Tony Birch

And so as I grew up in... I slept in that front room with my brother.

That's the peach tree that we used to climb in the backyard...

It's as if your memory is not quite legitimate because you don't have the physical places to attach them to.

Yes, of course, yes.

Well, this is in some ways a sad but I think beautiful story, Richard.

When my grandmother was dying in 1996, she spent her last week in St Vincent's Hospital in Fitzroy.

And I remember in those last days of her life, and she was barely conscious, we made a very strong decision in the family that my grandmother would never be left alone.

So we had a roster that each of us made sure that we stayed with her.

And I remember when my shifts were on, there were these very wide windowsills overlooking Fitzroy.

And I would sit on the windowsill in the sun and I'd be looking down across the streets of our sort of entire childhood and my relationship to her.

So there was something remarkable about that.

My grandmother died on the 4th of July 1996.

And my mother, the first thing that she did was to go to my grandmother's flat and call all of the children there and said, take one thing each or take a couple of things each that you think are important to you in relationship to your nan's life.

And the rest, my mum said, OK, everything else is going to the op shop.

And we packed everything in boxes, dropped it all at the St Vincent's de Paul op shop on Johnson Street.

And why I think there's something beautiful about that is that all of those objects that my nan collected, other than the ones that we...

took home as memento, went back to the op shops that she'd collected them from.

So, of course, it means that those objects that she'd loved and cared for and that we'd sort of poured over with our kids' eyes

had another life would go on to have another life with someone who walked into that up shop and i love the thought of someone walking into the up shop and picking up the glass horse that my grandmother had bought 30 years earlier and admiring it the way that she admired and taking it home and putting it somewhere maybe on a bookshelf maybe on a mantelpiece so it was it was actually quite beautiful gesture on my mum's part i think

It happened because the Catholic Church in Fitzroy, which was associated with the Sacred Heart School where I went to primary school, used to arrange for kids to have holidays with middle-class Catholic families together.