“As If It Were Yesterday When I Lived There!”
One of our long-time members, Elizabeth, reminisced about her childhood home after coming across a photo that brought the memories flooding back.
Riverdale – The Way It Was
Interesting when you look at a photo, it brings back lots of memories.
My sister took this photo in the early 1960’s from our grandmother’s veranda which overlooked the dairy and farm. I can see so much as if it were yesterday when I lived there.
We would walk down to the dairy past Grandma Armstrong’s home, past the chook pens on the left and the huge mango tree near Grandma’s and the old car garage on the right. We would walk through the gate where the tank lay and the old sulky. There was a macadamia tree on either side of the gate.
The poddy calves were kept in this small paddock we passed as we took the track to the dairy with the big cement tank on one side and the old dairy on the other side. Then past the fire boiler always stacked with wood to boil the water to wash the milk cans and clean all the machinery after the milking was finished – see the smoke. We had eight bails for the cattle and troughs in front of them where we fed them hay, oats, etc. The cows were very contented chomping as they were being milked. This was all done in the big shed which housed all the feed; bales of hay, and oats and lucerne which had been cultivated on the farm. The paddock below the dairy was for the ponies; and the one above the dip was for the bullocks.
Looking again from the veranda we can see down the dirt road around the corner to the left of the cattle dip which had been used until the 1950s, when a new system of tick spraying of the cattle was brought in.
Looking to the left of the dip to the far hill we could see the home of the Murray family. This was where Slacks Creek meets the Logan River. Jim and Rose Murray and family sometimes came to our place to look after the dairy, so we could go for a short holiday to our holiday home at Surfer’s Paradise. We had a day paddock on the edge of Slacks Creek called Benson’s. If we are looking over that way now, we see the Logan Motorway cutting along our property past Griffith University along behind the hill, that the Murray house stands on to this day, to Loganholme and onto the Pacific Highway.
The paddocks around the dairy were our night paddocks. They were called “The Church”, “The Aerodrome” and “Auntie’s”. These are now occupied by the Logan Hospital and Logan TAFE, the Logan Motorway and Griffith University. Every paddock had a name.
We have so many memories of our home “Riverdale” at Loganlea, from the 1860s to the 1970s.”
What about you? Do you sometimes riffle through old albums, shoe boxes of photos or a digital album and unexpectedly be drawn back into the past as a photo weaves its memory magic? You start to think about the people in the photo and wonder what happened to them.
As family history researchers, we often find that photos help us to understand past generations and the lives of our ancestors – even those of parents and grandparents. It you would like to know more, please visit us at our rooms at the Slacks Creek Progress Hall, Springwood.
