Sometime
around late 1961 this photo was taken of my brother Åke, me and
some of the girls from the neighborhood in Cottesloe, with all of us,
as you can see, dressed up for a masquerade party or gathering.
No place on earth could have given
us boys from Sweden a greater pleasure than those sunny Western
Australian beaches where we could play around all day, try and tackle
the surf or go beach combing for shells and capsules. In those
early days of innocence and laughter we became almost as
amphibious as a pair of frogs, prob- ably spending more time in the
water than up on land.
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Or even doing things which little
girls
are more into, like going out with a pram or two!
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And this is me posing with my dearest
pos- session, that well beaten Australian football of mine. By this
time we had
moved away from
the city to the small, rural town of Katanning. Life was nice and kind
of slow there though a
little bit rough, while my father had finally gotten himself a steady
job teaching woodwork to the kids at high school. But inevitably
our
hearts still yearned for the ocean and so eventually the family
purchased a
summer residency in Kwinana on the west coast.
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The family out with the first car we
had,
heading down Albany way while passing along side of Stirling
range, which I was deeply fascinated by.
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Here
dad and a friend of the family are burning off dry grass just prior to
the summer season. It's something every house owner had to
attend to in order to prevent unexpected fires from blazing up around
their property.
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If you couldn't make out who the
boys were on the previous shot, here's a better presentation!
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And
fairly soon we had gotten acquainted with most of the kids in the area,
playing "cowboys and indians", "simon says", "hide and seek"
and doing most of the things boys do, like wrestling for instance.
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This is my first chance meeting with
a
koala, even though this photo was taken at a zoo
somewhere near Perth.
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Here's my dear mother perched on a
fallen gum tree somewhere in the vicinity of Katanning or there abouts.
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Once again here is my mother, this
time holding my youngest brother Niklas only a few days after he was
born, thus being (or once having been) the only true fair din cum
Aussie of all our family members! In the
background is our
Chrysler Valiant which regularly carried us vast distances from our
habitat in the wheat district all the way up to our summer residency in
Kwinana and then back again.
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Sometimes
it could get out of hands as one had to pay close attention to how and
where
the wind was blowing. No easy match for a beginner, but an obligation
one just couldn't escape from if you didn't want to get interrogated by
the local authorities!
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previous page!
continued during this period to teach
woodwork, this
time
at Pinjarra High school where I also attended class for a year and
a half. During this period I
gained
some of the best friends I've ever gotten to know, from left to right
Jeff Carroll and Melvyn Tuckey, with whom I
am still in contact though it took me more than forty years to find
them again. To the right is a small image of my old class mate Melvyn
in the year of 1965.
dining
hall of the passenger ship
called "Fairstar", while the pic up above, on this
side, is a shot taken from the Fremantle wharf just before our
departure. In the midst of the waving crowd is my mum and brother
Åke looking smug as ever and happily unaware of the
terrible storm we were to face within the next week on the leg of our
journey which took us from from
Adelaide to Melbourne. It was an unhappy ending to our
5½
years in OZ which took us for a rough and tumble ride that
went
on for a whole night and well into the next day, giving us a really
wild and horrifying perspective on the full throttle power of a
Roaring forties winter hurricane.
