from my writing/diaries class last year:

Once upon a time, my Grandma showed her bellybutton on St Kilda beach, in what was possibly Melbourne’s first bikini.
She didn’t have a mother to stop her. Her wicked stepmother had packed her off to live with her grandparents in Ballarat when she was small, and some people might have said she ran wild.
She was beautiful, with tight waves of hair breaking on her high, flushed cheeks. She held her head like the prow of a boat, jutting out and up, saying “I am here.”
Every day but Sunday, she swam from St Kilda Pier to St Kilda breakwater and back; one mile in the salty water.
Then she’d go to work in the job that was keeping her safe from the circling shark of Depression. She joined forces with another young woman, and together they did the work of two for the price of one, holding together the office of a fabric factory in Brunswick with their painted nails, holding onto a steady income as fast as their fingers could type.
They had no one but each other. She didn’t expect a prince.
And then one Sunday as she strolled the promenade above the pier, listening to the military band playing in its elevated bandstand, George Hogg saw her. He saw her straight back, her white teeth, her smile as she whispered into her friend’s ear.

My grandmother, Elsie Dunn, was married in a church that still stands today on the highest hill in St Kilda; you could see the bay from the confetti-covered steps. She made her own wedding dress by hand, for reasons of economy rather than sentiment. It had a silken train that made it impossible to see where her feet met the ground; she could have been a mermaid.

Her mother, Elizabeth Dunn, died before she could see her daughter grow up. Her father, Albert Edward Dunn, remarried. My mother has not chosen to include the children of that marriage in her handwritten family tree. It was 80 years ago if it was a day, but that nameless new wife has not yet been forgiven.

Elizabeth’s parents, Elizabeth and Andrew Thompson, of Ballarat, took in their granddaughter for a while; but she had been a child in St Kilda and that was where she returned. The flat she and her new husband shared, a flat called Graham, is still there, desirable Art Deco real estate just behind the cake shops, bars, cafes and seaside diversions of Acland St.
Their first child was a girl: my mother. Lorraine Joan Hogg grew up in leafy Glen Iris, with early memories of bomb shelters and chickens in the backyard: George went to trhe war, came home and never spoke of it again. My mother, Lorraine, shouldered the care of two siblings while Elsie devoted herself to moving and massaging the stiffened limbs of my aunt, nursing her through polio to walk again, no matter what the doctors said.
I was five; I stayed with Grandma, dressing paper dolls in paper cutouts in her floral bedroom. She gave me illicit cups of tea, a sweet sludge of sugar settling in the fine white and purple gilt-edged cup.

Elizabeth and Andrew Thompson are mysteries to me. Jewellers, I think, though I don’t know why. Andrew’s father, though, rides a rich settler’s fine horse through our family’s tales.
He is mentioned in histories of my hometown, Ballarat, for citizenship and assistance in erecting marble statues of Robert Burns.
Andrew Topping Thompson: a topping type.
I knew none of this, and wouldn’t have cared if I did, when I was growing up in Ballarat, the great-great-great-granddaughter of a city founder.
What I did know was that things weren’t what they used to be.