The Salt family arrived in Adelaide in 1848. Then tragedy struck.
In the past, ordinary people often endured extraordinary pain and hardship – something that’s usually forgotten within a generation or two. But I’ve made it my mission to keep these stories alive.
It’s an issue that has always been important to me, even from a young age: the idea of collecting and storing family photos in albums – and of understanding who was who, and where and when a photo was taken. I love the idea that a parent, a grandparent or a distant aunt captured a moment in black and white years ago, and somehow fate has delivered that moment to you.
I’ve been collecting family photos since I was in my twenties visiting distant relatives – often siblings of my deceased grandparents – to collect stories. Occasionally they would give me a photo: these gifts included one of my grandfather cutting timber with a mate in the Otway Ranges in 1919, when he was 30. Were it not for this incessant curiosity, that picture probably would have been lost to my family.
I have photos of great-great grandparents who were born in England, Ireland or Scotland in the 1820s – taken, I think, in the 1870s. They were not well-to-do people; they were station hands and prospectors who barely eked out a living. If I did not capture their stories, who would have? The Salt family arrived in Adelaide in 1848; within four years, three of the children – all boys – had died of scarlet fever or diphtheria. They’re buried, I suspect, in a single unmarked grave in Adelaide’s West Terrace Cemetery. Ordinary people in those days often endured extraordinary pain and hardship – something that’s usually forgotten within a generation or two.
I have a grainy black-and-white photo of my grandfather’s mother, then aged 75, taken in 1929 in Wallan, north of Melbourne. Her grandfather was a convict who’d arrived in Van Diemen’s Land (as Tasmania was then known) in 1832, the first of my (modern) DNA to arrive on the Australian continent. Do you see the significance, the romanticism, the cultural importance of stories like this? Or is it just me?
Over the years I have realised that families who were continually moving from place to place carried few possessions, including albums. It takes just one so inclined person within a family to collect and hopefully to disseminate rare and precious images to the wider family.
I have solved the problem of storage and dissemination of my collection of 400 or so family photos. A niece and I have created a private group on a social media platform where they can be uploaded and annotated. Nieces, nephews, cousins and siblings can see and share photos and stories of grandparents and other family members. My 86-year-old aunty and godmother is among the group’s most ardent commenters and likers.
There is a tendency for families to drift apart over time, as grandparents pass on and family members move to different locales. And while I will always love turning the pages of an old-style family photo album, the digital age has delivered the ability to hold families closer. All that’s required is a common interest, such as an old photo, and the ability for members to comment as they wish. Plus, it provides a platform for sharing photos that would otherwise be limited to a single line of the family. Uploading family photos with annotations to a private group is one way of sharing a common heritage. It also has the effect of helping families recover, to find solace in the familial tribe, when loved ones pass on.
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