Today I have a very special post! In keeping in touch with my Grandma while I'm overseas, I started asking questions in my emails about her childhood. Obviously her answers are particularly interesting to me, but I thought they might be of interest to some of you too, so I asked if I could share them. They are really lovely, and I think it is particularly good to learn a bit about life in Australia during this period, as so much of the information that is available out there is to do with life in Britain or America. I hope you enjoy them as much as I did!
I grew up in Red Cliffs and Mildura. Red Cliffs was a Soldier Settlement town, and my father, as a returned WW1 veteran was granted 640 acres of land to start a vineyard or citrus orchard. He veterans lived in a tent city and assisted one another in the building of their houses. Ours was a weatherboard house with as wide return verandah. I lived there until I was five, and this was very much country living. In 1929, due to financial trouble, my father was obliged to sell the block and we moved into Mildura--ten miles away. Mildura was a large country town established by the Chaffey brothers from California in 1900. They saw the potential for transforming the area from dry mallee scrub into a green oasis by means of irrigation from the Murray River. Mildura became a city in 1934 and I can remember the day as all the schools of the district were gathered onto the football oval to witness the declaration of the city by the Duke of Gloucester (brother of George V1).
During my earliest years my mother made most of my clothes and I don't have any memory of a particular dress. Later in the 1930's when the depression was at its height our family was having a hard time. The poultry farm my father had established was hit by a severe thunderstorm and the chook pens were flooded .The chooks got a disease equivalent to pneumonia in humans, and we lost the lot. During this time my mother's sister (Auntie Jessie) would send a tea chest full of cast-off clothes from herself and her daughter Peggy at the end of each season. Many of these fitted myself and Marj, and Mum cut down others, so we looked far better dressed than our circumstances would suggest. I have a particular memory of one dress. It was a pale blue hail-spot voile with a three-frill skirt, and ruffles round the neck and sleeves. I remember walking to a birthday party feeling like a princess with my long white socks and black patent leather shoes and the blue dress. I suppose I remember it particularly as many of the girls at the party came from families which hadn't been hurt by the depression (dentists, doctors etc.) and I felt I looked as pretty as any of them.
I probably wore the blue dress to the party you mention. (Grandma has told me before about a blue theme party she once had, which sounds lovely!) It was while we were in Mildura, not Mt Evelyn. The jacarandas come out in October and the falling flowers carpeted the ground underneath in blue. So Mum decided on the blue theme. She conceived the idea of making the icing on the cup cakes blue by mixing it with water coloured by the blue bag ( you mightn't remember blue bags--they were dipped into the final rinsing water when washing was done by boiling it in the copper, and then rinsing it in the troughs). I don't think the cakes tasted very nice! Of course there was a blue tablecloth and serviettes and balloons. Somebody gave me a beach ball, and we were playing with it in the lounge when I hit the hanging light shade and broke it, so it ended up a very "blue"party.
As a teenager after we had arrived in Melbourne Marj and I would often go to a church dance, or a dance in the local town hall on Saturday nights (like the one in that movie you sent me). We would wear our "best" dresses which were often made by Marj,or hand-downs from our cousin Peggy. (Marj, like you, was making her own dresses from age of about 12). I don't think I ever had a bought dress until I got my first job and started earning money. Some of the things we did in preparation for a dance were-- hair in curlers, cucumber slices on our eyes, lemon juice in the rinsing water for our hair, and frantic attempts to disguise pimples (calomine lotion).
