For years, birthdays in the Burgess family have travelled down phone lines. Christmas greetings have crossed state borders, while Facebook messages have helped fill the long spaces between visits. With relatives now spread from Caboolture and Brisbane to South Australia and Canada, being together has become something far less ordinary.
For Barbara Burgess, a retired paediatric nurse from Top Camp near Toowoomba, staying close has often meant hearing familiar voices rather than seeing familiar faces. A long-awaited reunion is now taking shape after Barbara was selected for Tahbilk’s inaugural Long Lost Lunch, an initiative created to bring together an Australian family separated by distance and circumstance.
For the Burgess family, it offers something they have struggled to arrange for years: everyone in the same room again.
Birthdays kept the family close
Barbara’s relatives have lived far apart for decades, with family members scattered across Queensland, South Australia and Canada. Caboolture is among the Queensland communities where members of the extended family now live.
Distance gradually changed what family occasions looked like. Barbara and her cousin Victor built their own birthday tradition, calling each other every year even when they could not celebrate together.
“I ring my cousin Victor for his birthday, and he rings me for mine,” Barbara said.
Christmas brought another round of calls, while Facebook helped bridge the months between them. The family remained connected, but the small rituals also became reminders of how rarely everyone could gather in person.
The last major family reunion described in Barbara’s story took place in January 2010 for her Uncle Victor’s 80th birthday. There were Coffin Bay oysters, home-cooked food and a game of pool that ended with Barbara’s cousins teaching her a few Hungarian phrases.
Food has always carried its own language in the family. Barbara remembers Uncle Victor joking that she was like her father, except she “didn’t eat enough”, while another of his sayings summed up the household attitude to hospitality: “You don’t have to be hungry to eat.”
Another gathering of the wider family never quite came together. Illness, financial pressure and the challenge of coordinating relatives living hundreds or thousands of kilometres apart kept pushing the next reunion further away.
Family roots stretched from Hungary to the outback
Barbara’s father, Janos, known as John, came to Australia from Hungary in 1951 after fleeing Communist rule. He later worked as a miner at Radium Hill in South Australia, where he met Barbara’s mother, Connie, who had left a dairy farm near Toowoomba to work as a nurse with the Australian Inland Mission.
John later searched for opal at Andamooka, spending periods digging by hand and sleeping in the back of a ute. His determination became part of the family story Barbara grew up hearing.
Her own childhood memories are less about hardship than the ordinary pleasures of being together. Birthdays meant party hats, a house full of friends and plenty of food, while rain could become an excuse for fun.
Barbara recalled her father raising the dump truck when it rained so she and her brother Peter could swim in the water that collected there. Memories like those have remained part of the family history long after Barbara and Peter lost their parents in a plane crash while they were still children.
Nursing became another thread linking the generations. Barbara eventually worked as a paediatric nurse, while her family says nursing and midwifery have been represented across four generations.
Illness made distance harder to bridge
As the years passed, visiting relatives became increasingly difficult for Barbara. A long period of poor health brought medical expenses and made interstate travel harder to manage.
Barbara later attributed her symptoms to mould exposure after spending years looking for an explanation. Whatever the cause, the financial and physical strain made family visits more difficult.
“Catching up with family is just too difficult,” Barbara said.
Her experience comes as regular face-to-face contact has declined more broadly across Australia. Australian Bureau of Statistics data shows 53 per cent of Australians aged 15 and over had in-person contact with family or friends outside their household at least once a week in 2025, compared with 68 per cent in 2019.
For families living across several states, keeping close can involve far more than finding a free weekend. Travel costs, health and distance can turn a simple family meal into something that takes years to organise.
A story Tahbilk says stayed with them
Barbara’s story was selected after Tahbilk invited families to share why they had become separated and what bringing them together would mean.
Fourth-generation Tahbilk custodian Alister Purbrick said Barbara’s family stood out because of its history of migration, nursing and resilience, as well as the circumstances that had kept relatives apart.
“When we read Barbara’s story we knew immediately she was our family,” Purbrick said.
He said the combination of her father’s journey from Hungary, the generations of nurses in the family and the years spent apart captured the kind of story the Long Lost Lunch had been created to recognise.
Saroo Brierley, who is due to host the gathering, also found something familiar in Barbara’s story. Brierley was separated from his birth family in India as a child, later grew up in Australia and eventually reunited with his mother after decades apart, a story later told in the film Lion.
“Barbara’s story moved me,” Brierley said. He pointed to the family’s resilience, the distance between relatives and the years spent wanting to be together again.
One table after years of phone calls
Tahbilk’s Long Lost Lunch is planned for its estate at Nagambie in Victoria in October. The selected family will receive return travel to Victoria, transfers, accommodation and a hosted lunch, giving relatives who have spent years speaking across distance the chance to finally meet around one table.
The occasion carries echoes of the family gatherings Barbara remembers from childhood: food to share, relatives close by and no need for a phone call to bridge the distance.
“It’s so exciting to think we’ll finally be together at Tahbilk Estate, sharing great food, wine and of course celebrating our love for each other,” she said.
Published 16-Sept-2026
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