The following images and writings - mainly selections from her diaries, show a little more of Caitlin as the person she was. Her diaries were very private. I don't believe she had ever intended anyone else ever seeing them, but, saying that, although we found them in the bin, she hadn't destroyed them, so perhaps it was her intention to leave them for us.
To begin this page I couldn't resist this reference to Santa as "Mr Claus".
We haven’t put our Christmas tree up yet.
On Thursday my class is going to the water park,
And also it’s my Mum’s birthday on that day.
I hope you remember me.
Please make sure that all the poor children in the world get fed healthy foods for Christmas.
These are the things I want for Christmas: a karaoke thingy, a big brat doll, a very good novel, a furby, and another brat doll.
(If you send me a letter back can you please send it to
67 Francis St, West End, Townsville, North Queensland, Australia. )
Sausages for now, bye!
Caitlin
December 1, 2003
(She was 7 years old)
She was doing some interesting art around this time as well as witnessed by the following piece. Her diaries up until she was 14 or 15 are full of drawings and her writings are always with different coloured pens. Although she wouldn't let others see her diaries she enjoyed the pleasure of having them look aesthetically pleasing.
Although often brutal with herself - self love wasn't something she was good at, she would admonish herself constantly with reminders such as the following.
She wrote well - winning a creative writing competition when she was 11 (a copy of that story might turn up one day), but sometimes her writing made little sense - she would take a dream, thought or idea for a story (especially when she was younger), and create visually attractive little pieces, which didn't necessarily go anywhere, such as the following.
She would critisise me for trying to help her get around her black moods, assuring me that my attempts were futile, but, although i didn't suffer from depression, I knew that throwing myself into my tasks stopped me getting lost in negative thinking. I felt that exercises such as contemplating the things that make you happy, might work for her. Perhaps she found it worthwhile as in the following page from her diary she lists things that made her happy: the feel of a paintbrush on paper, drinking cool water after exercising in the sun…
And being a devotee myself, I can appreciate that the poetry of TS Eliot resonated within her. I found the following cutting amongst her diaries.
Her mother and I built a lovely house at Batlow, taking the original old family farming home from 1904, and renovating and extending it. Caitlin stayed there with her mother at one point in 2009 and reflected in the following entry in her diary.
The following entry, although artistically not as effective as the page I have shown earlier, is more typical of her diaries in that text is scattered amongst the doodles.
