If you have old slides, I urge you to sort through them pronto

Happy days: Nikki Gemmell's christening in Wollongong

We’ve just gone down the rabbit-hole of family history with old shoeboxes of 35mm slides that have been tucked away in a cupboard’s darkness for far too long. All the absorbing wonder of half-forgotten childhoods are staring back at my brother and me, mysteries of holidays not remembered and delectable babies I assume are me but oh, are not. That would be my brother. I am the astoundingly ugly one. It’s a tough pill to swallow.

Nikki's first day of school at Keiraville Public

The boy Jago’s been coaxed into bringing hundreds of these old slides to life with the lure that always works – a new Lego set; he’s been happily digitising on the dining table for weeks with just a laptop, A4 paper and phone. It’s worked a treat (for Jago’s surefire strategy for sick slide conversion, see below). Do you have any crammed into vinyl suitcases, perhaps, or in shoeboxes under a bed? If so, I urge you to sort through them pronto, with people who remember the vintage, before it’s too late. It was for us, because both parents are dead and many places and people remain a slide-trapped mystery.

The distinctive church

Twitter showed its best side with one photo – the two of us young tykes in Sunday best outside a distinctive country church. But where? The building must have had some family significance for us to be dressed like that. Our orbit was small in our childhood, so the radius for the locality was relatively tight. The good detectives of Twitter solved the mystery within minutes – wonders! It was at Menangle, a village north of Wollongong that hosted the extraordinary Rotolactor, a circular contraption that milked cows 50 at a time. Of course my mother would have dressed us in Sunday best to witness it, because, well, standards. And maybe that church was a stop-off for the scintillating main attraction of cow-milking.

The slides unearthed a different kind of childhood. Same holiday every year, never too far. Play at the mighty two-trunked tree that looked like a giant striding up a hill. A backyard table appears again and again in birthday parties, its checked tablecloth the only constant through my mother’s frequent wig changes. An outlier birthday party at the newly opened McDonald’s Fairy Meadow, complete with overhead food conveyor belt – flash. Our world was unvaried and spare compared with the crammed childhoods of now, yet the days seemed full.

Nikki as a young girl

Ah, the solace of happy, uncomplicated times. But then the darkening over the years, with a family’s fracturing conveyed through my mother’s changing face; eyes wide hurt. The stress and strain, the sudden inability to smile, the stony fury aimed at the person wielding the camera who was attempting to create the record of the perfect family while hiding the seams of discord – my father, of course. There’s another story entirely going on behind all these carefully posed snaps. All the lost worlds and lost people, all the depth-charges of poignancy punctuated by Jago’s shrieks at his mum’s bulbous baby pics and an array of vintage toys on a ’70s Christmas morning – Hot Wheels existed, even back then!

Nikki and her brother at Menangle

How to digitise your own slides? Jago’s more than happy to share his setup. First, photograph a blank sheet of A4 paper, send it to your laptop and expand the white across the screen. This is your lightbox. Place a Blu Tack blob on a school rubber. Position this at the screen’s bottom. This is the stand for the slide. Take a photo of the slide on your phone using the “Portrait” setting. Crop and voilà, you’ve got a pretty good image – most of ours were as clear as a bell. Send the shots to interested family members and I guarantee much shock and laughter, tears and chuff will follow. And if anyone can remember the specifics of the slide, well then, gold.