International Women's Day

It’s International Women’s Day and people have been posting photos of all sorts of wonderful and heroic women, so here’s my contribution. My mum.

She was a smart cookie — won a scholarship to a private school in Melbourne, and was Dux (top student) of that school. But although she had matriculated with honors, she was too young to go to Teacher’s College, so she returned to her home town, picked up another four subjects, coached a couple of  men who were studying for  their matriculation, and sang with a local band — she had a glorious voice. The following year she went to Melbourne Teacher’s College and won the Gladman Prize for teaching.  And met my dad.
That’s Mum as a schoolgirl.

I was born almost ten years after the older kids in the family, and though I claim I was an accident, she always insisted I wasn’t. She said she had me because she’d had three kids in three years and realized that the older kids hadn’t really experienced or had time to enjoy a baby. I think that was her, too — she’d been so busy as a young mum, coping with three under three, that she hadn’t had time to enjoy a baby either. My brother also wanted a boy, so I was a fail there. <g> He got a puppy as compensation.

When I was born, my family had been camping in a tent close to the beach in the coastal city where my maternal grandparents lived — she was nine months pregnant!  After a week or two Mum went into labour and I was born in the local hospital. It was around lunch time, and when the nurse brought Mum some lunch, she said, “No, the baby’s coming.” They smiled and said, “No, no, you have plenty of time yet, dear.” And Mum said “This is my fourth baby, I know when the baby is coming.” So they looked and sure enough, she had crowned.

That was in the long summer holidays, and when we returned home, everyone went back to school, except for Mum and me. Dad was the headmaster of a small rural school where she had taught also. It was a primary (elementary) school that was part of a center for recent migrants, and none of the kids spoke English — my brother and two older sisters were the only kids in the whole school who spoke English at home. After the first week or two Dad said to Mum, “We can’t get a replacement for you, you’ll have to come back to work.”

So Mum took me, aged not quite six weeks old,  in a bassinet and sat me in the classroom while she taught a class of about fifty little kids, beginners, in their first ever experience of school, none of whom spoke any English.

At the end of the school day she and Dad would come home together. She must have been exhausted, but she set about cooking for us all — on a wood-fired stove, because the house we lived in was far out of town and didn’t have electricity or gas. On the weekend she washed our clothes and boiled them in a copper, just like her grandmother used to do.

We didn’t have piped water, so all our water came from the  rainwater tank. She and Dad had a large veggie garden, and there were chooks (hens) a couple of geese, two goats, two cows, one of which always had a calf — the goats and cows meant we always had fresh milk — a pony and a couple of dogs and cats.  So everything she cooked was from scratch — garden to plate. And as was usual in those days, she did all the cooking and cleaning, too. And sewed clothes for us kids. And made teaching aids for her class.
And yet, somehow, she always found the energy to go dancing — she and Dad loved dancing — and that’s a dress she made herself.

This is her passport photo when she was in her mid forties and we were heading for a year in Scotland.

Dad and one of my sisters had to go early, as the Scottish school year was different to ours. So Mum — still teaching full time, though in a different school and with electricity etc. — had to pack up the house, get everything into storage and shift it all down to Geelong (240 miles away) where my grandparents now lived, as well as  pack for of us all for  a year in Scotland.

At the same time she was dealing with a 7 year old — me—  and two older kids doing their final year of high school. And because she was who she was, she had to scrub the house from top to bottom —windows, walls and all — so it was sparkling clean and ready for the Scottish teacher who was swapping jobs with my dad.

Mum continued teaching all through my childhood and youth. She loved it and the kids loved her. And she cooked and cleaned and gardened for the rest of her life. Dad retired, but as she often pointed out, she didn’t get to retire.

So she’s not famous or anything, but I reckon my mum was a real heroine.