The topic for Week 38 in Amy Coffin’s and Geneablogger’s 52 Weeks of Personal Genealogy and History series is: Did you have any hobbies as a child? Which ones?
My childhood hobbies depended in part on circumstance. Throughout my life reading and books have been my constant leisure time activity. Life just wouldn’t be the same without books in any form. This topic was my theme for Week 23 in the 52 week series, so I won’t go back down that path. The other lifelong hobby which I’ve enjoyed has been photography – this love affair started with my first camera when I was about 10 and has continued every since: hence all those images I still have to scan.
One of my favourite hobbies was collecting shells but this of course depended on being near the beach, so it was a periodic hobby rather than an everyday one. I was lucky that every few years we would holiday on Magnetic Island, which I’ve already talked about previously. Although quite close to Townsville it also has off-shore reefs and tidal flats where it was possible in those days to see and collect shells. While we stayed at Picnic Bay, the best place for shell hunting and collecting was usually Horseshoe Bay where low tide exposed rocks and reef and shells. Cowrie and olive shells were especially prized for their glorious sheen and colours while the potentially deadly cone shells had to be treated cautiously. Their poison darts had to be carefully avoided so there was definitely a right way to pick them up. Also on the tidal flats were quite a lot of stone fish which are nigh on impossible to detect until your eyes adjust to spotting them. With their poisonous spikes they would inflict a major injury if you were unwary enough to stand on them.
Now I cringe at the environmental impact of collecting the shells, but in those days I suppose we didn’t know any better. The smell of decaying molluscs in the sun is an abiding childhood memory. In high school I catalogued a series of shells for a science show and was proud to win a prize though it was pretty tame in comparison with the high-tech scientific experiments which others presented (most of them boys I have to say, also reflecting the era perhaps).Still I got a £7 (today about $160) prize from the competition (thank you the donors Peters Arctic Delicacy Co) and with it I bought a gorgeous book on Shells of the Western Pacific. On my shell wish-list is seeing live paper or pearly nautilus shells “swimming” – they are just so gorgeous.
I still have some of the shells I collected (and in a few cases bought) and my grandchildren enjoy seeing them when I unearth them from the cupboard. Perhaps because the shell book was on the table today my eldest grandchild wanted to see the pictures of the shells then look at the real thing so we spread them out and inspected the different varieties….building up memories I hope.
Family history across the seas 
It’s interesting that you were into photography at such an early age. I grew up on a grazing property 45 miles from town (long before it had TV reception) and did school by correspondence – so we made our own entertainment. Like you, I was always an avid reader. We went to the coast once a year and I loved looking for shells, but we rarely took them home. It seems to me that there aren’t nearly as many whole (intact) shells on Gold Coast beaches now.
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Sorry Judy have been offline most of week. I think the Coast probably does have fewer shells with the changing tides and beachmpatterns plus more people collecting.
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It’s cool that you still have the shell collection. This post brings back memories of collecting shells with my grandparents when I was young. I wonder whatever happened to my shells.
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Yes most of them ,and they’ve been carted from pillar to post for decades. At the next move I may have to give them to my grandchildren I think. Collecting shells along the beach is fun and more so when we’re with people we love.
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