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Dorothy Meagher

From the Archive

A little tale of past history by Dorothy Meagher

28/03/2021
Black edged white memorial card with a photograph

Last month, I found a handwritten story in the archives written by my grandmother about her grandmother’s encounter with a bushranger in the 1870s. I could not resist sharing it for Women’s History Month! Dorothy Hogan Meagher (nee Donovan) was ‘Gran’ to me, ‘Dot’ to some of my cousins and ‘Doll’ to my father.  She wrote this story in 1996, when she was eighty years old, about a recollection – a little tale of past history – for my mother who was doing family tree research.

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People

A veiled tradition

26/02/2020

As a child, I would rummage through my mother’s sewing basket. It was a bright orange plastic box with a removable tray divided into little compartments. I was always curious about the contents collected over time. On one occasion, I asked my mother about a strip of beautiful beading sitting in the tray. She told me it was from her wedding dress, made by her mother. Years later, the memory of the beading was recalled sharply when a saleswoman suggested I could add embellishments to the shoulder straps of a wedding dress I was trying on. Tears stung as I thought of this beautiful, silent nod to my mother, whose absence was going to be keenly felt at my wedding just eight months after she died.

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People

Yuletide and a nutty aromatic pig’s pluck

22/12/2019

Last year, I spent Christmas Day in Belgium, reconnecting with my old university friends and celebrating Christmas with their respective families. I enjoyed generous hospitality, food and conversation. It was a fitting conclusion to a superb three-month trip in Europe.
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Places

An open door to Ikerrin Hawthorn

17/09/2019

A beautiful painting titled Ikerrin used to hang above the fireplace in my grandparent’s dining room. The watercolour depicted a freestanding gabled brick house framed by an ornately trimmed verandah and a lush garden in bloom. Ikerrin was my grandfather, Jack Meagher’s childhood home, named after the family ancestral lands in the Barony of Ikerrin, County Tipperary, Ireland.

In the lounge room was another curio, a small-framed sketch also captioned, “Ikerrin,” Wattle Road, Hawthorn. This monochrome sketch, anchored to a place by its caption, is almost abstract. I asked my grandmother about it, and she showed me the back of the frame complete with glued on card and envelope addressed to Miss D. Donovan. Read more

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