The inspiration for
Dream of Margaret River
The story started for me when I read Chris’s letters.
His enthusiasm, his love of his new life, his plans for his farm, his hopes and dreams for the future leap out of the page, even now, almost a century after they were written. I inherited his letters from my father, Peter Ransby. My parents had been primarily concerned with finding out the story of Evelyn Wilton, my maternal grandfather, but as I read Chris’s letters I found myself being drawn more and more into the lives of the Andrews brothers, Lance and Chris. They left no descendants to speak for them, so this is their story too.
All three went away to the Great War. Chris was killed at Gallipoli. Lance was wounded at Gallipoli, recovered and returned there, and in the last months of the war was killed on the Somme. Evelyn served at sea on the north Atlantic convoys. His ship was torpedoed by a U-boat and sunk, but he survived both the sinking and the war. The waste and tragedy of the war, and the continued loss to the survivors, their communities, and to us as their descendants, is to me a story worth telling.
‘Dream of Margaret River’ tells the story of their farm, their service in the war, their dreams of returning home, and the aftermath of the war. This account of their lives is entirely non-fiction and is drawn from original sources (letters, personal diaries, battalion diaries, government records, eyewitness accounts, contemporary newspaper articles) and, seven decades later, recollections by contemporaries.
