Category: Memoir

  • Welcome to a Long-Awaited Grandson

    Welcome to a Long-Awaited Grandson

    December 13th November, 2008 You can’t know the sheer joy and wonder of grandparenting, until it happens to you. It was around 4am when Grandad Mark’s mobile phone rang, waking us from our sleep. Thirty minutes earlier, our daughter Kate had rolled out of bed onto the floor in a cascade of waters. Your Mummy…

  • The Angel of Islington

    The Angel of Islington

    After some confusion, I started at the Angel in search of a boy, my long-lost Ern, my namesake, darling. A perfect starting point for my research. I felt sure your old street would be nearby. It was missing from the map they gave me in the hotel. There is an angel hovering over your streets,…

  • New Family New Decade and a New Blog

    New Family New Decade and a New Blog

    A Watershed Year: 2014 My husband Mark Onslow and I went to bed one night with three grandchildren, and woke up the next day with seven grandkids!  That’s exaggerating; it happened over a few months, starting with two new little ones (fostered Aboriginal kids) and then increasing to two more older siblings. Moving house and…

  • The River Clown

    The River Clown

    I love my brother Donny to bits. He’s the funny one in our family. He sings and yodels “There’s a Track Leading Back” and plays the guitar like his heroes, Slim Dusty and Smoky Dawson. I follow Donny, both of us barefoot, around the farm. I’ve been following him all my life. Since I was…

  • Fishing in my Childhood River

    Fishing in my Childhood River

    Our house was a simple tin roofed ‘shack’, as Mum called it, sitting on two acres of land divided into three paddocks. There was an outdoor wash-house and a lavatory down the back. Dad had rented the house after he married my mother on Australia Day, the 26th of January in 1940. If you walked…

  • Armidale Teachers College: the class of 1961-62

    Armidale Teachers College: the class of 1961-62

    Armidale, a regional University town, is situated in the northern tableland area of New England, halfway between Sydney and Brisbane with a population of 25,000. In the sixties, when I was a student there, there would have been perhaps half this number of people living there, and even fewer during university and college vacations. My…

  • A Country College Residence for Women

    A Country College Residence for Women

    Armidale Teachers’ College in the New England Tablelands, was an impressive building where we went for courses each day during the week. We trudged up the hill with a group of friends from Smith House, situated in Barney Street near the town centre, to the college at the top. At the College, we were joined…

  • My Brother Donny

    My Brother Donny

    My brother Donny was brave. He could climb the tallest trees in the valley where we grew up. I was three and afraid of the dark. Dad sent me back to my room in the middle of the night. He wanted Mum all to himself. I climbed in next to Donny and felt the flip…

  • Water Memories

    Water Memories

    My very first water experience is in my mother’s womb. I’m safe, secure, warm. I swim, mermaid-like, do somersaults and swallow the magic fluid. I imagine that I’ll never leave this watery place. At Waterview the humid scorching air engulfs us; the heat, ruthless, tears at our skin and sends us kids scurrying towards water.…