Abstract
My Mum, Edna Wilton, died in July 2009. It was unexpected. She had been living independently. It’s true, she was short of breath, had a heart condition, a cracked pelvis and had had a fall—but she was rallying; getting better. Then, after four weeks of slow recovery, her body suddenly shut down. She was 90. The medical staff, friends, relatives; we all kept talking about a long life, a good life. It didn’t compensate. She was gone. As so often at times like this, my brothers, my sister, myself, our families, our relatives, our friends started to share memories. Her life, our father, our childhood. Her memorial service was full of memories. An oral history interview I had conducted twenty years before, complemented by her exquisitely eccentric diary of significant events from across her life, shaped the memory-picture we used to provide a framework for all of our other memories. Her mass of loose photographs and photograph albums offered up images and memories that could be shared through the wonders of modern technology. As we talked and remembered, there was Mum as a child, a Girl Guide, a young mother, a grandmother, a volunteer at the Royal Far West Children’s School,2 and so much more. Someone photographed the service. This mixing of photographs and memories continues to shape the ways in which we are coming to terms with our Mum’s absence; we are sharing stories and building a bank of family images that can be passed on to children, grandchildren, great grandchildren, cousins, and friends.
With thanks to my brothers, Noel and Greville Wilton, sister Lyn Loveday, and other family members for sharing their memories and for their willingness to participate in this exercise. Thanks also to Glenda Kupczyk-Romanczuk and Joe, Daniel, and Rachel Eisenberg for their thoughtful feedback and suggestions.
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Notes
Martin Bashforth, “Absent fathers, present histories,” in People and their Pasts: Public History Today, ed. Paul Ashton and Hilda Kean (Basingstoke Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 203–223;
Margaret Gibson, Objects of the Dead. Mourning and Memory in Everyday Life (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2008);
Mary Palevsky, “Questioning history: personal inquiry and public dialogue,” Oral History Review, 29, 2 (2002): 69–74.
Hilda Kean’s readable and inspiring family history London Stories (London: Rivers Oram Press, 2004)
Janis Wilton, “Telling objects: material culture and memory in oral history interviews,” Oral History Association of Australia Journal, 30 (2008): 41–49,
Janis Wilton, “Belongings: oral history, objects and an online exhibition,” Public History Review, 16 (2009): 1–19.
Janis Wilton, Golden Threads: The Chinese in Regional NSW 1850–1950 (Sydney: Powerhouse Museum, 2004);
Annette Kuhn, “Remembrance,” in Family Snaps: The Meaning of Domestic Photography, ed. Jo Spence and Patricia Holland (London: Virago Press, 1991), 17–25.
Geoffrey Batchen, Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004);
Albert Chong, “The photograph as a receptacle of memory,” Small Axe, 29 (2009), 128–136;
Martha Langford, “Speaking the album: an application of the oral-photographic framework,” in Locating Memory: Photographic Arts, ed. Annette Kuhn and Kirstin McAllister Emiko (New York: Bergahn Books, 2006), 223–246;
Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart, Photographs Objects Histories: On the Materiality of Objects (New York: Routledge, 2004).
On the materiality of photographs and how to read them, see also Marcus Banks, Visual Methods in Social Research (London: Sage, 2001)
Richard Chalfen, “Interpreting family photography as pictorial communication,” in Image-Based Research: A Sourcebook for Qualitative Researchers, ed. Jon Prosser (London: Falmer Press, 1998), 190–208.
Maryanne Garry and Matthew P. Gerrie, “When photographs create false memories,” Current Directions in Psychological Science, 14, 6 (December 2005): 321–325.
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© 2011 Alexander Freund and Alistair Thomson
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Wilton, J. (2011). Imaging Family Memories: My Mum, Her Photographs, Our Memories. In: Freund, A., Thomson, A. (eds) Oral History and Photography. Palgarve Studies in Oral History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230120099_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230120099_4
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