Memories of my maternal and paternal grandparents are few, mostly because I really only knew them for a handful of years. By the time I came along, all four were already elderly.
(Note: Names under photos are links to the individual stories of my grandparents)
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| George Thomas Connors 1880 - 1966 (photo courtesy of Carmel Ryan) |
My paternal Grandfather George was 79 years old when I was born and died when I was six years old.
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| Grace Olive Brown 1885 - 1974 (photo courtesy of Carmel Ryan) |
My paternal Grandmother Grace was 74 by the time I was born, and Grace passed when I was fourteen.
George and Grace lived at the other end of my home state, so visits were infrequent - only every couple of years.
There simply wasn't enough time together for me to gather the sorts of memories I now wish I had.
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| James O'Donnell 1887 - 1974 (photo from my personal collection) |
My maternal Grandfather James was 72 years old when I was born. He also lived until I was fourteen.
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| Sarah Mary Josephine McCane 1894 - 1970 (photo from my personal collection) |
My maternal Grandmother Sarah was 65 when I came into this world. She died when I was 10.
By the time I celebrated my 15th birthday, all four of my grandparents were gone and the memory-making times were ended.
At that age, of course, I didn't really think about what that meant. I was left with only a few scattered memories of elderly people who had always seemed old to me, and for many years I gave little thought to the lives they had lived before I knew them.
Family history research has changed that.
In recent years, I have found myself wondering more and more about the world George, Grace, James and Sarah knew. What events frightened them? What changes amazed them? What did they talk about around the kitchen table? Which great moments in history seemed important at the time - and which passed almost unnoticed while they were busy earning a living, raising children and getting on with everyday life?
All four were born within fourteen years of one another, between 1880 and 1894.
George lived to 86. Grace to 89.
James lived to 86 and Sarah to 75.
They were relatively long lives, stretching from colonial Australia well into the twentieth century, and what extraordinary changes they witnessed along the way.
(pictures are taken from the National Museum of Australia's 'Defining Moments In Australian History' timeline).
The 1880s - The World George Was Born Into
George, the eldest of my grandparents, was born in 1880.
That same year, Ned Kelly was hanged at Melbourne Gaol, bringing to an end one of the most famous - and controversial - chapters in Australia's colonial history.
Two years later, Australia's victory over England in a cricket match at The Oval gave rise to what became known as The Ashes, a sporting rivalry that would become part of Australian life for generations.
I have no evidence that George later sat glued to cricket scores, although I rather like to imagine that he and my grandfather James followed at least some of those famous contests as adults.
The 1880s were also a time when women were beginning to organise more strongly for political and legal rights. The Australian Women's Suffrage Society was formed in 1889.
It is remarkable to think that the campaign for women's voting rights was still gathering momentum around the time my grandmothers were born.
1890s - Childhood During Difficult Years
Grace was born in 1885, James in 1887 and Sarah in 1894.
Their childhoods coincided with difficult economic times. The great land boom of the 1880s collapsed in the early 1890s. Banks failed, investment dried up and unemployment rose sharply. The effects of the Depression touched communities throughout Australia.
There were the formative years of my grandparents' lives. I can't know exactly how deeply their individual families were affected, but none of my grandparents went on to live wealthy lives. They belonged to working families and, throughout their adult years, knew the value of making do with what they had.
Perhaps some of that thrift and practicality had its beginnings in the world into which they were born.
There were lighter moments too. Waltzing Matilda was first performed publicly in Winton, Queensland, in 1895, and in 1896 Edwin Flack became the first athlete to represent Australia at the modern Olympic Games.
Meanwhile, change for Australian women continued. South Australian women gained the right to vote in 1894, followed by women in Western Australia in 1899.
The county my grandparents would inherit as adults was already beginning to change.
1900s - Australia Becomes A Nation
One of the greatest changes came in 1901.
Six separate British colonies joined together to form the Commonwealth of Australia, and Edmund Barton became the country's first Prime Minister.
George was about twenty years old. Grace was around fifteen, James thirteen or fourteen and little Sarah was only six or seven.
For us, Federation belongs to history books. For them, it happened during their own lives.
The rights of women were continuing to change as well. Women in New South Wales, where Grace was born and was living in at that time, gained the right to vote in Commonwealth elections in 1902. She was about seventeen.
Queensland women gained voting rights at the state level in 1905, when Sarah was still only a child.
I do sometimes wonder what the women in their families thought about these changes. Did Grace's mother talk to her about voting? Did Sarah grow up simply accepting rights that her mother and grandmother never possessed? Those are the little conversations I wish I could somehow recover.
1910s - A World At War
The decade after 1910 brought events that must have seemed almost unimaginable.
Canberra was officially named Australia's capital in 1913, but within a year Australia was at war.
Australian soldiers landed at Gallipoli in 1915. Others fought and died on the Western Front, at places such as the Somme, while the Australian Light Horse fought in the Middle East. For my grandparents, the First World War was not distant history. It touched their families directly.
Two of George's brothers served. Only one came home. George's youngest brother died on the Somme in France in 1916.
Three of Sarah's uncles also served. Two returned home, but one died in Belgium in 1917.
By the time the war finally ended in 1918, more than 60,000 Australians had lost their lives. George, Grace, James and Sarah were young adults by then. The war must have entered their homes through letters, newspapers, casualty lists and the grief felt by the absence of men who did not return.
However differently each of them experience those years, the war had become part of their family story.
1920s - Marriage, Children and Family Life
The 1920s brought a different kind of change.
Qantas was founded. Edith Cowan became the first woman elected to an Australian parliament. Vegemite appeared on Australian grocery shop shelves. Construction began on the Sydney Harbour Bridge, and Australian aviators such as Bert Hinkler and Charles Kingsford Smith captured the public imagination with daring long-distance flights.
But for my grandparents, the decade was also about something much closer to home - family.
My maternal grandparents, James and Sarah, began their married life in the early 1920s. Their first son was born in 1922, and another four children followed before the decade was over.
George and Grace had been married for nearly fifteen years by 1920 and already had six children. The following few years brought both happiness and heartbreak. They lost two newborn babies in 1921 and 1922 before welcoming twin boys in 1924. Their final child was born in 1929.
While the wider world celebrated aviation records, new foods and ambitious engineering projects, my grandparents were occupied with the timeless business of family life - babies, children, work, bills, illness, laughter and loss. History was happening around them, but life was happening inside their homes.
1930s - Depression, Bradman and the Shadow of Another War
The 1930s brought another severe economic depression. Australians struggled with unemployment and financial hardship, and memories of those years stayed with many families for the rest of their lives.
There were distractions. Don Bradman became a national hero. In 1930 he scored an astonishing 452 not out in a Sheffield Shield match, and later that year made 309 runs in a single day's play during the Third Test at Leeds.
Perhaps George and James, and even Grace and Sarah, followed Bradman's exploits. I like to imagine that they did, although whether they raised a celebratory stubby or shandy is something I can only wonder about.
Phar Lap won the Melbourne Cup in 1930, and the Sydney Harbour Bridge opened two years later. but by the end of the decade, darker news had returned.
Australia entered the Second World War in September 1939. Of course, for my grandparents, this was not their first experience of war. They had already lived through the terrible losses of 1914-1918.
Now another generation was being asked to serve. For George and Grace in particular, the possibility must have felt very close to home. They had sons aged 31, 28, 25 and 15.
James and Sarah's boys were younger, but no Australian family could have been certain in 1939 how long the war would last - or how far its reach might extend.
1940s - War Comes Close To Home
The Second World War soon became deeply personal for George and Grace. One of their sons - my uncle - served and became one of the men later known as the Rats of Tobruk.
Between April and August 1941, Australian and Allied troops held the Libyan port of Tobruk against German and Italian forces. My uncle's wartime experiences affected him for the rest of his life, and I can only imagine how keenly his absence, his dangerous circumstances, and eventual return were felt by his parents and siblings.
The war also came physically close to Australia. Darwin was bombed in February 1942, and almost one hundred Japanese air raids were carried out against locations in northern Australia during 1942 and 1943.
For James and Sarah, living in north Queensland, those events must surely have made the war feel alarmingly near. News of Japanese attacks on places in northern Australia was no longer news from some distant battlefield on the other side of the world. It was happening much closer to home.
Australian troops fought in places that would become part of the national story - Tobruk, Kokoda, the Mediterranean and the Pacific. By the time the war finally ended in 1945, my grandparents had lived through two world wars. What a relief that moment must have brought - and how many memories it must also have stirred.
The decade ended with more peaceful changes. Australia became a founding member of the United Nations, Australian citizenship was formally established, and in 1948 the first Holden rolled from the production line. The country around my grandparents was becoming recognisably more modern.
1950s - A New Generation
By the 1950s, George and Grace were grandparents themselves, and James and Sarah would soon join them in grandparenthood (yes, I think that's a real word!)
The world their grandchildren were entering was very different from the one into which they had been born. Australian troops were again fighting overseas, this time in Korea. Britain conducted its first nuclear test in Australian territory in 1952. Television arrived in Australia in 1956, and Melbourne hosted the Olympic Games that same year. Imagine that, nuclear testing came before television and Olympic Games in Australia!
I sometimes wonder what my grandparents made of television when they first encountered it. For people born in the age of horse-drawn transport and kerosene lamps, watching moving pictures and news from around the world in their own homes must surely have seemed extraordinary.
By then, another generation of the family was beginning. Our generation.
1960s - The World I Entered
By the time I was born, my grandparents had already lived through so many world-changing events, but the 1960s were about to bring enormous social and technological change.
Australia changed to decimal currency in 1966. The Beatles toured the country. Australian troops were sent to Vietnam, and compulsory military service was reintroduced. The 1967 referendum brought an important constitutional change affecting Aboriginal Australians (First Nations People), and during the same decade, people around the world watched the space race unfold.
How strange it is to think that my grandparents had been born into a world where powered flight did not exist, yet lived long enough to see human beings travel into space.
George died in 1966. He had been born the same year Ned Kelly was hanged and lived long enough to see Australia using decimal currency. That simple comparison makes the span of his life seem enormous.
1970s - The End of Their Stories
The Vietnam War drew to an end. Equal pay for women doing equal work was formally established. Gough Whitlam led Labor to government in 1972, and the Sydney Opera House was officially opened in 1973. Australia was continuing to reshape its identity and its place in the world.
Sarah died in 1970. Grace and James both died in 1974. By the middle of the 70s, all four of my grandparents were gone. Between them, they had lived from the final decades of the nineteenth century well into the second half of the twentieth.
They had lived through economic depressions and two world wars. They watched cars replace horses, aeroplanes conquer enormous distances, radio and television enter Australian homes, medical science transform people's chance of survival and human beings travel into space.
Australia itself had changed around them. When they were born, it was still a collection of British colonies. By the time they died, Australia had developed a much stronger identity of its own and was becoming a vastly different society from the one their parents and grandparents had known.
And yet, when I knew my grandparents, I understood none of that.
They were simply my elderly grandparents. I didn't think to ask George what he remembered of the First World War, or Grace about how she felt about women gaining the vote. I didn't ask James what it was like raising a family through the Depression, or Sarah about how frightening the war in the Pacific has seemed from north Queensland.
Perhaps that is one of the gifts family history research gives us. I can't go back and ask them those questions now. I will never know which world events mattered deeply to them, which ones frightened them, which made them laugh or celebrate, and which barely interrupted the ordinary routines of their days.
But I can learn something about the times they lived. I can place their lives within the world around them and perhaps understand a little better the experiences that shaped them.
