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…
Alfreda Maria Coates (née Holm)
The archive’s established first-name form.
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…
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…
October 2022
Women’s Work
Like women throughout history, most of the women in our family have had the primary job of parent and homemaker. Those homes…
March 2019
Auntie Bert, a “sterling character”
These three young women are our grandmother Alfreda on the left, with her two younger sisters, Beatrice in the middle and Berta…
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…
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…
March 2016
Alfreda Maria Holm, our maternal grandmother: the first seventeen years
We remember little of our maternal grandmother as a person. She was rather a remote figure, tall, elegant, well dressed but she…
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…
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…