My Auntie Dot passed away last month, 29 May 2023. She was the youngest of three sisters who grew up in Goulburn, a town on the Southern Tablelands of NSW, a few hours south of Sydney on the main route to Canberra and Melbourne. Nowadays the busy Hume Highway bypasses the historic township, so my brother Stephen and I took the exit to drive down the old “Sydney Road” past the Goulburn General Cemetery where Dot’s body would later be laid to rest. The funeral service was to be held in another cemetery on the northern edge of town where there was a bigger chapel. There was a hearse waiting outside the chapel to transport Dot later to her final resting place, beside her parents, on the hill overlooking Goulburn town.

As Stephen and I climbed out the car a chill wind wrapped itself around us; it was the first day of winter. We crunched our way up the gravel drive to where the assembled mourners – Dot’s family and friends – were gathered. After brief greetings we were ushered to our seats inside, close to the flower laden coffin. Above the coffin a slideshow of scenes from Dot’s life drew our eyes and minds away from death to life.

Some of the pictures of Dot’s early life showed her sisters – our now long departed mother Gwen, and our Auntie Joyce, who disappeared mysteriously many years ago and whose whereabouts was unknown to us. Wendy had asked me to say something about the girls’ family background – our shared family history – before she gave the eulogy proper. They had grown up in rural Australia during the hard years of the Depression and the Second World War, so their lives were not easy. But the faces that peered out at us from some of those very old photos were happy ones, and I was reminded of the stories my mother used to tell us of their childhood.

The story I told on that day in the chapel in Goulburn I have now reworked into a rather longer account, which includes some of those pictures. It is a long read. Click here if you are interested.