I like April people. My Dad was born in April. My son was born in April. Today I had a wonderful chat with another April person in my extended family that I didn’t know existed. They have a similar awesome sense of humour to my other awesome April people I know.

I’ve written about Dad’s birth and his jokes about being born on April Fools Day.

Today is Dad’s birthday and I want to talk about the silly idea that women’s internal reproductive organs are animals and that this thinking existed right up until the early 1900’s. This is not an April Fools joke, this is very real.

A taster…of what I will be writing about next in relation to intergenerational family stories, what my research has uncovered and in particular Jane Brady’s death at 82 in Sunbury Mental Hospital.

The following is from an academic piece (I’ve…

I’ve been thinking about my Dad a lot lately and his dark sense of humour and how he engaged humour to soften the blow of difficult times – as the best medicine. Interesting for a man born on the 1st of April 1923 and who resented that date for the rest of his life. CW: low level discussions of end of life conversations.

My Dad joked at the most inappropriate times, but always made it about the ridiculousness of the situation instead of mocking the people in it.

He would often tell me how much he disliked people who played ‘practical jokes’ on people. Being born of the 1st April and growing up in the 1920’s and 30’s in the Collingwood/Fitzroy are of Melbourne meant he never got to experience a birthday that wasn’t filled with anxiety about what someone might do to him in the name of joke.