Early Life of Keith Miller - Birth

Birth

Born in the western Melbourne suburb of Sunshine on 28 November 1919, Keith Ross Miller was the youngest of Leslie (Les Sr) and Edith (Edie) Miller's four children. He had two older brothers and a sister. Sister Gladys was 12 when Miller was born, while Les Jr and Ray were nine and seven respectively. Miller was named after the Australian pioneer aviator brothers Keith and Ross Smith, who were half-way through their historic flight from England to Australia at the time of his birth. Miller's two Christian names reflected his Scottish heritage; his father's family originated from the dock area of Edinburgh and Dundee, and his paternal grandfather arrived in Australia in April 1849. The family lived in a one-level terrace house in Sunshine, which at the time was a separate town of 900 people, 11 km (6.8 mi) west of Melbourne's city centre. The area was and remains a working-class area. The town's lifeblood was the farm machinery maker H. V. McKay, which employed a large proportion of the population. Miller's father started as a teacher in Warracknabeal in rural Victoria, before working as an engineer for McKay in Ballarat until a transfer brought him to Sunshine.

Read more about this topic:  Early Life Of Keith Miller

Famous quotes containing the word birth:

    The boredom of Sunday afternoon, which drove de Quincey to drink laudanum, also gave birth to surrealism: hours propitious for making bombs.
    Cyril Connolly (1903–1974)

    Sin their conception, their birth weeping,
    Their life a general mist of error,
    Their death a hideous storm of terror.
    John Webster (c. 1580–1638)

    To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.
    Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)