My Earliest Memories

My earliest memory, is, I was told by my mother, when I was 8 months old. I remember standing next to a chair and looking at another chair, some few feet away, and wondering if I could walk to it. I remember the sense of not being sure of what I was contemplating doing - in other words I was unsure of being able to walk. I remember my mother, dressed in a floral dress, standing in the doorway to a room beyond her - the kitchen. The doorway was at the left side of the room from where I was standing, and the chair that was my target was a large "grandfather" chair - wooden, carved, with a high back and armrests. The sun was coming in the window behind me.

My mother was able to place the memory for me - I was 8 months old. I walked by myself at just on nine months of age, as is the norm in my family.

The room I described was the living room of the place we lived in from just before my birth until around my 2nd birthday. It was a partitioned Quonset hut, that is, a converted army hut used to take up the overflow of increased population after World War II. At that time, accommodation was scarce in Sydney and the state government was forced to put people into converted army accommodation until homes could be built to take them. When I was just 2 years old, we moved to a semi-detached two up - two down brick place in Bexley North, in a housing commission estate of similar houses.

My memory has a large gap after the first memory of that room and trying to walk. I next remember standing in the foyer of the Bexley North home with my sister crawling near my feet, and my mother greeting my father as he came home from work. I had apparently stepped on my sister's finger as she was crawling and had broken it, she was explaining to my father. I did not feel any guilt at this, so I must not have been chastised for it; and I cannot remember if my sister was in any pain at all. All I remember of the incident is my mother telling my father about it. I must have been about 2 years old at the time, as I was 14 months older than my sister. Unlike my brothers and I, my sister did not walk until she was 12 months old.

The two photos show my sister and me with my father in the back yard of the Bexley North home. Behind us is the toilet. In those days there was no sewerage, and the toilet waste was collected by the "sani-man" twice a week. The sewerage and consequently the toilet was put on within two years of us arriving in Bexley North. The toilet was then situated in the bathroom on the first floor, near the bedrooms.