The second Sunday in May is ‘Mothers’ Day’ in Australia. My darling mother died on 28 August 2011, at the ‘ripe old age’ of 91 years. I still miss her.
Mum spent her childhood in the Western Australian mining town of Kalgoorlie.
She always said that Kalgoorlie bred special people. They certainly had to be hardy. Founded in 1889 it became known as Western Australia’s “Golden Mile”, “the world’s richest square mile of earth”.
During the 1890s, the area boomed, with a population exceeding 200,000, mainly prospectors chasing gold. The area gained a notorious reputation for being a “wild west” with bandits and prostitutes.
It was around this time that my mother’s family arrived from Goulburn in New South Wales and set about making Kalgoorlie their home. Mum’s grandfather, Richard Everett, was a builder who brought six of his children aged 10 to 23 with him to the frontier town, including Louisa, my grandmother. As they were teetotal Methodists, I think it is fair to say they would have had a culture shock.
Although the first electric trams ran in 1902, it wasn’t until 1903 that the ‘golden pipeline’ was completed, pumping 23,000 kilolitres (5,100,000 gallons) of water per day from Perth.
My grandfather, James Eastwood, was an accountant from England who met the Everett family in Perth when they were on their way to Kalgoorlie. He fell hard for Louisa, threw over his job and followed her to Kalgoorlie.
James and Louisa married in 1903. The house James built for his bride wasn’t fancy but has lasted for over a century and is still occupied.
My mother was born in 1920, very much the youngest of five sisters, after her father returned from WW1. When she was only eighteen months old James died. With no widow’s pension Louisa took in a lodger and returned to dressmaking.
Despite having little money, Mum had a happy childhood, surrounded by aunts, uncles and cousins. Her adored “little Grannie”, Archina Everett (4’ 11” tall) came to live with them for the last 10 years of her life, after becoming blind with glaucoma. Archina was an old-school Scottish Presbyterian and to Mum’s amusement, insisted on calling Kathleen, Mum’s older sister, “Katherine”. Why? “Because “Kathleen’s too Irish”.
On Sunday afternoons one of Mum’s two uncles, Wilfred and Victor (who had a carrier’s business) would take Archina out for a “jaunt” in a horse and sulky. Grandma’s “going out” outfit was a long black sateen dress, little black boots (she was born with a club foot) and a black cloche hat trimmed with black lace.
As Mum’s cousins were Methodist, she always gate-crashed the Methodist Sunday School picnic, which apparently had the best games and cakes of all the Sunday school picnics.
Aunt Edie’s Sunday “teas” for the whole extended family were spectacular. Cold meats and salads, fruit salad, jelly and ice cream and all varieties of scones and cakes would be laid out on a large table on their side verandah. After tea, there would be sing-songs around the pianola.
Mum (who was always called Monnie, not Mona) was a bright child and was put up a grade at North Kalgoorlie Primary School. A tiny girl, with skinny legs encased in the black stockings, her nickname was “Minnie Mouse”, which she hated. But she had many friends and an active social life, attending parties, sports events and ballet dancing, as often recorded in the local newspaper, The Kalgoorlie Miner.
Below is the Kalgoorlie Mum knew in 1930.
The family’s fortunes revived when Louisa inherited James’ share of his mother’s Isle of Man estate. One of her first actions was to send Mum on a Young Australia League trip around Australia:
In late 1939 (shortly after the start of World War II), Mum sat for the Commonwealth Typists’ Examination (in English, Arithmatic, Typewriting (178 wpm) and Shorthand (191 wpm). She came top of the State, just as her sister Marjorie had done fifteen years earlier. She was offered a job in a Government department in Perth, and left Kalgoorlie with her mother and sister Jean. (The other sisters had all left home and married by then.)
For a while during the war they lived in Megalong Road, Nedlands, a house that features in one of my books, A Stranger in my Street. It’s where Meg Eaton is living with her mother and sister when she discovers a body in the air raid shelter of a neighbour’s house…
