We have plenty of gluten-free and vegan bakery options, as well. For over 13 years, our bakers have been providing some of the best pastries, cakes and pies in Williamsburg and Newport News. The opportunity to gather together with food, friends and family and to spend time outdoors has offered great joy to many of all ages and backgrounds.We are proud to serve delicious specialty cakes and pastries that will make your visit to Aromas memorable. The picnics at Silverton did continue in future years and were a meaningful part of Fred Purcell’s life, as well as for the communities of Silverton and Broken Hill.ĬOVID-19 might have seen a resurgence in picnics but it’s clear they hold a deep and enduring meaning for many Australians.
The train carrying picnic goers from Broken Hill to Silverton was shot at, a fifteen-year-old Alma Cowie was sadly killed and the picnic that year was cancelled. Fred Purcell, born in 1897, remembers an incident on New Year’s Day in 1915, which is widely regarded as Australia’s first case of domestic terrorism. While picnics are overwhelmingly remembered positively, there are some memories that are less pleasant. We used to go off to the Stromlo Pine Forests and have picnics down on the river there and up on the pine trees or we’d go out down to Uriarra or up beyond into Mount McDonald and the mountains beyond that and we loved all that and the kids enjoyed it I think and we’d always take their friends out with us when we went and we liked that kind of healthy outdoor life for the children on weekends anyway.’ ‘We took the kids for picnics most Sundays just out into the hills or the pine forests. 1946, nla.obj-151741591Ĭharles Price and his family were based in Canberra in the 1950s and he remembers picnics being a big part of family life. There was no such thing as ice-cream and we never thought of going out to buy things.’Īlfred Amos, Picnic at Millamolong Station, Mandurama Region, New South Wales, ca. My mother would make sandwiches…you couldn’t go to a shop and buy things. ‘We would go down somewhere and find a quiet spot. Queenie Symonds, who was Jewish and born in 1896, enjoyed going to picnics in Sydney on a Sunday in the 1910s. At these picnics, Hilda would ‘mostly have a pasty and then a bun and a glass of raspberry.’ When Hilda attended Sunday School picnics, the food and drink was provided to the children for no cost. ‘You could get a pasty for threepence…and we’d buy a glass of raspberry, that would be a penny.’ At the larger elaborate picnic events which occurred a few times a year, she would usually be able to buy ‘what she wanted’ as food stalls were set up. Hilda Ferguson, born in 1890, remembers clearly the food and drink she used to enjoy as a child at Silverton picnics. Wendy McDougall, Yok Mai, Chinese school picnic, 1999, nla.obj-137301842 Watch the boats.’ Unsurprisingly, while enjoying such times, ‘It didn’t ever enter our minds that we were poor. He'd put a blanket out, under a tree and walk along the foreshore. Just, just walking around…he'd have the picnic. Picnics were enjoyed at La Perouse, the National Park at Wattamolla and the Botanic Gardens down by Sydney Harbour, before the Opera House was built. ‘Every weekend dad would take us somewhere.’ He remembers his father loading his first car, an Erskine, up with Ronnie and his siblings and, then later, when he had a bigger car, picking up cousins as well. Picnics were a regular feature of his life growing up and he ‘loved it’.
Growing up in Sydney in the 1950s and 1960s, his family were not wealthy. Ronnie Gauci migrated to Australia from Malta with his family when he was a child. Some of the happiest childhood memories in the oral history collection involve picnics.