This year my creative life has lost its splendour. Looking after
my Dad, boredom with the creativity I adored and feeling stale
has contributed to much gathering with little outgoing. Plenty
going on my head, gorgeous items all produced in my imagination
but nothing to show. I’m hoping to pick up the pieces soon. I’ve
started to knit, made postcards for a swap with a US group and
purchased some beautifulness to endeavour creating something
different ~ so watch this space. During this time I’ve been devouring
books and magazine to try to reignite the spark and heave me out
of the gloom.
A true reading joy came via
The Sydney Morning Herald 'Good Weekend Magazine' in the stunning edition produced for
the 175th anniversary where I discovered the following two gems ~
Read #1 ~
‘Life under Rations” by Ruth Park.
Identity cards for civilians were part of life during World War II. Without one, you could not get your food and clothing ration coupons or a hospital bed or a job, and certainly not entry to any official place or building. Ruth Park found hers among some old papers years later and the memories came flooding back.
The shortage that affected me most was needles. (Anything made of
metal was certain to disappear sooner or later.) I can still remember
sitting up in bed in my parachute nightdress, between mattress-ticking
sheets, crying because I’d lost my needle. You can’t imagine what it’s
like to be without a needle, with no hope of another till the war ends,
which was probably never,
Where did it go, for I never found it. Down a crack, I suppose, like those long-ago years when we laughed, and had our hearts broken, and made eggless, butterless, sugarless cakes, and waited for the boys to come home and life to start once more.
Makes me realise how fortunate I am have own such a bumper, creative stash.Read #2 ~ Adoring all things Art Deco this is gorgeous ~
THE FLAPPER BY ONE WHO KNOWS HER.
August 21, 1926.
Certainly taken en masse she would seem to be a painted, pleasure
loving, cocktail drinking, cigarette smoking, thoughtless little lassie,
whose thoughtlessness to her elders and the aged in many cases
amounts almost to heartlessness. She would appear to have one
thought, and that thought, self and how much juice of pleasure she
can squeeze from the orange called life, and throw away the rind.
Traditions are trampled under her feet; youth is paramount.
Yes, all this is true, or so it would seems collectively. But,
individually, what so we find in the Australian lassie, anyway? A
clean-limbed, wholesome, sports loving girl, who can play a
game of tennis, golf, or hockey with anyone, who can row a boat,
or run a car all day if need be, and dance half the night, but who
can, also equally well, run a business, nurse the sick, make cleverly
and daintily her won and oft times her mother’s or sister’s frocks
and undies; who reads much , and oft times quiet deeply, who can
organise and committees, and provide for meetings for the benefit
of these same charities. She can, and does, all the time, look smart,
trim and fresh, as she goes about her business or pleasure.
I admit that oft times she is loathe to relinquish her gay freedom
and take-on the responsibilities of matrimony, but when she does
she can keep her home as well as any of the lassies of a former
generation, can be as faithful and loving a wife, as tender a mother,
as thoughtful as a daughter-in-law, as thrifty a housekeeper; and can
entertain her own and her husband’s friends, even better than the
young wives of former generation, for her style is more open, more
free – there is, to my mind, more of a comrade between the sexes,
nd less of sex thoughts than there used to be in our grandmothers’
time,
Yes, the flapper of today, with all her faults – and I admit she has
them – is yet to me a nearere perfect girl than any that has gone
before her. Miss Australia, all hail; I raise me hat to you, and I’m
one of your own sex, and old enough to be your mother.
Don’t you just breathe a sigh of relief at not being a ‘flapper’?
