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3 - The Social Community: Networks of Memory and Attachment to Place

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2018

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Summary

Eighty- five- year- old Melva McInnes lives at Three Trees, which was built by her great- grandparents Mary and Josiah and is just off the main road between Burra and Mt Bryan, a few kilometres south of Mackerode. Melva told me that during secondary school, she used to stay in Burra with her grandmother, who was called Mavis. Mavis was ‘Mary and Josiah's daughter’; she was ‘the one who used to ride out everywhere’.1 Mavis married Alexander John Reid and lived in Burra. Frances Mary Maude was the daughter ‘of the one who stayed at Three Trees, she used to ride out everywhere too. She married Cornelius Wesley Gare. They had Glen View, then [Melva's] father took it over and they moved into Burra’. Melva also had an aunt called Mavis who was Frances's sister. ‘They had Wandilla, east of Burra.’ Josiah and Mary also had a son, Henry, for whom they built The Pines, which neighbours Three Trees.

I struggled to keep up with the connections between people, places and eras which Melva spoke of with such ease and familiarity. While I found Melva's ready and confidently stated explanations confusing, to her this information was clear and obvious. Melva has lived her whole life in the district in which her forebears arrived in the mid- 1800s. As she travels around the district, places remind her of her family's long connections in the area; people remind Melva of places, and places remind Melva of people. These may be people currently living or people who died many decades ago.

Melva said, ‘My grandparents used to talk to me a lot about things, and also their housekeeper […] she stayed with them all her life. She knew about everything in the family […] she would be telling me stories about everyone’. Melva's grandparents’ housekeeper was called Essie, who, Melva told me, was the illegitimate daughter of a well- known pastoralist who lived in the district. Melva considered Essie a member of the family.

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Memory, Place and Aboriginal-Settler History
Understanding Australians’ Consciousness of the Colonial Past
, pp. 93 - 110
Publisher: Anthem Press
Print publication year: 2017

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