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…
Marge Rostos
The archive’s established first-name form.
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…
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.…
December 2017
I can hear sleigh bells
Christmas has always been special time in our lives. It is not surprising, I suppose, as the whole of society gears up…
February 2017
A Great Sorrow
Our mother's sister, Marge, who had been close to marrying an American Serviceman during the war, had had a whirlwind romance with…
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…
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
Sue, Margaret, Rikki and Fred
Susan:The 1960s was rather a bleak period in my life. The break up of our parents’ marriage, and the aftermath, had a…
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
First Year Teaching
Teaching was an obvious, perhaps the only, choice for us to study after Matriculation (Year12). The Commonwealth Government provided scholarships to cover…
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
Lunchtimes at Primary School 1950s
Both Sue and Margaret remember school games as going in crazes or fads. It was suddenly, as if by magic, swap card…
September 2015
Wednesdays at Number Ten
In this post we are stepping back from our collection of FAMILY STORIES to write specifically about this site: its origins, our…