Life: Woodend

Cities and Memory - remixing the world

This is a recording of a few moments from Christmas Day 2023 in Woodend, Victoria, Australia - about an hour north of Melbourne. I come here with my wife, Heather, and our children when we can save up enough to pay for the airfare, as it is a critical opportunity for my family to connect with their cousins, and particularly for my wife to see her niece and nephew, who she loves very deeply and for whom she tries to play a sort of maternal role - even though we live on the other side of the world.
FaceTime plays a huge role. In 2016 my wife's sister, Clare, died from cancer at the age of 40, she left behind her husband and two small children - who were 6 and 3 at the time. She had moved from the UK to Australia more than 10 years earlier, and the separation from her sister had been really hard on my wife even before the loss. Marc, my brother-in-law, has done an incredible job raising the kids on his own since then - I don't have many heroes, but he is one of them, and the kids are growing up into wonderful young people.
Marc had moved to the UK in the late 1990s with his older brother, Byron, and they had lived together in London, before his brother moved to Dorset, on the south coast of England, where he has lived ever since. Marc and Clare moved to Australia when Marc's mother was very ill. Byron had only been back to Australia for his mother's funeral and for Clare's funeral, and had not seen his sister, Megan, since Clare's funeral in 2016.
For Christmas this year Marc and his family hosted both of his siblings, me, Heather and the kids, and Megan's kids too (and some friends). He had managed to keep Byron's return to Australia a secret from Megan, and this recording captures the moment Byron came into the kitchen from the utility room as Megan's Xmas present. Megan's response is priceless (even if it was at such a spectacular volume that it created some momentary clipping on the recording).
While migration, separation and loss have been cruel to my family and to Marc's, most of the time we just get on with our otherwise very happy lives, and loving one another from across the world. The sheer joy of this moment was a delight, and to have captured it in this recording is wonderful.
Recorded in Woodend, Australia by Rob McNeil.
Part of the Migration Sounds project, the world’s first collection of the sounds of human migration.
For more information and to explore the project, see https://www.citiesandmemory.com/migration