Day 444 | Dinninup Showground: still heading east through those hills
69 km | Heading west total: 16,020 km
A few years ago I helped my father with a family history.
He did all the writing, he’d taken an interest in the complicated marriages the numerous progeny and had made sense of it all. It stretched back 4 or 5 generations. He also assembled all the photos and documents.
I, umm, formatted it.
To be fair it ended up being over 250 pages long and there were quite a few family tree diagrams and resizing 150 photos etc for me to get stuck into. It took a few hours, well many, many hours, and my partner was concerned I wasn’t paying attention to her in the evenings, instead staring into a computer screen.
In the end I only worked on it when she was out and the process stretched on a frustrating year. She’d come in and catch me at it, still working on that thing. Gee, I was only doing something with my father for the first time in my adult life.
Then she found out she wasn’t included. Things were obviously getting a little rocky at this stage and this realisation really cranked her up. She moved out temporarily because it showed just how much I really cared. So with a little drama I finally got what was now The Family History completed.
There was a single line in my mother’s life story that always interested me, something I knew very little about.
In the 1930s my grandparents moved with their 5 children to Kulikup in Western Australia. My mother, the youngest, was a toddler and the adventure only lasted a couple of years before they returned to NZ.
I have put Kulikup on my itinerary.
Kulikup had always been imagined on the edge of the desert, flat wheat country maybe.
I’m surprised to find the countryside I’m traversing is highly reminiscent of, well, South Canterbury, NZ, where the family returned to farm. Rolling green hills, just like around Geraldine or Waimate.