Craiglands in Tasmania

I forgot to mention in my first entry, that the photo that is the header of the blog is actually one of our old farm pictures. We are fortunate that we have a family history of excellent record keeping (this has come in very handy in recent years when registering cows), and we are able to trace our farming roots back many generations. Prior to farming in Colac, the dairy was operational in Tasmania and in England before that. The name "Craiglands" comes from the farm in England, although I'll have to do more research as to how the name originated. When I get all my various history pages together in front of the computer, I'll update the linkges. But that photo in the header is actually a cow and calf from the Tasmanian farm around 1900. The farm no longer exists and is pretty much Launceston suburbia now, but there are street names that reflect our former ownership of the land (eg. Craiglands Court).

Mark and I sometimes have a chuckle over some of these old photos. We would die if our cows today looked like the one in the picture! We have just come so far in not a really long period of time. Mark has done a slide show on the past 100 years of dairying (for a presentation that his dad gave to a local services club) and he incorporated many photos from our own farm over this time. It is so interesting to see the differences.

I love taking photos and making sure that things are recorded (this blog is part of that info recording), so it is certainly my intention of preserving old photos, records and information, along with making sure that present day stuff is recorded and stored correctly. The advent of the digital camera and online storage is an absolute boon for the amateur historian. I am constantly taking photos around the farm and in my 8 years on the farm, I can safely estimate that I have taken hundreds and hundreds of photos, trying to capture different moments in time. I do this, because I want to believe that in another 100 years, when we are no longer here any more, that one of our decendants that maybe still involved in farming (or not), can look at how we did things and have a chuckle about how antiquated we were and think about how far they have come over not such a long period of time.