I had the pleasure of touring the Western Sydney Records Centre recently which I can only describe as the closest thing to Dr Who’s Tardis: unassuming on the outside, larger on the inside. The archive belongs to the NSW (state) government and holds its most significant records in 50,000 square metres of space with 500 kilometres of shelving. [If you’re so inclined you can take a virtual tour here]

The tour guide stopped me in my tracks with her statement that:

Digitisation replaces one problem with another. We are not in a rush to digitise. Paper is a stable technology.

As family historians we are encouraged to digitise the heck out of our significant records, photos, documents, certificates, trees etc… but as I discovered during the archives tour, with the changing nature of preservation (even in the six decades of my life) mass digitisation means constant upgrading, re-digitation, space, energy, cost… and you can begin to understand the scale of the problem.

In 2013 an ambitious exhibition filled a football-field-sized space in Sydney’s former train workshops at Carriageworks. Artist Song Dong’s Waste Not comprised more than 10,000 household objects—each one saved over decades by the artist’s mother—creating a portrait of a life shaped by scarcity, upheaval and nurturing.

Share Jane Hutcheon's Show & Tell

The project began as a way for Song to help his mother navigate the profound grief she experienced after the unexpected death of her husband in 2002. The project developed into a memorial, following her death in 2009.

Song’s mother became a meticulous keeper of objects after surviving the famine that followed Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” and the turbulence of the Cultural Revolution. Her saved items—broken lamps, obsolete televisions, record players, blankets, crockery, shoes, plastic bottles, neatly folded plastic bags, string and more, embodied the revolutionary ideal 物尽其用 wu jin qi yong (“make full use of things” or “waste not”). Presented with deliberate order and care, her ‘stuff’ evoked a broader culture of frugality, resilience and resourcefulness. The exhibition stood as a tribute to one family and as a reminder of an urban way of life rapidly disappearing amid China’s sweeping modernisation.

Waste Not also illuminated the quiet histories contained in belongings usually discarded: photographs and letters, tangled knitting, piles of old newspapers, broken household items and the ordinary tools of domestic life.

I was reminded of our household ‘collections’ at another event I took part in recently - a history network intending to save the stories, records and memorabilia of female cricket players from the past. One of the participants spoke of her club’s collection of memorabilia as “creating a rod for her back“ as there was no management plan for the collection. It just began… and the collection now fills personal space in her home and those of close associates.

I’ve been thinking deeply about collections and memorabilia as I’ve started work on a book about significant objects held by a local history society where I’m a member. The Randwick & District Historical Society - which began in 1957 - has more than 40,000 items in its collection. It’s all catalogued to museum standards. And there are real treasures in here.

One of the many which has caught my eye is convict restraints… a ball and chain. How sinister! And also a reminder that the end of convict transportation was not that long ago. Oh, how I wish I knew exactly where that ball and chain came from.

The vast majority of the Randwick collection tells stories of long-gone colonial men; predominantly aldermen (local councillors) and sportsmen. We are searching for stories of people who were hidden from history; women, people of different nationalities, children, scientists. Fortunately, there are many objects relating to First Nations Australians of this area.

What do we do when we don’t find people represented in the RDHS collection? This is our challenge. I think we need to ‘adopt’ objects. All our ideas are currently under construction.

But circling back to my opening question of what to do with all our personal memorabilia and records…

I came to the conclusion months ago that I would not digitise everything significant in my own family history collection. As the tour guide told us during the archive tour I did earlier this week, the repository only digitises items requested for research use. This makes sense. The archive will also repair, re-humidify and conserve fragile items. This makes sense too.

I think it’s important to consider whether our family collections of ‘stuff’ are a gift or a burden to future generations. If the items have value (dollar or emotional) do something with them. Turn them into a project, an artwork, a display. Don’t let your home become a dump for lost objects with no provenance, no stories.

That’s what a garage sale is for.

Leave a comment

Credits:

https://anartteacherinchina.blogspot.com/2013/01/waste-not-want-not-song-dong-and-art-of.html

In Shanghai and Hong Kong where she grew up, she stashed her precious things in a biscuit tin.

By the time she began earning money as a journalist, and later married my dad, the world had opened up to her. The biscuit tin was replaced (though never abandoned). By the 1960s and 70s, she and my Dad were veterans of the antique shops of Hollywood Road, returning from auctions with mysterious treasures wrapped in old newspaper. They soon filled two display cabinets. And covered the walls, bookcases, window ledges of our apartment.

My parents called them curios; curiosities, intriguing objects.

From auctions, travels, and gifts passed down by beloved aunties, Mum gathered treasures — snuff bottles, miniature clay teapots, lacquer boxes, and carved chops.

I remember her coming home with a carved ivory figure - the length of her index finger - of a naked, reclining, woman. She called it a Netsuke and explained that in ancient China, women these around to discreetly point out to the doctor which body part was giving them grief.

I’m not sure that the figurine actually was a Netsuke, which is a Japanese kimono toggle. And the story about showing the doctor proxy private parts may not be totally accurate either. But none of that matters. I derived joy from from watching my mother’s hazel eyes widen and then crease when she told that story.

Share

I don’t know why, but I often think about that figurine. Recently I looked it up online. Mum’s Netsuke could have been an ancient Chinese mass-produced replica. But that hardly matters. It was her story that gave it its charm, and my memory of it.

After she died in 2022, I found a small seal or chop in the shape of a guardian lion — though Mum probably thought it looked like a dog. Perhaps she was right in spirit; she was born in the Year of the Dog, after all.

My friend tells me the chop reads: “the treasure of Qianlong”. Qianlong (1736–1795) was a supremely cultured Qing Dynasty emperor who reigned for sixty years. These seals were used by the emperor on the paintings he collected.

Qianlong probably had more than a thousand of these chops in different styles, shapes, and sizes. I haven’t done much research on this one, but it’s likely to be a counterfeit as it appears to be made from bone rather than ivory or precious stone.

Still, I adore it, because it was Mum’s.

The truth is, I never asked her about her favourite trinkets:

Why was this special to you?
What made you buy it?
Where or who did it come from?

If we’d brought it to a taping of Antiques Roadshow, I’d probably have asked the experts, “And how much do you think it’s worth?!”

In her later years, Mum would wave the naked lady figurine around, suggesting she should give it to her long-time GP (doctor). I guess she did, because it was not amongst her belongings. I wish I had said something.

All over the world, there are dozens of little museums in every city and town filled with objects which have been amputated from their stories, waiting for someone to reattach their meaning.

Volunteers dust them, label them, and try to imagine their pasts. “Teacup, c.1930.” “Unknown origin.”

I fear this for my own family trinkets, not that they’ll be amputated, but that they’ll remain as silent as the imperial dog.

Subscribe now

My Dad is a different story. Decades ago, he quietly began sticking tiny labels to the backs of paintings and objects: a date, who it belonged to or created it, a brief note. “Bought in Weihaiwei, China 1930s.”

His neat, deliberate handwriting is a trail for whoever comes next.

It’s such a simple act of care. And it’s made me wonder about my own things: the souvenirs, books, photos, the objects that have followed me from one stage of life to another. What would my descendants make of them if they found them in a box? Would they know why I kept them? Would it ,matter?

We often say that stories are what connect generations, but sometimes stories need something to hang onto: a physical anchor, a way to begin the conversation. If my mother’s figurine has taught me anything, it’s that an heirloom doesn’t have to be valuable, or even real. What matters is the story we attach to it.

Without that, it’s just clutter.

Do you have an object that holds a story? A cup, a badge, a photograph? I’d love to hear what you’ve kept and why.

Leave a comment

It’s definitely winter and despite plenty of rain, I’ve been out and about and already spotted a few whale spouts and surfing dolphins off the coast of eastern Sydney.

I adore the colour at this time of year!

I drove past a Golden Penda tree on the way home the other day and was so captivated I turned the car around so I could look at it again.

I have some updates to share.

My history article has been just been published in family history magazine Traces (Edition 31 2025: hope the link works!) I’ve been working on the story of Edna and Hazel Pritchard - Australian sporting stars from the 1920s - for nearly a year now and this is my first published story on the sisters. I’ll be sharing more about them in future posts.

In other news, my new online course, SAG Show & Tell - developed for the Society of Australian Genealogists has gone live and is open for bookings!

This is a four-part live, online, hands-on story-telling course for people who’ve already done quite a bit of research and are looking at news ways to tell their stories (think a mini Ted Talk). I encourage you to read the course description on the SAG website and feel free to ask any questions in the comments or via direct message.

Share

There are only twelve spots available as I hope to be able to respond during the course without leaving anyone behind. The cost is A$200 for non-members, A$180 for affiliate members and $160 for SAG members. As always, the Society keeps pricing extremely reasonable.

We hope in future to turn the Show & Tell night into a live event.

The time zone is 7 pm AET which suits many parts of the world including New Zealand, Hong Kong, China, Taiwan, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, the United Kingdom, Europe… it’s not perfect for the U.S. and I’m sorry about that, but if there’s demand, anything is possible.

I’ll be posting a video FAQ shortly to answer anticipated questions. I’m very grateful to SAG and particularly my friend for the development of the series. And now, let the Show (and Tell) begin!

Leave a comment

Phineas Ryrie was a pioneer of colonial Hong Kong. Even today, it’s hard to imagine that he was born on a remote island in the Scottish Outer Hebrides in 1827. Like many in his family, the ocean unfolded in front of him like a beckoning highway. By his early twenties, he was living it up in Canton and Hong Kong, known as a ‘taipan’ or merchant prince, with his finger in many pies, as Patricia Lim put it beautifully in her seminal book Forgotten Souls.

Share

Phineas founded the St. Andrew’s Society which contributed to the renovation of his headstone. In Hong Kong, he made a name for himself becoming a member of the colony’s Legislative Council for more than twenty years. He also had a hand in the establishment of the Jockey Club, Peak Tramways and the Dairy Farm Company.

Phineas’ nephew Alexander, the dude I’ve written about before, fathered three children with my maternal Chinese great-grandmother, Josephine Ryrie Greaves, whose given name was Ng Jo Sing.

At the cemetery, despite a plan and a plot number, it took me hours to find Josephine’s grave. Take a look at the image below. I walked past this several times.

Close by are the graves of her son Alfred, his wife Rose and their son Alexander (Alec).

Josephine’s daughter Winifred’s resting place is in London, where she spent the final decades of her life. Regrettably, there are no surviving graves for Josephine’s youngest son, my grandfather C.K. (Keat) Greaves, or Keat’s wife, my grandmother Elsie. They were both buried in Shanghai’s Bubbling Well Cemetery in the 1930s. The graves were destroyed when the area was cemetary was transformed into a public park.

Leave a comment

Perhaps because of this, I have developed an obsession with old cemeteries. I want them preserved as quiet spaces in perpetuity. I love the idea of cemeteries reimagined—like Helsinki’s Plague Park, or stone walls with headstones embedded into them, such as Hobart’s St David’s Park. Cemeteries remind us that time and memory are short.

Saving cemeteries is not a logical or practical exercise. It’s muddied by emotion. Many cities are rapidly running out of burial space (and the money to manage these spaces), like the regional city of Bathurst in Central West New South Wales.

I plan to return to Hong Kong to revisit my Chinese great-grandmother’s grave. Josephine died in her eighties during the Second World War. Hong Kong was under Japanese occupation. How and When was she buried? I don’t know anything about what she was like as a person. My mother used to be scared of her because she was blind, a forbidding character sitting in a dark room, my Mum recalled. Josephine’s grave (and a handful of photos) is pretty much all that speaks of her existence. Unlike my famous great-grand-uncle Phineas, no one will be reviving Josephine’s headstone. Except, perhaps, me.

In cemeteries, we measure what remains—not just stones and names, but the idea of presence. Phineas left behind a legacy etched in the city’s infrastructure and upheld by a long-gone colonial society. Josephine left only silence and a deteriorating grave. Yet both are part of me. I search for remnants of stories whether untold, overgrown with weeds or entirely forgotten. Graveyards are more than burial grounds. They are archives of belonging. And in preserving them, we preserve a little of ourselves.

Thank-you for reading. Here are a few additional photos from my visit. Your thoughts and feedback are welcome.

Share

I don’t know the full story. We never do.

Until a few years ago, I was a willing subscriber to a family myth. The myth, which I repeated in my first book From Rice to Riches, was that my Scottish great-grandfather married my Chinese great grandmother in colonial China around 1880. It sounded promising. East meets West. A cultural blend which gave me inroads into an identity story about being a connector and a bridge-builder. As a journalist, I felt it gave me an early ability to see both sides of a story. Hah.

It was a lie.

Share

The arrival of my seafaring Scottish ancestors to China and Hong Kong in the late Nineteenth Century, certainly added some wayward branches to the family tree. My maternal great grandfather Alexander Ryrie Greaves was one of tens of thousands of working-class Britons lured to China with the enticement of earning better money and making a name for themselves before leaving the Far East. Alexander or Alec as he was called, was born in Liverpool, but identified himself as Scottish.

Alec’s grandmother had brought the family from the Hebridean Island of Stornoway (Scotland) in 1829 to Liverpool (England). Her husband, a lieutenant in the Royal Navy had just died. So she took her children on a schooner and joined her brother in the thriving port city. Young Alec was born in Liverpool a year after an uncle, a sea captain whom he was named after, was lost at sea on a clipper ship travelling between Shanghai and Hong Kong.

Alec worked for several companies in the colonial treaty ports of Mainland China and resided in Hankow and Shanghai. Here he is as a young man.

At some stage, he met a Chinese woman who came from the southern province of Canton (Guangdong). We don’t know much about who she was, what she did for a living or the type of person she was. It’s likely Alec gave her the English name, Josephine. There is no record of how they met or how they described their union or conducted their relationship. They had five children together, two of whom died either in utero or after birth. The first surviving child, Winifred, was born in 1882. Alfred followed two years later. My grandfather, Keat, was born in 1887. From several verbal accounts, the Greaves family lived together in a house. We have a photo of young Josephine with the three Greaves children. They are mixed-race of course, known in those days as Eurasian.

By the early 1890’s Alec and Josephine’s relationship was over. Josephine took the children to Hong Kong where she raised them on her own. Alec, it seems, didn’t plan to leave China as a single man. In 1894 when he was thirty-eight years old, he married an English divorcee in Shanghai. Her name was Constance. Their marriage certificate described Alec as a bachelor.

I am not sure if this is bigamy either now or back in its time. From my family’s understanding, Alec never had anything to do with his former de-facto Chinese partner. Nor did he have anything to do with his children. No details of any paternity arrangements have been uncovered. His will does not mention them. The records don’t tell the full story about my tree; the Chinese branch of the Greaves family.

Leave a comment

I’ve often imagined writing a TV drama where the lead character (me) gets to go back to 1880’s China to find out exactly how Alexander and Josephine lived and what was said when he abandoned her (or perhaps she walked out?). In Hong Kong there were laws aimed at protecting the mistresses of colonial subjects. Not the case in Shanghai. In my imaginary TV drama (inspiration from a series called Lost in Austen, 2008) my character, confronts Alec and demands he accounts for his behaviour.

Continuing this fantasy, I wonder, what would I say if I found myself in the presence of my great grandfather? As a journalist, I would interview him, of course. Here’s some of the questions I’d ask:

1. Did anyone in your (British) family know of your relationship with Josephine?

2. Why didn’t you make provision for your children in your will?

3. Did you think about the three children you abandoned as you got older? What sorts of things did you think about?

4. Did you feel an iota of discomfort about your relationship status with Josephine?

5. What would you say to Josephine now?

6. What would you say to your three children now?

7. Are you ashamed of your behaviour (although it was probably considered the default at the time)?

8. Did you have other mistresses and are there other Greaves we don’t know about?

9. Were you a serial bigamist (if that’s the correct word to use)?

10. Did you die in peace?

Subscribe now

The world of family history is full of stories like mine. People who get to do the work we do are usually white and privileged. We spend our money and years of our lives searching for information about the past. Do we search hard enough for the truth? Or are we content to accept as indigenous academic Victoria Grieves Williams suggests “the myth of great white men and women, bravely opening new worlds and taming the wilderness.”

There is fascinating work underway to examine critical family history. That is, the truth beyond superficial readings of our ancestors existence, their pretty diaries and touching photos. Pastor and genealogist Diane Kenaston has put together an entire research guide on Genealogy and Racism: A Guide for White People.

Here in Australia I’ve been deeply moved by the work of journalist David Marr. In 2023 he published Killing for Country an investigation into his ancestors role in murdering scores of indigenous people during the land grabs that preceded the creation of Australia. This truth-telling, as it’s known in Australia, is the necessary work of good family historians.

My investigations into my own family are far from over. I am lucky to have other truth-tellers in my living family tree. Am I way off the mark with my own truth-telling? Maybe. But in the spirit of sharing, shouldn’t we all be a bit more vulnerable, a bit less certain and open to learning another side to our stories?

Leave a comment

You see something that stands out in the distance; a surfboard fin, a photo, a cross, wilted flowers, a letter or card, a teddy bear, and then the realisation sinks into your knowing like the tide disappearing into thirsty sand. Someone died here. Someone who was loved, ended their story at this place.

I am an avid collector of unconventional memorials and their stories: images, monuments and moments signifying life’s final page. Memorials are changing hand in hand with the way we commemorate death and remember life. Why not explore further with a ‘slow cooker’ series (my term for something that allows time for marinating and braising to enhance the flavour)?

The word ‘memorialise’ (memorialize for US friends) is the process of preserving memories of people or events so Wikipedia tells us. The words usage peaked around 1870 at the height of Queen Victoria’s reign. Back then death was more visible than it is today. It had to be. Death was everywhere. The term’s visibility has been on the rise again, sharply so from 2000 where the world witnessed 9/11 and the atrocities of the Iraq War.

The starting point for my upcoming six-part webinar series (one a month from 15/16 October to March 2025) Forget-Me-Not; how we memorialise has tendrils that reach back into my own timeline. If I were to mark a beginning for my fascination with memorials it was in the 2000s. I reported from the World War One battlefields of Passchendaele in Belgium and Gallipoli on a windswept Turkish peninsula. I reported from Israel and the Palestinian Territories. Iraq, Iran, Lebanon. I became interested in the hallowed ground where tragedies happened and wars were fought. But it’s also the smaller and more personal memorials that capture my attention these days rather than national sites and war memorials which receive funding and widespread attention.

After my mother’s death several years, I encountered the funeral industry for the first time. In a state of grief and weariness, my family sat in the meeting room of a well-known funeral director which promised to ‘craft the ideal funeral with exceptional service’. In grief, you don’t have the capacity to question deeply. You are in a funk. The ceremony happens, the funeral home hands over a USB recording and later, a box of ashes. It can feel quite clinical.

A century ago, cities regularly stopped for emotional funeral processions like this one in the Sydney suburb of Newtown in 1934. It turns out 1934 was a bad year for tram conductors including Henry Loxley:

Subscribe now

Funerals rarely bring a city to a standstill these days. But in 2024 how important is it to commemorate a death and mark the end of a life? As a journalist and family history fan I am always looking for the creative ways that community marks the end of life.

Is it always necessary to preserve the memory of someone? No. Not everyone feels this need. People cope with bereavement and grief in different ways.

As usual, I begin an enquiry by casting a wide net. I am planning to explore pop-up shrines, digital memorials, the art of the eulogy, life stories. There’ll be more, but the beauty of slow-cooking is that you shouldn’t lay the table too early.

Share

I’m so excited to introduce my first three guests in the Forget-Me-Not series:

Episode One: Tuesday 15 + Wednesday 16 October 2024 (US + Australia)

Gordon Coonfield, Associate Professor of Communication at Villanova University is the creator of the Kensington Remembers website which describes the street memorials of Kensington North Philly. If you want to read more in preparation. Here’s a start:

Episode 2: Wednesday 20 November 2024 (UK + Australia)

Peter Billingham is a professional eulogy writer who has written and delivered more than 700 eulogies. He’s from the United Kingdom and keen to ensure the best possible ‘good words’. I can’t wait to discover his process and to learn more about this craft.

Episode 3: Tuesday 17/ Wednesday 18 December 2024 (US + Australia)

James Ware Ph.D is a retired business leader who, earlier this year, farewelled his beloved wife Cindy Booth Ware after fifty-seven years of marriage. He has generously agreed to speak with us about how he crafted Cindy’s online memorial using the skills he acquired over a long career.

Please note, if you register, and you can’t make the live event, you will be notified as soon as the recording is available. I’m delighted to be collaborating with the on this one. And of course, as always I welcome your comments in my preparations.

Leave a comment

She never had a mother to teach her how to cook. Her mum, my Grandma, died when Bea was five. Getting married in her mid thirties - later than most of her friends - she learned to cook as a wife and new mother. She adopted the challenge with gusto.

Mum died several years years ago. This still gives me tremors when I write the words down. But this week, going through her recipe books, I’ve noticed she left me little love letters in the margins: food receipts, guest lists and recipe tweaks.

Recipe books, particularly for Chinese cooking (written in English or bilingual English and Chinese), were a booming market from the 1960s onwards. Most of the cookbooks came out of the US and Taiwan as China was in the grip of the Cultural Revolution. But by the 1970s, Hong Kong (where we lived) got in on the act and Mum was an early adopter in Chinese cookery for English speakers.

Here are some of the margin notes and scribbles she left for me to find:

Share

Below is the book accompanying Mum’s first modern convenience: a grey-blue Kenwood Chef mixer. I remember it well. The recipe book that came with the mixer (which we no longer have) is a beauty and a doozy in one. So many descriptions like Invalid Fish Creams (a meal, liquidised) we would balk at today and others - like Orangeaid and Tutti Frutti that we don’t hear enough of.

What have you found in the margins or hidden in the pages of old books? I want to hear about your love letters from the past.

Leave a comment

That’s it for this week, friends. Have a delicious weekend and a Happy Father’s Day to my husband, my Dad, my brothers and all who are fatherly in Australia. Why don’t you give my little Father’s Day Q&A a try?

And there’s still time to book my Conversation Show in Sydney.

Friends, I need to take a minute. My eyes just fell on a packet of Jaffas and in an instant, I found myself on a magic carpet ride, whisked back through time to my childhood. [Note: a jaffa is a type of lolly as we call them in Australia, candy as you say in the U.S. and in the UK - and colonial Hong Kong where I grew up - we called them sweets. AKA confectionery!]

Born in Australia in 1931, Jaffas are like a round M&M (or Smarty) with a bright red hard sugar shell covering a ball of orange-flavoured chocolate. They are named after the city of Jaffa in Palestine (as it was back then), famous for sunshine and oranges.

My grandmother in Australia would post us brown paper packages filled with knitted pullovers, jaffas and dog biscuits for the canine of the house. To me, Jaffas were magic. I liked to pop a handful into my mouth, sucking on them until the red outer shell turned white. Then I’d bite into the chocolate with a hard crunch. Bliss!

When we ask people to reminisce about old times, we might ask about the soundtrack of their lives, their education, treasured holidays, favoured clothes, stamps, pets or best-ever meals. But if you ask me about sweet memories, I can summon those flavours in a heartbeat. And, I can tell you how eating them made me feel. They felt like childhood.

The film Chitty Chitty Bang Bang starring Sally Ann Howes [I originally wrote Julie Andrews. She was probably already booked] and Dick Van Dyke was a bittersweet favourite. The sweet factory made my jaw tingle with delight, and the evil Childcatcher with his greasy black hair and ridiculous nose was the stuff of nightmares. In England on our holidays my brothers and I found new varieties of sweets that weren’t available in Hong Kong. Brother Stephen adored Gobstoppers and arranged for his godmother to post them to him. My other brother swore by Bassett’s Wine Gums (and still does). And I fell in love with the simplicity of a crumbly Cadbury’s Flake. I once hand-carried an entire box home with me. They took many months to finish.

My dad recalls MacRobertson’s Tip Top Toffee from 1940. I just love the name! Tip Top Toffee was made in Australia by MacRobertson's Steam Confectionery Works. Macpherson Robertson has a great story you can read about here.

My final offering is the iced confectionary produced and sold by the Dairy Farm Company of Hong Kong. An army of men drove motor-scooters filled with boxes of iced-lollies and ice-creams all over the colony. We called the ice-cream seller, Popsy Man. We children learned the sound of his motor scooter as he pulled up near the bottom of our driveway, our coins jangling in our pockets. From the fruity Tropical Sundae to my regular choice, Choc Frost. Happy days indeed.

Friends, writing about sweet bygones brought me much pleasure. Thank-you for indulging me. For family story-tellers, you could do a whole project on memorable candy. I bet your kids and grandkids would love this one too.

Leave a comment

Yum!

When I told radio host Renee Krosch I was excited to be there in the ABC radio studio with her, I wasn’t joking. Family stories are perfect for talk-back radio where listeners call in with their own fantastic tales, discoveries and roadblocks! Renee and I spent thirty minutes talking about my family story Lost in Shanghai and then we invited listeners to call in and share their discoveries.

Brian’s story was particularly moving. His mother died last year. His stepdad died a decade ago. In sorting out his mother’s effects, he took a DNA test revealing that his stepfather was his biological father. You can hear the emotion in his voice when he speaks of what this discovery meant to him.

I will be joining Renee again on Evenings, ABC Radio Sydney for a regular monthly segment on different aspects of family story-telling and genealogy. Stay posted and please tell me your stories by joining my Members Chat!

Leave a comment

Share

It’s not Fathers Day in Australia, but the day is marked in the U.S. and U.K. on Sunday so I wrote a little Q&A you can record with your Dad on your smartphone’s voice memo app or something similar.

Subscribe now

If your father is no longer living or unable to do something like this anymore, I’m so sorry if this upsets you or makes you miss him even more. Maybe you could interview someone about your father?

I suggest you record the Q&A session on your smartphone. Make sure you have a bit of memory on your phone. I have kept the Q&A short, but hopefully, this may just be the start of ‘Conversations with Dad’, a family story project perhaps?

Why did you marry Mum?

What’s the family chore you like the least?

What are three moments in your life you most treasure. Why?

How - and in what ways - is your life different from (or the same as) your father’s?

Who taught you how to be a good father? How do you define a good father?

How do you talk to your children (or/and grand-children) about love?

What are three events (book, show, film, painting, photograph, sport, anniversary, gathering) that you treasure?

What have you been successful at?

What brings you pleasure?

What would you do differently, if given the chance?

Instructions:

• Show the questions to your father a day before the interview so that he can have time to think about them.

• On recording day, find a quiet spot, preferably away from a crowd, maybe a guest bedroom or somewhere carpeted.

• Grab your dad and the questions. Touch ‘record’ on your smartphone voice memo app.

• Be sure to hold the phone about the width of your hand (from tip of the pinky to tip of the thumb) from his mouth to ensure the sound is clear.

• Encourage him to elaborate by being, well, encouraging!

Leave a comment

These questions are triple verified by an actual father. Thanks Dad!

Share The Juvenile Geriatric

I’ve been busy working on Beginning, next week’s online family stories workshop. As well as that I’m preparing for my Let’s Talk event at the Bathurst Writers’ and Readers’ festival this weekend. I went to university in this beautiful regional city and I also performed Lost in Shanghai there so I’m super excited to be going back. I love to see new and old audiences and have a good old chat about the power and problems of conversation in the 21st Century, the subject of my recent book Rebel Talk.

As there is only so much time in the week, my offering is the video I promised last week! I was so excited to see your responses and all the ways you continue to communicate using snail mail. If you want to go back and read the comments from that post, I’m sure you’ll enjoy them.

Share

I’d love you to make a family story conversation starter kit as I suggest in the video! Here are some suggestions for what you could include in the kit:

• a letter (like Pigeon-Posted, but you could make your own version or just keep it simple)

• Instax or polaroid photos

• A pretty box or envelope to hold everything in

• Return addressed envelopes

• Your questions cut into little strips and printed on colourful paper

• If you are crafty, feel free to go nuts!

I can’t wait to see what you come up with!

Leave a comment

I’m thinking of signing up to Postcrossing which was one of the lovely suggestions in a comment by . My friend Suzanne alerted me to the new French scratch’n sniff postage stamps.

Subscribe now

It’s the last week of May 2024 already. I wish you all excellent conversations and I’ll see you next week.

I discovered to my great surprise the other day that, here in Australia, they still sell aerogrammes at the post office. At A$3.00 it’s the cheapest way to send a letter overseas. I remember when I first came to this country as a student in the 1980s, living far away from home, I treasured the arrival of a weekly blue aerogramme from the parents in Dad’s neat typing (Olivetti) with a bit of his tidy handwriting at the end of the letter. Other times he’d send a brown envelope containing a typed letter and cuttings from the newspaper. Sometimes, in her messy, manic hand-writing, Mum would add a note at the bottom with lots of xxxxx.

Leave a comment

Apart from aerogrammes you can buy a growing range of philatelic products (Is it me, or is there something about the words philatelic products?) I learned this from standing in a post office queue. I love to use Express Post satchels which are quite pricey, but now there are a whole range of prepaid products so that once you buy them, you can post these anywhere without having to go back into the post office.

I’m known for ordering second hand books from overseas. Then, I forget that I ordered them because it takes at least 2 -3 weeks to arrive, sometimes longer. This is what happens when you live at the ‘arse end of the world’ as one of our former treasurers famously put it. Suddenly this little rectangular miracle is in your hands and a rush of joy fills you as you recall what you ordered in that precious moment of surprise.

Leave a comment

Speaking of philatelic products, I’ve recently starting sending post-cards again and I try to look for interesting places from which to post them from so I get the unique post-office stamp saying where the card came from and it’s postcode. For example, I was recently in Penguin, Tasmania. Yes, the town is really called Penguin, because Little Penguins live along the coast there. It brought me joy to queue (briefly) at the Penguin Post Office and watch the nice lady manually stamp "Penguin 7316” onto my postcards.

On an aside, good postcards are increasingly hard to find, but this is not a topic I’m going to dwell on today.

I recently discovered some letter-writing stationery, a single sheet of A4 which you can fold in an origami-like way, address it and pop a stamp on it. It’s made by a British company called Pigeon Post: The Letter. Reinvented. Write. Fold. Send. The blurb on the back of the package says “because even with all our hi-tech wizardry, nobody has managed to recreate the magic and joy of the hand-written letter.”

[I am making a video for next week’s newsletter. The link will go here!]

When I was little, my grandmother sent us little squares of tapestry art which she included inside our birthday, Easter and Christmas cards. I kept a few of her mini tapestries and they are treasured. [I will try to put some pictures in, but as you can probably tell, this newsletter was a bit of a rush job] Apart from the surprise of receiving a real letter (as opposed to the rubbish that usually fills a post-box) I think what I love most about letters is the handwriting and typing. Remember typing on a typewriter? You’d have to really press down on the QWERTY keyboard to get an impression.

And of course, what a letter is really all about is a story. When someone sends a letter, they have to stop what they are doing, decide how to deliver their news or deliberately download their thoughts, craft them into at least two sentences, buy a stamp, write the address, seal the envelope and post it. Ahhh, what a simple pleasure! When was the last time you felt that way about an email?

Don’t get me wrong. I loves me technology. I’m all for instant gratification and the dopamine hit of a ‘restack’. But I hope I never lose my joy of writing, receiving and posting letters.

Have a lovely weekend, friends. As always, send me your thoughts. PS There’s only one more week to sign up to my three family story workshops which start on 30 May Australian time. Please join us!

Family Story Workshops

Family history isn’t just about ancestors. One day you and I will be ancestors. We don’t know whether our descendants or people of the future will be interested in exploring our lives however we each have a unique take on what it’s like to be living at this particular time. If we want to collect people’s stories, an excellent way to do this is to put your reporter’s hat on and become an interviewer. Lots of people are naturally skilled at this. Experts call the art of interviewing to preserve history, oral history. But real oral history can be a long process and some of us are short on time.

Mother’s Day is coming up this weekend for some parts of the world including my home country, Australia. I wrote a little Q&A you can record with your mother on your smartphone’s voice memo app or something similar.

Subscribe now

If your Mum is no longer alive like mine, I’m so sorry if this upsets you or makes you miss her even more. I miss my Mum more than anything but I love thinking about her and all the motherly and not-so-motherly things she did!

If you are going to record this as I suggest, make sure you have a bit of memory in your phone. I have kept it short, but hopefully, this may just be the start of ‘Conversation with Mum’. All feedback welcome.

Share

Instructions:

• Show the questions to your mother a day before the interview so that she can have time to think about them.

• On recording day, find a quiet spot, preferably away from a crowd, maybe a guest bedroom or somewhere carpeted.

• Grab your mum and the questions. Touch ‘record’ on your smartphone voice memo app.

• Be sure to hold the phone about the width of your hand (from tip of the pinky to tip of the thumb) from her mouth to ensure the sound is clear.

• Encourage her to elaborate by being, well, encouraging!

Q&A: Ten Questions with Mum

Why did you marry Dad?

What’s the best thing you’ve ever done for yourself?

How would you summarise/describe your life to this point?

What do you fear most?

What was a missed opportunity?

Was motherhood what you hoped it would be?

Who taught you how to be a parent?

What is something you’ve regretted?

What are three things you dream of doing that’s still ahead of you?

What are three pieces of art or literature (book, show, film, painting, photograph) that you treasure?

Don’t forget I have three family story workshops coming up in late May and June. I would love you to register for these 👇

Have fun with your questions this weekend and let me know how you go!

Leave a comment

So happy to release my online Family Story Project workshops. The details are now up on my website. I wanted to give you the first opportunity to sign up and book your spots.

Please read carefully and then click on the images which will take you to the payment portal. Once I have confirmed your details I will send you a Zoom links and post you a Welcome Package of goodies and tools.

You will also find info about what is in each workshop below.

The Package: AUD 150

Three Workshops:

Part One: Beginning 2hrs 15 mins

Thursday 30 May 2024 5.00 pm - 7.15 pm AEST

Part Two: Middle 2 hrs 15 mins

Thursday 6 June 2024 5.00 pm - 7.15 pm AEST

Part Three: End 2 hrs 15 mins

Thursday 20 June 2024 5.00 pm - 7.15 pm AEST

Part One: Beginning 2hrs 15 mins

Thursday 30 May 2024 Online 5.00 pm - 7.15 pm AEST

You will learn a simple hands-on family story project which will be completed by the end of the workshop. All information and Zoom link will be sent to you. You will have the opportunity to ask questions and discuss your project intentions with Jane.

Part Two: Middle 2 hrs 15 mins

Thursday 6 June 2024 Online 5.00 pm - 7.15 pm AEST

You will learn how to set up a life-story interview using Jane’s tools. Discussion about types of interview formats, transcribing interviews and options for sharing stories in different formats. All information and Zoom link will be sent to you.

Part Three: End 2 hrs 15 mins

Thursday 20 June 2024 Online 5.00 pm - 7.15 pm AEST

A special guest will join us for part of today’s workshop. Participants will share the progress in their projects from the previous workshop. I will also discuss a pet project of mine, creating a memorial booklet. Further discussion about options for sharing and engaging members of the family. All information and Zoom link will be sent to you. Option to join Jane’s exclusive member chat to support each other and continue family story projects.

Please do reach out if you have any problems or questions!

Leave a comment

On Monday 29 April 2024 you’ll receive an email with a link to the booking site as soon as it goes live. You can read all the details about the three workshops - which I’m leading - and I can’t wait for you to join one of my small groups.

Share

The Backstory

In December 2023 I conducted a series of in-person family story workshops in regional Australia to engage communities ahead of my Lost in Shanghai 2024 Tour. Those initial workshops, developed in collaboration with the wonderful Contemporary Asian Australian Performance (www.caap.org.au), were not about teaching people skills to become genealogists. There are already plenty of societies, local history groups, libraries and associations where you can learn how to search records, physical archives and digital collections.

My passion is turning stories (written and recorded), images, documents and keepsakes into bite-sized projects: as they say, from little things, big things grow. After more than three decades in journalism, storytelling is my strength and my love. I’ve met many people who commit to writing a family history or life story but find the process overwhelming. With Beginning, Middle & End I want to show you how to collect and share your stories from the very first workshop, using exciting tools I’ve developed. I’m also keen that you gather living stories first; in other words, use the people around you while they are still able to tell their stories. Mine your past and tap into the stories of grand-parents, partners, parents, siblings, children and relatives.

Subscribe now

There are too many half-completed family stories lying around in bottom drawers or somewhere up in the Cloud. Now is the time to dust-off them off; to turn them into projects using the tools from my Family Stories Project Beginning, Middle & End series.

Why shareable?

Have you ever thought about how different your life is to a compared to a child born in 2010? Did you go to a school in a small town with two teachers or did you ride to school - on a horse? Did you grow up in a colony or a place that has changed beyond recognition? What was life like before the Internet? What was the food you ate like? Did your grandparent tell you stories about relatives that you’ve never written down? There are so many reasons to scatter ‘crumbs’ for the people, our loved ones, who will come after us.

I want to show you this fabulous story about childhood created by one of my workshop participants Kush Kuiy, an artist and second generation Australian with South-Sudanese roots:

AND… if you want to sample my workshop series, I am partnering with the fabulous to deliver a 1 hour taster workshop on Friday 10th May 2024 at 9 am AEST or Thursday 9th May at 4 pm PT and 7 pm ET.

This is a free workshop but you must register (click on the image).

If you have any questions so far, please contact me. Otherwise all will be revealed very soon. Please spread the word and keep an eye out for my email on Monday and I hope to see you online!

Leave a comment

Gosh, after all those years of working in television, I won’t even tell you how many takes I did of this little video!

All the info is in the video, but you need to register for this one hour event (suitable for ET zone in the US/Canada and Australian eastern states/territories)

It’s a teaser for my upcoming workshop series. More soon.

What? An online event about sharing family stories: Beginning, Middle & End with Jane Hutcheon (friendly author of this newsletter) hosted by

Where? Online

When? 7 pm (ET) Thursday 9 May 2024 AKA 9 am (AEST) Friday 10 May 2024

How? Register

Any questions? Bring them to the event or ask me in the chat!

It’s tricky to describe but when you’re interviewing and in the flow, you and your guest should feel relaxed, happy even. Think, Cary and Grace:

When the chat isn’t going so well, you and the interviewee may feel tension or dismay. It could resemble this scene with Nova and Derrick:

The great thing about an interview is that it can start off like Scenario Two (Nova and Derrick) but with a bit of hard work and luck you could end up like Cary and Grace in Scenario One, hopefully with a bit less fake tan. So here are some tips to help you ace the interview process.

Leave a comment

Research

I’ve noticed many people dive into interviews as if they are the most natural conversations in the world. This can be fun for both interviewer/subject and listeners. But if you have the opportunity, spend a few moments thinking about the intention behind the interview; fun, education, revelation, book promotion, self-promotion? Is there something you can research to bring greater depth and value to your audience?

Do you have a list of questions? I like a list to keep me on track, but I don’t always follow it It’s a guide.

I craft my interviews so that they have a beginning, a middle and an end, like a story or book.

Empathy

If you want to create a connection with your interviewee or subject/s (and your audience) ask about the motivation behind their work. What led them to this place? Did their work emerge because of a family tragedy, a longing, childhood inspiration or a financial imperative? Listeners love to make these connections. An interviewer’s job is to help them.

Don’t fear silence.

Be Curious

There is no such thing as stupid questions but there are definitely better questions and you should always aim for these.

“What made you choose comedy?” Is a question for ask a comedian. But they’ve probably answered it a million times.

“Tell me about your childhood and the time you discovered….” Better! Now you are taking your audience by the hand and leading them into an illuminating story.

Keep your questions clean and ramble-free (see ‘Research’. The list)

Engage Listening

I say ‘engage’ because many of us enter the interview space disengaged. An interview is something we schedule within busy lives. I suggest you give yourself plenty of room to focus your mind.

Think of yourself as a ‘humble listener’, someone who is there to learn.

If you are moderating a panel, scatter the questions around as if you are feeding chickens, although we tend to be drawn to the more interesting people (chickens) and better communicators. That’s ok.

A great way to demonstrate listening is to summarise what you’ve heard and repeat it back to the guest. Use this to device dwell a while. Take them further into the subject or use the summary to segue to the new topic or question. Interviews are best when they sound organic.

Lead

It’s a joy and a privilege to be in the driver’s seat, steering around a curvy cliffside road, avoiding the potholes and meeting other humans in convivial conversation. The test of a good interview (if it’s people-centred rather than technical) is to reach points of vulnerability and revelation.

I like to start with a question I think the interviewee might enjoy answering. I ask permission before I go to hard places. I think of myself as someone in the service of the listener. And I like to have fun.

Thanks for reading. Did you notice my tips are organised as an acronym, REBEL? Please support my obsession with acronyms by sharing this and signing up to my newsletter so I can create more sad acronyms. It’s the kind thing to do. If you’ve read my book Rebel Talk, the art of Powerful Conversations you’ll see why.

An interview, media appearance, video/podcast or Q&A is an opportunity to present your work and you-the-person to a wider audience. If it’s a straight up Q&A format like the Proust Questionnaire, you will probably submit written answers in an email and that might be the extent of your participation. But if it’s a live or recorded audio or video interview a bit more preparation is called for. How much should you divulge? How do you know when to stop talking? Perhaps you get nervous. Some people find interviews incredibly stressful, but hopefully this little guide takes some of the pressure off.

I’ve been a broadcast interviewer for more than three decades (and had my own TV interview show from 2010-2019). Over the past few months I’ve had the opportunity to be on the other side; being interviewed for my theatre show Lost in Shanghai. As well as media interviews I had to do many post-show Q&A sessions. I put together this guide for fellow Substackers, particular those who haven’t had a lot of experience at being interviewed. I hope you find it useful. Please feel free to ask questions or leave comments. Your questions can help other people. Don’t be shy now.

Know the Basics

Who is interviewing you?  Is it live or recorded? Is the interviewer experienced or a newby? What’s the duration of the interview? Will it be edited? Where and when will the interview be published?  Will it be a video, sound-only, text only, or all of the above? Will there be photos taken and who is taking them?  How will the interview or article be shared?  What’s the interview about?

These are ten basic questions you should ask the organiser prior to the interview, if nothing else for your peace of mind. You may even prefer to know these basics before accepting the offer of the interview. Sometimes it helps to supply a professional photo of yourself or just a photo you are happy with if you don’t want to have a random or poorly limit image doing the rounds on the internet. For ever.

Should you bring written notes or just be off the cuff?

 If it’s TV/video, it’s best not to refer to notes or answers you’ve carefully prepared. It never sounds natural and if the audience can see you checking notes, it reduces authenticity. It always sound better when you speak off the cuff and from the heart.

Share

What should you do if you say something to the interviewer that you don’t want broadcast?

If the interview is pre-recorded, it normally isn’t a problem. Discuss it the journalist/producer/podcaster. If the interview is live there is little you can do.

How much you reveal is up to you.  You can segue your life story into your book’s story easily.  You can also talk about what dramas you have had in writing the book or whether they story came easily, took you 111 drafts etc.  Like each author, the making of every book has its’ own story.

Know when to stop!

Remember to pause or make a definite end to your answer so so that interviewer can get a questions in. They like that. An interview always sound more interesting when it’s like a game of ping pong!

Guide the process

Write out a list of Frequently Asked Questions about your work. More detail is good! Put it on your website or newsletter. Share it with the interviewer. For an example, here’s one I wrote for my third book, Rebel Talk.

Many journalists/podcasters are time poor. If they find anything that helps them to pose meaningful questions they will probably use it.  

Use your contacts

Get introduced. Don’t be afraid to offer yourself or your book as potential content for shows, events or festivals. Don’t forget your local library/aged-care home. However, many of these organisations will probably have booked schedules well ahead of time. It pays to start pitching three to six months ahead of your publication date.

Don’t fixate on how many times your book is going to be mentioned in the interview. Don’t keep repeating ‘as I say in my book’.  

When I worked in TV the producer used to edit these mentions out, as they are tedious to listen to! Audiences are sold on the stories they hear, not the constant repetition of the title.

I’m so nervous! What do I do about it?

• Step one: breathe.

• If you are feeling star-struck because the interviewer is famous, try to imagine them doing something very ordinary like shopping for groceries in a store, just as you would.

• Confidence (for most people) is a muscle that gets stronger with work. So try to do more interviews. If you need practice, write out the questions and answer them after hitting ‘record’ on your favourite voice memo app. Listen back. What do you notice?

What should I wear (for TV or video)?

This one is really up to you. If in doubt wear dark blue jeans, a t-shirt and an open jacket or a shirt with a collar. Not too many prints or patterns on the shirt unless you really want that. If you are having a photo taken, consider a bit of make-up. Beware of tapping feet, busy hands or noisy bangles which are distracting and might be heard in the background. Sit tall. It looks better and makes you feel more confident.

What is the difference between a dull interview and a riveting one?

Ah. Interesting. I’ve found that around 80 - 90% of the questions I get asked in interviews are variations of the same thing. I call these bread-and-butter questions (tell me about your writing process, why did you make this creative work? What surprised you most about the book’s reception?). Remember, the channel, feed or publication needs you (or your book) as (usually, free) content. But now and then you’ll come across an interviewer who really is engaged in the subject you’ve written about or in your life story. That opens up a tunnel of curiosity. And within that tunnel, is the space for a more engaging, potentially, delightful conversation. Good interviewers are adept at finding the tunnel. A friendly, professional conversation with moments of light, shade and humour (if appropriate), in my view makes an interview riveting. The audience is left wanting to know more.

In recent interviews I did to publicise my theatre show Lost in Shanghai (which was about my mother’s life story and also mine), only one interviewer asked me about what Mum was like as a person. It was the opening question during a Saturday morning radio interview and it made me so happy. I felt relaxed and honoured to be talking about my mother, rather than simply publicising the show or talking about myself.

Thanks for reading. In part two, I’ll change places and discuss what makes a good interviewer. If you think of anyone who might enjoy this post. Please share. As always I welcome comments and feedback.

Leave a comment

During the tour I’ve had the pleasure of meeting so many new faces at family story workshops, meet-and-greets and post-show Q&A’s. One lovely woman bought Terumi and me an after-show glass of bubbles, told us how much she enjoyed the performance and then exited the theatre, not wanting to impose on our time. Other people have shed tears with me, shared their stories, spoken about losing their mothers, expressed grief about parents suffering with dementia, prejudice from being mixed-race, being rejected or losing much-loved childhood homes. I was trying to explain these web-like connections to a radio interviewer this morning. Lost in Shanghai really is about human connection from generation to generation.

Share

I thought for what is probably my final newsletter from the tour (don’t worry, I’ll be back here next week), I’d offer some observations and reminiscences about the journey I’ve been on. It’s a pretty random list. Here goes.

The Tour Book

Everyone in the touring company gets a copy of the Tour Book which details our flights, car hire details, timings and accommodation, tips, a few restaurants and treats (massage places, bars sometimes) and coffee recommendations. My favourite part of the tour book is the emergency recipe. So if you only have a kettle in your accommodation and you remember to bring vermicelli noodles and peanut sauce with you, you have a meal.

I loved this idea. Arts On Tour, our lovely touring company, revealed that as far as they know, no-one yet has tried making the recipe. I didn’t end up making Spicy Peanut Noodles either. But seeing the recipe in the book told me that the AOT team really cared about the one person who arrives at their destination and desperately needs something warm to eat, so they can get into an unfamiliar bed and hopefully, rest well. When you are moving every few nights, comfort and rituals take on new meaning.

While on the subject of food, I developed a new morning habit on tour. I didn’t want to eat a full breakfast every morning when I was likely to be eating lunch and dinner out as well. So I came up with this habit after a wellbeing workshop the team attended where we were encouraged to adopt practices that brought comfort and health as we travelled.

Here’s my healthy morning combo: I bring prebiotic powder and a jar of instant coffee vfrom home. Then when I arrive in a new place I purchase a bag of fresh carrots, berries, and milk. Breakfast is a full glass of pre-biotic water, a cold coffee shake, two carrots and half a punnet of berries. I often found it took a bit of time to crunch through two big carrots. On one occasion I walked into the Darwin Museum only to be told by the lovely Clair @clairparkinsonpottery (Instagram) “sorry, but you can’t bring your backpack inside. Or the carrot.”

Performance Report

Stage Manager Jen Jackson, sends out a production report after each performance to tell us what went well and what could have gone better. I looked forward to these reports for Jen’s observations and great sense of humour. Jen is the person who is changing the slides as I tell my Mum’s story. This is already a gargantuan job (especially as I tend to mix up my lines). Yet, in addition to this, she also oversees the tour, takes notes about the show itself, the lighting, sound, what is going on with the audience; moments when they laugh or murmur, clap or comment. One time (opening night) she referred to my ‘wardrobe malfunction’ when a decorative set of beads I was wearing began to break up and drop like tiny hailstones onto the stage, moments before I was due to get on stage.

The offer

In the world of theatre, whether during a rehearsal or a performance, I never got feedback or criticism. Nobody used those precise words. Whenever director Tasnim Hossain or stage manager Jen Jackson made a suggestion, it was presented as an ‘offer’ or a ‘note’ as in ‘I have a note for you’ or ‘here’s an offer’. I found this language shift deeply inspiring. In my former TV career, some managers couldn’t wait to tell me everything I did wrong or ideas that didn’t work or didn’t rate. It could feel callous and blaming. But a gift of advice? That’s an offer I can gratefully accept. I will certainly look for ways to fold that into my creative practice.

Subscribe now

Audience

One of our first performances was for fifteen to seventeen year-old schoolchildren. I had delivered family story workshops to them a day earlier. Privately, I was terrified of performing in front of them. My inner imposter popped out and I could feel my nerves tying themselves into knots. I confided my fear to our , who worked at the venue we were in. As a performer herself, she understood my wobble.

“Just think of the one girl in the audience who needs to hear this story. Then tell it to her.”

I don’t think I can ever forget those words.

In another show we had a much smaller audience than I had hoped for. Initially, I felt disempowered. Then I stepped out on stage and saw that the audience had literally closed in, as if they were listening to someone telling stories around a camp-fire. They hardly uttered a sound until the funny bits. Then they revealed their delight with gentle laughter. It didn’t matter to this audience how many people were there. And it didn’t matter to me. I was bringing my story to them. As said in a recent Substack post, ‘the numbers change nothing’ whether you have an audience of 10 or 100, we should show our work.

Director Tasnim Hossain (quoting a friend) describes the ‘offer’ between performers and audience as ‘a church for the modern era’. "You are in the theatre, she says “where you might be in the dark. We put our phones away, we don't take calls, we don't get up and go attend to an urgent email. We're just there in that space for that ninety minutes or however long. And it feels like it's time that’s carved-out from the rest of our lives. That's really special.”

Every audience is different. “Sometimes they are very quiet,” notes stage manager Jen Jackson. “You feel like they are just paying attention and trying to listen to you, Jane, and engage with you in silence rather than responding more vocally. Or you can see someone leaning in, leaning forward in their seat because they are just so engrossed in the story. They are laughing or really alert. And every now and then, you see someone asleep in the front row! This does happen occasionally.”

Trusting the Process

I always imagined directors to be humans with megaphones wielding power. My experience with Tasnim Hossain couldn’t be further from that image. Once again, the word generosity, comes to mind.

Tasnim insisted I do vocal warmups on stage before each performance so I didn’t damage or strain my voice. She taught me the exercises and then she did the warm-ups with me. I’m happy to report that my voice has survived the tour!

I asked Tasnim to describe the role of a theatre director:

“I just trust the process. I trust that everyone is there because they're meant to be. And I trust that we've created an environment where people can express whether they're feeling stuck or uncertain; that we can work through it together. So definitely, there are moments where it feels like something might not have landed but I also know that that's not the end of the process. The joy of something like performance is that it shifts every night. Once you've published a book, unless there's a reprint, you can't fix things. But with theatre, you can because it lives and dies every single night.”

Friendship

I don’t usually hang-out with four people I don’t know well for a month. Our group chat is like a little journal, sharing everyday movements, what we did on our precious days off, Laksas (Malaysian and Indonesian soup noodle dish) consumed, restaurant suggestions, crocodiles, snakes, beautiful landscapes, little penguins, pademelons (stocky wallabies), morning swims in the Bass Strait and the chatter of being on a journey with a beginning and an end. Some of my work companions are young enough to be my kids. But I have so much respect for their professionalism and I’ve learned so much from them; how they navigate lives, choose paths, face adversity (as I say in the show). These really are conversations close to my being (another line from the show). I will cherish the Lost in Shanghai tour for many reasons. and I am so very grateful for the care and friendship of Jen, Sammy, Terumi and Kraig. Thank-you for looking out for me. And putting up with me. It’s been an honour and a joy working with you.

Leave a comment

Greetings from somewhere between Warrnambool and Narre Warren in Victoria.au as the Lost in Shanghai team and I continue our theatre tour. The map’s looking a bit messy as we have covered 10,227.3 kilometres (6354.95 miles) so far, which is pretty exciting. And we have further to travel. My mother’s story has been told in eight wonderful regional theatres and we are now at the three-quarter mark. As publication day coincides with International Women’s Day, I wanted to reflect on some of the women in my past-family and the unanswered questions I have about them.

Leave a comment

As I travel one of the books I have with me is a slim edition of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters To A Young Poet. Apart from language and passion, I adore the unhurried revelation of Rilke’s letters, the landscapes they cover and to me, most importantly, devotion to a spirit of questioning and living with inner questions that go unanswered at key points in our lives. Let me share this beautiful passage:

So, as I attempt to inhale this spirit of living the questions, here are some thoughts about the women in my life. I won’t talk in-depth about my beloved Mum, Beatrice. Her death, in 2022, still feels too recent and I haven’t fully processed her place in my life. When I’m on stage, sometimes I come to a point in the story, where I glance at a photograph projected behind me and suddenly I remember that Mum isn’t here anymore. In that moment I have to regain my footing. I don’t want to lose my composure during a performance. That would not be a service to the audience.

Share

But I will talk about Mum’s mother, Elsie Mackenzie Greaves. My grandmother Elsie died in 1927 of dysentery, an infectious disease we don’t hear much about anymore in our privileged world. Elsie was in her late thirties and my Mum, Beatrice, was only five. Elsie had given birth to four children and her eldest daughter was ten years older than Mum. Mum had a vague image of Elsie as a gentle woman sitting at a sewing machine. She doesn’t recall going to Elsie’s funeral. In Lost in Shanghai, we developed a refrain that comes whenever Bea or I, for that matter, search for resilience: ‘Don’t Cry Bea. Don’t Cry.’

How did a middle-class woman contracted dysentery in the foreign concessions of Shanghai in 1927? Apparently she caught it from her young son. Her son survived. Elsie died in hospital (I note that it wasn’t a hospital for foreign residents) Did she leave it too late to seek treatment?

But the biggest question I have about my grandmother Elsie, is, was it you, who wanted my Mum sent away from the rest of her family; your husband and her siblings? Why did you want her to away? This story came from a cousin. She heard it from her mother who was very close to Mum when they were growing up.

My Mum, Beatrice, got sent away twice. The first time, after Elsie’s death, was across town to live with Elsie’s sister in a one-room apartment above Uncle Henry and Auntie Winifred’s garages in the grounds of their sixteen-room mansion, Ferryhill House.

The second time Mum got sent away, was by her father, from Shanghai on a ship (the Empress of Canada) bound for Hong Kong in October 1931. This was a painful episode that Mum never forgot. She never saw her father again. Why, did he send her away? Probably because she became ill with diphtheria the previous year and Hong Kong’s climate was considered more suitable. But it also suggests there was dysfunction in the family. I would love to have known what really happened.

The question quest continues about my Chinese great-grandmother Josephine (Ng Jo-shing), who gave birth to three children with my British great-grandfather Alexander Greaves. What exactly was their relationship? Was she a mistress, a sex-worker, a domestic staff member? Where did she come from and how did she happen to be in Shanghai? In those days, relationships between foreigners and locals were known as miscegenation. Ugh. What a horrible world.

This (above) is the only photograph I have of Josephine with her three children but even this image elicits yet more questions. Why did Alexander make this visual record of his ‘secret’ family? Did he show it to anyone in his English family? What exactly is Josephine wearing (it looks Japanese)?

Chinese women who were ‘partnered’ in pseudo-colonial bachelor societies like Shanghai and the Treaty Port cities, were kept out of sight. They were either mistresses or they were called ‘domestic helpers’ to disguise the truth of why they lived in a foreigner man’s home.

When Alexander abandoned or left Josephine in the 1890’s or early 1900’s, why did she move to Hong Kong with her children? How did the family survive? And my final question about Grandma Josephine is around her death in Hong Kong during the Second World War. She died during the Japanese occupation. She has a gravestone in the colonial cemetery in Happy Valley. Did the headstone come much later (well after the war and the devastating occupation) and is she really buried there?

I have many more questions about Alexander Greaves, but another time. This is only about the women.

On my Dad’s side, the family research has barely begun. I have the precious original cabinet card of my paternal great-grandmother Mabel Alice Radford born in Alverstoke, England in 1879. Her husband was an officer in the army. Mabel, became a nurse in the Voluntary Aid Detachment helping to rehabilitation injured soldiers in Pimlico Hospital in London in 1916.

Mabel died aged thirty-six of meningitis, contracted from soldiers in the hospital. Her grieving husband and two teenage children left England to live in the treaty ports of China after her death. My questions about Mabel are very simple. What was she like? She gave her life for her country in such a silent and selfless way. I hope she did not suffer too much. Who were you Mabel? Speak to me, somehow!

Finally, my paternal grandmother Ethel Bryan Hutcheon: Gran. This image is Gran as a young wife in Shanghai.

Gran died of cancer when I was sixteen years old. I didn’t have a huge connection with her when I was growing up as we lived in Hong Kong and she lived in Sydney, Australia. However, I have a deep admiration for her youthful curiosity, bringing-up three children while living in China and surviving a pirate attack (yes! That story coming soon). I will always remember her brown-paper packages (tied up with… Sellotape) we received in Hong Kong containing her hand-knitted, scratchy, woollen jumpers, Jaffas and Munchies (quality Australian dog biscuits!).

Sadly, at the time Gran died, cancer screening was not widely available. I remember my grandmother as being unemotional and judgemental. She was a committed Anglican. She sang with a trill. I didn’t realise she spent her last months in a hospice and I did not go to her funeral in Australia. My question for Gran is, when you look back at your life, what did you cherish and what did you regret? But of course, what I’d really love to ask all the women in my family is, tell me your story, in your own words, in your time. Let’s start from the beginning. I want to know. I want to know it all.

Rilke, I fear, who urged his young friend to sit a while with his questions, would be displeased.  

Subscribe now

Please feel free to leave your comments so that others can read and learn from them! I’m keen to build a community, so let’s put our respectful thoughts out there!