Video transcript for Looking back

[Music]

[A cartoon tree grows from the bottom corner.]

['Looking back … Family.']

[A photo shows a girl reaching up to a Christmas tree.]

Looking Back – Family

[A young girl sits in a living room facing an old man. She asks questions and listens to his answers.]

Girl: Who did you live with when you were six and seven? What did they all do?

Man: I lived with my mum and my dad and my sister, who was younger than me, and I think we probably pretty much always had a little dog as well. There always seemed to be a dog around. My father went to work every day. My mum stayed at home and looked after the house and looked after us children and the dog did what dogs always do, just sat around being smelly and making lots of noise.

Girl: What kind of family celebrations do you remember?

Man: We did a lot where we would get together almost every weekend with my grandparents and with my cousins and aunts and uncles. So we would go to one set of grandparents one week and the next week we'd go and visit the others. So there were always big family gatherings where we would all see each other quite frequently, as a big family. It's a bit different today I think, well I may be wrong. In my family things are different, these days everyone's so busy and everyone's so scattered. So, we would get together, of course, for Christmas and for birthdays but I think I remember that almost every week we would be with all of our family members or with one half of the family at least.

Girl: What did your family do for fun?

Man: We would drive out of town a little way, we didn't seem to have to go very far in those days before we could find a park or some bush somewhere and we'd have a little barbecue together, just the four of us and the dog. I think you've got to travel a lot further now to find places like that where you can be out with nature quite as much as we seemed to be able to do very easily then. So that's something I remember a lot was the barbecues and picnics that we used to go on.

Girl: In what ways have families changed since you were my age?

Man: They've changed in, well, just around the house for instance, and family life at home, there are so many more gadgets and appliances and things to do the work now that there wasn't when I was young. There was a lot more, my mother in particular had a lot more work to do just to run the kitchen. We certainly didn't have dishwashers. I'm just trying to think what else we had. I can remember my mother grinding meat in a meat grinder, so we didn't have blenders to mix things up like we have today. My father used to have an old push mower, so he would push this mower instead of having a petrol driven one or even an electric one. Even the gardening … there was a lot more physical work involved in just keeping the house going.

The other thing that's changed in families, and my family in particular, is that where we all used to live close by one another now my family for instance is scattered all around the world. So where I used to be able to meet up with my grandparents every second weekend, well, every weekend with one set and then the other one the following weekend and see all my cousins and aunts and uncles, today I don't very often see my children. My parents are still living but they live a long way away and so I don't see them very often. My sister also lives a long way off so family gatherings for me don't really happen very much anymore. So I find that sad.

Girl: How have things stayed the same?

Man: Well I think that even though we've all just changed in the ways I've just described, where all are scattered, we still love each other just as much as families do. My daughter lives in another country and my son lives a long long way but still in Australia but last night I spoke with both of them on Skype, so we were able to sit on the computer with all the three of us and have a chat as if we were all together. So that's different but it's also the same in that we're still communicating, we just do it differently.

Girl: Thank you.

[A long view shows the girl and the man sitting in the living room.]