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The Third Son of a Duke

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I’ve been researching the Melbourne of March 1915, and I was basically gobsmacked.

How can you live in a city for almost half your life and know absolutely nothing about it?

Why wasn’t any of this taught to us in school?  The joke of that is that I know every king and queen of England from William the Conqueror.  I could tell you more than three Australian prime ministers, or state premiers, from when Australia was born, which, by a miracle, I do know, 1901.

As for Victoria, no idea when it became a state, no idea how it was populated beyond a gold rush in the mid-1800s, and barely anything about the Ballarat goldfields and the revolt by the miners.

My great-great-great-grandfather emigrated from England to a place called Harrow in Victoria, a place I’ve never heard of until I started tracing my ancestors, said to be the first town in Victoria.

Since my grandmother features in this story, it is around the time she meets my great-grandfather and her husband-to-be in 1914/1915 in a place called Bairnsdale, a place my father used to mention but not with the fondness a child who was born and brought up there would.

What in hell’s name happened there?

Not our problem in this story, it is just the periphery, or what I think might have happened that interests us, but only as outsiders looking in.

We have a ship to catch. And hi ho hi ho it’s off to war we go!

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1750 words, for a total of 33030 words.