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…
Alf
The archive’s established first-name form for Alfred J. Coates.
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…
September 2024
Books of Our Childhood
Books have always played a large part in our lives and I cannot remember a time when we have not had a…
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…
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…
September 2016
Family camping
Our grandparents and parents had camped as young adults, so living in third world conditions in order to be able to enjoy…
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…