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Various tools dad owned included hammers, saws, hacksaw blade, screwdrivers of various kinds, drills and drill bits including a manual hand rotating one, digging fork, digging spade, pick, axes, block buster's, ladders, trailers, lots of various nuts and
bolts in jars, plenty of nails, files, whetting stone, alan keys, pliars, wrenches, spanners, cutters, electric sander and all sorts of other things, and
bits and pieces of things, especially electronic things. In his desk he had things like hundreds of
staples and pens and pins and safety pins and things. We still have the desk, which we got when he was in Cooma, and mum uses it now. I think some of his old
files are still in there, and the photographic equipment is still there, the really old stuff.
When he worked at the brick Telecom building in Cooma, I would often visit after school or sometimes on Saturdays for a little while when he brought me and often Greg and Matt in. I would wander around the big electronic boards full of wiring, or type
away at a writer thing dad said I could write on, or drink water from the water
fountain, which I just about always did. Dad usually sat quietly in the partitioned off mini-office area in the main section of the building, were he did his thing, and I
always liked looking at the cool electronic calculator he kept from the 1970s. Matt inherited that calculator, but its gone now. Dad would discipline us as kids, but he never got really angry, or very rarely with us, even though we were a brat pack of
kids. It all worked out as we got older though and the family stuck together through thick and thin. I am sure he learned how to raise children as a work in
progress just as much as anything he he had learned from a book or his own family experiences,
but I think, looking back, he did a pretty good job at it. Mum and him took to the task with responsibility and almost expertise. Mum had been a nanny in England, and had some training looking after children, so she always knew when we could have a break
and when we had to be disciplined, and looking back I feel they usually worked together as a team to resolve the various problems which cropped up. It seems they likely always talked about it to resolve the issues, and while mum usually
directed us in
what was to be done, it seemed everything was talked over with Cyril beforehand. They worked together well as a team raising children, and despite the difficulties and challenges, I think the world of them both for the wisdom they were able to impart,
more from their examples than anything else. If and when I have children of my own one day, I know the kind of responsiblities I will be entrusted to and, because of mum and dad, the kind of ways and lessons I know to be able to handle them. I guess, if
I really have a problem with Cyril Daly, is that he has passed on, now, when I am at the kind of age which wants to chat with dad and ask him questions about life and really develop a good friendship. For so much of my life it was Daniel-centric vision,
but I am starting to get over myself and see the rest of the world, and I really do wish I'd had another decade or so with my old man, just to nut out his wisdom on life, and to have a drink of beer with him, and uncle Kevin, and chat about the war and
the cricket and old grandpa Peter Paul and life in general. Yes, if I have one complaint, is that, even though he lived to 84, he was gone to soon for this son of a gun. But life decides when, and I thank God our final time together was a blessing, and
that he died in peace, content in a good home with a good family. He's buried at Queanbeyan lawn cemetry, with Matt now on top of him, and just the other day
mum paid for another plot, which can have someone placed on top of it as well, which is for
herself and myself when I finally pass on. It's not the same column going along, but it is in the same row I think, and we are not far from Dad and Matt.
It's all paid for and the family knows so, when I rest in peace myself, I won't
be too far from the
man who gave me life in the first place. And that must be a good thing.

There was one time in Cooma, when I made a gate between the house and the garage (the shed). We had what was probably the side of an old cot or something, and I used bolts or fasteners of some kind and then, finding a chain
which would support it,
connected it to the house so that it swung as a gate. It lasted a few years or so, and I was proud of it and, from memory, I think dad paid me some money for doing the job although I never asked for the money. There was another time when
I cleaned out
the garage voluntarily, not thinking of money, organising everything and putting it all neatly away, and dad paid me for that as well. But when I had put a lot of comics on the account at the newsagency, even though I wasn't supposed to, mum and dad
allowed me to do some chores to pay them off a bit. I think I probably overcharged them for the work I did, but I did do a number of chores to work it
off, and they left it at that, and didn't hassle me about it. Of course, they probably knew I pinched a
fair few pennies from mum's purse, but it was always grace which covered it. They didn't judge me too harshly. They were merciful and forgiving parents. I look back now and realize that dad had a caring heart, and he rewarded work and
effort we did for
the family. They were occasions I did think voluntarily for the most part, not expecting payment, but they paid me anyway. It was very kind of them, especially with 5 kids and what must have been a tight budget as mum stayed home looking after us all. I
never went without clothes and food, though clothes had initially been hand me downs from Matt when I was a bit younger and he was still bigger than me. We got new shoes pretty regularly, and I was always in my school clothes, and they
were always clean
and washed and ready for school. The lunches were predominantly sandwiches, but
some times we had lunch orders from the canteen, which were always my favourite
days. They obviously did well balancing the family budget, and we had many regular holidays,
looking back in fact it seemed we were always away some where doing this and that. There were a lot of coast trips, especially Terrigal and Tathra, and numerous visits to the Newmerella river and the Murrumbidgee, but we went to other places as well. Mum
was usually the instigator in getting us out and about, and she said she often had to push dad to get us out somewhere, but he never really complained, and let mum handle the organising of those things, but, like he said, he was always
there with us, and
he watched over us as a responsible parent ought to do. With a moderate sized catholic family, they obviously budgeted well, and with his superannuation payout he was able to pay back his brothers for some of the money we got on house loans to buy the
families first homes. When we moved to Canberra, we went into a payback interest only loan for many years from our bank, for the Macarthur house, but that was all finally paid off last year, and Cyril can attest to having afforded the family a Canberra
home, largely through his own fidelity to his work. A responsible man, who provided properly for his family's needs – if anything else, that is an enduring legacy of the life of Cyril Aloysius Daly, as much a positive and good
witness as any family man
can hope to attain. He drove us everywhere, and he would even come and pick me up from Peter Dradrach's down town in the later 80s, after I had been at the Games Arcade or playing cricket at the Rotary oval nets in cooma, and he didn't
need to do that,
as I usually walked home from these things, but he did do it from time to time anyway, as he had done earlier on picking me up from Andrew Pighins house in Cooma West after work, as I went there after school. He never once roused at me
for doing this
from memory, never complained to me that I was too much of a problem, and always treated me with care and respect, and was a greatly caring father because of it. One of the things I felt later on in life is that he never really taught me any great moral
lessons of the family as it where, but he did give me 16 years in Catholic church every Sunday, and his silent witness, retrospectively, is more than enough now for me to learn from his example of the Godly father and parent he was to me. He was a great
dad, and I will always look fondly on how he did raise us, for I am well experienced now in how many parents of especially latter generations can fail so readily on these challenges of life. Good on you dad.

In 1967 dad was living in Jindabyne with a friend, working for PMG/Telecom, and
he went on a pilgrimage to Lourdes in France were he met mum and a lady called Maeve. He had an interest in Maeve, but nothing ever eventuated, but he also met mum and the
became friends. He returned home, and mum returned home to Hull, were she was staying the Presbytery of St Stephens at the time, looking after a priest, and dad corresponded with mum. He eventually proposed in a letter, and she said no initially, but
after a while she said yes, and he came over to England and married her in 1968. They came to live in Jindabyne then, were they stayed, although they lived for a brief while in Braidwood. Matthew and Brigid were born while the family was living in
Jindabyne, but then they moved to Berridale in early 1972 (I think) and I was born later on that year on the 20th of November back in Hull, because mum wanted to go home to have help from Grandma with the birth and early times of the new baby. In
Berridale one of the friends of dad (who I remember) was Joe Scotland, who lived up the road in a more southern area of Berridale. The Luchetta's and the Lindstroms were good friends in the Berridale years, and I still remember the Berridale Catholic
church intimately and the statues which were for a while kept in a vault in the
ceiling. The church has a bell tower which is still there today, and Berridale is much the same as it was then, still around the same size and population and housing. Of
course, next door to us in 7 Bent Street in Berridale was the Anglican church presbytery, with the Anglican Church at the end of Bent street. Dad would take the trip into Cooma each day to work at the Telecom building in Cooma, and while there had been
options of buying a house in Jindabyne, they eventually bought 6 Bradley street
in Cooma in the late 1970s/Early1980s, and the whole family moved into town. As
I have said previously, the Berridale house had a double garage, and we kept chickens and had
a dog called Toby (which disappeared one day) who was a little terrier, and had
all our early adventures tromping around Berridale town. There was a tennis court across the road (a variant of which features in one of my 'Harvest' stories in the
Chronicles of the Children of Destiny), but we never played on the court, and I
wasn't sure if it was private or the town courts. Mum was really the centre of my world in those years, but dad was too, and we were a close-knit family who did our thing,
and it was one of those lucky idyllic childhoods, before the schooling years began, and a harder world started becoming known. I think, in many ways, in such a small town, I was shielded from some of the harsher elements in life, for it was an idyllic
little town, with beautiful summers, were everything was fascinating and interesting in the town, especially the weird bugs in the back yard which were native (it seems) to the region, and with the pool and the cannon in the park and Anzac day marches
dad marched in each year, and plenty of brothers and sisters, and wonderful christmases were pillow cases were full of presents, filled a young life with imagination and happiness and very good times. But school started in the late 70s, and the boys at
St Pats were tough, and I wasn't quite ready for the real world I soon found myself in. But, regardless of all that, there was a firm and protective hand from Cyril Daly on his family, watching over us, making the right decisions for
us, and as when we
came to Canberr in 1990, the move to Cooma in 1980 seemed like a progression of
sorts, and in hindsight, the wisdom of God to lead us on to bigger and better things. Even if those things had a whole host of new challenges associated with
them. I think
dad probably liked Jindabyne and Berridale, for he worked all over the snowy mountains region with his work, and in Cooma he was living a life in a town he was well used to after his earlier years in the Sydney region of his youth. As I have said, dad
didn't seem to attract a lot of personal friends to home very much, mostly friends of what I would call the family, but he was always at church each Sunday, and it seems, now, looking back, his friends and colleagues of the church were the main part of
his life, especially the workmates at St Vinnies were he worked in various capacities, and were mum occasionally did some volunteer work sorting clothes and things into the various bins. St Vinnies used to be on Sharp Street, but moved to its current
location on Vale Street back then, and so much of my childhood memories are of entering the store and asking mum 'Can I have this? Can I have this?' We'd get a lot of stuff we wanted, but not every single time, and we always had nice toys and things to
play around with from the charity. Even now I shop very regularly at Vinnies here in Tuggeranong especially, and while I am no longer a Roman Catholic, if I
were, I could imagine I would be heavily involved with such an organisation. The main friends of
the family in Cooma years were The Collins across the street, who also were Catholic, and the Bryants and the Torley's. The Bryants and the Torleys are still part of our lives, and we see Gerard and his family now every now and again, who live in
Theodore, down south in Tuggeranong. Jill Torley is a long friend of the family, but she is now in Western Australia, yet sends regular correspondence and cards and things to members of the family. Dad got along well, mainly it seems, with these sorts of
people as his company for they were regular guests in our household, and, looking back, while he had a rare beer at home, he was not the kind of guy who ever really went out drinking with his mates at the pub. It wasn't part of dad's makeup. Oh, I am
sure there was the odd beer at a pub with a co Telecom worker now and again, but I never once remember him going off to get pissed, as it wasn't part of his
makeup. He was always a sober man, and for that I am eternally grateful for his
good example.


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