The Tumbrel Diaries

The day before my mother’s funeral in early December 2009, I bought a new pair of socks. I am not quite sure why I did this, except tha...

At last I am able to dilate upon my remote ancestry, thanks to the National Geographic Society’s Geno 2.0 project, which I described ea...

One of the reasons I fell in love with my house in the first place was the Norway spruce. It must be at least as old as the house...

Mum again: It was a really tricky business for my mother to feed us at Metung. Meat was ordered from the butcher in Bairnsdal...

Today I made a sudden discovery, that stopped me in my tracks and took my breath away. Nothing especially major, but it was as if...

Mum again, at around the age of eight or nine: We always went for a walk with the governess in the afternoon, usually along th...

I have been re-reading Mum’s reminiscences, written about twenty years ago in her neat, self-disciplined longhand. Mostly they c...

Anniversaries are peculiar, because aside from a mere accident of the calendar there is no particular reason why Mum should seem any more ab...

In London over the weekend I picked up a copy of Excellent Women by Barbara Pym (1952), and devoured it. Notwithstanding Alexander McCal...

Dad kept everything. Tucked inside the back cover of the earliest of his many scrapbooks is the receipt for Mum’s engagement ring. He bought...

On Ash Wednesday, February 16, 1983, fanned by hot winds of up to nearly 70 miles per hour, about 180 wildfires burned over more than a mill...

I’ve been looking through the albums. How very lucky we are to have them. Whenever they traveled to the United States of America, which wa...

After she died nearly sixteen months ago, Mum left behind very few loose ends. Helen made a lifetime’s habit of throwing things away, and a...

For as long as I can remember Mum used this kidney-shaped Georgian brass snuff-box to store pins inside her sewing basket. I am not quite su...

In the midst of preparing to move house, I unfolded Mum’s card table—for the first time since it arrived here last February. It is a pretty...