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…
Story Thread · 6 Stories
Women’s Lives, Work and Making
Follow several generations of women through education, paid and domestic work, family responsibilities and making: teaching, sewing, resourcefulness and the distinct lives behind these stories.
Read in the order chosen by the family. Each Story leads to the next.
The sequence
November 2015
First Year Teaching 1909
These children, photographed in 1910, are writing on slates with chalk, as did the children in our grandfather…
October 2022
Women’s Work
Like women throughout history, most of the women in our family have had the primary job of parent…
March 2019
Auntie Bert, a “sterling character”
These three young women are our grandmother Alfreda on the left, with her two younger sisters, Beatrice in…
May 2024
Pins and Needles
SUE Although I have grown up with sewing and sewers in my life, it has never captured my…
October 2015
First Year Teaching
Teaching was an obvious, perhaps the only, choice for us to study after Matriculation (Year12). The Commonwealth Government…