My memories of life with my mother and father and sister like most children were good ones as one tends to forget the not so good ones which were thankfully very few in my case. I recall sitting around the camp fires while on holidays at night under the very bright stars in New South Wales and Victoria, with both my parents recounting stories from their past.  Most of them came from father, although he tended to be a little backward in revealing tales from his youth.  He grew up in the North and West Melbourne area.  I guess he didn’t want to give us young ones any smart ideas.

His stories of the cable trams, and of having 4 gallon kerosene tins with a cord tied to the handle.  This they dangled into the cable track until it caught on the cable and took off down the street scaring the hell out of the pedestrians and the horses in the horse drawn vehicles.  Unfortunately they only traveled as far as the first corner as the cable cut across the corner, so the tin then became jammed much to the annoyance of the tram drivers.  As they had to freewheel across the corners, so they had to stop and remove the collection of tins before proceeding on his way after pushing the tram back to get a run to get around the corner.

Also in the days of milk delivery a Billy was hung on a nail above the front door with the amount of money in it for the milkman who collected it and filled the Billy with the appropriate amount of milk.  This nail was also used by the young lads of the day, father included, to hang by a piece of string anything that was dead that they could find such as cats or chooks or even rats they were not fussed what it was, as long as it was dead and preferably smelly, and then swing it so it knocked against the door.  Most times it was the lady of the house who answered the knock at the door with the accompanied scream as the dead animal swung in to the open doorway taking her completely by surprise was a joy for them to see.

One of their other tricks involved them sitting behind a hedge with a flat rock and a handful of washers in the dark.  There they would wait until people went past on there way to the picture theater, then throwing the washers onto the rock and watching them crawling around in the dark in there Sunday best clothes looking for the money they had dropped.

Mother told us of her years living around the goldfields of Bendigo and of the farms and dogs they had, she also told of fossicking for gold specks on the mullock† heaps and of learning to paint at the school of art in Bendigo in 1925.  In those days was this was considered a very expensive and frivolous thing to do.  If you don’t have any talent for art. She did but sadly wasn’t to pursue the subject to her full capability later in life.  She was able to pass on her knowledge to my sister and myself.  However I was never to achieve the ability to draw and sketch like mother or my sister.