Posted originally on February 26, 2015 by Neil

This series of posts is the most comprehensive I have done on family history. I am doing them backwards here so that in due course they will appear sequentially.

There is such a trove on Trove! By way of background, see More tales from my mother 3 — Braefield NSW 1916-1923, Jean Christison to her grandmother — an undated letter from Braefield, More tales from my mother 4 — Dunolly NSW — and conclusions. Roy Christison was Head at Milton, his next school, from 1925 to 1929. Then Shellharbour 1930.

A couple of pieces from my mother’s Milton years from the Sydney Mail.

A forgotten bit of history: the NSW referendum on prohibition, 1 September 1928. Also in 1928:

See Charles Kingsford Smith and the first trans-Pacific flight.

My mother turned 17 in 1928. She had left school at the end of 1923, thus not going to high school. Her mother would have been pregnant with my uncle Neil (b. 1924). Jean was needed at home. Her father Roy, also her only teacher, did later express regret that unlike her younger sister Beth who went to Wollongong High my mother did not get the opportunity to complete her schooling. Clearly she had gifts, as the following poem shows.

By the way, “Cinderella” was “a poet, journalist and children’s author and a founding member of the Society of Women Writers. She worked at the Sydney Mail for over 20 years, …and her poetry was published in the Australasian, the Australian Town and Country Journal, the Lone Hand, the Spectator (London), the Sunday Times and the Sydney Morning Herald.”  Another young writer she encouraged was Judith Wright.