Through the Lens
Recalling memories from black and white photographs, I am aided in my selection by a family who embraced with enthusiasm the Box Brownie camera.
In one of many images that document my early life, I’m being held at the entrance to Christ Church in Claremont, Perth, heavily swaddled in a knitted white shawl and bonnet. Two godmothers, my aunt, June, and Mother’s best friend,Markie, stand beside my parents and the priest. Dashing in service uniform, a peaked cap slanting rakishly over one eye, Father overwhelms the women dressed in suits of wartime austerity their hairdos firmly imprisoned in popular “victory rolls”.
Grandmother and her family are quietly in mourning for my uncle, who was shot down somewhere over the Arafura Sea on the day he turned twenty-one.
My birth gave them a reason to celebrate, showering me with joyful attention. The love I was shown became ultimately, both a gift and a curse. I grew to interpret family to mean responsibility, mine.
It was clear very early on my small world of surrounding adults were loving and engaged in all my pursuits; that I was the end product of an extended family, Mother, my aunt, step-great-uncle, grandmother, great-grandmother and Father.
In my grandmother’s home in Perth, my great-uncle made me a billycart, attaching four wheels to a wooden orange box with ropes steering the two front wheels. I would career down grassy slopes with enough glee to tempt the young boy next door, John, to borrow my "billy judge". Jack stopped that very quickly by threatening to take one of his infamous "running laughs", always a threat but never experienced; its horror being enough to deter Johnny or any of his friends. He showed me how to push my finger into the soil to plant a seed and gave me fluffy chickens and ducklings to hold, showing me how to collect eggs, warm from their nests. As I grew older, on one of the many trips to Grandmother’s, I can remember being in too great a hurry to wrestle with the straps of my sandals before visiting him in the chook yard, knowing that I would have to feel the squishy mud between my toes, which I hated; but the tantalising joy of the chook yard beckoned, impatiently.
In another black and white photograph four females are posed in my grandmother’s garden in Perth. It is cold because you can see her scarf blowing in a breeze and the trees behind are sharply etched in their winter form. There is no sun and we cast no shadow, but we do not look cold. My mother is standing there in all her natural, auburn beauty, her slim, athletic figure clothed in a short sleeved, hand-knitted dress. These dresses were to become a specialty of the family when my clever grandmother took up knitting to celebrate my birth. Previously she had only ever sewn and embroidered. My mother holds the only male in the picture, a delicate baby born six weeks premature who is my eighteen-month-old brother, Richard. Mirroring Mother, holding Rosie a cloth doll, I am standing with my grandmother whose restraining hand lies lightly on my three-year-old self. She and I are dressed similarly in suits, mine are pants, and she would have made both outfits. Clothes were important in my family, we had clothes for best and clothes for play, and special clothes were made and given as presents for birthdays and Christmas; materials were stockpiled and clothes cut down for re-use. The centerpiece in the grouping is great-Granny, eighty-three-years-old, and the only one seated. Like my grandmother, she is wearing a suit and soft, velour hat, all home-made. Somehow in all the fuss of preparation, her final appearance was not checked with her stockings pooling in folds down her ancient legs. Granny died soon after the photograph was taken and I carry with me the memory of her cantankerous parrot, which bit my enquiring finger, and an imperious old voice calling me her little “Dutchy”.