My mother’s family

Growing up I heard my mother and her sisters speak of growing up in Collinsvale during the Depression years of the 1930s. Tough times for workers and dirt farmers alike, and formative years in their lives. They were stoic. They just got on with it without fuss: they found pleasure in simple things, knew what it was to go without and wasted nothing.
I found this photo of my mother and her siblings in her old photo collection taken a couple of years before the war. The elder brothers are not pictured, perhaps at work or behind the Box Brownie.
Around this time, their mother passed away after a period of illness. My mum (top left) became a surrogate mother to her younger siblings: an experience which bound them together throughout their lives. The youngest two live on. I can see it captured in this image, this moment in time.
Visits to, and from my mother’s family was a childhood constant: weekends, holidays, Christmas, summer holidays at the beach, and looking after kids in times of need. An extensive collection of uncles, aunts, their friends, and my cousins ensured an eventful childhood.
In her funeral eulogies, my uncles and aunts spoke with heartfelt appreciation of my mother for being a second mum.
Here they are as children, smiling for the camera, on my grandfather’s farm where he made a living growing produce to sell at the Glenorchy market, the hills of Collinsvale and the Wellington Range behind them. Do they wonder what future lies ahead? The Second World War, post-war marriages, raising families through the 50s and 60s, and their eventual retirements scattered around the country.