​I remember one time I rescued a Galah, which fell out of it’s nest.  I raised him and one day he wanted his freedom so he flew up into the trees.  He would come back for regular feeds but eventually he flew away.  I was happy he had joined[i] his mob. This I know as one day I was walking across the paddock, when 3 Galahs flew by.  Naturally I called out Rocky and to my surprise one flew back to me,  just to let me know he was happy out in the wild.

This hobby was something my daughter could get involved with too.  She showed Australorp Bantams and her hen was Champion hen of the Benalla and Wangaratta Shows. ​

Later archaeologist criticised him for his destructive excavating methods and proved that Pinarbasi could not be Troy.
  
Unlike the book I was gifted, this introduction does not do credit to Schliemann the man and his discovery, nor the influence it had on me. Courtesy of that book I announced that “when I grew up”, I would become an archaeologist. My mother took me at my word. The reality however is that I imagined archaeological digs as the treasure hunt that always delivered, a bit like scavenging through op. shops.

As we all know, archaeology actually involves backbreaking work, scrupulous documenting of fragmented finds and the reality that the Troys of this world are few and far between. It requires the sort of patience and meticulousness that I have never possessed and never will.

Despite this, by the age of eighteen, I had acquired a healthy collection of books on archaeology and archaeologists and when it came to enrol at University I initially applied for “Archaeology” at Sydney University. Life at home was too comfortable for that adventure, so instead I majored in Latin and Greek at Melbourne University, de rigueur I thought for any aspiring archaeologist.

I was hopeless, and should have been failed, but somehow always scraped through. I sometimes cynically wondered whether it was the shortage of students that saw me plough through. Combined second and third year, honours and pass filled a tiny room. That said, it was a fabulous department, though today I could not read either language to save my life.

Emerging as a graduate with a BA in the classics, teaching seemed the only option, and that option limited to schools like Xavier College and Methodist Ladies College, where I did my teaching rounds.

I was persuaded to finish my Dip. Ed. despite being aware that prostitution was a better option than fronting a classroom. I was no teacher. Clutching my Dip. Ed., I applied for a job at the Presbyterian Bookroom running the children’s section.

I knew nothing about children’s books of course, and I hate to think the mess I left behind. At some stage, I was also given a catalogue of religious books, Schocken Books, and in one glorious afternoon blew the budget of the theology section. They were very forgiving. My year at the Presbyterian Bookroom is one that I remember with great fondness.

I resigned from the Bookroom  because my father, horrified at the thought that I would spend my life as a shop assistant, offered to pay for me to do a Dip. Lib. He would also support me for the year. My parents were by then well and truly divorced. My father had remarried and living in Canada. I suspect that the angst was father’s and the solution his wife’s. For this I am eternally  grateful as my Dip. Lib gave me a dream life: getting paid to work with books. Nor could I have done my two bookshops without my background in librarianship.

However, I have no idea how my father felt when I gave up librarianship to become  a bookseller.

So here we have it. Had it not been for the book on Schliemann, I would never have chosen to study the classics at university. Who knows what subjects I would have selected instead and where they would have led. 

 
Delfina Manor
February ‘25

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Schliemann

Project Gutenberg link to E-Book - 'Troy and Its Remains: A narrative of researches and discoveries made on the site of Ilium, and in the Trojan Plain.  By Dr Henry Schliemann.  Translated with the Author's Sanction'.​accessed 16 Feb 2025

Heather Wallace
​October 2023

THIS

Today 16 McFarland Road is opposite the vast Stocklands Shopping Complex and 220m from Merrylands Railway Station and Bus Terminus.  Well done, Sadie.  
​

Graeme Morris
​October 2022

​​It is with some regret that I admit to having lived 90 years with the feeling of envy.  Envy that I never experienced the love of a mother or the enjoyment of a family life with my five siblings.
 
I was the youngest of the family and my mother died when I was 4 years old.
 
My father was an alcoholic and his sisters determined that he could not adequately care for his family.
 
Consequently my 6 years old brother, Basil, and I were packed off to Villa Maria in Ballarat East. I always regarded Villa as a home for the disadvantaged, even though it was gazetted as a boys’ boarding school.
 
We both remained until grade 8 when we received our “Merit Certificates”. We had not enjoyed our time at Villa. The nuns, the Sisters of Mercy, did not live up to the title of “mercy”.
 
School holidays were spent with Uncle Ned and Aunty Mary Caine at Swanwater. Mary was Dad’s sister, but never showed us any affection. On the other hand, Uncle Ned was a loving man.
 
On receiving my Merit Certificate in 1944 I was deemed to be too small to enter the work force and, living at Caine’s, went to the Swanwater North State school to re-do grade 8 and sit for a scholarship. I was successful and the scholarship entitled me to tutorial and accommodation at St. Patrick’s College, also in Ballarat, where I obtained my “Leaving Certificate”.
 
On leaving the college, I got a job with the Stock and Station firm of Victorian Producers Co-Op (VPC). My first posting was to Benalla, where I became acquainted with the Hernan family, comprising John and Francie and their 7 children. They gave me the “home” which I had never known. Also, the Elliots, who put on a “surprise” birthday party for me on my 21st.
 
I worked for 17 years with the VPC, spent at Benalla (1950 - 1955) St.Arnaud (1955 - 1958) Wodonga (1958 - 1961)  Melbourne Head Office (1961 - 1963) Benalla (1963 - 1967).
 
In St. Arnaud and Wodonga I boarded in hotels.  I succumbed to the ready availability of alcohol and, to my detriment, became a regular drinker. However, I retained my strong work ethic.
 
On the bright side, I joined the Wodonga Bowling Club and have been a lawn bowler, now, for over 60 years.
 
While in Melbourne I was reunited with my older brother John.  I lived the happiest years of my life, up till then, with John and his family.  The exception was that  I suffered multiple internal injuries, a depressed fracture of the skull and brain damage in a motor accident. I still bear the scars.
 
On returning to Benalla, I became re-acquainted with Bernadette and married her in 1967.  We built our own home and raised 4 wonderful children who all graduated at university and are now successful in their chosen fields. We have 11 grandchildren.
 
Now I have the family life which I sorely missed as a child.

From the early to mid 70s, Bernadette and I fostered an infant relative who'd lost her mother to cancer.  We were heart broken some years later when her father remarried and claimed her.
 
In 1967 I changed jobs, and, after intensive study, I entered a business partnership as a Chartered Accountant. The partnership survived a fraudulent office manager, and the 1993 floods, and prospered.
 
In 1971 Bernadette and I purchased the Benalla Coin Laundrette as an extension to our business interests. We sold it in 1988 after an interesting 17 years.  In 1986 we, together with four other parties, formed the River Gums Estate syndicate which developed and sold 150 residential blocks in the south-eastern corner of Benalla.
 
Regrettably, in the 1970s I mourned the deaths of my two best friends, Kevin Hernan and Bill Keenan.
 
I retired from business in the year 2000 and became more intense in my community involvement, resulting in an Order of Australia Medal in the Queen’s Birthday Honours list of 2013, “For service to the community of Benalla”.
 
Over a lifetime we have enjoyed holidays and travel in every state and territory of Australia.  In retirement we went on 6 Pacific Island and New Zealand cruises and travelled overseas to the British Isles, Europe, Scandinavia and St. Petersburg.
 
I continued my involvement with the Benalla bowling club, where I am a “life member”, and the Rotary Club where I am a “Paul Harris Fellow” and an “honorary member”.
 
U3A and Probus have played important roles in my retirement, and I am gradually easing out.
 
In May 2022 I celebrated my 90th birthday and now I relax in contentment, and am constantly aware of, and accept, my own mortality.
 
It has, indeed, been a long - and fulfilling - life.
​
 
Ray O’Shannessy      
September 2022

There are so many photographs!  Where to start?  With a goal of adding at least one photo to ancestry.com a day I have found myself immersing myself in the lives of two great aunts, ‘Auntie Beat’ (b 1872) and ‘Auntie Min’ (b 1877).  

​‘Auntie Beat’, my eldest maternal great aunt, never married, looking after her parents until they died, then living with nieces and nephews’ families until she passed away.  My only memory of Aunty Beat is peeping into a bungalow to see her while holidaying with an aunt who was caring for her not long before she died.  Two recent finds - a beautiful carte de visite from the early to mid 1880's in a battered album of the day and a loose photo, on the back of which is written ‘Beatrice Hooper – the eldest’.  A dressmaker, Beat is wearing a dark trimmed check dress, standing in front of a rose bush.  It was probably taken in the early 1900’s.  Photographs found in her scrapbook which suggest that she may have travelled with a theatre company to New Zealand.  While most of her younger sisters were dancers with J C Williamson’s, perhaps, being a dressmaker, she was in the wardrobe department?  There is a wonderful photo of Beat playing cards with a group of friends, another in an outfit suggesting she may have been a suffragette! ​

I now feel quite ‘resolved’ about the representation of Auntie Beat’s page on ancestry which now includes photos across her life span, including some in which she appears to be enjoying time spent travelling with friends. ​

‘Aunty Min!’ Do you have a person in public life in your family tree who other relatives all lay claim to?  ‘Auntie Min’ is that person in our family.   Family stories of her abound across the generations.  ‘Auntie Min’, my grandmother’s older sister Minnie Hooper, became quite famous as a choreographer and ballet mistress for JC Williamson and is remembered for having taught Robert Helpmann to dance.  While I have many photos of Auntie Min, until my visit to the farm last weekend they were almost all quite theatrical, revealing little of her life. 

I’d met Auntie Min when visiting Sydney as a child and remember her as a rather serious woman of considerable wealth who lived in a house looking over Sydney Harbour which had a path down to a private boat ramp.  I remember her son, John Rose, as being quite eccentric.  John was always described by my mother as a change of life baby, born after Min’s husband, Ernest Rose, then aged 51, had already had a stroke. 

Family research revealed that Min, who had married ‘Uncle Ern’ at 20, had two little boys who only lived for a few months during her twenties, followed by decades working in the theatre, before having a baby, John, at aged 46.  John was born with a disability which affected his development, and Min’s beloved husband died at 59 when John was 8 years old leaving her to care for John. Janette’s envelope for Auntie Min contains portraits of Uncle Ern pasted on a textured card and a portrait of John in early adulthood. 

​The photo in the envelope which somehow provides a deeper glimpse into their lives is a photo of Min and Ern sitting together, reading material in their hands.  Ern appears to be convalescing.  It is an evocative photo in which Min looks less severe than I remember her in latter years.  

​Adding this photo, and the portraits of Ern and John, to their profiles on ancestry a day or two ago, ‘rounded off’ my ‘time travels’ with Auntie Min’s family—at least for the moment. 
  
With Covid moving from pandemic to endemic, I’m likely to continue to lead a quiet life.  Underlying chronic illnesses have already impacted on my capacity to travel to places in which my ancestors lived to find out more, and now Covid! 

However, I can always resort to time travelling!


Beverley Lee
October 2021