Memorial Weekend

My father-in-law Robert Featherston passed away on 16 February 1992 and my own father Ian Cruickshank died eight years and one day later, on 17 February 2000. Coincidentally my father was eight years younger than my father-in-law, so Bob was 74, Dad was 75 years old when they died. It's quite a long time ago and not something I often think about, but there it is. I've blogged about both of them numerous times previously, here, here and here in relation to my Dad, and here, here and here in relation to Bob for example, so I'm not going to do any more than post a couple more photos of them that are vaguely on theme with our Sepia Saturday prompt photo this week, which shows a number of young swimmers standing on or hanging off a diving tower at a Brisbane pool.
There is a similar tower at the Eastern Beach swimming enclosure at Geelong, which also features in my last link, entitled Swimmers with Arms Folded. I don't have many photos of either Bob or Ian clad in their swimming costumes, other than the one of Bob in that post, but here he is relaxing in a river somewhere in 1947.

And here is my tall slim Dad strolling along a sandy beach in the 1960s:

        RIP Bob and Ian. We'll raise a glass to them both.

Now here are a couple of family snaps of children pretending to be on diving towers, which seems to have been a popular thing to do in our back yard when the paddling pool came out on a warm summer's day. I'm standing with a friend in the first photo and then apparently defying gravity in a tussle with my brother in the second one.

And one more of my brother and sister up a different kind of ladder, the slippery dip at our local playground. Hopefully they did not try to jump off! This was in Canberra in the 1960s. Now we live in Victoria, where slippery dips are rather less imaginatively known as slides, but I'm doing my best to teach my grandchildren the 'correct' term.😀

                      Anyone fancy a slippery dip?

For more blogs possibly featuring towers ladders, swimmers and related subjects, please visit Sepia Saturday #406.

Under the Jacaranda

I was just looking at the prompt photo again and the fact that it is in a garden and comes from Queensland suddenly brought to mind this oil painting that I loved seeing last year when I visited the Art Gallery of Queensland in Brisbane. It was painted in 1903 by English immigrant R. Godfrey Rivers and depicts the painter and his wife Selina being served an elegant afternoon tea under a spectacular jacaranda tree in full bloom. They may well have been acquainted with John Nicholson and his wife Anna, as they lived in the same city around a similar time period.  According to a former curator of the Brisbane Botanic Gardens, this tree was planted there in 1864 and was the first jacaranda to be grown in Australia, from seeds obtained from a visiting South American sea captain. Click here for more information about the history of this tree. It was blown down by a storm in the 1980s but many jacaranda trees in the Brisbane region have been grown from cuttings and seeds originally  taken from it. 

Jacaranda season in Australia runs from October to December, depending on the location. They are not as prolific down here  in Melbourne as they are in Sydney and cities and towns further north, but I took this photo locally in December last year. Purple has always been my favourite colour! There's an Australian magpie enjoying it too.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Friends for life

This week's Sepia Saturday image shows a married couple talking over a cup of tea.  

I don't have anything similar really, but I do quite like this snap of my mother Jean and her good friend Colleen sitting together in front of the fireplace. Jean is knitting and Colleen is also doing some sort of handwork, perhaps sewing. They were both aged about 20. The photo is rather out of focus, possibly because whoever took it didn't have flash on their camera, but that doesn't detract from the relaxed and companiable atmosphere that is shown to exist between these two ladies, and nor did it deter Jean from including it in her album.

Colleen and Jean met as college students in Auckland New Zealand in the 1940s and remained friends for the rest of their lives, despite Jean subsequently moving to Australia. They both married and had three children. Coincidentally both ladies died in 2014 within a few months of one another, aged 87. 

To finish, here is a happy photograph of three ladies around Jean's dining table 60 years later in 2006, celebrating her 80th birthday. Colleen is on the left and the lady in the middle is Betty, a friend of Jean ever since school days. Cups of tea and cake all round!

RIP Colleen and Jean.

 Their friend Betty is still going strong.