IT WOULD be hard to condense a lifetime into a few short pages but it’s a trend which some Australians are taking up.
While people put their life into words for many different reasons, including nostalgia or to document their rags to riches story, many are like Mandurah resident Reg Lambert, who wrote Answering a Call: The Journey for his family a few years ago.
“My wife and I have been to lots of different, interesting places for work,” Mr Lambert said.
“We were full time pastors so we would go everywhere.
“While our children knew where we were and we kept in touch, they didn’t necessarily know all the details.”
Mr Lambert and his wife Bet travelled all over Australia and internationally, but the Erskine resident described their time in Borneo as the most influential time in his life.
It was because the pair had been to so many places and lived in so many different types of conditions, he thought it was best to put it in writing.
“Some people don’t want to believe that this is how we lived,” he said.
“For example, for five years of my childhood, I lived in a bow-roofed shed and my mum and dad lived in a tent.
“We had no walls and the shed was not only our bedroom but our dining room, our living room, our everything room.
“We didn’t have a kitchen; it was all outside cooking.
“We lived outside of Menzies at that point so it didn’t rain much.
“But that’s just how it was.”
Mr Lambert was not the only one in his family to write his story down, with Mrs Lambert taking the plunge a few years prior to her husband, writing Goats Need Space.
It took one year for the couple to write down their stories, which Mr Lambert said he hoped would be around for generations to come.
“I think it’s valuable to have everything written down,” he said.
“Sometimes people want to ask questions about someone’s life and they’re not around to ask.
“This way you can leave some sort of record.”
