When I was eleven years old I moved with my family from Bismarck, North Dakota, USA to Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. My Dad worked for Standard Oil and was working on a project to build an oil refinery in Brisbane. It was an adventure. Before we left I had lived in North Dakota and Minnesota my whole life. I had never seen the ocean, a lizard or a cockroach all of which were commonplace in Brisbane. It is a testament to my Mom and Dad that they were willing to take on such an enormous change with four young kids. I was the oldest and my brother who was three at the time was the youngest.
I had lived a few miles from my grandparents for as long as I could remember. We wrote a lot of letters. The phone was expensive and we rarely talked to my Grandparents or anyone in the states. Grandma and Poppy kept all our letters and Dad took a lot of pictures chronicling what we were experiencing.
Recently my sister Barbara decide to sort through the letters and pictures and put together a book about our families experiences in 1964. Using Blurb she put together some of the old pictures and excerpts from some of the letters. She created an amazing book. It was a lot of work, she typed all the text, sorted through all the old pictures and added comments and memories. The resulting book is of interest only to our family but for us it is an amazing reminder of that pivotal year in our lives.
