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…
Schooling and education
School, learning and educational experience.
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 2016
Primary School Teachers 1950s
MARGARETLike everyone else I started school in “Bubs”, aged five. The baby boom was in full swing and there must have been…
October 2016
“Are you up to it?”
All the kids in the neighbourhood walked to school. It’s what kids have done for ever. We went to Bennettswood State School…
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…
March 2016
Alfreda Maria Holm, our maternal grandmother: the first seventeen years
We remember little of our maternal grandmother as a person. She was rather a remote figure, tall, elegant, well dressed but she…
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…
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
Jim’s Schooling
Our father, Jim, who died quite young, did not tell us much about his early life. We remember some of his stories,…