My Golden Childhood VIII

A Wonderful and Large Extended Family

One of the things I loved about my childhood and now treasure so greatly is growing up with a close family and my extended family near by. Mum and Dad had eight kids, though we were well spread and never all lived at home at one time. Dad's parents lived about 1.5 klms from us and his two brothers, wives and total of 9 children, too. "Over the Road" we called it because you had to cross the main road to get their places. I spent a lot of time with my grandparents. Grandad was a great story teller. He smoked a pipe and had been to the First World War and for an old country gentleman was well read and had seen a lot of the world. Grandma was a very industrious woman and still made butter, cooked, sewed and knitted well into her eighties.

Here are some of us boarding the local school bus. What a motley crew!! It was only about 10 klm for us into town to go to school but our fathers had ridden to school on horseback, milking cows before they left. (So they would remind us!)

The cousins and one "ring in "playing some board game.
Between the three houses there were usually plenty of extra kids over school holidays.
The city cousins, assorted friends and sometimes needy kids would love to come to the farm for some carefree entertainment, with fresh air, good food and great company!


The kids from over the road on a hay ride past our front house gate.

As the years passed, Dad and the brothers who remained on the land bought and built up their own properties. Now that generation has retired/ died and two of my brothers and one cousin own those properties and keep expanding them. They have a total of six children, quite spread in ages, so who knows whether the land will stay in the family into the next generation and beyond. I mentioned in the very first Golden Childhood post that we are holding a family reunion to celebrate 100years of our family farming this land. It is becoming rare in Australia for family farms to exist .

It is hard to imagine some other family, other children growing up here. No other family has farmed here. I still have a close tie to my childhood home while the boys continue to live there but thankfully, I am not yearning for an earthly home. And while my memories are precious and golden, they cannot compare to the wonderful home awaiting me in Heaven.

Top photo: A family hike in the lovely hills behind our home stead. 1983

Second top: That's me on my 18th birthday with Grandad (91) and Grandma (89). He died about a month later. Click on their names to see photos of them as young people. 1980

And yes, that's me, the oldest girl in the first two group photographs! All 1974