I headed out to Little River today to have lunch with Dad and Liz and generally catch up, having been a terrible son recently and barely seeing them at all since Christmas! To be fair though, they hadn’t really seen me at all since Christmas either (bumping into Dad spraying weeds around the flat doesn’t count), so I guess that makes them a terrible father and (effective) step-mother. Or us a terrible family. Or something. Or perhaps a busy family. That sounds better, think I’ll go with that.
So anyway, point is that they are planning a trip to Broome, Western Australia, and further north to Derby and surrounds in order to trace the footsteps of my uncle, Dad’s younger brother Brent, who lived out there from the early 70s until he died in 1991. They asked if I wanted to come along with them, and I immediately said “No, thanks though” as is my way, but now I’m beginning to wonder whether it might be quite a special trip to take. Hmm.
I didn’t know Brent at all – there are photos of the last time he came to New Zealand in the mid 80s, and I think all of my memories about him are actually memories of the photos rather than the man himself, if you know what I mean – except for the occasional story that my grandparents or Dad would tell back in the day. So this afternoon when we pulled out old boxes of family photos and documents that had been stashed away feeding the mice in the garage since Grandma’s house was emptied when it was sold a few years back, I started to get to know who he was and what his life was like via faded photographs and the irregular letters he had written to his family back home.
The stories and news about his everyday life contained in the letters were supplemented by stories from Dad about Brent growing up in Christchurch (sounds like Grandma had a hell of a time bringing up the three brothers!), and other documentary detritus from the boxes such as school reports and bank statements, his death certificate and shopping lists, tax returns and testimonials from friends who went to the funeral and who knew him much better than I suspect his family ever did. The picture that emerged is of a man who had always been a bit of a drifter; who was incredibly unlucky in life and could never seem to get ahead; who was an alcoholic who smoked too much; who loved the land and the people of Western Australia which he adopted as his own part of the world; who had loved and lost (the letter that was sent to my grandparents by his ex-fiance after the funeral was something very special); who had lived a hard life, dropping out of school after repeating sixth form and moving to Western Australia to fish for crabs and work as a fencing contractor; and who I suspect would have been quite an interesting individual to sit down and have a chat to. Probably over a beer or two.
He had spent a lot of time living in the Aborigine communities in that area, and from his letters home and the details of arrangements made after his death it would seem that he had just started to help one particular community set up a reserve on an island near where he lived, a community to which his car, caravan, boat and all other worldly goods were donated on his death. Going by his final bank statements, he managed to amass the princely sum of around $14 after almost twenty years scratching out a living in what I imagine was a harsh and unforgiving environment. But he was never downbeat in his letters, and the crab season was always going to be a good one, and there were always plans and schemes afoot, and Grandma and Granddad were never to worry about him cos everything was fine.
In the end he died of pneumonia just a couple of months before he was due to come back to Christchurch to see his family again.
As he never featured particularly highly on the scale of people who I’ve known throughout my life, I’ve never really thought a lot about him until today. Maybe I will take that trip, see if that reserve made it into being. Hmm.
Among the letters and photos from the more recent past, the boxes also contained possibly hundreds of photos and negatives dating from the 1950s back to the late 1800s (from what I can tell – the earliest definite date was about 1902, but there seemed to be some that were from even earlier years, judging by the clothing and the condition of the prints). Photos of my grandfather training and going off to World War II (he was an aircraft engineer in the Pacific – the boxes had his campaign medals in them as well); of the subsequent Pacific Islands with jungles, landing strips and mud covered tents, all printed of course stamped with the RNZAF censor’s stamp; of him and his friends spending Christmas in Timaru in 1937; of my grandparent’s wedding after the war; of random birthday parties where entire families (ours? Who knows) are present although we only recognise two people in them… gazing back in time which is like watching a documentary or reading a book about the period, except this time with an actual feeling of being linked to the past being spied upon.
The photos with recognisable inhabitants were interspersed with the even earlier ones in the box, no doubt of friends and family from generations gone past. Like the one from 1919 of a returned World War I vet with the name “Ernie” scrawled under it, or the one taken in Dublin in 1902 of a woman standing at a dresser, or the one of what looks like an intensely strict school with a fearsome woman sitting in front of the class, or the one of a large group of friends or family all posing together on the tennis court, all the guys with moustaches and straw boaters, and all the girls with white blouses and huge dark skirts down to the ground. Strange, faded, mouse eaten photos which are a bit freaky when you look closely and notice that in some instances the people gazing so hauntingly out at you have those strange cloudy eyes that make them look intensely ghostly – adding to the knowledge that they are dead, and already have been for possibly a hundred years or more, the feeling that they are still watching the world go by, if only via the cloudy eyes in the photograph in your hand.
Moving on from such weirdness, the main problem with almost all of the photos is that they contain neither names or dates, rendering them at the very least frustrating in the extreme. It’s like we have all these links to our family’s past in our hands, but we have no way of putting the pieces of the puzzle together in such a way to make the tantalisingly close links back to the past complete. We are lucky in that in the 1980s a cousin of my grandfather did a family tree back to Ireland in the 1700s (turns out Granddad was the cousin of Ernest Edmund. Crazy), but it would be so nice to take the photos and put faces to names! Which is not to say that this would be impossible to do, simply that it will take a lot more research, time and effort than if the names had been scrawled on them in the first place. And even more unfortunately, we’ve only discovered this box of photos after the generation who took them or who would know who is in them has passed away – so we don’t even have an oral history we could rely on.
I guess therefore that the lesson is that I (we?) should (all?) take more photos for the future, because everything is interesting in photos from the past – even what would have been considered boring everyday stuff back then is absolutely fascinating now, and I imagine our own boring everyday stuff will probably be so to our great grandchildren in turn! And when we do, for the love of whatever supreme being is being worshipped at the time make sure that they have names and dates and the like somehow attached to them.
Oh, and talk to your grandparents about your family’s past if they’re still around, cos it’s not much good wishing you had done so once they’re gone, and you might learn more about uncles you never really knew you had.