Stories of my Family

 Bullecourt battlefields Tuesday 8 October 2024, and we are leaving Belgium for northern France and the big battlefields of Bullecourt and The Somme. Two places synonymous with massive Australian casualties.  It doesn't take long to arrive at Bullecourt, and the roads Phillippe takes us down are the narrowest yet. Farmers or lost tourists are surely the only drivers to use these roads and fortunately we encounter neither. As always, there is a point to this cross-country driving.  We stop on a track through a paddock, just over the raised embankment of a long-disused railway line. In front of us are the killing fields of Bullecourt.  On the distant ridge is the village of Bullecourt, destroyed in the fighting.. Stretching in front of us, these now peaceful, productive paddocks belie their brutal and bloody history. How many unrecovered bodies still lie in this fertile earth? There's a cold breeze of early Autumn today, a reminder of that cold 1917. Australians attack...

  Lucretia, 1915. It was about 6 months before Lucretia’s 18 th birthday when she knew she was pregnant.   Her boyfriend was an energetic 22 year old carter, employed also by “The Store” – the rapidly growing co-operative which supplied everything from bread and milk, to building supplies as Newcastle spread and suburbs appeared. The attractive Lucretia had worked a few years behind the counters in the main shop, learning how to measure and sell fabrics for clothes, cushions, curtains and everything else the home seamstress needed.   She liked Herbert Adams, but it was an undefined inner emptiness, an incompleteness, that drove her need for the warmth of his body and the feeling of oneness with him. She knew it was “love”, but she didn’t know that love had consequences. How babies were made was not at all clear to her. Before now.   Her friend Beth said she would help Lucretia speak to her mother. Not Lucretia’s mother, whom both girls remembered only dimly,...

  Donny I sometimes wondered who that kid was who walked past the house. But I didn’t think a lot about it, I couldn’t be bothered. I don’t think I thought deeply about much at all in those days. I saw him go past three or four times, stopping briefly on one occasion to look at our windows. I was about 17 at the time and I reckon this kid would have been around 11 or 12. I didn’t know him but there was a familiar look about him I couldn’t put my finger on.   I was living with my grandmother, “Ma” to me and to most people who knew her.   Her house in working class Newcastle had been my home for most of the years I could remember. Living near the steelworks I learnt early to look at the wind pattern and help Ma get the washing on the line before the fine black soot belching from the ‘works would drift over and settle on everything. I hated that dust, I hated the way it made Ma cough, I hated the way it got up your nose and into your throat and over everything. It came t...

 Frank. 1941 Nolene died when Frank was three days at sea, and it was two months later, in camp in Palestine, that the letter from home reached him. The news was not unexpected, he had lived with this dread for months now. A slip of a girl at 17, her “weak heart” had increasingly struggled. His mum had included with the letter a clipping of the death and burial notice from the “Yass Tribune”, and he stared at it through teary eyes, unable to escape its black-edged finality.   But it was the photo, taken on his last leave, which opened up the depths of his misery. Standing on the back steps of home, his mum and dad at the front, Frank and Nolene behind, her arm through his, a married sister on the top step. Nolene’s shy smile contrasting with the seriousness on every other face,   suppressing the fear of the farewell to the soldier off to war. The bond between brother and sister, always strong, had grown in recent years through increasing hospitalisations and the atten...

 It's a short drive from Polygon Wood to the outskirts of Zonnebeke, which is itself close to Passchendaele. We're stopping for lunch at Cafe Taverne de Dreve, owned and run by Johan Vandewalle. He's an extraordinary man. This is the back wall to Johan's cafe, an immediate hint of a special connection to Australian forces. Under the Australian Army Rising Sun badge, is inscribed : "In dedication of the Anzacs who fought here during The Battle of Polygon Wood, Sept - Oct 1917". There's a big story here, and this wall is just the start of it. For me, the story began back at the Buttes New British Cemetery, at the grave of John Hunter. But there is a lot more to it. John  was the eldest of 7 sons of Henry and Emily Hunter from Nanango, Queensland. The military story begins when 25-year-old Jim Hunter  volunteered on 23rd October 1916. However, his older brother (and close friend) John thought it his duty to protect his younger brother and volunteered as well ...

 It is a challenge to drive a bus into Ypres, and Phillippe manages it in the unflustered style we are rapidly becoming accustomed to. As you approach the city centre, the cobblestone streets are narrow and the corners sharp. Apparently in the near future buses are going to be banned entirely from the centre. I wonder how this will affect the economy of the town, which is strongly built on battlefields tourism. It's Sunday 6 October 2024 and this is my second visit to this city. 25 years ago, Robyn, Andrew and I had planned to stay here, but with no accommodation available we stayed in the neighbouring town of Poperinge. It was Andrew's gap year after the HSC and he was travelling with us on this segment of our first big overseas holiday. Michelin maps provided our only navigation guides, and Andrew proved to be an excellent navigator. Ypres was our first battlefields stop on a trip that was taking us from Amsterdam to Paris. So there is a familiarity as our bus edges through t...