On a lazy Sunday afternoon

It's been a busy week, so some lazy time at the end of it is very welcome!

Last night we saw the local dramatic society's production of "Midsummer Night's Dream", a play which I studied in my second year of high school - a thousand years ago, at least - and it was an excellent production.  A very good cast made sense of most of Master Shakespeare's words, not always an easy thing!  The humans wore modern dress, the mechanicals wore fun steampunk costumes, and the fairies were.....well, fairies, I suppose.  They didn't wear tutus or wave sparkly wands, but we still knew they were fairies.

That was preceded by a performance early in the afternoon by the uke group in the garden of the local music school, people said nice things to us and about us but I don't think we played as well as we have on other occasions.  Never mind, there's always next time......

On our recent trip home from the Big Smoke we stopped off at a memorial to a miner killed on 16th December, 1929, in the bush between two towns which are rapidly encroaching on this peaceful spot.

You can even tell that I was wearing blue denim capri pants and a red top, can't you?  Here is more information about the event which led to the memorial - the so-called "Rothbury Riot".  Many words have been written about this in newspapers, books, and song; here's one (interestingly on an Italian site) written by a local man a year afterwards, a musician who played violin in a dance band.  It was played and sung for many years afterwards. Another song written many years later was sung by my choir in Sydney who learnt it at my request because Norman Brown, the miner shot and killed by a police bullet that day, was my mother's cousin.  His death certificate states that he died from the " effects of a gunshot wound in the abdomen accidentally received at Rothbury during the quelling by police officers of a riot".  Accidentally - who knows?  There's no one alive today to dispute that; police apparently had orders to fire into the air to dispel the miners, although some eye-witnesses said they fired directly into the crowd.  Norman was sitting to one side with a few mates and was hit by a ricocheting bullet, dying almost instantly.  The information contained on his death certificate was written after the inquest into his death which took place nearly two months afterwards.

Norman was born when his mother Laura was 17.....interestingly my grandmother Edith, her sister, also had a child out of wedlock at 18.......and now the mystery deepens, as Laura later had (so my mother told me) a daughter named Dorothy Grace.  Gracey, as she was known in the family, died of appendicitis as a teenager, but on looking online for her birth record the only Dorothy Grace born in possible years has Ethel given as her mother - and Ethel was a sister of Laura and Edith!  Note to self:  must investigate further.....I have no memories of Laura as she died when I was barely a toddler so have to rely on memories of what my mother told me, and she died 15 years ago so I can't ask her.  Matters like illegitimacy used to be hushed up and not spoken about in earlier days so my mother probably wouldn't have known who gave birth to Gracey, she herself was only two years old when Gracey died.  Laura is named on Gracey's grave marker as her mother, and Albert, the man Laura married in 1910 (two years after the only baby I could find named Dorothy Grace was born) is named as her father.

Family mysteries are quite intriguing, aren't they?  A distant cousin and I both have Grace as our middle names as a tribute to Gracey......Jennifer Dorothy would be a bit of a mouthful.  Jennifer Grace isn't too bad.

"Sunday hospitalities.
In this country it is not expected that persons will call after informal hospitalities extended on Sunday.  All gatherings on that day ought to be informal.  No dinner parties are given on Sunday, or at least, they are not considered as good form in good society."

Thank goodness for that, because I am feeling too lazy to prepare for a dinner party.

Enjoy your days!