WEEK 2

A FAVOURITE PHOTO

When this title came up, wow! I immediately knew my subject photo.
It is an old black and white of my mother’s father, he is not posing, he doesn’t look spectacular in fact it is quite an ordinary photo.

I was living and working in Colac, Victoria in 1970.
One of the older ladies in town had been quite ill during the winter, and I had visited her a few times, I discovered, rather quickly that she was not into small talk, and when not well, preferred not to talk at all.
One day when I went to visit Mrs Watkins, she was up and about and ready for a good chat.
Mrs Watkins had lived all her life in Colac, raised her many children and buried her husband, her children had moved out of town, so she was alone in her old but lovely home, that her husband had built when they married.
This day I mentioned to her that the walls must have been very sturdy as there were a lot of photo attached to them.
This comment started Mrs Watkins telling me about every photo and who was who, they were mostly family, but there were two that were a group of people.
She told me who was who in the newer one, it included her husband and sons, who was related to each other and who they married. By the time she got to that bit I was thinking gosh I hope I am not expected to remember all this!

She then commenced on the older photo, I was thinking oh dear does she know everyone in town, the answer would have been yes, after telling me about just a couple of the names in this photo we both noticed we had been standing quite a while, she went to a drawer pulled out a copy of the photo and we sat down to look at it, while she continued with the story of the photo.
I was once again told the whole story who was who, who married etc.
There was a rather tall man standing on the end of the back row, Mrs Watkins looked a bit worried, “you know dear, I don’t know anything about this man except the name written on the back”, with that she said “it says R Drake,” that was all the clue it gave.
I sat for a bit taking in that name, she had the phone connected and I asked if I could make a phone call to Stawell, where my parents lived, dad answered the phone, it was him I wanted to speak to, I asked him if mums dad had ever lived at Colac, the answer was yes! Then dad told me the approximate years, he wanted more information but I put him off.
The man in the photo was my mother’s father, and here he was in a photo of a brass band in Colac, Mrs Watkins was a bit surprised when I told her who R Drake was to me, she lent me that precious photo, with her father in it, taken about 1901.
On her suggestion I took it to the newspaper photographer as he was the only person in town who could copy the photo, more correctly a tiny section of the photo, just the face of the man on the end of the back row, standing on the ground when everyone else was standing on a bench so that they could be seen.

I just wanted some copies of his face for mum, as she didn’t have any of him he died when she was 9, in 1925.

A favourite photo and how I came to have a copy of it! Wow this was how, I was in the right place at the right time talking to the only person in town who would have a copy of that old photo,and know the details of it, everyone else in that photo had at some time later left Colac with their family, except Mrs Watkins.

Mum was thrilled to have a photo of her father Robert Cooper Drake, until the day she passed away that photo stayed within her line of sight. The only photo she ever had of him, slightly fuzzy, but that was ok, to mum it was the best photo on the shelf.