Wednesday, December 28th .....

So that was Christmas! For us it was a very quiet time. We had great food and enjoyed the fact that there was no pressure. The pressure is on now, of course, to use up the mass of leftover food. At least, with the internet, there's any number of recipes and we've had garlic prawns fettucine, ham quiche and leftover turkey lasagne to excite our tastebuds. My favourite Christmas meal is a fry-up of ham eggs and fruitcake. In the old days I would also have black pudding, tomato and mushrooms but, with the simplicity of the times, I've pared the dish down to its essentials. Great stuff!

It's dangerous to count the cost of Christmas and we don't. Even the surprising number of presents to people we hardly know must add up. Marilyn likes to buy chocolates or biscuits for the people she sees regularly: the hairdresser, the chemist, the lady who does the ironing and so on, and a heap of small boxes of chocolates for the unexpected. She decided on Tuesday morning she would leave out a box for the garbage man, thinking back to the time when it was expected that the garbo, the milko, the baker, the ice man and anyone else who called regularly would all get a Christmas hand-out. The norm was a bottle of beer left standing in a conspicuous spot. In those days when most of us had outside toilets, the dunny man who changed over the full pan for an empty one would also get his bottle. I suppose when he got home his wife would have to wash down all the bottles to remove the smell.

Nowadays, of course, we have two garbage men who never get out of the truck. No matter, we'll leave the boxes on top and stand them up so the men don't miss seeing them and drop them into the truck with the rubbish. At least they drive from the left-hand seat so they should see them easily. With the help of a few stones to hold them up, it was done and before long, we heard the first truck coming up the hill. It pulled up near the bin, the garbo jumped down and grabbed the box, tore off the wrapping and, as he pulled away stuffed the first chocolate in his mouth. Success!

We’ve had terrific weather for the whole of the Christmas season and today we’re expecting another 27 degree day. I took a break from mowing for Christmas Day but I’m back into it now, striving to keep the summer growth under control.

I’ve been busy with the family tree. When I discovered that June Gillies had a mass of information about the Gore family, I made an effort to flesh that out and see what I could discover about the Donachies. There’s a site called Scotland’s People where, for a fee, you can get access to lots of information: birth, death and marriage records, census, etc. I spent a few dollars and have now pushed the Donachie line back to about 1820, when the family first came from Ireland, and the Gore family back to 1762. With one or two exceptions, all the males were coal miners and the women worked in the weaving mills.

I’ve found people who died young, others who had two or three marriages and others who never married. Nobody seemed to stay long in one house: in a 10-year period, it was not unusual to see three or four moves, often within the same street. It would have been a hard life, living on the edge. At the time, mining would have been one of the most dangerous industries, wages were pitifully low and families were large. My generation climbed on the shoulders of those who went before and grabbed the opportunities and advantages that the 20th century made available. We should remind ourselves every day how lucky we are.

And that's my century - 100 posts in 2011!

Friday, December 23rd .....

Christmas comes to Dilston in a very nice, old-fashioned way. Jamie and I were working in the garden last weekend when an old red Tarago van pulled in to the driveway. A young girl jumped out and ran over to me with a couple of colourful little parcels. Happy Christmas, she said. I’ve no idea who she was but it was a wonderful gesture. The van continued on, stopping at letter boxes to drop off some more parcels.

We had also received a flyer in the letter box warning us that the Rural Fire Brigade’s Lolly Drop was being held on Sunday evening. Sure enough, at about 5.30 we heard sirens and horns tooting and three fire vehicles came over the hill and turned into our street. A hand came out of the window and a few lollies were chucked over to us. The houses are well spread out in this area but someone’s trying hard to develop a sense of community.

The only worry is that we might get carol-singers on Christmas eve.

I’ve been to two Giant Steps’ Board meetings this week. The Chairman received a resignation letter from the Principal so we’ve been considering how to respond and make sure the school operates effectively when classes resume after the new year. Anne had only been in the job for two years but had never really settled down and will be happier returning to the Education Department. We’ve decided to appoint the Deputy as Acting Principal for a term while we advertise for a permanent replacement. Of course, the Deputy will be seriously considered but we have to look at all options.

For me, it means a bit more involvement with the school as I’ve been asked to act as an advisor in the first few weeks.

We’ve had some rain overnight and it’s overcast this morning. We’re heading out to Deloraine for a meeting and we’ll stop on the way to pick raspberries. It’s a shame they’ve had some rain on them as they won’t last as long but we’ll just have to eat them more quickly.

I notice that this is my 99th post for the year; the pressure is on to make the century. Watch this space!

Tuesday, December 20th .....

I got so much information about the Gore family from June Gillies’s family that I thought I should make a special effort to push back the Donachie line as far as I could. Nobody else online seemed to be interested in this family so I had to do all the work myself. It’s surprising how quickly the framework fell into place. I’ve now printed out birth certificates for my grandfather, Alexander and his father, John. I’ve discovered that John was a pit pony driver and his wife, Elizabeth had an illegitimate child before her marriage. This child, James Rodger, was accepted as a full member of the family and was listed as stepson in the census.

My mother mentioned to me that there was a fellow called Jimmy Rodger in the family but she didn’t know where he fitted in, so now we know. Going back another generation, I came upon Owen Donachie who was born in Ireland. He first appears in Scottish records, in the 1851 census as a 9-year old in Kilmarnock, Ayrshire where his parents worked on a farm called Graham Land. His father, James, was a Thatcher and his older siblings worked as Tearers, whatever that is. One was listed as a Calico Tearer, but that doesn’t help us particularly.

In the 1861 Census, Owen is working as a labourer at a property called Knecocklav, in Loudon Ayrshire. The farm is 150 acres and owned by Mrs Elizabeth Gilchrist. Also working there is Janet Morton, an 18-year old domestic servant. Owen and Janet marry in 1865 and produce 11 children, one of whom is my great-grandfather, John.

There is a family tradition that one of my ancestors was left as a foundling on the steps of Limerick Castle. It doesn’t seem to be Owen so my next project is to check whether it might be his father, James. Irish records are not as accessible on line as Scottish ones so it’s not going to be easy.

Saturday, December 17th .....

Looking across the range of entries for the Gore family, it is interesting to see the same names recurring from generation to generation; Janet, Helen, Grace, Robert, William, and so on. The same thing occurs in the Christie family. We have lots of Alexanders, Andrews, Johns, Janets, Janes, etc. The Scottish tradition, of course, was to name children after relatives, the first-born son was always named after the paternal grandfather, the second son after the maternal grandfather, the first girl after the maternal grandmother, and so on. It makes things very confusing and you often find 2 or 3 cousins in the same generation with the same name.

I came across an Upstairs, Downstairs moment when I was sorting through the information on Jane Gillies’s tree. Helen Gore was born in 1847, one of a large family and was employed as a domestic servant. In 1871, when she was 24, she workd for the Menteith family in their home in Glasgow. The Menteiths are one of the great families of Scotland and the head of the family has the title of Earl. They are part of the powerful Graham clan.
In 1872, Helen left their employ because she was pregnant. That part of the Gore family believes that the father was Alexander Menteith. Alexander seems to be the name reserved for the Earl, so could it be that she was impregnated by a member of the nobility? Of course, it could just as easily have been the Under Footman, or even the Boot Boy, but not nearly as romantic.

Jane Gillies has discovered that Helen’s child, Janet, was born on January 7th, 1873, at 66 Dalmarnock Street, Glasgow. I’ve found a sketch of the rear of a nearby house in Dalmarnock Street, showing the open, rear staircases, the only access to the upper floors. The note with the sketch also mentions that the only running water to the house was at ‘primitive external sinks’, which would have been installed after 1862, in an attempt ‘to deal with the insanitary conditions in housing if the epidemics which ravaged Glasgow in the 19th century were to be controlled’. Before that, it would have been stand-pipes in the street, with an open drain if you were lucky.




I was also interested in the history of a later family member, Grace Gore, born in 1925. Grace was a Bus Conductress in Glasgow, and that’s enough information for any Glaswegian to know all he needs to know about Grace. Bus Conductresses during and after the Second World War became notorious for their crude and abrasive attitude to their customers. When an American soldier, or a recent immigrant tried to get on a full bus, the conductress would shout, ‘C’moan, Get aff! (Come on, Get off!) The poor old newcomer wouldn’t know whether he was coming or going.
Anyway, Grace married Sid Carter and they moved to Australia in 1960, settling in Carlingford. Their daughter, Elaine, married William Murphy and had three children. Lisa, born 1967 and her sister Nurel, born 1970, now live in Launceston. Their brother Paul Murphy, was born in 1974 in Battery Point, Hobart and is now a chef. I suppose we could pass in the street and wouldn’t know our connection.

Friday, December 16th .....

Five or six years ago, I became interested in building up our family tree and I was amazed at the amount of information I could glean from the internet, mostly from research done by other people willing to share their information. A fellow in Gourdon, Scotland contacted me and offered to search through the archives in the local library on my behalf. He gave me a hand-drawn family treecovering three generations. We were also lucky enough to have a Mormon in our ancestry and another descendant had compiled a fantastic amount of information which was all available on-line. It was great and I ended up with quite an impressive overview of where we had come from in the past 300 years.

However, there were two significant black holes: the line of my mother’s father, Alexander Donachie, and of my father’s mother, Janet Gore. The Donachies still elude me but yesterday I came across a great mass of information about the Gores, gathered by an enthusiastic researcher called June Gillies. She’s managed to push the line back to 1762, and fill in a lot of the significant gaps in the ensuing five generations. It’s a story of the Scottish coal mining industry as most of the men were miners, working in one or other of the large number of mines in the Lanark area near Glasgow. One or two of the women were in domestic service but others were skilled workers in the weaving mills before marrying.

Reading a list of names and dates doesn’t tell you much about the times, but reading between the lines can tell you a whole lot about the conditions under which these people lived. One of the early family members was Janet Davie who was born in 1806 and married John Gore. Janet came from a big family but, when you look at the names of her brothers and sisters, you can see that there was a William born in 1788, a Margaret born in 1790 and a Grizel, born 1798 (Grizel was their mother’s name). Then you notice there is another William, born 1796, another Margaret in 1799 and a second Grizel in 1803. The implication is that the children born earlier had died in infancy and their names were recycled when new children came long.

Another clue to their lives can be seen in the addresses reported in the censuses of 1881 and 1901. Several of the families resided at Watsonville, others at Old Logans Row, and others at Camp Row, Motherwell. The mine-owners, in those days, built rows of tenement houses close to the pithead which were rented out to their workers. They must have been pretty grim. I found some 1914 reports on some of the premises which certainly tell the tale:

Watsonville, Motherwell (John Watson, Limited)
These rows are known as Watsonville, and are situated in the centre of Motherwell Burgh. They are a very poor type of house, and were built over forty years ago. Water is supplied by means of stand-pipes in the street, with an open channel to carry off the dirty water. There is a meagre supply of washhouse accommodation, and grave complaints were made on this score. The streets and back courts are in a very bad condition. [Evidence presented to Royal Commission, 25th March 1914]


Old Logans Rows, Motherwell (Merry & Cunninghame, Limited)
This property is on the side of the Glasgow Road, Motherwell, and consists of a long row of single- and double-apartment houses; rent, 3s. 8d. for single, and 5s. 8d. for double houses per fortnight. Water-closets and washhouses have been erected within the last few years; no coal-houses - coal put under the bed. The single houses are built back-to-back, and are in a very poor condition. [Evidence presented to Royal Commission, 25th March 1914]


I particularly like the comment that they would have to keep the coal under the bed as there was no coal-house. I imagine each miner would get an allocation of coal, probably in bags, and it would be used for cooking as well as heating so would be precious, especially in winter. The old photograph is of a row of miners' cottages at Coatbridge and typical of the day. You can see the open drain down the middle of the road. These are one-storey cottages but many of the 'rows' were two-storey with residents sharing toilets accessed from the outside and wash-houses or sculleries. Most would have only one bedroom and children would sleepon makeshift beds in the kitchen/sitting room or beds set into the walls. It didn't stop the people having large families. In these Victorian times, Scotland had the lowest wages in Europe, the smallest children and the highest mortality rate. It's no wonder they also had a very high emigration rate - to the Americas and the Antipodes. Scotland's biggest export for 100 years was its people.

Thursday, December 15th .....

I’ve never been able to understand the concept of a leaf-blower. I see the eager gardeners out on a Saturday afternoon, blowing leaves and grass clippings off their driveway into the gutter, and watched the wind come up and blow them back again. Or the debris is blown onto someone else’s driveway, and I wonder what’s the point of it all?

I suppose the blower makes a satisfactory noise and, for a fleeting moment, the yard looks better but the job isn’t finished, the problem hasn’t been solved. The problem has simply been moved to another place and, at best, becomes someone else’s problem.


I did wonder when I walked through Bunnings this week and saw all the various models of blowers lined up that perhaps the purpose of a leaf blower is just to give another Christmas gift option for the father who has everything else. It looks good, comes in a range of attractive and masculine colours and, when wrapped, makes a very substantial looking present under the tree. It beats hankies and socks, hands down.

They’ve just finished the last little bit of the new highway outside our house. The asphalt layers have been out this week completing the last two sections of the road surface so that we can have an uninterrupted 100Km/hr ride home. The last part of the process of sealing the road is to spread a layer of fine blue metal on the road. I suppose it stops the tar from sticking to tyres, or it’s a final hard-wearing layer which sinks into the asphalt to extend the life of the road. It’s a dangerous time for drivers because the little chips can be thrown up and can break windscreens, and that’s a particular problem here because the road was built to cater for log trucks going to and from the proposed pulp mill and the drivers have the reputation of being notoriously uncaring of fellow road-users.

Anyway, I’ve noticed that a certain amount of blue metal finds its way to the road edges where it just lies, seeming to cause no harm. However, for some reason, the builders of our highway have decided that the surplus stones have to be shifted off the road. Who knows why! So, there’s a fellow in an orange shirt, armed with a leaf blower walking sideways along the road blowing the stuff into the grass verge. Apart from questioning whether the grass is the right place to shove the stones, I’m astounded at the decision to give him a leaf blower. The nozzle is about 3 inches wide and stones are a lot heavier than leaves so I watch him virtually using the nozzle as a scraper to push the rocks away.

He’s been on the road for three days now. He has a little truck, a sign which encourages drivers to slow down to 60 Km/hr (fat chance!) and 5 or 6 orange cones to give him some protection. He’s on his own and I wonder whether the job has been invented to keep a recalcitrant worker out of sight and out of mind. It’s ludicrous! The section of highway is probably 10 Km long so, in effect, he has a job for life. The thing is, if he had a 15 inch broom, he would do the job in a fraction of the time and wouldn’t be burning fossil fuels into the bargain.

Thursday, December 8th .....

Jamie came across this Canadian ad somewhere. Maybe we should be looking for royalties!

Our proposed trip to Japan, still 24 weeks away, looks set to become the most over-organised holiday ever. The internet certainly draws you in and I find myself following up question after question. When we were in Japan last, in 2005, we discovered that we could travel from our hotel to the Tokyo Railway Station without ever standing on the surface. We simply took the stairs down to the nearest subway station and, by judicious following of our noses, we found ourselves emerging where we wanted to go.

I was interested in seeing whether this might be possible in Osaka. There are 6 railway stations, main line and subway, within 15 minutes walk of our hotel and it didn’t take me long to discover they are all connected underground, not just by tunnels but by shopping malls. Osaka claims to have more underground shopping than any city in Japan, and possibly the world. This may be so because there are many kilometres just near where are staying without looking at other transport hubs in other areas of the city.


So, within 100m of the hotel, we take the stairs down to the Diamor Shopping Mall and walk through to the station we want. On the way, we can get a meal or a snack. There are several coffee shops, two MacDonalds, a couple of noodle shops and, our favourites, bakeries.
Japanese bread is delicious, a little sweeter than ours but that’s not always a bad thing. Certainly, Madi got a taste for their buns and we got into the habit of buying a bagful before we got on the train. Each of us took a tray and pair of tongs and chose what we liked best. How many can I have Grand-dad? was the constant cry. Sometimes the answer was three, sometimes four, but I was never sure I was on the right track.

We keep discovering new forms of wildlife on the ‘farm’.
Today, we noticed a very healthy-looking echidna snuffling through the grass. When he heard us, his snout started twitching as he tried to find where we were and he curled into a ball hoping we would leave him alone. We did!

Monday, December 5th .....

Well, it’s official, we’ve passed the criteria and are now classified as ‘rural’. The first two criteria were easy: our property is too big to kick a football from one side to the other, and we drive a perpetually-dirty 4WD, but the last two eluded us for a while.

We could have got a goat to keep the grass down or Marilyn could have joined the CWA and learned to bake lamingtons but they seemed a bit extreme. And then, as if by chance, we met two criteria on consecutive days.

Yesterday, we bought a chainsaw. Nothing (except perhaps a shotgun) epitomises ‘rural’ more than owning and using a chainsaw. I must say, we felt good and the local fire department will applaud our attempts to keep the property free of dead branches.

The last criteria was met this morning when I woke up to hear the farm cat, CB, yelling about something in the laundry. She sleeps in the laundry each night but has a cat flap to get in and out. Her yelling was to tell me that she had brought home a gift for us: a dead baby rabbit.

I couldn’t believe our luck, the fourth criteria, that the farm cat brings home prey bigger than a mouse, had been met.

So now we are rural. We have to learn to talk more slowly, wear a big hat, take our political views from Barnaby Joyce, show interest in the price of fat lambs, and wait all week for Macca on a Sunday morning. But, it’s worth it. No section of the Australian population has more leeway to whinge and complain. Now, if only I can work out a way to write off our overseas trips as farm expenses.

We decided we would treat ourselves to lunch yesterday. We went to a little restaurant in Gravelly Beach called Kouklis, ostensibly Greek but something for everyone. Jamie had Spanakopita, Marilyn had Fish Cakes with a Greek Salad and I had a Sicilian Fish Stew. Each time we do this we promise it will become more regular but it never does. The restaurant is just a few doors along from 303 Gravelly Beach Road, the holiday house we once had. It looks out over the river to Swan Bay so our current house was almost directly due East. As Jamie said, if we had a boat we could sail across for lunch and save the long drive around through town.

It’s just 9 o’clock here, the sun is shining and there’s not a cloud in the sky and all we have to look forward to is another day cutting down grass. I’m going to spray some roundup on the piles we laughingly call rockeries, and Jamie will get the chainsaw going – just another day in paradise.

Saturday, December 3rd .....

Dad’s folk (as they say in Scotland) came from a small fishing village on the East coast called Gourdon. His father, also John, moved to Lanarkshire to find work and married Janet Gore from Motherwell. Motherwell was the home of the famous Colville Steelworks which produced the best ship-building steel in Europe and supported the Clydeside Shipyards.


My grandfather, though, was a miner and worked in the Blantyre Mine. My father was the first of three children. A girl, Anne, died young and his sister, Janet, married and moved to England. Looking through Dad’s family tree shows that generations of his family were fishermen, although the earliest direct ancestor I have found, George, born 1785, was a Limefiller. There are a few masons and similar occupations among the generations but, essentially, fishing was the family trade. The next generation had a John (born 1821) who was a Whitefisher, a term used to differentiate them from fishermen who caught lobsters and crabs,etc. This John was the first in the family line of boys named John. I'm the fifth in the line, and Jamie (John James!) is the sixth.

The third generation John was born in 1852 and had 9 children but only two boys. George probably died young and John, my grandfather, left the sea behind to seek his fortune in the steel-making towns of Lanarkshire. Sadly, he died in 1946, aged 51. I have a faint memory of him helping my brother who was learning to walk but I would have only been 3 years old and I can’t guarantee it’s not a false recollection, based on family stories.

One of Dad’s aunts married a fishermen called Alexander Gibb whose boat was called the Tunbury Castle. It was a converted canal narrow boat. We visited them in 1950 in Johnshaven, the next village to Gourdon and I have strong memories of that trip. Dad had already sailed for Australia so there was just Mum and my brother and I. We travelled from Glasgow in a Bluebird Coach
and we each had a comic for the trip. We got off the bus at the highway and walked down the hill to the little cottage right on the foreshore in Johnshaven. Uncle Alex had an upturned boat in front of his house, a smokehouse in the back-yard and an attic, which my brother and I were keen to explore. That’s where I keep my ferrets, said Uncle Alex, so we didn’t dare go up there.

That’s where I ate my first crabs and the taste in my memory is as vivid as the day I ate them.

So Dad’s generation produced 2 sons named Christie, and my generation has produced three: my son, Jamie, and Sandy’s sons, Andrew and Simon. Jamie has only one daughter and Andrew has two girls. Simon, though, has two boys, Jack and Ty, so the Christie name continues into another generation.