Ettie's Diary

This seems a good day to begin a diary.Thus begins, on Wednesday 27th April 1910, this 74-page account of the life of Henrietta Petrea McManamey, at her home in Woodford, NSW. Ettie, the 42-year-old wife of Woodford Academy headmaster John McManamey, was inspired to begin her journal not through a creative urge to have her words recorded for posterity but 'As an aid to memory ..., ' because she had mislaid an undershirt. This small exercise book contains an all-too-brief glimpse of Ettie that reveals an intelligent, acutely observant and engaging personality, freely expressing her most personal feelings and opinions in the privacy of its pages, before her death in 1913.The few years covered (1910 to 1912) were eventful, both locally and nationally. The Edwardian era was brief and King Edward VII's death in 1910 marked the end of a decade of national prosperity and peace, that included development of a Federated nation, the granting of suffrage to...