Slide night :: funky father

This is my Dad in the early 1980s, when he was starting up a Lutheran secondary school in Hamilton, in rural Victoria. He's looking decidedly understated here - some of his ties and shirts were eye-searing; I particularly remember a short sleeve bodyshirt with maroon paisley, taken from his dead father-in-law's wardrobe and worn until all too recently. Also fond memories of a leather jacket that I appropriated and wore with a very funky edge (or so I like to think).

My Dad kept a bottle of cordial at work. He has a sweet tooth but with two hyperactive kids in the family, there was a strict 'no red anything' rule in the house. Dad would have a sneaky shot at work, the way some men take whiskey on the sly.

So this is one half of where my food culture comes from. This is clear from his post, here, on eating, traveling and in the end, family. What the man doesn't mention is that when he travels he is always good for an ice cream or a beer (although suggested, perhaps, in the number of memories that include sweeties of some description). This makes him a most excellent traveling companion; he's not a man to save five dollars and potentially miss out on a good strawberry ice cream or an iconic sausage. (And what is a trip away without an iconic sausage in the mix?)

Dad, Al and I traveled together in Germany a few years ago and save for his driving, which often left me praying or in tears (he's had his cataracts done since then), it was great. He speaks German fluently and can be awfully charming when he wants to be - thus, we stayed in places, heard from people and had meals Al and I could not have negotiated ourselves. The backbone of my black and white photo collection came from this trip and in particular, a small junk shop in the back streets of a town in Thuringer (which does indeed have its own iconic sausage) where Dad regaled the two slightly shifty looking owners with our own family history that includes a flight from the Red Army at the end of WW2; it seemed to be the kind of place where a flight from the Red Army goes down well. I left with two dozen photos from before WW2, indeed, some well before the turn of the 20th century: soldiers, jolly women in overalls and gas masks at what must have been the beginning of the war (too jolly, surely, for what happened later); many sepia steins being clinked in rustic huts; and chillingly, some blurry dark haired children, not blonde like the rest, and I may be jumping to conclusions, but I cannot bear to think of what might have become of them. That last photo is one I look at only rarely and in solitude.

Here is my Dad with some of his own kids, dark and fair (another quiet shirt; can it be my memory is playing tricks on me?):

Slide night :: the good looking side of the family

I get my work ethic and my unforgiving standards from my father's side of my family. But my charm, elegance and good looks in a hat are inherited from my mother's.




Top: Great-grandmother Agnes Passmore and great aunt Nora
Bottom: Grandad and Uncle Wal.

Slide night :: Fashion rules are for wimps

(for bluemilk)

All through my childhood my mother was brave enough to let me choose my own clothes.



Now, I have really great bags and some funky shoes. As a general rule, I don't look too crazy at all. Sometimes, I even look quite nice. And I never mix my plaids, spots and stripes. Proof we learn from our mistakes.

Slide night :: glamour girls

I have spent the past few days throwing up into a blue plastic bucket and tending to sick children - not my most fabulous self. In contrast to these glamorous types:


(Grammy (r) and a friend and ukelele - still a humorous prop after 80 years)


(Grandad (l) and unidentified glamorous friends)

I especially love the second photo though it's a bit spooky in its National-Socialist architecture and aesthetics. All the photos from my early 20s involve drunkeness and casual draping and a decided lack of glamour, even when the group were tricked up in black tie (and we were, more often than you might think a bunch of uni students would have cause to be - that's the UQ Law School of the 1990s for you). This on the other hand, has captured A Moment for the future.

Slide night :: travelling in style

I love slide nights. I love the translucency of the colours, the musty smell and the faint heat from the projector, and the little stories that come with each picture. My Dad has thousands of slides, and I love sitting in the dark and staring at the past. We don't as yet have a slide scanner to take those images digital, but Dad does have a scanner and on the last, sad trip to Brisbane I collected up a whole lot of Grammy's photos and put them on a thumb-drive. Mum doesn't know what to do with them - they're another person's memories. But I'm happy just to look and marvel at the difference and the sameness I see between those people and my own life.

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These photos are from a trip my Grammy and Grandad took to Japan with my mother, back in the 1960s, back in a time when people made more of an effort when they travelled. I'm always a little taken aback by the get-ups I see in the airports - I'm not saying people should travel in furs, with their maids carrying the jewels in morocco cases, but surely there's nothing wrong with being turned out - and seen off - in style. I was going to write "My Grammy is the woman in the headband, standing next to the woman in the glasses", but I now see there are many glasses, it was the age of glasses. So I'll keep it at, my Grammy is the woman in the headband, the one with truckloads of style.