Eleven months today

Today marks eleven months since Joan died. I have noticed that elderly people (and I now admit to being one) have a propensity to weep at thoughts and events which previously would not have affected them. I'm one of them...not overtly, but Joan's presence in our home, in the form of her many artefacts, photos etc often move me to a few tears as is happening as I write this.

Years ago when I was a young (22 year old) single teacher at an isolated school in the Gulf of Papua I observed a daily mourning ritual of a young man who had lost his brother. At approximately the same time each afternoon this fellow would suddenly start howling loudly and beating his chest in front of other villagers and often me. The performance went on for probably no more than five minutes and he would suddenly stop and carry on as if nothing had happened. I cannot recall how long this went on for and I guess it was a traditional thing in this language group. I was Teacher in charge at Arehava Primary School for three years and as I lived in a village, saw much of the traditional family life around me. I wrote of one of these incidents here.

This morning I rang the Public Trustee to find out what the delay has been in processing Joan's estate. It seems that there is no reason it was not processed weeks ago and I received a promise, one of several over the last couple of months, that it would be finalised by this Friday. Maybe.

My mother was born in Narrogin and brought up on a farm at Toolibin 30 miles east of Narrogin. I remember her talking about all the neighbours and one family, the Hoyles was often mentioned. Some time ago amongst mother's photographs I found a nice pic of three of the Hoyle kids, probably taken around 1921 or so. There is Sally, Minnie and Dick. Dick went to war in New Guinea and was killed. He is buried at Lae Military Cemetery. Yesterday I had an urge to see if I could find some descendents of the surviving two in the photographs. I rang my cousin Val to see if she recalled anything about the Hoyles and surprisingly she did in fact; she was a flowergirl at Minnie's wedding. Next I looked up the Whitepages Online and found a few phone numbers for Minnie's married name living around Wickepin which is quite close to Toolibin. Bingo! I talked with a couple of folks and have emailed the cleaned-up photo to them. Hope to continue contact and find out what happened to the Hoyles. Val is, of course, very interested and if anything of great interest emerges we will drive to Wickepin to meet up with the descendents.