There’s a cabinet in my dad’s house that held our family’s entire history on magnetic tape. VHS cassettes, Super 8 reels, decades of birthdays and Christmases and Sunday lunches and people who aren’t here anymore. They sat in that cabinet for years. And I didn’t watch a single one of them.
I need to be honest about that, because if you’re reading this, there’s a fair chance you’ve got your own version of that cabinet. A box in the garage. A drawer in the spare room. Tapes with handwritten labels in your mum’s handwriting, or your dad’s, and you know roughly what’s on them, and you know it matters, and you still haven’t done anything about it.
That’s not because you don’t care. It’s because you care so much that the act of pressing play feels enormous.
I know, because I lived it.
My father Giuseppe came to Australia from Apricena, a small town in Puglia, in the early 1960s. He was a man who filmed everything. Super 8 first, then VHS when the technology arrived. Birthdays, weddings, family gatherings, the mundane beautiful moments of daily life that you don’t realise are precious until they’re behind you. He captured decades of our family on tape.
And those tapes sat in his cabinet. For years. Through moves and milestones and everything that life throws at a family. Just sitting there, waiting.
About four years ago, I decided I was going to do something about it. I found a bloke on Gumtree selling a second-hand VHS player, drove out to get it, brought it home, and connected it up to the TV.
And then I tested it with a Star Trek tape.
Not one of the family tapes. Star Trek. A safe, emotionally neutral piece of content that would confirm the machine worked without requiring anything of me. The family tapes were right there, literally sitting alongside it. I could see the handwritten labels from where I was kneeling on the floor.
I told myself I was being practical. Testing the equipment. Making sure the tracking was good before I risked the important stuff. And there was truth in that. But there was also a deeper truth I wasn’t ready to say out loud.
I wasn’t ready to hear their voices.
There was one tape in particular. The label said Luisa’s 50th Birthday. My mum Luisa. And I knew what was on that tape before I pressed play — the room, the faces, the laughter, the way people moved and talked and existed in a moment that’s gone now. It wasn’t just a video. It was a time machine. And time machines are heavy to operate.
That VHS player sat connected to my TV for years before I finally pressed play on Luisa’s 50th. Even then, I only made it halfway through before I had to stop. Not because it was bad. Because it was so overwhelmingly, beautifully real. The voices. The faces. All of it, exactly as it was.
I came back to it days later and watched the rest.
Something changed after that. Not suddenly — slowly. The weight of those tapes shifted from something I was avoiding to something I needed to protect. Because magnetic tape doesn’t wait for you to be ready. It degrades. The oxide layer breaks down. Every year those tapes sit in a cabinet, they lose a little more of themselves.
My father filmed our family for decades so that we could remember. And I was letting those memories dissolve because I was afraid to look at them.
Around the same time, my cousin Elisa visited from Italy. I had never met her before. She came to Perth and spent hours — hours — going through family photos, asking questions, hungry for a history she’d never had access to. She wanted to know where she came from. She wanted faces and voices and stories.
Watching her, I realised something. This wasn’t just about me and my feelings about pressing play. This was about a generation who’d never even had the chance. Valentina didn’t have the luxury of a cabinet full of tapes. She had fragments, secondhand stories, and a longing for something more tangible.
She deserved to see what I’d been too afraid to watch.
That’s why Yesterday Memories exists. Not because I woke up one morning and decided to start a digitisation business. It exists because I was the person with the tapes in the cabinet and the VHS player gathering dust and the Star Trek cassette as an emotional buffer. I was the person who couldn’t press play.
And I know there are thousands of people like me. Good people who love their families and treasure their memories and still haven’t opened that box in the garage. Not because they’re lazy or forgetful, but because they know what’s in there, and knowing makes it heavy.
What I can tell you, from the other side, is this: it’s worth it. Every second of Luisa’s 50th was worth the years it took me to press play. Every crackly frame of Super 8 footage my father shot in Apricena before he ever set foot in Australia — worth it. The voices, the faces, the way Nonna laughed — all of it, worth every moment of hesitation.
The tapes won’t wait forever. But whenever you’re ready, we’re here.
Whenever you’re ready.
