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The Return of the Rellies
I will remember April as 'the month of the rellies', though how it happened that way, I'm not really sure.Living overseas, it is easy to lose touch with one's relatives, and especially if both parents are gone, there's no one to pull you into line and encourage you to keep in touch.
Was it going through my old photos - I wrote about photo memories in my last letter, Don't Look Now!. Was it a question one of my children asked? Perhaps. But in any case I now have relatives popping into my life from all over the place.
It's not like me at all. I have a couple of relatives that I've kept with, but as the years have gone by, I've neglected even my favourite aunt. Now suddenly we are in touch again.
There he was, but no photo. It looked so sad. I surfed around the site and found out how to have his photo displayed. You can see him HERE.
I sent the link to a few of my rellies on my father's side. So that put me back in touch with that lot. And then my mother's side. I was trying to locate a cousin in Israel. No way could I remember his address, and since I threw out my old paper address book, and have gone to an electronic one, I had no older addresses, only names and vague memories of Melbourne suburbs.
But I found them. I found one in the White Pages and she put me onto another, and another ... and so on. I even spoke to one cousin who I hadn't seen or spoken to in well over thirty years.
What is interesting, is not that I found them all, but that it has stirred up more memories. And not just mine, but theirs as well. Photos fly across cyberspace. Questions bounce from the
I dig out one of three brothers. Two of them with two of their seven (in total) wives. The ones on the left is my mother. My dad is top left. Guess which brother was the family black sheep?
"Tell me more about them?" one cousin writes. "Don't you know I email back?" "No", she replies, "my mother wouldn't allow their names to be spoken. Said they were a lot of drunks!"
"Oh well, not all drunks are bad people," I reply, and tell her about a town founded by the rellies on my dad's side. Juliff, Texas, and quote.
"JULIFF, TEXAS. Juliff is on the Missouri Pacific Railroad, Farm Road 521, and the Brazos River, twenty miles east of Richmond in eastern Fort Bend County.[...] The small community soon became a center for drinking, gambling, and prostitution. In 1934 a local resident made up a song about the community that went, in part, "Diddy Wa Diddy, ain't no town, ain't no city," and Diddy Wa Diddy, spelt in a variety of ways, became the unofficial second name for the community." - Texas Handbook Online.
What was he like as a child, another relative emails, about her husband. This one is from my mother's family, so I'm safe from comments about drunks. All solid citizens in that line. I remember the man as a boy. A real bugger. Gave me hell. Oh well, out with the truth. He reads my email, standing behind her as she opens it. He says - "tell her that I haven't changed," she emails back.
Some of the emails concern scandals of days long past. I mention things I've always known but could not say while the participants were alive. Some of us begin to doubt our parentage. My god, what have I done. A cyber Pandora's box is opened. Do I have no sisters? Or two, or three?
There's one relative no one seems to know about, but I do. His name was Jewel. I say 'was' as I am sure he would have changed it. It wasn't as if he was a child of the seventies and had little Sunshine's', Chaos's and Heavenly Hiraani Tiger Lily's to grow up with. Jewel Juliff was born in the 1940's - those black and gray days of Australia in the Menzie's era. Perhaps he changed his name to Julian.
So if anyone out there knows of him, please let me know. He can join all the others and ask me about his dad - third brother on the right. Jack the rogue!
Jack had a huge scar along his inner right thigh. He used to tell people he got with a bottle opener while trying to open a bottle of beer. But occasionally the story changed and he would say he got it in Papua New Guinea in World War II when he was single-handeldly fighting off seven Japanese soldiers.
Another one of Jack's yarns we thought. ASIF!
One day Jack checked himself in to the Heidelberg Repat in Melbourne. He'd gone there to die. He was sick of life. The doctors said there was nothing wrong with him, but admitted him, and within three weeks Jack had departed this world.
Almost forgotten. But not quite. In 1982 a cleaner at a Melbourne university saw the name 'Juliff' on a door. He knocked and entered.
"Juliff!" he said. "I knew a Juliff." "Great bloke. Bit of a drinker. It was during the war in New Guinea. Last time I saw him he was standing on a hillock fighting off seven Japanese soldiers".
So there you go Jewel, if you are reading this. And it just goes to show, that as I said to another relative of yours and mine, not all drunks are bad.
Till next time,
Kate Juliff
New York
May 2006