I struggle to recall exactly how I first became interested in history. Maybe it was a continuation from an earlier interest in skyscrapers and cities; from the date of a building’s construction or a city’s foundation to their stories through time. Or it might have been something at school that sparked it off, either in class or by reading something in the school library. Whatever the case, it was my grandfather – my mother’s father, I never knew my father’s parents – who was the probably the greatest facilitator of my interest when I was about six or seven years old.
A retired public servant (worked in civil aviation) in his eighties, my grandfather was very smart and was very sharp of mind. Mum has often boasted that it was definitely from her side of the family from which I inherited my intelligence. He designed and built himself the four-bedroom, white-weatherboard house in the bayside suburbs of Melbourne where he and Grandma would bring up their four children. An amateur historian, he sent letters on matters of historical interest off to publications and in his old age researched the family history. A writer, he composed a poem or two, contributed to the industry journal, and wrote an unpublished account of a road trip to Queensland that he and Grandma undertook soon after his retirement. Unfortunately despite his intelligence and his thirst for knowledge and learning, he never had the opportunity to go to university. Back in the 1920s, higher education of that sort was the privilege of the wealthy, not of a son of a butcher.
In one of the three spare bedrooms, my grandfather kept his library. The two metre high and six metre long bookcase (which he had constructed himself) contained a cornucopia of knowledge. There were books of any age, topic and type: early editions of Dickens; political tracts by Paine and Machiavelli; nineteenth-century antique encyclopaedias in the volumes of which were inserted notes, pamphlets and newspaper clippings of subjects that he’d found interesting; souvenir books of the Melbourne Olympics and the Coronation of Elizabeth II; bibles and prayer books; books, books and more books!!! To a seven year old used to a primary school library that contained mostly picture and short easy-to-read books (apart from the mandatory World Book Encyclopaedia set and Guinness Book of Records), it was the Great Library of Alexandria!
My grandfather also had a huge collection of Parade magazines that I was especially attracted to, as it was filled with stories of people and events from history. I would read, absolutely enthralled, about Ned Kelly, Alexander the Great or some now little-known nineteenth-century colonial war. Unfortunately, I wasn’t allowed to read them too often, as he was concerned that I would mess them up.
He also owned some very cool objects including a piece of rock from Mt. Erebus, and a small fragment of masonry that he had chipped off Hadrian’s Wall. I was also told by my mother of a musket that was supposed to have been stored somewhere in my grandparents’ garage. Wow I thought, an actual musket!!! I imagined it being used by a redcoat fighting in the Napoleonic Wars or some other ancient conflict that I had read about. It was a part of history; I wanted to see it, touch it and even – in the hope there were also musket-balls and gunpowder – to fire it. I asked both my grandparents often about the musket, but they couldn’t remember where it was. Years later, I found out that the musket had disappeared long ago.
Recognising my interest, my grandfather encouraged it to the fullest. In conversations with him, I was fascinated as he talked about Australian and British history and the famous people therein, like John Curtin, the Battle of Hastings, or the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. I thought of him as the venerable old sage that you encounter in fantasy or adventure stories (or movies). The one whom the hero (or heroine) would visit to discover the significance of an ancient artefact, to find a certain spell or herbal potion, with the old man needing to reach into the depths of his large in-built knowledge, or failing that trawling through his collection of very, very ancient books.
Every birthday and Christmas, my grandfather always gave me a book on history that not only broadened my knowledge, but also helped to build a small library of my own. He would also encourage me to watch historical documentaries on TV. That was how I first learnt about the Titanic, and as a result developed a mini-obsession with the doomed liner, which thankfully petered itself out long before an idea for a movie on the disaster germinated inside James Cameron’s head.
In May 1994, my grandfather passed away in his sleep at the age of eighty-eight. His ashes were sprinkled on the grave of an ancestor on whom he had spent a great deal of time researching. Therefore, he never saw his grandson go to university, and complete an honours and then a masters degree in a discipline that he had treasured. Undoubtedly he would have been proud of my achievements.
Jason Taylor grew up on the Mornington Peninsula and completed an M.A. in history at the University of Melbourne (after a dual Arts/Science degree and Arts Honours at Deakin). Devotees of public TV game shows, might remember (yes, MIGHT) him from his somewhat successful stint on Einstein Factor in 2008, becoming a series finalist (‘Kings and Queens of England 1066-1714’, if you really want to know what his special subject was), and a rather disastrous appearance on ‘Letters and Numbers’ (the less said about that the better). Living in Melbourne’s bayside suburbs, he is a sometime member of the Mordialloc Writers’ Group, contributing a piece to their 2009 anthology ‘Carnival Capers’. He wrote his first two books at eleven on the French Revolution and King William III of England, has written a couple of yet-to-be published short stories, and is currently undertaking a long, slow, frustrating attempt at a memoir. A cricket aficionado, he is a regular writer of match reports for his cricket club’s e-mail newsletter. His twitter account is @jasejtaylor.