I find that I have plenty of time on my hands, and I’ve been listening to tapes and watching some of my old VHS videos.

One of those cassette tapes from the 1980s is an interview with my Grandmother. It’s wide-ranging and covers all sorts of stories from her life.

Grandma died in 1991.

My brother Shane and I visited our grandmother, she was living with her eldest daughter, and recorded at least 2 hours of stories.

On this little snippet she talks about the sort of work my grandfather did. Mostly he was a blacksmith, but things were changing, cars where making their way onto the roads, and the need to shoe a horse was no longer a life-time job.

This image appears on a Facebook group I’m a member of.

I’ve seen it described as ‘Harold Hadden’s blacksmith shop, Glenthompson’. When I visit the State Library of Victoria’s page, where the image is held it’s described as ‘Buggies outside blacksmith’s shop‘. The photo was taken between 1890 and 1917 – my Grandfather didn’t have a shop in Glenthompson until 1928 at the earliest.

The surrounding countryside doesn’t really look much like Glenthompson either.

The photographer also took this picture

The country-side looks very similar and it’s captioned, ‘View of town-Archies Creek?‘ which is out Gippsland way.

In amongst my old things I’ve also kept this invoice:

He has invoiced Mr. S Beggs, very likely is Sandford Beggs, father of Tammy Fraser.

Anyway, all of this was enough to inspire me to put together this little video of my Grandmother talking about the work that Harold used to do.

Enjoy.