family

January 2008. I move to Bendigo to be near my daughter. She is 27 years old and I am 57. I want to leave Melbourne; I am taking up a job in Bendigo; but more than that I resolved some time ago to be near my grandchildren. As a child I lived a long way from my grandparents and never formed the comfortable bond many children have with their extended families.

No grandchildren are on the agenda at the start of 2008, but my daughter is more likely to produce heirs. She has a partner, whereas my son has not had a girlfriend for nine years.

January 2010. My daughter summons her partner into the driveway when I pick her up to take her to Melbourne and they announce a pregnancy. Within weeks her partner leaves to work in a remote Aboriginal community as far away as you can be on the Australian mainland. My pregnant daughter stays on to organise their belongings, then drives herself and an embryo across the Nullabor in a small rusty car packed to the gunwales.

They love life on the edge of the Great Sandy Desert but her partner hates the job and they return to Bendigo seven months later. By now I have made plans to return to Melbourne; my work contract will soon end. I resolve to stop pursuing my children and do my own thing. If in the future we live close and I see my grandchild, I’ll count myself lucky.

January 2012. Nerri’s birth means that four generations of my family inhabit this place: my parents in their eighties, me at 60 and my sister at 58, my son and daughter, now 32 and 30, and one-year-old Nerri. Growing up without grandparents in my life, I knew only two generations, and gave neither any thought.

The birth and growing up of my sister’s and my children offers a new perspective; I can look both back and forward and observe family traits. The fourth generation will sharpen that perspective.

My mother’s family were well known to me. She and her three elderly sisters still get together regularly. Her brother died 30 years ago. My father’s brothers died long ago too and ostensibly he has no living relative, until I discover one.

An article on the Carlton Football Club website alerts me that the man my family knows as Uncle Charlie, five-time Carlton premiership champion, has a surviving daughter, my father’s cousin Olive, known as Ollie. She lives in a nursing home in Bendigo. I ring the home and speak to her. I want to give her a premiership medallion that her father gave to his sister, my grandmother, handed from her to my father and from him to me.

She tells me she is not well and I should talk to her son Geoff. We meet and he’s a champion bloke, my second cousin, if he’s correct. We organise for my father to catch the train with me to Bendigo to meet Ollie. My father, who never cared about family, is excited, but before we can make the connection, Ollie dies.

I commiserate with Geoff. He introduces me to his older brother Jim, the black sheep of their family. He’d gone his own way, made his own mistakes. I like him too. Now I’ve left Bendigo I doubt we’ll keep contact. I don’t see my daughter or grand-daughter often enough either.

Rock on.