“Mum and dad are home,” Kathryn, daughter of Alfred and Edna Wynn, said. 

“My entire life I have always wanted to come here. It has always been a dream.”

Ms Wynn, newly engaged to Norm Ownsworth, traveled across Australia to the Top End to fulfill a life long need to visit the Katherine residence her parents bought at the time of World War II. 

“I am blown away by how important this piece of history is to my family,” she said. 

“I heard many stories from my parents and it seems surreal to be seeing it now.” 

O'Keeffe House is a small residence on Riverbank Drive, built in 1943. 

Alfred Wynn, a Corporal in the army in World War II, was in Darwin at the time of the bombing. 

Coming to the NT and seeing the history her parents were part of has been an important step in stitching a long family history together.  

“I am only realising the enormity of what my dad must have seen and been through in Darwin during the war,” Ms Wynn said. 

“After seeing what he must have been through I can understand why he wouldn’t want to come back. 

“I never had the chance to have that conversation with him. About the war. About how he felt.

“Mum said [O’Keeffe House] used to have a dirt floor, she would call it the ‘bark hut’. 

Original photos brought along with Ms Wynn and her partner are new additions for O’Keeffe House, adding to the rich history of the residence. 

Ms Wynn said she thought it would be fitting for some of her parent’s ashes to be buried at the residence. 

“This is something that feels appropriate for mum and dad,” she said. 

Ms Wynn buried the ashes under a young frangipani tree in the well kept garden, after tea and scones provided by the National Trust ladies. 

“This was all just so unexpected.” 

Although Ms Wynn said she would have liked to have been able to ask her parents many more questions about their lives in Katherine during and after the war, this felt “right”. 

“When you get older you start to reflect on your family’s history and what brought you to this point in your life. Seeing this house with all this history has been surreal,” she said. 

“There is so much more history to see here than we realised, so much we were not aware of, so much Australia is not aware of.”