I really enjoyed the family treasures people found on the Trove website after the last newsletter. Thank you for sharing your finds. Like this description of a great-grandmother’s 1928 wedding dress:
The bride, who was given away by her father, wore a beautiful frock of ivory georgette and chantilly lace, draped and falling into an uneven hemline. Her veil of embroidered net was confined over each ear by bunches of orange blossom and she carried an exquisite bouquet of white camellias and azaleas.
Shepparton Advertiser, Friday 26 October 1928
The article doesn’t have a picture, but the bridal party probably looked a lot like this one, which I also found on Trove:
Love the dresses and the shoes. Not sure about the headgear. This shot is more of a mysterious appearance, because the women in it are unknown.
If you missed the Trove link last time, and want to find traces of your family’s past out there, click here for the instructions in the June Scroll.
The Coffee Palace
Now for something to warm up wintry days — a coffee story. My home city of Melbourne prides itself on good coffee. We’ve been brewing it a long time. In the boom year of 1888, the setting for the novel I’m writing, a new Federal Coffee Palace was built here for the phenomenal sum of £150,000.
At the time, Melbourne claimed to be the second richest city in the world, after London. Wealthy supporters of the temperance (anti-alcohol) movement wanted to offer an alternative to pubs. Hence Melbourne had esveral Coffee Palaces. The Federal Palace was rather more than the average corner cafe. Here it is, in all its Victorian glory, at 555 Collins Street:
The Argus newspaper called it ‘a very imposing pile of building… in the French Renaissance style.’ It had a grand vestibule, a lift, a telephone room and a billiard room, as well as a cafe and a dining hall for 350 people. Wonderful place to set a novel scene, or several.
Unfortunately, in the years following the bust, the bottom end of Collins Street became rundown. The building was demolished in 1973. How did developers get permission to obliterate such an extravagant piece of architecture? I wish they hadn’t. But at least we still have plenty of coffee here ;)
The Case of the Disappearing Website
This week I went to check my website… like the Coffee Palace, it has disappeared. All my content — poof! Vanished like a genie. All that’s left is a generic ‘Hi’ page. Even the smoke of any malicious attack has cleared. The webhost support desk has no clue. A single screenshot on the Wayback machine is the only proof it was ever there.
Bother, as Pooh Bear would say. More than annoying, it’s unsettling. You might remember that in January my laptop was stolen. That turned out well in the end — new laptop and leftover insurance money! But the combined effect of these events, (plus, perhaps, the major changes we’ve seen in our world the last couple of years) have left me feeling that my life has become slippery. Things can disappear into thin air. The world changes, and I can’t hold onto every piece of it. Loss, even of small things, is like a plummeting drop, where previously there was solid ground. This could be depressing. Personally, I’m deeply glad I believe in a permanent eternity, beyond this physical world.
I will rebuild the website, nevertheless, and manage it more carefully in future! I’ll aim to have a new site up by next newsletter — probably a better one. In the meanwhile, I’m sharing my thoughts, because they may touch a chord with you. All of us suffer loss, great or small. I think the perspective it gives us is too valuable to pass over.
From my reading pile
As it happens, I’ve just reread Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh. It’s an incredibly haunting book, about the end of the pre-war era and the transience of life. The beautiful passage below describes the day the narrator comes back, decades later, to the empty Brideshead manor:
These memories, which are my life — for we possess nothing certainly except the past — were always with me. Like the pigeons of St Mark’s, they were everywhere, under my feet, singly, in pairs, in little honey-voiced congregations, nodding, strutting, winking, rolling the tender feathers of their necks, perching sometimes, if I stood still, on my shoulder; until, suddenly, the noon gun boomed and in a moment, with a flutter and sweep of wings, the pavement was bare and the whole sky above dark with a tumult of fowl. Thus it was that morning of war-time.
On a closing note, the theme music from the BBC TV series from 1981 captures the feel of the book so well — elegaic, wistful, nostalgic, stately, gracious. You can enjoy it here:
Warmest winter wishes,
Alison L