In 2015 I went to Canada with members of my family. The trip included time on Vancouver Island, staying with relatives at Glenlake on Victoria’s western outskirts. It also involved traveling east to Toronto to visit our daughter, Hannah. Hannah, like the rest of my family, has always felt a strong connection to Canada and the family there, and was living and working in Toronto in the inner-city suburb of Bloor West.

In Toronto, I visited the Art Gallery of Ontario. There, I saw a fabulous exhibition of Canadian artists including by the Group of 7 and by Tom Thompson. Later, Hannah and I journeyed to the McMichael Gallery at Kleinburg, on Toronto’s northern outskirts. The gallery features Canadian modern art, including that by the forementioned artists, and Emily Carr. In some ways it is not dissimilar to Melbourne’s Heide Gallery of Modern Art in that both focus on important painters of the 20th century from their respective countries, and also feature the works of contempory artists. Visiting these galleries were two of many highlights of time spent in Canada.

The trip took my mother, Helen and I to the prairie provinces of Manitoba and Saskatchewan, on what was for her a journey through the past. Helen was raised in a farm that adjoined Elcapo Lake, about 5km south of the prairie town of Broadview in Saskatchewan in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Broadview sits by Canada’s Highway 1, the Trans-Canada Highway, in eastern Saskatchewan, about half way between the province’s capital city, Regina, and its provincial border with Manitoba. It was established in 1882 when the Canadian Pacific Railway first reached across Canada’s western prairies.

I had always wanted see Broadview, but Helen had expressed no interest in visiting the place. She had grown up there during the Great Depression, when the value of farm produce plummeted, and coinciding with the dustbowl years of drought and severe dust storms of the 1930s. Her father, Albert called these years ’the dirty thirties’. These were hard times everywhere on the prairies. In 1933, her family, tired of cold, dust, hardship, sickness and death, made the call to sell the farm and head west, settling at Glenlake on Vancouver Island and establishing a new life there. Helen was the eldest of her siblings and had an extraordinarily good memory. Barely seven years old when her family left the farm, she remembered the hardships of prairie life only too well, this explaining her lack of enthusiasm about visiting her birthplace.

All the same, Helen knew that I was determined to visit Broadview, with or without her. Being the kind and considerate (and slightly curious) woman she was, she agreed to go. We went to Broadview. We met up in Manitoba’s capital city, Winnipeg, Helen flying in from Vancouver and me from Toronto. We hired a car and drove from Winnipeg through Broadview in Saskatchewan, to Regina, the province’s capital city. The site that became Regina was once called Wascana, an Anglicization of the Cree word Oskana meaning Buffalo Bones. It was changed to Regina (Latin for Queen) in the late 1800s in honour of Queen Victoria. My personal view is that Wascana is a far better and more befitting name for a Canadian city, even if the buffalo and their bones are long-gone.

In Broadview we went looking for the old family farm. We found the farm, but not the farmhouse, which was either demolished or hidden in scrub. The area was full of ticks, which did not aid the search. We visited the Broadview cemetery, locating long-gone family members. We found homes built by her grandfather, local builder, William Silman with his partner, Bill Webb. And amazingly, we met people who were incredibly interested in the fact that a Silman was in town, despite the fact that the last of the Silmans had left Broadview in 1933.

Broadview has a population of about 600. This is much reduced since the 1930s when Helen lived there. As a consequence, there are scattered vacant blocks across what is a well-treed town, giving much of it a park-like quality. For Helen, returning to Broadview for a two-day stay was something of a revelation. The town was much greener than she remembered it being when she was young and she felt it looked so much better than it had. And in contrast to her childhood memories, she was warm and dust-free. It was like she was visiting another place and not that of her birth. The pleasure she got from visiting Broadview alone was more than reason to travel to Canada in 2015. My memories of visiting Broadview and travelling across the prairies with Helen are and will remain some of the highlights of my life.

On this visit to Canada. I took what I think are some half-decent photographs of the place. If I don’t show them somewhere, they will live and die on my computer’s hard-drive. So they are posted here. Enjoy.

Canada 2015

Victoria

Toronto

Winnipeg

Broadview

Regina

Melbourne’s Remnant River Red Gums

One Life and Two Dreams