Tag

Mary Meagher

People

From the mouths of babes: four generations of children’s letters

07/12/2021
Boy with a football smiling at the camera.

Amid the first winter of the COVID-19 pandemic, I mailed two drawings of a garden scene to my seven-year-old niece (one coloured in, the other black and white).  I asked her to add to a story I started about fairies in the garden and requested that she colour the black and white picture and return it. We exchanged a few drawings and developed the fairy story before our collective effort fizzled out.

During the second winter of the pandemic, in-between lockdowns four and five, I unexpectedly received an email from my niece (via her mother’s inbox) with a word document attached and a simple message.

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People

You can never replace a mother

20/05/2020

“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.

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Places

Social distancing in 1929

15/04/2020

How are you coping with your isolation?

I started working from home on Tuesday 24th March 2020 in response to the coronavirus pandemic. I am not in quarantine or self-isolation, just socially –  more precisely physically – distancing from public spaces by staying at home.
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People

Spanish Flu pandemic 1919

12/02/2020

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.

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Places

Summer Holidays, Frankston 1922

05/01/2020

For many Australians, a January beach holiday is a quintessential summer tradition. The post Christmas migration to the coast is as Australian a tradition as the Boxing Day test.

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