Sketching family history in rural Australia - Hallo friendsCAPITAL STORIES FOR CHILDREN, In the article you read this time with the title Sketching family history in rural Australia, We have prepared this article for you to read and retrieve information therein. Hopefully the contents of postings Article ADVENTURE, Article ANIMATION, Article LATEST DONGENG, Article WORLD OF ANIMALS, We write this you can understand. Alright, good read.

Title : Sketching family history in rural Australia
link : Sketching family history in rural Australia

Sketching family history in rural Australia

[Guest post by Richard Aitken, Melbourne, Australia] We sketch as much with our minds and memories as we do with hands and eyes. This is particularly so when we sketch locations that are steeped in family history. Arriving early for an upcountry family funeral recently, I took the opportunity to stop in Mitiamo, now really a speck on the map but once a thriving hub for the surrounding district. Despite its modest size, three people stopped in the space of an hour to ask if I was lost. Once I started reeling off the names of my father’s cousins, I was treated as an honorary local and I tried to imbue the resulting township portrait from the war memorial reserve (above) with an air of quiet decency.

This country, my ancestral stamping ground, is a vast plain north of Bendigo in north-central Victoria, given over from the 1860s to wheat and general agriculture. With hindsight, land was given cheaply, scant attention was paid to Indigenous knowledge and welfare, and some questionable environmental practices were enshrined in legislation. Yet this was the land of my forebears, who ‘selected’ blocks of 320 acres, then gained freehold title via a series of conditional licenses. One such block, north of Mitiamo at Mologa, has been retained in family ownership since the 1870s, and its sheds are a sketcher’s dream.

Australian farmers are reluctant to throw anything away, and at least one shed — often several — almost always guards old harvesters, clapped out motor vehicles, and defunct appliances. You just never know.

As well as farm sheds, few Australian country towns — however modest — lack a war memorial commemorating the First World War. This catastrophic conflict claimed 60,000 Australian lives with an additional 150,000 wounded, all from a voluntary force numbering over 400,000, a staggering eight per cent of the country’s population. Towns like Mitiamo and Mologa had dozens of casualties and many made the ‘supreme sacrifice’. Some, like my great grandmother’s brother from nearby Kamarooka, were buried in unmarked graves in France but memorialised nearer to home in a family plot. The end of September this year marks the centenary of one of the last battles on the Western Front, near Bellicourt, on St Quentin Canal. Today was the centenary of my ancestor’s death in that battle and I took the opportunity to quietly sketch in Raywood Cemetery, where the name of Alfred Edgar Miles graces the tombstone of his grieving parents, surrounded by paddocks of wheat and the quiet rustling of wind in the sheoaks.

Richard Aitken is an Australian urban sketcher and keen family historian. He hopes in the near future to visit and sketch in the French countryside around Bellicourt, perhaps the subject of a future blog post. See his previous guest posts here. 

Thus Article Sketching family history in rural Australia

That's an article Sketching family history in rural Australia This time, hopefully can give benefits to all of you. well, see you in posting other articles.

You are now reading the article Sketching family history in rural Australia with the link address https://capitalstories.blogspot.com/2018/10/sketching-family-history-in-rural.html

Tweet

Subscribe to receive free email updates: