WHO WILL KNOW ME TOMORROW ?

A story by Sandy Campbell.

Recently to my surprise I was invited to talk about my life at a local Probus meeting. I'm a very ordinary person who has lived through extraordinary times. However, I felt that before I talked about me, I needed to go back to the origins of my family. Although I'm as dinky die an Australian as you can get, there are at least four European nations that have contributed to my gene pool - Danish, English, German and Irish and I rely on the fragments of family stories to fill in the picture.

Names such as Hancock, Taylor, Shalders and Campbell are all prominent in our family tree, but who are the people behind the names. Scraps of information have told me that I come from a line of violin makers, fruit growers and farmers, but I know nothing of the people themselves or their hopes and fears as they made the momentous decision to leave their homeland to travel across the world to a strange often inhospitable country. Some escaped religious persecution in Germany , others, I presume came here to build a better life, but I know not of what they were leaving behind. Did they leave behind families and friends knowing they would probably never see them again? What was it about their lives that made them believe they could find better across the seas?

Towns that have been mentioned in our family history read like a road map of Victoria , but I have no idea of why they moved to a particular area or if they were successful or otherwise. What hardships did they face, what skills did they bring with them, what did they do for entertainment, were they happy in their new country, did they pine for the homes they'd left behind?

Nowhere is there a written history of my family - all that has been left is a brooch, an old watch, a few pieces of crockery, a few old photos and fragments of stories, but no real insight into who my family members really were. Luckily, I still have my parents who help me to collect snippets of stories to record for my future generations, but I wish it were more.

The migration to this area during the gold rush is regarded as one of the greatest migrations of humanity in modern history and I've been told that 61% of all Victorians can trace family roots to the Goldfields - one can only wonder how these families coped emotionally, spiritually and physically.

They, like those of my generation lived through extraordinary times. For us we have seen the assassination of JFK, the Vietnam war, man walking on the moon, the women's movement of the 70s, the end of communism and the fall of the USSR, the millennium, September 11 and the Bali bombings to name only a few. But what will my grandson know of the impact these events had on my life, or how they shaped me as a person unless I record my thoughts and feelings. Will he be able to tell his children and his children's children about their lineage or will they, like us have to romanticise about the pioneering stock who were our forebears.

That's why I am recording my life. While I may just be here for a mere drop in the great expanse of time, I want to leave a record that will reveal something of me as a person and not just be a name and date on a family tree or remembered only by a brooch.