The Theory of Objects: readers’ amazing tales of family treasures
A bent army badge, a worn pair of gloves … When the call went out to readers for stories about their treasured family possessions, they didn’t disappoint.
He calls it the Whatnot. He capitalises the “W” in his letter whenever he mentions the Whatnot and I know immediately the Whatnot is not what it seems. “In my study sits ‘the Whatnot’,” writes Rob Benson, a 68-year-old retired GP from Moonee Ponds, Melbourne. “A massive — and massively heavy — object. Three long shelves on which ‘things’ can be displayed. No one else in the family wanted it. It came to me, and for years I’ve teetered on the brink of selling it. But something stopped me.”
This curious object-saved-from-the-brink-of-destruction notion is a thread running through many letters The Weekend Australian Magazine received after we put out a call on our summer podcast and print crossover series, The Theory of Objects, for submissions from readers and listeners about the precious and unheralded objects in their lives. We set up an email for these submissions — objects@theaustralian.com.au — and the floodgates opened. Objects and stories from all corners of the country: war stories, family stories, love stories, sad stories, inspiring stories, all penned by our dear readers and listeners, a loyal and deeply appreciated audience that is, quite plainly, the most informed and highly evolved collective of inquiring minds in the country.
“Finally, I am permitted to say, loudly and proudly, I love old things,” Rob writes in the spirit of the podcast’s mission statement, a celebration of those beloved objects that everybody keeps telling us to throw away. “I can live guilt-free with clutter. I no longer have to throw out old treasures. Like the collection of walking sticks [topped] with my grandfather’s grandfather’s briar. Or the volume of letters written by him in the 1850s. These objects have a history to be wondered at. He held that briar, and the pen that wrote those letters.”
This is why Rob Benson turned a piece of unwanted furniture into the Whatnot. The Whatnot is a treasured object built for the treasuring of objects. The Whatnot holds a collection of containers that themselves hold precious objects he keeps for his four grandchildren, all under the age of four. “Recently, my containers seem to have taken on a life of their own,” he writes. “They have become useful. It almost seems miraculous. In fact, each container holds a miracle. A ‘little miracle’.” Some 20 little objects that, were they not housed in containers and placed reverentially in the Whatnot, his beloved grandchildren might label with the vilest word ever spoken: “boring”.
“I have cotton and copper and cork,” Rob writes of the deceptively simple contents of his containers. “I have seeds and silk, salt and shells and a stone flute, so I can talk to my grandchildren about sound and music. I have feathers and rubber and glass. I will talk about art and eels, insects and inventions; wood, water and writing. One container is empty. But not completely. It contains ‘air’. I want to tell the children about everything.
“All the containers can happily stay there, waiting for the searching hands of one or other grandchild. The containers can gather and grow there. No longer ‘junk’. Each container holding its secret and each secret telling its story, and often linking to other containers and their stories. This is the plan. Only one container at a time can be opened. Only one a day. When the contents lie in a hand, I will tell the child that holds it all about whatever they’re holding. In preparation I’ve been scouring the net. Searching for the history and science of each ‘miracle’. Giving each miracle weight and substance. And meaning.” Object plus story equals meaning. This is the idea behind our lofty Theory of Objects series.
“As I’ve done this, I’ve come to realise just how diverse and extraordinary this world of ours is,” Rob continues. “That’s what I want to share with the little ones. I want to open their eyes to the wonder of life.”
Wonder: that is another notion threaded througheach letter we received. “Dear Sir or Madam,” writes Robert Spiers of Brisbane. “Please see enclosed a photograph. Following is an excerpt of a letter from Cpl W J Spiers to his mother, published in The Northern Herald, 25/2/1916, in a section of the paper called ‘The Soldiers’ Postbag’.”
Mum, I am sending you a parcel (memento of Gallipoli) by this same post. You will get a surprise when you see it. It is a rising sun badge (which I was wearing on the right collar of my coat) with a shrapnel pellet embedded in it. That happened to me on the day of the landing — 25th April. I never mentioned it to you before because I thought you would get worried. I intended keeping it or giving it to someone I knew going back to Australia, but they all advised me to register it and send it home.
It happened just like this. While our company (about 240 men) were being towed ashore in a barge a shrapnel shell burst above and in front of our barge. One of the pellets got me on the badge and stuck there, just as it is now, while another pellet killed a chap hitting him on the head. We were the only two hit, although the Turks shelled us constantly. The badge no doubt saved my life because when I showed it to Dr Kay (he was our medical officer in New Guinea) he examined my neck and he said that the pellet would have passed through the jugular vein.
The object in the photograph Robert Spiers from Brisbane enclosed with his letter is so extraordinary — a Gallipoli pellet hugged by the life-saving protective shell of Corporal William Spiers’ rising sun badge — that I phone him immediately and gently ask if he is staging some elaborate hoax. “I get that a lot,” he laughs. “It’s an amazing thing.”
Robert says Corporal Spiers — “Uncle Bill” — wanted the miracle badge to go to his sister, Agnes. “They hailed from Irvinebank, North Queensland, west of Cairns in the Atherton Tablelands,” he says. “The badge was given to Agnes, who cherished it and kept it in her jewellery box at home.”
After the war, William Spiers returned to a hero’s welcome in Irvinebank. “When Aggie’s home was burgled a short time after the war, she was devastated to find her jewellery box was taken, with the badge inside. She shared her grief with all she met for a few days, and then began to live with it. A month later, one of her neighbours, who had been to far-off Brisbane on a trip, came to visit her. Over a cup of tea, the neighbour told Aggie that one day, walking down one of the busy streets of the city, she stopped and was idly looking in a pawnbroker’s window ‘and saw something I thought you might like’. She held out the rising sun badge, its edges wrapped around the lead ball.
“It has been in our family ever since, and is our most prized possession,” Robert says. “I keep it in a safe at home. I want to put it on the wall but I worry about it getting robbed.”
Rosemary Stride writes about a curious and tender toast she made to her dinner table last Christmas. She was toasting the table, but she was really toasting her mother-in-law, Molly.
“When I first met my husband’s family, in England, over 30 years ago, I was struck by their apparent isolation from one another,” she writes. “Polite niceties revealed little warmth or understanding of one another’s joys or sorrows. Like satellites orbiting earth they were bound to the family, but somehow separate, remote. The exception was Molly. Her brown eyes betrayed a depth, a longing, and an occasional spark of mischief which suggested that her life had demanded significant self-sacrifice. This hidden self emerged, however, whenever she invited us all to lunch. An excellent cook, she served simple but perfect meals — most memorably, salmon with cucumber salad — on the most elegant oval mahogany table I had ever seen. During those meals she shone.”
Rosemary looks upon that table as magical, transformative. Molly could do great things around that table, cast an English lunchtime spell that formed isolated individuals into family.
Molly died a year ago. The table was passed down to her loving daughter-in-law, Rosemary. It was shipped from England to Queensland, her adopted home. But the table was in disrepair. It had lost its strange magic. “Heavily bandaged in paper and packing tape … further examination revealed orphaned morsels of mahogany — fragments of a family fractured by distance.”
Rosemary wept. She had hoped the table would reconnect her to England, to Molly. “Instead, I was reminded of my own sense of dislocation in a country I have come to love, but in which I rarely feel entirely complete,” she writes. “But this Christmas, thanks to the sensitive labour of a gifted cabinet-maker, and my own energetic polishing, Molly’s son, daughter, daughter-in-law, and three of her grandchildren sat around her table — reunited in a different hemisphere, however transiently. A toast to Molly’s table seemed the only possible form of grace.”
Maggi Koerbin of Kingston, Tasmania, has adeliciously mysterious heading in the subject line of her email: “The Gloves in the Cupboard.”
“There was no malice in Jack,” she writes. “Bush born, free-spirited. A real Aussie larrikin with no love for those in authority. His father would shake his head with wonder and worry about what life would give his son. But he could honestly tell his son how proud he was the day he heard Jack had enlisted in the RAF. There was a war on.” Jack was an aircraft gunner stationed in PNG.
“His return home was difficult,” Maggi writes. “Like many others he found it was hard to settle, to find purpose, to work out his place in the overall scheme of things. One thing he did know: riding his motorbike lifted his spirit, strengthened his resolve.
“Why he was trying to evade the police that night he would never say. It is doubtful that it was something heinous; more likely it was too mundane to be part of the story. But pursued he was, flying down the road, wondering if he could hide among the houses. Suddenly the community hall caught his eye. The weekly dance was in progress. Jack sped into the forecourt, dropped his bike and rushed into the hall shedding goggles and gloves as he ran. Gear stowed, he grabbed the first girl he came to who wasn’t dancing and whirled her onto the dance floor.
“The police had no way of knowing which of the crowd was the owner of the still hot bike outside and gave up. Jack thought the brown eyes in front of him were thoroughly enjoying the joke. She thought he was the best-looking bloke she had ever met. Jack sold his bike and with the proceeds bought an engagement ring. They were married the following year.”
Years later, after Jack’s death, his son was clearing out his shed and came across the gloves from that fateful night. “Now the gloves are at my place, for Jack’s eldest son is my husband,” Maggi writes.
Kaye Britton pens a short masterpiece of object recollection titled simply: “A Paper Serviette”. “When I was in my late teens, Grandma pressed a tight wad of paper into my hand and said I might like to keep it,” she writes. “It was a paper serviette, folded into a kite shape and ragged around the edges.” There was an image of a wisteria vine wrapping around the edge of the serviette.
“I tucked it away in a box and forgot about it for a long time. In my early 40s, a few years after Grandma had died, I came across it again. I then realised what a treasure she had given me. Grandpa was severely wounded in battle on the Western Front and sent to hospital in England. He and Grandma were engaged at the time. He spent Christmas 1916 in hospital and from there sent this used Christmas Dinner serviette to her. Upon his return to Australia, they were married. Mum was their fourth child.”
Printed on the serviette is the menu on offer that Christmas Day, 1916, to our recovering diggers in “No. 1 Australian Auxiliary Hospital, Harefield Park”. “Poultry: Roast Turkey/Goose. Meats: Roast Beef/Ham. Vegetables: Potatoes/Peas/Cabbage. Sweets: Plum Pudding & Brandy Sauce/Jelly/Custard/Mince Pies.” Kaye had the serviette cleaned and framed. It hangs on her wall at home now and everybody who passes it loves the fact that you can still see the stains from Grandpa’s 1916 Christmas plum pudding and brandy sauce.
Sandra Hamilton from Woronora, Sydney, tellsus how heartsick she felt on a visit to an old wares store called Yesterday’s News in Brooklyn, New York. She saw several industrial washing tubs filled with discarded black and white family photos, hundreds of personal family moments, unwanted and unloved. “I thought, who would throw out these family photos, which to me looked so precious?” It was then, she says, that she became “a rescuer”. She trawls vintage stores across Australia and the world collecting discarded family photos, adding them to a sprawling artwork — one glorious and meaningful object — dedicated to “the lost people in the pictures”.
“This is my mission now,” Sandra writes. “To bring these treasures to life again.”
Perth reader Joanne Scotney still has the receipt for her favourite object, bought at the “Blacksoil Antique Centre, Stock Market Village, Warrego Highway, Blacksoil [west of Brisbane], #Docket 769, 20/8/1992”. It’s a wooden box with ornate metal work and the initials of its presumed first owner — the mysterious “RDD” — above a date that stopped Joanne in her tracks in 1992: “1765”.
“I saw it being offloaded from a truck of arrival goods at the Blacksoil Antique Centre,” Joanne says. “I checked with the Australian Museum as I thought it may have been made for someone of importance coming out on one of the first boats to settle Australia but their records only go back to 1770. They suggested it may be a dowry box and possibly from Denmark. I paid $1195 for it and before I had finished paying it off on layby a Sydney dealer rang me to offer me $2500 for it.”
She spent years researching the initials “RDD” in old books and historical registers. “Nothing but dead ends,” she says. If she ever does find out who “RDD” is, Joanne figures she will donate the box to the National Museum of Australia, but until then it will remain the most potentially significant wooden box ever to hold a pile of spare winter blankets.
Each letter sent to us is another little mysterywaiting to be unravelled. The letters are written by born storytellers. How’s this for a title: “The Lighthouse Keeper’s Cap”. And the opening line: “By all accounts Allen Levings was a cautious man.” I was hooked. Reader Fiona Levings from Margate, Tasmania, follows with a story peppered with a few of my favourite storytelling things: lighthouses, the sea, love, belonging, time; ordinary Australians leading extraordinary lives, never asking for thanks and never needing it.
“If you work and raise your family on the edge of the world, it pays not to make mistakes,” Fiona writes in reference to the photo she had emailed of an old white maritime cap. “Those who work with the sea learn to respect her; to lay in extra and expect delays. Hang onto things that might be useful. Make shrift, contrive. And to paint. Lots of paint.
“This is the cap of a light keeper in the service of the Commonwealth Lighthouse Service, the grandfather of today’s Australian Maritime Safety Authority. This is Allen Levings’ cap. Light keeper at Tasman Island in ’67. Head keeper at Maatsuyker, Bruny, Eddystone, Wilsons Promontory and King Island through to ’89. Fixer of Land Rovers. Patient fettler of finicky lamps, signwriter, artist, boatbuilder, father, husband and, for 23 years, a servant of the people living and working on the remote lights by the sea.
“His cap and its badges are a symbol of his authority, a record of his service and a reminder of the esteem that was once afforded to his role. One of several, it served him well over many years, even into retirement where it lived on the rear window shelf of the [Holden] Commodore, its resemblance to a more constabulary garment discouraging tailgaters.
“Twenty-three years of faithful, faultless service with an ignominious end. Injured, he was forced into retirement as the lights he loved were de-manned and replaced. With loss of purpose came depression. He withdrew. Refusing to live within view of the sea, yet he remained within earshot. Time and tide heals, he fished and painted and pottered. And just when things seemed to be within reach, when grief eased, when contentment or even happiness seemed to beckon, he died.
“How do you explain the grief that goes with his loss? It’s not just a man who has gone, a husband, father, uncle. It is a way of life that has disappeared, made redundant by the wonders of the modern world. Isolated, harsh and beautiful, the sea lights, the grand ladies of the sea, eyes of the coast, are diminished. No longer do the keepers polish the brass by day and wind the clockwork by night. No longer do the kerosene mantles explode into flame, filling the lantern room with smoke while complaints from shipping pour into the Department in Canberra — The light is out! No longer do small boys lie on their backs inside slowly revolving prisms, marvelling at the play of rainbows as the powerful beam glints and reflects off the great glass lenses. It’s all plastic now, lights-on-a-stick, small, automatic, solar-powered. Shipping relies more on GPS locations, computer controlled. All very reliable, all very safe and all just so achingly dull. How ironic that a lifestyle defined by a dedication to the safety of seafarers should be ended by things becoming safer.
“The hat sits on a shelf now, one treasure among many, in his wife’s room. She is in the grip of a dementia. Her life is its own story of tragedy and great romance. She still remembers those big hands though, the ones that asked for her trust, and who kept it, keeping her and the kids safe for all those wonderful, wonderful years.”
These many emailed letters moved me. I thoughtthey deserved to be printed out, sucked out of the great intangible void of the digital world and launched into this glorious physical realm as thin paper objects that deserved to be kept some place more real than a computer inbox. I’ve decided to keep that email address alive: objects@theaustralian.com.au. Maybe readers can keep sending through stories about their favourite objects and maybe I can keep writing about them.
And I have stored these beautiful stories in one of my own favourite objects, a rectangular wood box I made in Year 9 Manual Arts class. I was given a “D+” for it — Mr Rose said something about not stuffing the cracks of my dovetail joints with chewed paper — and it never really had any practical use before. It was always just called “That Dodgy Box I Made in High School”. Now it means something important to me. It’s the box that holds the stories. So now I call it “the Whatnot”.
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