By: Peter Collins

Peter Collins — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 03:58:03 +0000

Genies can be eternally grateful for the advent of the likes of the Queensland Family History Society and its valiant volunteers who have just delivered the Crown Jewel – the 1959 Commonwealth Electoral Roll Index for Queensland.
Just a moment on this CD database produced the – to me – astonishing finding that my grandparents (both now long since passed) lived in a house (still in existence) just a street away from where my three children would begin their educational journey some 45 years later – Wooloowin State School.
Indeed at the Kedron Park Road end of Isedale Street, is the childcare centre all three of my boys attended.
[For a time I was on the Parents' and Citizens' Commitee of Wooloowin State School and often wondered why the place was always so "front-of-mind" - to the point of attending a rally to save it and publicising its pleas for a "fair go" in the local press, even though I had no prior direct connection to it.]
Anyway it turns out that this little, non-descript worker’s cottage in Isedale Street was the place where my Dad and Uncle, in turn, had to await the pleasure of their future father-in-law to ask for a blessing; the house from which my Mum, her sister and brother left for church on their respective wedding days; and where my Grandfather tinkered with his mowers and set out, in his “retirement years”, to mow other people’s lawns to earn a quid.
In 1959 I was born in the “old” Royal Women’s Hospital wing at Herston (in an era before air-conditioning was available in the wards) and my Mum and Dad were residing in a house they had just built in Masefield Street, Toombul (across the road from the future site of the Toombul Shoppingtown).
Fifty years on, each one of these buildings – including the Bradshaw Street, Wooloowin, private hospital in which my Dad was born – has literally vanished. Now they only exist as grainy, black and white snapshots – or in elderly locals’ memories.
With a place as under-siege as the suburb of Wooloowin (the State Government’s Airport Link juggernaut is tearing at its built environment and social fabric while developers can’t wait for the hubbub to die down), no doubt that weatherboard and tin-roofed cottage in Isedale Street will join this ghostly throng of places directly linked to my own past.
But for now, I’ve taken my boys for a drive-past and introduced them to a house that “belongs” to them in a heritage sense, even though I bet one day one of them scratches his head and wonders, “Didn’t Dad tell us something about some old house in Wooloowin when we were little?”

By: Liz Pidgeon

Liz Pidgeon — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 05:36:20 +0000

Thanks for sharing Shauna. I find it sad that your mother did not think to share the letter with you sooner – or give it you, especially because of your profession. We hear too many stories of photos, letters etc being thrown out because someone does not take the trouble to enquire who in the family might like them – even direct descendants!

By: Maureen Burton

Maureen Burton — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 07:40:00 +0000

A timely reminder with closer family contact for most of us at Christmas time. That old African proverb is so true -”when an old man dies, a library burns to the ground”. And yet, as you say, you can’t get some information until the time is right.
Cheers
MB

Comments on: Living Relatives – Don’t Waste Opportunity

By: Peter Collins

By: Liz Pidgeon

By: Maureen Burton