OK. What photos are there in our family's albums matching this week's Sepia Saturday theme?
First of all a photo taken in the early 1980s. There's me with my family on the main wharf in Portland harbour on Victoria's south coast. That's our car in the background and I wonder if anyone can casually drive onto the wharf like that now.
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| Portland, Victoria c1983 |
And see that little blondie in the middle? Here she is a few years later, on a flooded dam on our property, with a raft she and her siblings built. I look at this photo now and wonder what we were thinking, allowing them on that without life jackets! Ship ahoy.
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| Gemma having fun on the farm dam, 1980s. |
On a more serious note, at an earlier time. In February 1918 my husband's grandfather, Roy Phelan, enlisted in the Australian army and embarked on the ship 'Nestor' for Europe. As you can imagine, the departure of a shipload of soldiers was always a big event - a sad event but exciting. The ribbons stretched and broke as the ship left the wharf.
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| The 'Nestor' departs Melbourne February 1918 with troops aboard bound for Europe. |
Twenty years later, in 1937, in happier times. Roy Phelan was on another ship in Melbourne's harbour, the 'Orcades', with his wife and brother Gib and sister Ina. They were about to leave for a holiday in Tasmania and again the streamers are in evidence.
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| Roy (in the tall hat), Annie, Gib and Ina, on board the 'Orcades', Melbourne, 1937. |
Do they still have streamers when passenger ships depart?
