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The ‘Great Australian Dream’ conjures a picture of a home of one’s own, suburban security, a three-bedroom brick veneer, trimmed lawns and backyard barbeques. This collectively held aspiration for home ownership gained traction in media and literature from the 1960s.
“You can replace a partner, but you can never replace a mother”.
These words cut through the haze shrouding my existence. I was walking towards the gates of the Immaculate Conception Church, Hawthorn with a pastoral worker. Her words were spoken kindly, even maternally; it was followed with a genuinely concerned, “take care of yourself”. But the sentence, ‘you can never replace a mother’ seared my heart, and forewarned me of the pain ahead. Spoken by someone who knew deeply, the grief of losing a mother.
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.
My dear Liffer,
We are in the middle of what promises to be a very severe influenza outbreak…
On 12 February 1919, my grandfather’s sister, Mary Meagher wrote to her brother Frank, a doctor stationed in France, about an influenza outbreak in Melbourne. It was to become known colloquially as the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-1919, and it was a tragic postscript to the devastation of the First World War.
Last year, I travelled to Ireland to visit the place where my paternal ancestors came from. The Irish call it the ‘homeplace’, and my family’s homeplace is close to the village of Dunkerrin in County Offaly. It’s a stone’s throw from the Barony of Ikerrin (Uí Chairín), the ancient homelands to one of the oldest Irish families, the O’Meachair/Meagher/Maher Clan.
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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
When was the last time you did a jigsaw puzzle? The family archive in my spare room is the ultimate games room to me. Boxes upon boxes of various pieces waiting to be put together to create a new understanding of my family's collective history.
What Will Be looks back at people, places and travel and uncovers stories hidden in diaries, letters, and photos. It pieces together obvious clues and obscure details; reveals the personalities of people we used to know and those we could not have known; and re-tells the stories that have been forgotten or hidden. Tell me your thoughts and put a piece or two in the puzzle while you're at it.