This short story is about my late mother Evelyn and her faith in the One whom Mary Magdalene met in the garden on that first Easter morn. It’s a companion piece to My mother’s latter years: Living with dementia (March 27, 2021), in which I gave an account of Evelyn’s later life and the impact […] Read more…
Some of us have the privilege of meeting and getting to know our grandparents. I was fortunate to meet all four of my grandparents and to get to know each one, to some extent, even from afar. This story is about my maternal grandfather, whom I met and spent time with as a child. I […] Read more…
This story is a tribute to the late Elizabeth Annie (“Betty”) Anderson, of Rockhampton. Betty died on 25 February 2020, aged 100 years 6 months. I met Betty when I was a child. She was a long-standing family friend. My mother Evelyn and Betty had known each other since their late teens. My husband, Tony, […] Read more…
The year 1871 began on a sorrowful note. Holiday festivities came to an abrupt end when it became known on Monday 2 January that His Excellency, Colonel Blackall, Governor of Queensland, had died. With this news a universal gloom settled on the entire population of the fledgling colony. Colonel Samuel Wensley Blackall had been in […] Read more…
This story is a tribute to my father, Petar Salečić (also known as Peter Salecich), who was born in a small Croatian village on this day, October 16, 99 years ago. It’s an abridged version of the eulogy I delivered at his funeral service that was held in Brisbane (Queensland, Australia), on April 17, 2009. […] Read more…
In 1958, at 36 years of age, Anđelka Salečić (nee Tomašić) left her European homeland and all that was familiar to her to make a new life for herself and her family in Australia. For the next 30 years she called Australia home. A New Australian, she came to love her adopted land, and never […] Read more…
I never knew my aunt, my mother’s sister. She died long before I was born. There are no photographs of her, so I can only imagine what she looked like. But I do have something that belonged to her. It’s a lock of hair. A carefully preserved lock of hair, fastened with a tiny silk […] Read more…
On Thursday my husband and I attended a funeral. It was the funeral of Brian Edwin Sara, friend, much-loved brother in the Lord and member of St Andrew’s Anglican Church South Brisbane. The church was packed, as family members, parishioners, friends and representatives of the scouting movement and Brian’s tenpin bowling club gathered to honour […] Read more…