June 2026
Excursion to Templestowe
Sue and I both remember our grandparents’ Templestowe house. Sue even remembers walking from the house with our grandfather: down to the…
Alfred J. Coates
The archive’s established first-name form for Alfred J. Coates.
June 2026
Our Family in Wartime
We are Baby Boomers, the generation conceived and born, as normal life picked up again, after the end of the Second World…
February 2025
Fire and Storm
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…
September 2024
Books of Our Childhood
Books have always played a large part in our lives and I cannot remember a time when we have not had a…
February 2023
Hair
Our plan was to write about hairstyles. Many of our family photos feature the hairstyles that were popular at the time, so…
June 2018
The Croydon Years
Our mother’s and aunt’s formative years were spent in Croydon. Alice was six and Marge nine when they moved. They remember the…
April 2018
Decade by Decade
Five hours of Alice and Marge’s family stories finishes with an overview. Strikingly, Alice did most of this by herself, without notes.…
November 2016
The Demon Drink
Alcoholic drinks hardly ever entered our world. We were aware that the communion “wine” used by our own Presbyterian church was actually…
September 2016
Family camping
Our grandparents and parents had camped as young adults, so living in third world conditions in order to be able to enjoy…
April 2016
Alf and Alfreda: the Early Years
Alfreda, our maternal grandmother was living in St Kilda and attending the Melbourne Continuation School in the early 1900s. While she was…
December 2015
How to Rescue the World
In our family it feels natural and right to hold, to debate and to act on political opinions: a thread that runs…
November 2015
Great Great Grandparents
Alice and Marge in 1990, as they sat with their cassette recorder, told as much as they knew about their grandparents and…
November 2015
First Year Teaching 1909
These children, photographed in 1910, are writing on slates with chalk, as did the children in our grandfather Alf's classroom in 1909.…
October 2015
Twelfth Birthday Letters to Alice
Letter writing is all but dead. When we were cleaning out our mother’s flat, after she had died, there was a collection…
September 2015
Our Little Allie 1895-1906
Late July 2007, on a clear winters day in Chiltern, a small Northern Victorian town I found myself standing by my great…