By Ellen O'Brien - “PhD student, book lover and tea addict, I spend my days researching and writing, with help from my bunny George. History is not quite so visible in Australia as in England… but it's there if you know where to look!”
I sat for a moment in her chair, and let the dust
settle. It was cool in the house, but out in the shed I could hear Mum and Tom
wrestling with four decades of accumulated dust and debris. I wondered if Rose
was somewhere nearby, watching us dismantle her home of fifty years? Sitting in
the silence of the front room– it still retained the air of pristine sanctity that
she maintained all her life– I thought that perhaps she wouldn’t mind. There
was nothing mercenary about our sorting through her possessions, no siblings
squabbling over jewellery (her frugal life didn’t allow for any), or the
irreverence of a removal company.
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| © Ellen O'Brien |
It is interesting to consider a life through objects,
don’t you think? From a scientific perspective, they reveal things about a person
or society. To an archaeologist, a fragment of pottery is as a good as a page
from someone’s cookbook, or a weather report! Certainly, objects have informed
my own understanding of history: ancient Egypt, to me, looks like the
sarcophagi in the British Museum. But on a more intimate level, they are the
mementoes we have collected on our way through life and chosen to keep around
us, to look at, to touch, to remember everyday. What do these objects reveal
about a person, and the joys and tragedies they have experienced? When Rose
died, some of her possessions had an obvious significance– others only made
sense because of the stories she told. Objects can tell us so much about the recently
departed, but they also invite us into the lives of an entire family and
extended family. This is what I recently experienced. That week, through the objects
left in Rose’s house, we were able to trace my own family’s journey, from the harsh
and isolated wheatbelt town of Kellerberrin, to the fringes of Perth in the 1960s,
to London in the present day.
Allow me to explain. My father and his cousin Tom grew
up a mere 127 kilometres apart in the towns of Corrigin and Kellberrin– pretty
close by Australian wheatbelt standards– but didn’t actually meet until the
1990s, when Tom brought his small, English children to Australia for the first
time. Somewhere in the depths of our family history, lies a dispute between
brothers Patrick, my grandfather, and Connor, Roses’ husband and Tom’s Dad. It
was tied up with the family farm at Kellerberrin, and which of the boys would
inherit… we think. Rose, for many years the only remaining witness, was
renowned for her ability to talk the leg off a chair, but was always uncharacteristically
tight lipped about the matter. When Tom returned to Perth with his children in
the 90s, they found some ready-made playmates in my brother and I, and more
importantly, that no memory of this family feud existed. Perhaps Rose did us a
great favour by keeping mum all those years, for Amy and I are now the best of
friends, and in that peculiar way families have, have discovered that although
we live 9000-odd miles apart, we have a great many things in common.
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| © Ellen O'Brien |
This is how I ended up, one warm January arvo, in
Rose’s shed. Chock-a-block with oilcans and newspapers from the 70s, it was
there we found Connor’s old tools. Thick with rust, they were clearly straight
off the farm: the average suburban gardener doesn’t have much use for a plough
chisel, or a set of imperial measurement spanners. Hanging on the wall was an
old horse bit attached to a decaying bridle. Green with age, Tom extricated it
from its cradle of spider webs. ‘That must have been the old horse’s… they kept
him at the farm after motorised tractors came in… I remember Mum talking about
him.’
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| © Ellen O'Brien |
A self-confessed bibliophile, I found that I was drawn
to the bookshelf in the ‘good room.’ The ubiquitous gold-edged Reader’s Digest
titles were interspersed with some more telling items: Simone de Beauvoirs The Second Sex, surprising, perhaps, for
a staunchly Catholic widow, and a collection of medical books, Yourself and Your Body, The Home Physician
and A Husband’s Guide to Marriage. Were
they a throwback to Rose’s nursing days, or an effort to negotiate what was by
all accounts a difficult marriage in the lonely climate of the 1950s and 60s?
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| © Ellen O'Brien |
In spite of these difficulties, there was evidence of
female friendship. We unearthed a box of telegrams received on the birth of Tom
in 1956, all written on identical General Post Office baby telegram forms, decorated
with balloons and a teddy bear. ‘Congratulations on the birth of a darling baby
boy, Love Patrick and Marjorie,’ read one in my grandmother’s handwriting. They
were both, after all, raising boys in the austere conditions of a 1950’s
farming community. With undertones of shared experience and affection, the note
quietly acknowledges the negotiation of family ties and the lifestyle they
shared.
That first day, Tom told us about his adventures in
Africa, where he met Jane, the mother of his children. The ordinance maps and
78” records in his well-preserved teenage bedroom told the story of his diploma
in surveying, his fascination with Perth’s growing music scene in the 80s, and
his eventual escape to Notting Hill, Africa, Europe and finally, Milton Keynes.
His tiny school hat –Aquinas College– was discarded as a symbol of the religion
of his parents, rejected utterly by Tom after his experiences at the
prestigious but close-minded boys’ school.
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| © Ellen O'Brien |
Wrapped in newspaper like a piece of battered cod, in a
box under my own bed, is a set of art deco teacups, which I hope one day will grace
the bridal tea or house-warming party of my cousin Amy, who resembles her
grandmother Rose in both waif-like build and resilience of mind and opinion. Our
family has come full circle, from the strife over a dusty paddock in
Kellerberrin, to enduring international friendship that has bloomed through the
days of letter writing, to email, to Facebook and Snapchat.
In our week in Rose’s house, I learned about history
through objects. It struck me as a shame that many of the stories were lost,
and all we had left were these physical fragments and our own speculations. At
risk of sounding like a community public service announcement, it is so important
to connect with the older members of your family. Ask, and let and them pass you their memories
with their own weathered hands. After all, the real value of an heirloom is the
story attached to it. Rose’s old Singer Sewing machine, now in my own mum’s
expert care, was built in Strathclyde in 1949. It’s a beautiful piece of
machinery, and surprisingly still works. But where did Rose get it? Was it a
gift? Did she make her wedding dress with it? Either way, we have started
making new memories with it. I can tell my children how, not knowing what it
was, I tried to get the lid of with a rusty screwdriver, which gave way before
the lid did. Or that a few mornings ago, our friend Peter hopped down the
driveway (yes, he had a broken foot) and tested the motor by grabbing the edge
of the sink and sticking a spanner in the socket. Electrical engineering at its
finest (ahem). What about the women in Strathclyde who worked at the Singer
factory? Wouldn’t it be wonderful to know what they were doing in 1949? For
many, German bombs had decimated their homes just eight years previously, yet
they were able to make these beautiful, intricate machines that travelled to
the other side of the world. Such an unobtrusive little device, sitting quietly
under its lid on the table, but what stories
it could tell.
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