In January this year I received a collection of letters my mother Evelyn wrote as a young woman to her friend Olive (“Ollie”) Hansen. The letters date from 1933 to 1938. Olive’s daughters found the now yellowed but well-preserved handwritten … Read More
Do you wonder what school was like for children growing up in Australia 100 years ago? My mother Evelyn, who grew up in rural Queensland in the 1920s, often spoke of her schooldays and the small one-teacher school she attended. … Read More
For more than a decade in the 1920s and 1930s, a deadly disease menaced residents of Rannes and other small communities of the Banana Shire in central Queensland. My mother’s family, who lived on a property near Rannes (about 105 … Read More
The Kentish cake was one of my mother’s specialties. I remember her baking Kentish cake often when I was a child (I wrote about this in Pasta Bake). As well as my mother’s Kentish cake recipe, this story includes a “slice … Read More
