Memories - true or false?

False memories have had a lot of attention lately because a respected TV news reader has been caught telling little white lies, or great big ones - the sort called porkies in rhyming slang. I've commented in earlier posts in this blog on the physiology of memory, and I've described my memories of many experiences, often in detail. Are all my memories true? Do I have any false memories? Many experiences I've described in posts on this blog are reinforced by photos I took at the time, and some are further supported by my notes or other records. Wendy's diaries and scrap-books reinforce my accounts of some highlights. I don't think I have any false memories.

Photos in our family albums have evoked and strengthened many memories, but there's no photo of that fig tree or the man in it, or of the three policemen watching it cautiously.

I'm sure Wendy kept a diary in 1957, but my diligent search has failed to find it. She must have destroyed it. That's unfortunate, because I'm sure she would have recorded my encounter with the rifleman in the fig tree.  I told her all about it less than an hour after it ended, and she provided much needed comfort in the week or two afterwards when I was still shaking. I have all of Wendy's diaries from 1951 until she became unable to write a few weeks before her death from motor neurone disease (ALS) with the single exception of her diary for 1957. It was a stormy year (see my post of June 28, 2013) so she probably had good reasons to do away with it when tranquility - if that's the word I want - came back into our lives.

My vivid memories of that scary episode include details such as the fact that the man had a bandage on his wrist and the policeman in charge had bad breath. Perhaps there's a police record, if the suburban police in Adelaide keep records for that length of time. I doubt if the event made it into the Adelaide Advertiser or the News (Rupert Murdoch's paper, from which he launched his worldwide media empire). Readers of this blog will just have to take my word for it.