trees … Cold Chisel

“Flame Trees” was sung by Jimmy Barnes to commemorate Australia Day on 26th January this year (2016). The song depicts the two sides of Grafton, its polarities, in a creative way. This town is the setting for my memoir “River Girl” that I intend to publish in the near future. We lived outside the main town at a place called Waterview. Being surrounded by nature was the positive side of my childhood when I was growing up.

Grafton and South Grafton

I was born and grew up in the far north coast town of Grafton in NSW, Australia. Actually, it was on the “poor cousin” South Grafton on the Clarence River at a place called Waterview. There’s a crooked bridge joining the two sides of the river. We lived on a block of land in a weatherboard cottage, a bit of a dump, really. Dad didn’t mind, so long as he was away from the town “rubber necks”. Mum hankered after mod cons and pretty things. Dad wanted only land, gum trees and bullocks.

There was an avenue of jacaranda trees, which marked the end of the township of South Grafton, and the start of the Gwydir Highway that we lived next to, one mile out from the town boundary.

September 2, 2016 6 comments

Childhood Emotions and Health Writing

Looking for Kitty Walker

waverley-cemetery-graves I’m lying in bed feeling sorry for myself when I receive the message from Kitty’s granddaughter. It’s ten days since I caught this virus from, guess who? my significant other. The first flu I’ve had for years and, guess what? It went straight to my newly 20/20 vision eyes… Just after having cataracts removed. Yes, nowhere else but there! Until today, when I felt nauseous and knew it wasn’t from “you know what”… Perhaps the tummy ache is a good sign, the last kick of the virus before it leaves for good…

A Photo of my Great-Aunt, Kitty Walker in 1910

Positive—bitter/sweet—things have been happening, too. A granddaughter of a long deceased relative has got in touch with my sister and me to find out about her ancestors, especially her grandmother, my great-aunt, Kitty Walker. The photo above is of Kitty performing in a musical The Absent-Minded Beggar from my brother’s genealogy book A Little Bit of Irish (William Skyvington).

This person who got in touch via my brother in France, I’ll call “Catherine”. She is the daughter of Kitty’s daughter—Kitty’s granddaughter. Let’s call Kitty’s daughter “Meg”: she was brought up in a Catholic orphanage in Sydney. Meg died quite young, after getting married and having a family, including Catherine.

Dad, Mum and Aunty Nancy

The photo of Mum and Dad with Nancy was taken at about the time poor little Meg was being put into the orphanage at age seven or so. She became a “work horse” for the nuns, according to Catherine. The child in the photo is my mother’s younger sister. She would have been about the same age as Meg at the time. Kitty was Mum’s aunt, the younger sister of my grandfather, Charles Walker, both of whom I never knew.

Kitty must have had the child Meg late in life, possibly in her forties.

No one in the extended family seemed to know about this at the time I was growing up in South Grafton.

It’s great when you feel a past hurt is able to be soothed a little by your actions. What hurt, you might ask? Some people in my extended childhood family refused to give answers when the adult woman, Meg, came begging: not for money, but for information about her family tree.

“This Kitty ended up in the gutter!” was, I imagine, the gruff utterance from the dairyfarming uncle, and “the daughter’s no doubt from the same litter, only wants a handout from us.”

It all boils down to ignorance and to shame. This withholding of information leads to more ignorance and false assumptions further down the track. Yes, there was alcoholism in our family tree, but the shame was so much greater in this case, because the sufferer was female. Thank goodness I experienced the coming of the Women’s Liberation movement!

Emotional problems and alcoholism, are often linked, being signs of an amazing gene—or a cluster of genes—shared by many creative people like Kitty Walker: the artistic ones!

So it’s back to Ancestry searches and telephone calls for us, to try to fill in some missing gaps. What we know so far:

Kitty Walker, born 1886 in Grafton NSW, Australia, was artistic and a singer, and helped the campaign to get Sir Earle Page elected into parliament. She had a vibrant social life before, perhaps, becoming addicted to alcohol at the hotel where she lived. She was brought up by her aunt, who ran the Walker’s Hotel in South Grafton. Kitty worked there as a barmaid for some time. That is where she met her future husband, the father of the child, Meg. Only recently have my newfound cousin, Catherine and I, discovered where Kitty Walker lies buried in an unmarked grave at Matraville Cemetery.

The Walkers’ Hotel in South Grafton

Catherine has since visited Walkers’ Hotel where her grandmother lived and worked. She had a sense of Kitty’s presence when she stayed there, and was able to glean some more information about her ancestor from staff.

The widowed publican, Kitty’s aunt, used to send men home to their wives if they had drunk too much.

We visited the cemetery where Kitty was buried, when Catherine came to Sydney, and we laid flowers on the grave.

Do not stand at my grave and weep
I am not there. I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow.
I am the diamond glints on snow.
I am the sunlight on ripened grain.
I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you awaken in the morning’s hush
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circled flight.
I am the soft stars that shine at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry;
I am not there. I did not die.
by Mary Elizabeth Frye

August 11, 2016 0 comment