Better than a picture

I have stacks of old postcards each one a small glimpse in the past for I had been collecting them for years.

This brief correspondence of a bygone age becomes the property of a reader voyeur often tells the true story many years later.

The were many of France in WW1 when hundreds of thousands of cards were sent home to loved ones all over the world.

I have one which is very precious as it it is from an Australian aboriginal soldier sent to his girlfriend Doris at home on which he writes: "On leave in Paris with friend I saw you at the station, better than a picture. Tell you about it when I get home and we are wed. Tommy.

I have been to Paris many times and it dawned on me what he meant for he had probably arrived at the old Gare'd"Orsay railway station now a museum where there are four statues of each of the races of mankind depicted by women; one of which was Oceania showing as an Australian Aboriginal woman with a kangaroo by her side.

Much later after a lot of digging in the war records that I found that Private Tommy Karpany hadn't returned back home to Australia to fulfill his dreams with Doris but had stayed on in a battlefield in France.


Image found at www.eurohistoryprof.blogspot.com