This is a Golden Moment repeat program, taken from our Vault of Treasured memories, where we re-present a program we believe is worth repeating, because while lockdown has ended, there have been restrictions on visiting and interviewing older people.

This is Part 1 of a 2-part story featuring the Life and Times of Bessie Connelly.

Bessie was born in 1934 and was 77 years of age when interviewed in November of 2011. Born in the period that saw the world just emerging from the Great Depression, she tells of the time when her family were forced to sleep on a bed of pine needles on the banks of the Yarra River at Heidelberg in Victoria. Her story includes an explanation for how this terrible predicament came about.

Although the family was not Catholic, Bessie attended a local catholic school and received a good education. She tells how she loved the nuns and the experience. However, in a remarkable part of the story, her father found gold while prospecting in Eltham and contracted “gold fever” and she was forced to leave the school as her father moved the family in order to seek more gold.

However Bessie also reveals how lurking just below the surface, was her father’s alcoholism and when the family moved into a house adjacent to a hotel, his problem became worse and was so bad her friends wouldn’t visit her because they were frightened of her father.

Her mother was a kind and gentle person who did what she could to be a barrier between her father when he drank, and her sister, her grandmother and herself. You could be forgiven for thinking that Bessie might have been a “beaten-down child” that would have become bitter toward the world – but as you will learn, nothing is further from the truth.

Click to hear – Bessie Connelly – Part 1Previous Listen To Older Voices Programs can be found in our archive, by clicking on one link or the other

– 2012 to 2016   

 –  2016 onward 

[Listen To Older Voices receives funding from the Commonwealth Government 
through the Commonwealth Home Support Program Program]