Category Archives: Writing

Getting to know my father

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I took a deep breath and began typing the first letter – one and half pages. There were words I couldn’t decipher. He was on the ship, “The Triona”. He talked about the Lascars – who were they? Who were the Mc Raes he saw before he left? I penned a note to ask my Aunt. She was bound to know. At 94, she was still as sharp as a tack.

I typed up the next letter ’20 June 1948’. Three weeks in and he was still on the ship. There was a diagram of his quarters and a description of the food he’d eaten. I guess he was a typical 18 year old boy who loved to eat. He wondered if his new nephew or niece had arrived. He worried about my grandfather and if he was coping with the garden without him. He was sick of being at sea.

I finished typing the second letter and pondered. It dawned on me that I was getting to know my father as a teenager. What child ever gets to do that? He was 28 when I was born and my earliest memories of him began at three. I was looking up at him, my neck craned to watch him shave off his red fluffy beard – he would have been 31. I really got to know him in his mid to late 30’s and by the time I was a teenager with a consciousness, he was already in his 40’s. By then we were already worlds apart.

What an extraordinary opportunity I’d been given to discover my father as a boy and watch him turn into a man – into the man I knew and loved. He was the man who I had adored and followed everywhere as a kid; who did no wrong in my eyes – the teacher, the larrikin, the organiser, the drinker; the fixer, the adventurer. The man,I had stood up to as a teenager, and fiercely argued with, for my own independence. The man who had been my champion; who had been proud of everything I had ever done even though I shrugged it off. The man who could fly off the handle for the smallest of things yet hated confrontations. The man, who in later years, withdrew from me and everyone else, into his own world. Had he always been like that?

The Letters

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I hadn’t looked at the old camphorwood chest since I was a kid. But now I examined it, as if, for the first time.There was a large butterfly carved into the lid and other designs on the side with old scratches across the front of it. I carried it to my desk and opened the lid. Inside were piles of envelopes containing old photos and letters. One envelope was neatly labelled Ocean Island. I flicked through the photos, the handwriting on the reverse named places and dates. Thank goodness there was no digital photography then.

Then I found what I was after. The letters were folded neatly inside a large envelope. There were three piles of them. I opened the first pile and glanced at the top right hand corner; ‘C/- BPC Ocean Island, 6 June 1948’. The letter was addressed, ‘Dear Mum’; my grandmother. The letter was yellowing yet crisp in my hand; I began reading the cursive writing and imagined the excitement of the writer and the reader. The letter told of the ship’s voyage from Melbourne to Newcastle; what it was like on board; the crew and the food. It was just a typical letter home from a travelling son. Only he wasn’t on holiday – he was on his way to Ocean Island to start a new job. I looked at the date again; my father had been 18. I imagined what it must have been like back then. The war had ended a few years before and for some reason he decided to go to a small island somewhere in the Pacific. What did BPC mean? I didn’t know.

I ran my fingers down the page. I’d never really taken much interest in his story. My childhood was peppered with vague memories of his adventures in the tropics and I remembered the name of Ocean Island. I knew  phosphate had been mined there. Like most kids, I half listened to my fathers stories or not at all. I read somewhere that interest in family history reaches us in our older years. Now it was too late to ask him anything as he’d passed away four years before.

I’d finally found the time to help my mother clean out his things – he had a lot. My mother and I had sat on the carpet of his study pulling out things that he should have thrown away years ago. We laughed as we binned the old cheque stubs from the 1960’s, his handwritten to do lists, business letters in carbon, receipts for things which had long since become landfill. And that’s when I found the letters – tucked away in a small camphorwood chest. My grandmother must have saved them and given them back to him a long time ago. I wondered why he’d never mentioned them. Even my mother hadn’t remembered seeing them before.
I made my decision that day not to let the letters wallow for another sixty years – I was going to type them up and publish them so that my family and future generations could read his story.  I looked at the dates of the other two piles of letters – 1949, 1950. There were three years of history in more than 100 letters.

This is the story of what I did and what I found out. I hope you enjoy it.