how does your garden grow?

quite nicely at the moment.

here is yesterdays harvest.

i keep meaning to take a picture of the raspberries on our vine, but we eat them too quickly!

i am SO loving this fabric. last night i cut it all up and began to piece together my quilt.

over the holidays i have been enjoying 'Little House on the Prairie'... if time wasn't so sparse i should have finished the book in a day. the thing i love about it, is that you can see that it is a collection of stories remembered and passed on to family. i like the window into some social history. like when the Ingalls family pack the wagon and head out to the west, with family arriving to farewell them:

"There was thin snow on the ground. The air was still and cold and dark. The bare trees stood up against the frosty stars. But in the east the sky was pale and through the gray woods came lanterns with wagons and horses, bringing grandpa and grandma and aunts and uncles and cousins. Mary and Laura clung to their rag dolls and did not say anything. The cousins stood around and looked at them. grandma and all the aunts hugged and kissed them and hugged and kissed them again, saying good-by."

or preparing a meal while travelling:

"While [the iron bake-oven] heated, she mixes cornmeal and salt with water and patted it into little cakes. She greased the bake-oven with a pork-rind, laid the cornmeal cakes in it, and put on its iron cover... The coffee boiled, the cakes baked, the meat fired, and they all smelled so good that Laura grew hungrier and hungrier."

it made me think of my own great-great-great grandparents, who were one of the first families to settle in northern New South Wales in the early 19th century.

my great-great grandmother (centre) and great-grandmother (second from right)

a book describes the settlement at that time, and names them: the Deaves, Freeman and Armitage families. episodes mentioned give me just a glimpse of what they experienced. when i was still in primary school we went to the region, and the mountains are high, the trees are massive.

"These were exhausting but exciting days for the newly arrived settlers - the Deaves and others who inadvertently were welding a scattered, half-baked community into a prosperous village. But a price had to be paid by these pioneers, the price of a few lives lost in the early struggles with the environment... in the month of July 1861... the youthful John Malone, seventeen year old son of Michael and Bridget, was busily engaged in felling a large tree near the creek, watched by his aunt... and young cousins. Suddenly the tree uttered a warning crack and commenced to fall swiftly. Mrs Blackford called to her children to come away, but tragically her fourteen year old daughter, Mary, ran towards the creek and directly in the path of the crashing giant... Mrs Sophia Deaves hurried down from her house, where she had been preparing the evening meal, to comfort the frightened mother, while the bewildered young axeman ran to fetch help from the menfolk."

"In January 1879 another of these settlers, James Armitage, applied to the Department of Public Instruction to have a school teacher appointed to the neighbourhood:

During the last 12 months the residents of the above locality erected a building for a school and employed a teacher at own expense... There was 17 children on the roll during that time and there will be an addition of 5 more in one month from date."

Hetty Annie Armitage (nee Freeman) my great-great grandmother

the Deaves, Armitage and Freeman families were bullock drivers and timber cutters right up until recent years. my grandfathers brother was killed the year i was born when a branch from the tree he was felling fell on him.

from the vault

i haven't shared any of my moth eaten collections lately...
years ago my dad found an album of old postcards at the tip. many of the pages were stuck together due to wet. again, i couldn't believe that anyone would throw something like this away!!
amongst the postcards was a photograph of a World War I soldier, and about a dozen postcards he had written to his mother , brother and sister. here are some of the things he said:

'14th June 1916
Dear Ernie
Your nice long letter received today. I haven't seen any of the chaps that you have spoken of over here. They may be in Egypt or some other part of France. Plenty of rain here - mud up to our boot tops...'

'28th Jan 1917
Dear Mother
I have just received your xmas card with Joe Cullens. I was talking to Joe this afternoon. Both him and I are well - too cold to write letters for a day or so 8 inches of frozen snow on the ground for over ten days and very little sunshine.
Love from son Walter'

'1st March 1917
Dear Mother
Am well, letter follows next week. Won't be too long now till I think the big struggle will end. The news here is good now. Hope all are well.
Love from fond son Walter Moore'

'[undated]
This is the village we are camped in at present. Not a bad little place but not up to old Queanbeyan. Would like to be back there again with you.'

'16th May 1917
Dear Mother
Today is my second day in London, and I was out and had a look at this place this morning... I am in Bonny old London at last.
Son Walter'

i contacted the War Memorial but (which i already knew) they are so laden with objects and artefacts, that these days they just record correspondence and take note of who has what. not too mind, i don't mind having Walter Moore's wartime correspondence!

franchise

one of the things that excited me about the election in the US yesterday, was the voter turn-out. for a country that has non-compulsory voting, it was inspiring that people were prepared to wait for hours because they wanted to have their say (many for the first time!)

I have had an email sitting in my in-tray for a few weeks now. this seemed like a good time to share it.

WHY WOMEN SHOULD VOTE

This is the story of our Grandmothers and Great-grandmothers; they lived only 90 years ago.
Remember, it was not until 1920 [in the United States of America] that women were granted the right to go to the polls and vote. These women pictured were innocent and defenseless, but they were jailed nonetheless for picketing the White House, carrying signs asking for the vote.
And by the end of the night, they were barely alive. Forty prison guards wielding clubs and their warden's blessing went on a rampage against the 33 women wrongly convicted of 'obstructing sidewalk traffic.'

Thus unfolded the 'Night of Terror' on Nov. 15, 1917, when the warden at the Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia ordered his guards to teach a lesson to the suffragists imprisoned there because they dared to picket Woodrow Wilson's White House for the right to vote.
For weeks, the women's only water came from an open pail. Their food--all of it colorless slop--was infested with worms.

When one of the leaders, Alice Paul (above), embarked on a hunger strike, they tied her to a chair, forced a tube down her throat and poured liquid into her until she vomited. She was tortured like this for weeks until word was smuggled out to the press.
So, refresh my memory. Some women won't vote this year because- -why, exactly? We have carpool duties? We have to get to work? Our vote doesn't matter? It's raining?
HBO's new movie 'Iron Jawed Angels' is a graphic depiction of the battle these women waged so that I could pull the curtain at the polling booth and have my say. I am ashamed to say I needed the reminder.
All these years later, voter registration is still my passion. But the actual act of voting had become less personal for me, more rote.
Frankly, voting often felt more like an obligation than a privilege. Sometimes it was inconvenient. My friend Wendy, who is my age and studied women's history, saw the HBO movie, too. When she stopped by my desk to talk about it, she looked angry. She was--with herself. 'One thought kept coming back to me as I watched that movie,' she said.
'What would those women think of the way I use, or don't use, my right to vote?'
We need to get out and vote and use this right that was fought so hard for by these very courageous women. Whether you vote democratic, republican or independent party ---
remember to vote.
History is being made.

so that's my election soapbox for the year... tomorrow i'll return to more homely matters!!

yes he did! :-)

* this speech was given on 28 August, the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jnr's 'I Have A Dream' speech.

let us now praise famous men

...is the title of a book that i would like to read (one day in my lifetime...). i first came across it in about 1992 when i was at the UC library supposedly studying. i always ended up browsing in different isles to where i should have been researching!

it is a book based on a collaboration between journalist James Agee and photographer Walker Evans that began as an assignment from Fortune magazine to report on the lives of Alabama sharecroppers. the photographs are famous, in showing the conditions that the poorest of the poor lived in 1930's America. photography is a great record of life. i like seeing how different people live their day to day lives - whether it is another country, another "class" or another time in history.

These photographs are from Walker Evans documentation of 1930's sharecroppers.

i know my paternal grandmother lived through some harsh times as a child, with a WWI veteran father who caught rabbits as a living. but i was never able to glean much information from her about her childhood. maybe that's why i am so interested in photographs and stories like this. i try to imagine life for my grandmother as she grew up. these are some pictures of her brothers and sisters.

love vintage

I have always loved anything old. since I was in primary school I wanted to be an historian. a bit odd? I went on to complete a Bachelor of Applied Science in Cultural Heritage Management.

at times regretfully, I moved on to employment in another area, just as interesting, but more on that another time.

I still love history, art, family history and collecting old photographs and postcards. the picture on the left of my banner is of family members on my fathers side. the boy in the back row, fourth from the left is my great-grandfather.

D was gracious enough in 2003 when we went to Italy and France to rummage through boxes of old postcards with me. I regret that I only bought a handful and not the whole box. Likewise, when we went to the Barossa Valley in 2006 one antique store had a box of old photographs. I should have bought that too. I like that loved ones cater to my indulgences - a beautiful brooch from my mum or a vintage perfume bottle from my sister.

Rebecca Sower collects old photographs (maybe I'm not so strange) and on her blog she is making up stories about who the people were. I do that too! D's mother has an old, old family album which is amazing. By the dress, some photographs are as old as the 1870's. Unfortunately, aside from the original album owner (his maternal great-great-aunt) we don't know who the people are. there are no names. one of my favourites is of a young woman. I have had the photograph copied and it is framed on our piano. she sits at a desk with a book. I love reading, so I like to imagine she did too.

you can expect the odd photograph here, with the occassional story.