The Library’s Manuscripts Collection includes material referred to as Recollections or Reminiscences; where the creator or author has remembered and recorded some part of their life.
One such collection contains 17 essays (MS 8615) written by older Victorians in 1965 for a competition titled ‘My Early Recollections’. Each essay (not exceeding 500 words) provides an insight into the subject’s early life, and is often told with an enthusiasm and a poignance.
It is my good fortune to be able to share with you some highlights of these essays.
R.H.Nagle was born in Grassmere, near Warrnambool and he recalls his near death experience; ‘In 1891 my brother and I was left at home alone for a few hours, it was a hot day and we attempted to make ourselves a cool drink using what we thought was cream of tartar and baking soda…When our parents returned home we were lying on the kitchen floor very sick. It was some time before our parents realised that it was arsenic we had taken. Father borrowed a fast horse from a neighbour and set out for Terang 14 miles away…’ (the story goes on and in the end, the brothers survived!).
Mock-up for poster, “Keep poison away from children.”/ Freedman, Harold; H2011.131/130. This work is in copyright.
Mr O.A. McHowden fondly remembered Brighton (Vic) and the ‘open heath country of Hampton, “abounding in wildflowers”. I recall vividly the occasion when “our battleship” HMAS Cerberus …indulged in gunnery practice in the Bay- making all the windows in our home rattle violently.’
Fanny Gill of Box Hill declares, ’I was born in North Melbourne (Hotham Hill) now the locality is proud of very modern flats. I wonder if they are as cosy as our dear old cottage…Later the motor car came it was so novel people came to see it…the boys would sneer and say, ‘That tin Lizzie is no good get a horse why don’t you!’
Photo from a page of Fanny’s essay
Fanny also remembers a neighbour who ‘used to take her cows to the Royal Park after milking. She was mostly barefooted…’
[Royal Park “North Paddock] / D. R. Drape. H2012.150/1
Mrs Mabel Line was originally from the Goulbourn Valley. One day, on her two mile walk to school, her new pink hanky blew onto the trunk of a tree, where at the bottom ‘lurked a brown goanna who grabbed it and ran up the tree. No hope of getting it, so on we trudged very sad and crying my eyes out’.
Mrs Leila Little, who spent her early life in Geelong, wrote, ‘Food was cheap. A leg of lamb cost 2 [pound]. Butter was about…1 [pound] / 3 [shillings] per pound. Fish and rabbits were bought from a cart travelling around the streets, and were skinned and cleaned as you purchased them.’
Miss Emma Moffatt ‘vividly’ remembers her ninth birthday in 1899: ‘I had been given a wooden teddy (doll) and two of my brothers promptly sawed off its nose. I was miserable until late the following Saturday night, a new baby sister arrived and dolls were completely forgotten!’
Mr H.H. Farmilo was 5 when he and his family moved to ‘the promised land of the Dandenong’s…Blue in the distance of 7 miles; their ever changing hues a feast after Brunswick…I was scared stiff of my lonesome errands, sometimes over that flooded creek, via log crossing, on my hands and knees.’ He recalls the Mt Dandenong observatory used to flash signals by a reflector to Melbourne.
Mrs Sibley writes of her brother’s birth in her mother’s bedroom. ‘I heard what I thought was a cockatoo screaming and was promptly hastened off to a neighbour when I tried to investigate.’
From Bealiba, the gold rush town in northern Victoria, Mary O’Brien recalls ‘my father weighing gold on tiny gold scales’, and seeing wagons taking fire wood to the railway stations to be delivered to Melbourne six days a week. ‘A Chinese man named Ah Loy would serve mother with vegetables and at X-Mas he would give us small cakes made of ground rice. We used to have a lot of swagmen call to our place for something to eat, they used to get a billy of tea and a parcel of sandwiches.’
And we’ll end where it all began for Dorothy Hayward from Swan Hill as she remembers England: ‘My earliest recollections are of childhood days spent in the old cathedral town where I was born in the west of England, of long walks in the countryside, and of beautiful music and choir boys’ voices in the cathedral.’
These are small excerpts from longer recollections from the memories of Victorian folk in 1965. The essays are available to order and view in the Library.
