Two and a half years ago, on a grey winter morning in our small kitchen, we sliced the tape on a cardboard box that had been tucked away in a cousin's garage for decades. The box was unremarkable from the outside, marked only with a faded shipping label and the name of a relative none of us had ever met. Inside, wrapped in old newspaper and tied with cotton string, lay a stack of postcards, roughly one hundred and twenty of them, spanning the years 1918 to 1934. Each card was addressed, stamped, and postmarked, carrying handwritten notes in fountain pen ink that had long since faded to sepia.
Loni's blog has been the home for stories like this one, the quiet family moments folded into larger histories. The postcards became a kind of time machine, offering glimpses of ordinary lives lived through extraordinary decades. Sorting through them became a slow, contemplative ritual. We set them out on the dining table in chronological order, brewed pot after pot of tea, and began reading. What we found was not just correspondence but a layered portrait of a family scattered across continents, writing home about weather, illness, weddings, and the price of butter.
The cardboard had gone soft at the corners, and the string had left faint impressions in the brittle newsprint. Our cousin had warned us the box was heavy with paper, and she wasn't wrong. It must have weighed three kilograms with everything inside. We placed it on the table near the window where the morning light came in sideways, the way it does in Adelaide during July. The kettle clicked on. The radio murmured something about a cargo ship docking in Fremantle. And for a few minutes, neither of us moved to open it.
There is a particular kind of hesitation that arrives before opening something sealed by a stranger's hand. The postcards had been written by people whose names we knew but whose voices we had never heard. Some were addressed to "Dearest Mother" and others to "My darling Vi." One envelope was marked simply "To be opened at Christmas." The act of reading felt almost trespass-like, as though we were stepping into rooms that had been left exactly as they were on the day they were written.
When we finally peeled back the layers, the smell was unmistakable. It was old paper, slightly sweet, with the faint mineral tang of ink that has oxidised over a century. The topmost card showed a young woman in a wide-brimmed hat standing beside a rose bush. On the back, in a careful copperplate hand, she had written six lines about a garden in Surrey and the price of flour. That single card set the tone for everything that followed.
The earliest card in the box was postmarked 11 November 1918, Armistice Day, and it was sent from a soldier to his sister in Melbourne. He wrote that he was "well and looking forward to coming home to the harbour bridge works." The phrase surprised us. The Sydney Harbour Bridge was not completed until 1932, and at the time the card was written, the project was still years from approval. Reading between his lines, we sensed the optimism of a young man who had survived the war and imagined a future built on steel and rivets rather than trenches.
The handwriting across the collection told its own story. Earlier cards, from the war years and just after, tended toward the upright and formal, likely taught in schoolrooms where the Palmer method was still gospel. By the mid-1920s, the script had softened, slanted more to the right, and began to include the occasional looping descender. The pens changed too. We could see where fountain pens had left thicker, slightly variable strokes, and where ballpoints, arriving in the late 1940s, produced crisp and even lines.
Many of the cards were sent from places far away. One series followed a family from rural Victoria to Perth, then on to a small settlement outside Broome, then back to Sydney. The postcards documented the journey not through photography but through the small, recurring complaints of the writer: the heat, the flies, the unreliable mail coach, the kindness of a station owner near Katherine. Together they read like a slow-moving chronicle of inland Australia in the 1920s, written by someone who had no idea their words would outlive the routes they travelled.
What struck us most, after the writing itself, was the postal infrastructure visible on every card. Stamps from the British Empire sat beside Australian ones, and occasionally a card bore a redirection mark from the Dead Letter Office in Melbourne. Several were postally used during the 1920s postage stamp shortage, when collectors stripped stamps from mail and replacements had to be hand-stamped. These details may sound technical, but they gave each card a second layer of biography, a record of where it had been and how it had travelled.
One card, sent from Brisbane to a recipient in Launceston, had been stamped three times. The first stamp had been torn away, leaving a brown paper rectangle. The second had been applied at the post office and cancelled with an iron handstamp. The third, a small blue two-penny, had been added later by the recipient as a kind of keepsake. We spent a long time over that card, wondering why someone had chosen to preserve it so carefully.
The geographic range of the senders was broader than we had expected. Cards had arrived from London, Cape Town, Vancouver, and Wellington, as well as from small New South Wales towns we had never heard of. Several were sent by relatives who had migrated during the gold rush era and never returned. Others came from the same families, written by different generations, and addressed to the same grandmother in a terrace house in Fitzroy.
| Era | Card Style | Common Subjects | Typical Postage |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1918–1922 | Black-and-white real photo, undivided back | Soldiers, families, war memorials | 1½d red, 2d brown |
| 1923–1928 | Colour lithograph, divided back | Beaches, gardens, city scenes | 1d green, 1½d red |
| 1929–1934 | Linen-textured, vibrant dyes | Harbours, bridges, tourist sites | 2d red, 1½d green |
The table above is only a rough guide, drawn from what we observed in our own collection. Card production changed rapidly during these years, and what we had were samples, not a comprehensive survey. Still, the pattern felt right: the early cards were intimate and personal, while the later ones leaned toward the picturesque and the mass-produced.
For readers unfamiliar with Australian postal rates, a 1½d stamp in the 1920s would have bought roughly the same postal service as a base-rate stamp today, but with far fewer letters in circulation. Sending a card from a country town to the city might take four or five days, and there were seasonal disruptions when river crossings flooded in the Top End or when snow closed the alpine passes.
A few voices stayed with us longer than others. There was "Auntie Gwen," who wrote from a sheep station near Hay in 1926, complaining about the dust and the silence, but also about the beauty of the river red gums at sunset. There was a young man named Ted who wrote from Perth in 1929, on the eve of the Depression, asking his mother for "ten shillings if you can spare it." There was a schoolteacher in Hobart who wrote to her sister every fortnight for almost a decade, her cards forming a kind of ongoing diary of weather, schoolroom politics, and the price of mutton.
The card that affected us most was the simplest. It had been sent on 25 April 1923, Anzac Day, and contained only three lines: "Thinking of you today. The harbour looks beautiful. Love, Dad." The recipient, we later discovered, had been one of the soldiers who had written the 1918 card five years earlier. He had survived the war, returned to Sydney, and worked on the harbour bridge project after all. His father's card, written on the fifth anniversary of the landing at Gallipoli, was a quiet echo across generations.
Once we had read and reread the cards, the question became what to do with them. Old postcards are surprisingly fragile. The inks can flake, the corners can curl, and the postmarks can fade if handled too often. We placed each card in a clear archival sleeve, then into a fireproof album, and stored the album in a drawer away from direct sunlight. We also made high-resolution scans, in case the originals ever needed to rest.
For those thinking of doing similar work, a few practical notes. Acid-free sleeves are essential. Polypropylene or polyester is preferable to PVC, which can damage paper over time. Gloves are useful but not always necessary if hands are clean and dry. A soft brush can remove surface dust without disturbing the ink. And patience, a great deal of patience, matters more than any tool. We read the cards in batches of five or six, took breaks, and let the stories settle.
The postcards are now part of a larger archive of family papers that Allen has been gathering for years. They sit alongside his poetry notebooks, his prose drafts, and the genealogical records of the Tidwell, South, Brighton, Telford, and McCarthy lines. The site allenhackworth.com is where much of this material is shared: chronologies, obituaries, photographs, and the occasional fragment of family writing. Loni's blog, linked from the main site, is where the everyday moments go, including a new recipe, a walk along the Yarra, and a quiet afternoon sorting through old boxes.
The collection is not finished. There are still boxes in attics, in cousins' sheds, and in the back of wardrobes. Each one carries its own sealed silence. Opening them is slow work, but it is also generous work, because every letter returns a voice to the family chorus, a mother, a soldier, a sister, a son, a father remembering his son. The morning we opened the box of century-old postcards was the morning the silence finally spoke, and the voices we heard that day still carry, faintly and clearly, into every room we walk through now.