Elizabeth

From England to Yallourn North

I have met people who’ve said there are people who think the streets of Melbourne, the streets of Australia, are paved with gold. I told them, “well they are really, aren’t they?” I feel as though they are.

Our family has benefited so much from being in Australia.

I followed my parents from North Devon, England. When they went, I felt as though they died. It felt simply dreadful. I needed to join my family again. My brother was there, my sister was there, and so too were mum and dad.

Friends had told me not to give up the beautiful countryside my husband and our four children called home. But when mum came to visit in 1979, I asked her to take two of my boys to Australia with her. We dressed them up in their smartest, because they were really rough, country children in a way, and they went on an airplane with mum.

Fergus and I followed a little while after with our other son and daughter.

Fergus was to teach electronics at Box Hill TAFE, a job he stayed in for 33 years. I taught mathematics at high schools for five years before joining Victoria College (later Deakin University), where I taught maths education for 12 years.

Our children all went to school, and have done rather well for themselves.

Our eldest son, Christopher, married a woman who grew up on a dairy farm in Gippsland. He’s held various jobs here and did almost the conventional thing and they have two children. My second eldest, Edward, has a gift for languages. He’s married to a Chinese American and is a professor at the Business School of Monash. My youngest son, Sebastian, was working for the World Wildlife Fund when he met his wife in the hills of North Vietnam. He now teaches at RMIT in the city, has two young girls, and lives very near where we lived in Box Hill. Our daughter, Zoe, had Down syndrome, and problems with her heart and lungs.

One of the greatest joys here was watching Zoe thrive.

The climate was easier for her. She went to a school with quality teachers. We received first-class healthcare. In England, there was a tendency among the medical professionals to say, “go home and look after your normal ones”. It was a fight all the way, really – a general thought people with disability were not useful citizens.

I never hit that attitude in Australia.

Most of our family followed Christopher to Gippsland. I got a job at the local university, while Fergus stayed in Box Hill near Sebastian. We had an amiable separate living arrangement. My mum followed next, then my sister followed, and then my brother came here too.

Gippsland is a fantastic place. So green. I had dogs, you see, and I walked up and down the rail trail at Boolarra and made peace with the farmers on either side. Zoe and I lived in Hill End for a time before we moved to a farm between Willow Grove and Hill End. I reared calves there and got to know the local people – lovely people.

Zoe died in 2011, and I don’t have people calling on me like they used to. She was the most extraordinary person. When she was with us, people would call in, because they knew they’d be welcomed by her. They felt grateful to Zoe for the way she received them and talked to them. I wanted Zoe to be accepted here, and she was.

In 2016, I moved to a place up in the hills, which look very much like North Devon, about three kilometres from Thorpdale. I was surrounded by land and could walk my dogs almost anywhere.

I’m now in Yallourn North and so very happy to call Gippsland home.

And really, that’s our story.