Great Aunt Gert

I’m seated at the dining table adjacent to Dad, typing away on my tablet as he dutifully answers my questions. Occasionally he gazes out the window as if looking beyond the loungeroom for inspiration. I’m interviewing Dad about his life, and in preparation for this occasion he has pulled out a pile of family history volumes about our ancestors. They sit unopened beside him. I’m more interested in the memories, feelings and ‘his’ story than the historical detail.

But Dad practically knows the content of these books by heart anyway, and takes every opportunity to discuss his forebears, some of whom had arrived in Sydney in the 1830s and dispersed to various farming communities in New South Wales. One particular character captures my attention. Dad’s Great Aunt Gert hailed from the small town of Newrybar, in northern NSW, where she was most likely born a bit before the turn of the century. She was still living there in the 1950s when my dad used to visit his grandmother as a boy.

Gert was a ‘spinster’, and 'a very unattractive woman’, I was told, as if one explained the other. Both she and her sister (my great grandmother) were apparently formidible women, who might have been called 'feisty' these days. Gert was also missing a finger, an attribute that only added to her frightening demeaner. That she had become her elderly mother’s main carer by the time Dad knew her was the only neutral fact I could glean. Nothing is known of her interests, leisure activities, sexual orientation, line of work apart from familial responsibilities, aspirations, or whether she ever left the small town of Newrybar.

When I was visiting a family friend, who also had family ties to Newrybar, and just as many family history volumes, I was able to grasp snippets of life in Gert's day. One community notice in 1928 describes a school concert. My grandfather, who would have been in his teens at the time, joined the other senior boys to perform an act entitled "The Dwarfs" which was accompanied by Miss Woods who played 'lightly on her violin'. Thank goodness Miss Woods didn't dominate the no doubt thought-provoking performance of the senior boys. Other acts were entitled "10 little niggers", "Ching Chong", and "Golliwog", providing a deeply depressing insight into attitudes towards diversity and multiculturalism in those days. The concert was declared a roaring success to the extent that some theatre goers had to satisfy themselves with a view through the window. And the women did a splendid job with the refreshments.

Newspaper clippings from our friend's family history book

Meanwhile, on my mother’s side of the family was another intriguing character. Great Uncle Ces was an artist, creating insightful sketches of life in the 1930s. In the early 40s he was in France sketching aspects of the second world war, and sending his cartoons back to the Sydney Morning Herald for publication. Many of us in the family have one or two of his limited edition works on our walls, and enjoy the minor celebrity involved. One of my favourites is “Sea legs", a lino print of five women sunbathing on the deck of a boat, legs outstretched in all directions. I also have one of his calendar sketches of a man awkwardly holding a baby, while a woman changes a flat tyre. It is entitled “the weaker sex”. I love the insights into humanity that we take away from these drawings. Like Gert, Ces never married, and didn’t have any children, yet his art survives him.

The weaker Sex, by Ces Percival

Sea legs by Ces Percival

So, while Ces is busy with his art and travel, Gert gets on with the daily drudgery of providing refreshments, entertaining weekend visitors, and dealing with bed pans. I wonder if she dreams of a different life. I’d love to sit down with her, and hear “her story”, and the issues that got her riled up, but sadly she’s now long gone. With nothing surviving her apart from a death certificate which Dad tells me would likely have been marked "Spinster of Newrybar" and a few community notices that list her as an attendee, I’m left to piece together the possibilities of her life from the impression she made on her great nephew.