Like any farm, the O’Connor’s farm at Valencia Creek had a variety of animals. In their letters to the ‘Young Folks’ page of the Weekly Times between 1906 and 1914, the O’Connor children mention not only the farm animals but those living in the wild. And they also show the roles the children played in … Continue reading The O’Connors of Valencia Creek – All Creatures Great and Small
Rural life
The O’Connors of Valencia Creek – Rain, Flood and Fire
The O’Connor children, like the children of any farmer, were well aware of the weather and the effect it had upon the family farm at Valencia Creek. In their letters to the ‘Young Folks’ page of the Weekly Times, they wrote of rain and dry spells, floods and fires. The two most prolific letter writers … Continue reading The O’Connors of Valencia Creek – Rain, Flood and Fire
The O’Connors of Valencia Creek – School Days
With the passing of The Education Act 1872, the colony of Victoria established a system of education that was free, secular and compulsory.1 Children aged between six and fifteen years who lived within two miles by road of a school were required to attend school for at least four hours a day, sixty days in … Continue reading The O’Connors of Valencia Creek – School Days
The O’Connors of Valencia Creek – Life on the Farm
My grandmother Catherine O'Connor c.1905 Aged 16 My grandmother grew up on her father’s farm at Valencia Creek in Gippsland, situated beneath the foothills of the Great Dividing Range and Mount Wellington. Her father, William O’Connor, had been born at Thebarton in South Australia in 1847. His parents, Patrick Connor and Mary White had migrated … Continue reading The O’Connors of Valencia Creek – Life on the Farm
Book Review – Miss Nobody by Ethel Carnie
The 19th century produced a great many female novelists from Jane Austen at the beginning of the century through the Brontes and Elizabeth Gaskell to Ellen Woods to name some of the most famous. Writing at the same time as Ethel Carnie at the start of the 20th century were, among others, Virginia Woolf, Dorothy … Continue reading Book Review – Miss Nobody by Ethel Carnie
Catherine Meyrick 