240704 Mary 2b

 Audio file

240704 Mary.m4a

Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker 1

14 years. Yeah, there are always cars.

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Sometimes it's a worry that you can park in front of a rubbish bins on rubbish collection or.

00:00:09 Speaker 2

Yeah, today is rubbish collection day.

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And we never get St. swept because there are always cars there. The street sweeper drives down the street very quickly down the middle of the road.

00:00:21 Speaker 2

Also, a lot of construction going on house construction.

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Yes. So the two houses across the road replaced one house and it took them over two years. They've just finished in May and for the last two years, I've had huge amounts of dust.

00:00:40 Speaker 2

Yeah.

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And rubbish, the builders did not put up a fence. Mm-hmm. I think a lot of regulations were not not.

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Right.

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Not worried about, so I'm really pleased now because we don't have as much dust. Yeah, and rubbish coming because the wind blows this way. OK anyway.

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We all survived. OK? Ohh, thank you very much. Yes, I can remember.

00:01:04 Speaker 2

I'm going to give you a copy about what you signed last time. Yeah, just for record.

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On that.

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Umm, so thank you for coming again. I was appalled when I saw how.

00:01:19 Speaker 2

Much. Yeah. You talk so much.

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And that was my job.

00:01:24 Speaker 2

No, that's good. I mean, yeah.

00:01:27 Speaker 2

Ah.

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I think you need someone listening to be able to say something. Most people and very good collection of. I mean, I'm amazed about your memory.

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So I went through and tried.

00:01:48 Speaker 2

OK.

00:01:49 Speaker 1

To mark things, yeah.

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But I.

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And I think maybe when we when we finished, I really need to read it and maybe take some bits out.

00:02:02 Speaker 1

Yeah. Condense. Make it sure. So I hope you can read my corrections. I my hand gets a bit shaky.

00:02:07 Speaker 2

Yeah.

00:02:13 Speaker 1

So I've tried to do what?

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Right.

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You're asking.

00:02:16 Speaker 1

Yeah. So if there's anything you don't understand? Yeah. When you look at it, I'm happy to.

00:02:25 Speaker 1

So do you want to read? Actually read through this?

00:02:29 Speaker 2

I'll take it. Yeah, because we it's better to have more time for new recording and have.

00:02:41 Speaker 2

Would you rather have a?

00:02:46 Speaker 2

This is a single spaced so 1.5 space next time.

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Yeah.

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For for more room. Yeah, for for.

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You or double spacing.

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Yeah, I can do that. It means more more papers. Yeah.

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Pages.

00:03:06 Speaker 2

Yeah.

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But I think that probably makes it easier for me to write in and then for you to.

00:03:10 Speaker 2

Read what? I've. Yeah. Done. Yeah, I'll do that next day.

00:03:21 Speaker 2

Normally I'm expected to read what I transcribe to you. Then we go over whatever correction. Yeah, but that will take too much time. I mean, we'll take whole one hour doing that. Probably. Yeah. So.

00:03:39 Speaker 2

Not being able to progress, so I I for this method is better.

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Yes.

00:03:47 Speaker 1

I was going to.

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Say.

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You can space it out further, but you could possibly go one size smaller of the font I can.

00:03:54 Speaker 2

OK. Yeah. OK. Yeah.

00:03:57 Speaker 1

Meet that quite clearly and that would help show that. Yeah. Paper too, yeah.

00:04:04 Speaker 1

What size is that 10?

00:04:12 Speaker 2

I use. I did just not in Word and then copied on word. So I use a font that is fairly big called verdana not. Yeah. Something that people don't use.

00:04:26 Speaker 1

Yeah, I don't know.

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Then.

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In my file there is not the font size of number, but it's like a normal small yeah, but next time I yeah, I'll go to word and choose I think.

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We'll try.

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Maybe.

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11 or something like that. Yeah, yeah.

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If if it's a good clear style.

00:05:01 Speaker 2

Yeah, this font is mainly for easy to read on on online.

00:05:08 Speaker 1

Right. And it was easy to read.

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On screen, yeah, but if you print it, it's a bit too.

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Big. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

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Yes, a lot of stuff on the screen is too small. That's right. But but yeah, but that would come up well.

00:05:24 Speaker 2

So. So it's nice chunk from childhood to youth. So do you. When you did that, did you have some sort of a plan or?

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I began to think ahead last week. I had no.

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Idea, yeah.

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But so today.

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Excuse me? I thought I'd talk about when I left school and.

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Perhaps for the next section of my life.

00:05:58 Speaker 2

Yes.

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OK.

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When we get.

00:06:03 Speaker 2

Yeah. OK. I also noticed that that clock is, is it correct?

00:06:11 Speaker 1

Yes it is. But the hand the second hand.

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Yeah.

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Yeah.

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Goes up a lot more easily than the minute hand. Mm-hmm. So it's correct, but it's misleading. Yeah, I always look at the one up here. Much easier to.

00:06:24 Speaker 2

OK. Yeah, yeah. Last time I remember it was somewhat confusing. Yeah.

00:06:30 Speaker 1

It is so I looked that way.

00:06:33 Speaker 2

OK.

00:06:34 Speaker 2

Yeah, let's start.

00:06:38 Speaker 1

I finished my secondary schooling in 1958 and I went to Adelaide University and Adelaide Teachers College to study to become a secondary school teacher.

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It was difficult for me to decide what sort of degree to do because I liked all the subjects I did at school. I liked languages.

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I liked math. I liked science.

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And so that made it difficult.

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Anyway, I did what a lot of girls in my era did. I chose to do an arts degree, but I had quite a variety of subjects in it, including English, French, history.

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And even maths and physics.

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In the long run, when I went out teaching, it meant that schools were very pleased because they could get me to teach all sorts of subjects that they didn't have a.

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Teacher for yeah.

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So in the from 1959 and into the early 1960s, I used to ride my bike from Payneham down through the avenues in Saint Peters and across the Botanic Park near the zoo.

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To Chrome Road and then go across into Adelaide University.

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And while I was at Teachers College, I had to do.

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And Teachers College was concurrent with the university study. I had to do a lot of professional type subjects, which included speech, education, health, education, physical education.

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Principles of teaching.

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Educational psychology and things like that.

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These were spread out over the the years in college and fitted in between studying the subjects at university.

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Again, I was lucky because during those years Bruce, my boyfriend was studying engineering at Adelaide University and so most days I had lunch with him and some of his friends.

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And that was all part of.

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The romance that Bruce and I shared.

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It worked in well with our studies.

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Mm-hmm.

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I remember we even had to do what was called swim school, which meant that the student teachers had to do 2 weeks of swimming classes at the old City Baths in King William Rd.

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And one of my memories is of going to the class one day and afterwards as we walked up King William Rd. towards the city, who should we be following? But a very young dawn. Fraser and I have to say I was impressed with the width of her.

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Shoulders.

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I could see why she became a world famous swimmer.

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During my teachers college course, there were times when I had to go out to schools for practice teaching.

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And sometimes that meant that we weren't able to go to lectures at the university during the day, so we had to catch those lectures up and the lectures were not online. We either had to go to an evening lecture if there was one available, or borrow notes from one of our friends.

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Who had been at the actual lecture during the day and catch up that way.

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So.

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After.

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Yes, I went out teaching to my first appointment in 1962 at a school called Strathmore Girls Technical High School, which was in Blacks Rd. Gilles Plains.

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That school no longer exists.

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At that stage, the Boys, School technical high schools and the Girls technical high schools were segregated.

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Give us plans where we nearer together than some in that there was an Oval in the middle which we shared for sports and PE lessons at the girls school was on one side of the Oval and the Boys school on the other.

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Some of the other schools in other districts.

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The two schools were separated by one or two kilometres, but at least ours was just.

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The school Oval.

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While I taught at Strathmore.

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Uhm.

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I took a variety of subjects and because I was interested in sport, I used to help with the sports teams and so after school on Wednesday afternoons, I would often often be umpiring a softball match or a basketball match and.

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One of the duties of people who were involved with sport was also to look after first aid so you could deal with any minor injuries or illness there were.

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Student services officers in the schools those days to deal with that. So the teachers had to one. One of the things I remember happening at that school is that one day.

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A girl trod.

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On a piece of wood with a nail in it and the nail went right through her shoe and into her foot.

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We couldn't.

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Do anything about that. So we had to get the poor girl into one of the teachers cars and two of us took her to a local doctor and let him have the job of somehow removing the shoe and giving her a tetanus injection and bandaging up the foot.

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Another time a girl slipped over on the wet Oval during a softball match and broke her arm. People complain about waiting for ambulances now, but I remember we sat on the Oval as the day grew cooler and we waited an hour and a half.

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For the ambulance to come to take that poor girl.

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Or.

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The necessary X-rays and resetting her arm. I felt very sorry for her because she was due to take part in a gymnastics performance that evening, but with a badly broken right forearm, there was no way she could do that.

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So it was a very upsetting time for the poor girl.

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So waiting for an ambulance is nothing new. When I left there, I was there for three years and.

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Like a lot of school teachers, I got married during the Christmas holidays, so Bruce and I were married in January 1965 and after that I was sent off to a different girls school, the Norwood Girls Technical High School, which was in Osman Terrace.

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In Norwood.

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And that, like Strathmore, that is no longer a school for the girls there.

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Originally it was a school shared by the boys and girls, but in 1951 a magnificent new building had been built on Kensington Road and the boys left Osmond Terrace north and went over to Kensington Road, Marriottsville into this beautiful new school.

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Now that is no longer a boys school either. It is. It has now become Marrickville High School and interestingly enough, our daughter eventually attended there in the 1980s.

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I worked for two years at Norwood.

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Girls Technical High School and the next year our son Graham was born, and so I left teaching to look after our little son when he was 2.

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Bruce, who by this time was working at Adelaide University as a lecturer in electrical engineering, took a years sabbatical and he went to Bell Research Labs in New Jersey in America.

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For years, research in the field of communications.

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So.

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Bruce Graham and our little and I went to America for a year.

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I remember that when we left here, it was very hot weather in January.

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And we thought that we would actually have a sort of holiday on our way to America. And we went across the Pacific on a chandras lion ship called the Australis. However.

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In 1970.

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The.

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Travelling on the Australis was nothing like travelling on the cruise ships of today.

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There, there was plenty of food, but other arrangements were not so good.

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The senior staff.

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Tended to stand around in white uniforms and look good, and the people who actually did the work.

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The people who service the cabins, he changed it in and and did all sorts of things like that, worked extremely hard and for long hours. And I think that made the owner of the Chambers line very, very rich. His name actually was Aristotle Onassis. So he was a rich man.

00:17:37 Speaker 1

It took us. We went from Australia, from Melbourne to Fiji.

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And there, Bruce and I had our first glimpse of life in a country that was a quite different style of life from Australia because we had a bit of time while the ship.

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Was in dock.

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Where we could go out on a little trip and have a bit of a look at life there.

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Up.

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When the time came later in the day to Reboard, we were on the boat again and for 11 days after leaving Fiji, we did not see any land until we got to the western end of the Panama Canal.

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We were very glad to see land again.

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Unfortunately, we went through the Panama Canal at night, so we didn't get as good a view of the way things operated as we would have liked to have had.

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But we were actually impressed with that great feat of engineering, which enabled ships to pass through easily from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic.

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After going through the Panama Canal, we went to Miami, where we disembarked.

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And we were struck by the colorful life there. There were a lot of people from all sorts of countries there and a lot of them were wearing quite colourful clothing.

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And so again, Bruce and I were being educated in the way people live in different places.

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One very.

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Upsetting memory I've got of disembarking from the australis is that?

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We were. We did not disembark from a lower level, but from a very high level of the ship, and there was a very long, steep gangplank that we had to walk down. Bruce took our two large suitcases that we had with all our clothes in and he walked down the gangplank.

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I had Graham with me. He was two years old.

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And fortunately, a fairly well behaved child who.

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Didn't run away from us, but also fortunately I had a set of what we called monkey reins on him, which was leather straps over his chest and clipped onto that was a a leather lead which I had hold of just as well because while the ship's.

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Officers in their lovely white uniforms were standing watching us all walk down the gangplank. Graham slipped and lost his footing.

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And so I walked most of the way down that long, steep gangplank holding my son by the leather strap that I had holed off, but fortunately he was well secured to it and we reached the bottom in one piece.

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From Miami, we flew and I would say that in Miami, the weather was still quite warm, but we flew N to New Jersey.

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And of course, when we arrived there, it was.

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The middle of winter snow on the ground and a big shock to people who lived all their lives in South Australia to that stage.

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In New Jersey.

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The people Bruce was working for.

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Welcomed us into their home for a few days. His boss welcomed us into his home for a few days while we had to find accommodation for the year and which we did.

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And so we began a whole new way of life. First of all, we rented a car.

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Until we could buy one.

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And we went to live in an apartment.

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And we had to learn to deal with the cold weather because the warm clothing that we had brought from Australia was really not warm enough.

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So because it was winter time and people weren't hanging around out of doors, Graham and I didn't meet very many people to start with. Whereas Bruce met lots of people at work. Bell Labs got him to work very quickly and got him onto the payroll. So we had money.

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To rent our apartment and then to go looking for a second hand car, which was a Rambler American.

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And also to buy what we needed in the way of clothing and food and.

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To rent furniture to go into our apartment, I would have to say that the standard of the rented furniture in America was pretty abysmal. Hmm, but it served its purpose for us for a year.

00:23:09 Speaker 1

Yeah. So we we learned quickly about things like double glazing on Windows.

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Something we've not come across before.

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And uh.

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Settled into our life in.

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An apartment complex called Strathmore Gardens, which was in a.

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A Township called Matawan, which was a little bit north of Homedale in New Jersey, where the Bell Labs were situated mattawan, was about 50 miles. I'm saying miles because the Americans were still in miles from New York City.

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And so that meant that many, many people living near us.

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Used to commute to New York City on a daily basis for their jobs, they either went on a bus or on the rail system. So during the day Mattawan was fairly empty. Apart from housewives and school children.

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And but at night there was a great influx of fathers coming home, and so the personnel in the district changed markedly. We discovered quite quickly because Graham had a problem with.

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Eczema.

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That it wasn't easy to find a local doctor, a GP, but eventually we found one and when I told him what our doctor here used to prescribe.

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To calm down.

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Graham's itchy skin. He looked horrified and said no. He wouldn't prescribe that for a child. So all we could do was to put calamine lotion on him. So Graham suffered quite a bit that year with skin problems. However. Ohh and I also discovered because I read up as much as I could.

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About it, we discovered that New Jersey was probably one of the worst places in the world that you could go to live if you had allergies. We think that could have been partly.

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Because there was a lot of industry which obviously polluted the environment quite badly and that industry was in the Raritan Valley and and the Raritan was a river that came down to the sea just north of where we were living.

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Uhm, I also got a shock.

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When I realized that the crossing guards who stood outside the primary schools for the children in the morning were actually members of the police force, and that they had guns in their holsters. So I realised in 1970, which is a long time ago now, that school children.

00:26:12 Speaker 1

In America, grow up with the sight.

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Of people with a.

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A handgun very ready to use and.

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I think that's not surprising that they have so much trouble with.

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Guns now?

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What?

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We discovered that there were jumbo sales held regularly and so Bruce and I bought a lot of things that we needed for our use during the year at these jumbo sales. And one of the things we bought was a second hand pusher. And so as the weather warmed up.

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Late in spring I was able to put Graham in the pusher and take him for walks around the district.

00:27:00 Speaker 1

It was interesting living in Matawan because.

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Mostly you would have thought that there was just white people living there, but what we discovered was that there was quite a settlement of coloured people who lived.

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In the nearby wood.

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In America, at that stage there was still quite a lot of.

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Wooded territory in between the.

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Residential districts and that was often where colored folk lived in small, quite small houses.

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So that they would come into the Township for shopping and to go to school. But you didn't really see them in the street very much.

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At during that year, we attended a local church there called.

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The Matawan First Methodist Church, and so we met quite a lot of people there, and I also sang in the church choir.

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And we found a lady there who was willing to babysit Graham. If we, on the few occasions we went out on a Saturday evening.

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Some of the friends we made.

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There included people from other countries like Germany.

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Vietnam, Switzerland. These were also people who were working at Bell Labs because Bell Labs like to get people from all over the world who were experts in their field.

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And some of these people also were very fond of playing tennis as we were. So when summer came, we spent many hours playing tennis with them outdoors. But sometimes on a Saturday night.

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All year round they would organise for people to play tennis in an indoor stadium.

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And so that would be a an outing on a Saturday night where we played tennis and had a meal there. Bruce and I got a shot because we assumed seeing that couples married couples were there, that we would play some mixed double s. But when we mentioned that to our friends.

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They were horrified, and it turns out that in America people said Ohh no, no, you never play tennis with your partner because that leads to arguments. Bruce and I were amused at this because many times in Australia before then and since then we played tennis to.

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Weather.

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As partners on the court and really enjoyed the exercise because we thought alike about who should take the ball and how it should be played and had a bit of success, but certainly a lot of enjoyment.

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So it was good when I met or when we met these people, and one of the girls from Germany was also a tennis coach in her spare time. And she said to me one day, Mary, I can't take my class today. Will you teach them for me? And I said yes.

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And then she said. But I will pay you my fee. And I said no, I do not have a work permit and I do not want to be kicked out of the country for earning money while my husband is still working here. So I did my volume.

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Dear bit for that day happily.

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I would. I would also add that during that year I'd put on a lot of weight and I blame that on the American food and the fact that I wasn't as active as I normally was in Australia in that I wasn't playing as much sport or walking or running about or riding a bike.

00:31:23 Speaker 1

OK.

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Did here and when I got back to Australia that same weight more or less fell off. So whether it was, I think it was the difference for me, but it might also have been the sunshine here that enabled us to get out of doors and be more active.

00:31:41 Speaker 2

How long did you stay in?

00:31:43 Speaker 1

America, we were there for one year almost exactly.

00:31:45 Speaker 2

Hmm.

00:31:47 Speaker 1

And.

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Bruce actually was offered a job to stay, but we thought that.

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Bringing up children in Australia was the place to be. Hmm. So we returned to Australia.

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And we'd also discovered that none of our family had visited us, or we're interested in visiting us there. So we thought we'd come back. And it was lovely when we arrived in Adelaide at the airport, there were a whole lot of friends who lived, lived in the Campbelltown area where.

00:32:22 Speaker 1

Where we live and have lived for over 50 years and they were all at the airport to meet us with a big banner which said, welcome home, Davises. We are still friends with a lot of those people today.

00:32:41 Speaker 2

So coming back was by airplane.

00:32:44 Speaker 1

We flew back by airplane. Yes, we decided that we were not going to do the the ship again.

00:32:54 Speaker 1

And it was lovely to come back to the hot weather and to.

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Go to the beach.

00:32:59 Speaker 1

When I mentioned beaches, there was a beautiful beach that we did go to while we were living in America. It was called Jones.

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Jones Beach State Park, which was actually, I think on Long Island from memory. As I said, we weren't living so far South.

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Of.

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New York. So we could actually travel and we did. We travelled out to Long Island and even went to the far end of it, a place called Montauk, where there's a a lighthouse, but Giant Beach State Park had a beautiful beach wide white sand. And I remember that, Graham.

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As a little.

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2-3 year old. He was by then loved playing on in that warm sand.

00:33:50 Speaker 1

The disturbing thing was, though, that we also heard that.

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Sewage waste from the new the Greater New York area, which included parts of New York State.

00:34:04 Speaker 1

I think New Jersey and.

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Connecticut was towed out by barge into the Atlantic, somewhere off that coast, and dumped out there so we weren't too sure about that sort of just how clean the beaches were. But I guess that's a problem all over the world too. Really.

00:34:28

Hmm.

00:34:30 Speaker 1

Yeah. So by the time we'd lived there a year, we discovered how different celebrations were during the different seasons.

00:34:39 Speaker 1

A Christmas time was a a time spent indoors where it was warm.

00:34:45 Speaker 1

Whereas in Australia there's a lot of celebrating done out out of doors, we also found that our birthdays tended to be in somewhat different seasons, so that was all all in new experience for us.

00:35:01 Speaker 1

Yeah. When we came back at the beginning of 1971.

00:35:09 Speaker 1

I'll leave that for a bit. I'll just go back to America for a moment. As I said, we bought our second hand car, which was very comfortable to ride in and to drive and.

00:35:23 Speaker 1

So personally I went to as many places we visited as many places as we could.

00:35:31 Speaker 1

In a in a day's journey around where we lived. So we saw parts of New York State, Staten Island became a frequent visiting place because we would actually drive up through a little bit of New Jersey.

00:35:49 Speaker 1

And then across onto Staten Island Park, our car there and go across on the Staten Island Ferry ferry to Battery Park on the southern tip of Manhattan.

00:36:01 Speaker 1

Ireland.

00:36:04 Speaker 1

So we could do that, but we also went into the more of the southern parts of New York State and we loved visiting Pennsylvania because there there was more open space and farmland.

00:36:23 Speaker 1

Much we felt more at home there. It was much more like Australia in many ways.

00:36:28 Speaker 1

On one of our trips there, we saw the very quaint Amish people driving along the road in their horse and carriage with their horse and carriages in the black clothing that they wore, and the men had long beards and long hair, and they had hats for hats.

00:36:48 Speaker 1

So that was again an A novel experience for us. And I remember that we were very impressed with seeing big steel works there.

00:37:01 Speaker 1

And going near and I think it was Allentown where there was a a Hershey's Chocolate Factory and as you drove near there, it smelled like you were driving past a great huge cup of hot chocolate.

00:37:18 Speaker 1

And we actually, we often went across into, into Pennsylvania when we felt we needed to escape from.

00:37:29 Speaker 1

Being in amongst lots and lots more people than we were used to being in amongst, we did also visit the City of Philadelphia.

00:37:38 Speaker 1

That was interesting historically because Benjamin Franklin came from there, but there were some very old parts of it and it was quite a large city.

00:37:52 Speaker 1

Uhm.

00:37:54 Speaker 1

And we also went down to the southern parts of New Jersey, Trenton, and down to Cape.

00:38:01 Speaker 1

Way, there was a lot of history in New Jersey and one of the things I made Bruce do was to take me to a lot of the old cemeteries and I would read the gravestones because you could see then when a whole lot of little children had died from childhood illnesses that we no longer have to battle.

00:38:22 Speaker 1

With these days, umm and you could also tell.

00:38:28 Speaker 1

A lot from plaques that were put up, which battles had been fought there against the British and also some of the Civil War history. So we actually did a lot of that and sometimes more local people would say to us ohh such and such is a good place to visit.

00:38:49 Speaker 1

You should go there and we would smile and say we've been already.

00:38:54

Mm-hmm.

00:38:55 Speaker 1

So that was one of the things besides playing tennis in.

00:38:58 Speaker 1

The.

00:38:59 Speaker 1

Warm weather. We did a lot of visiting and learning about the history of the state that that we lived in.

00:39:08 Speaker 1

Uhm, and during?

00:39:13 Speaker 1

The one weeks holiday that Bruce had, which was in September 1970. So he had nine days away from work 22 weekends and five work days, and we spent that time travelling through the New England States and they were very beautiful because fall was beginning.

00:39:32 Speaker 1

The leaves were turning yellow, orange, Crimson and the weather was still quite pleasantly.

00:39:42 Speaker 1

Form.

00:39:43 Speaker 1

And we enjoyed going through Connecticut, Rhode Island.

00:39:49 Speaker 1

Uhm.

00:39:52 Speaker 1

New Hampshire. Vermont. What have I left out? Massachusetts.

00:39:59 Speaker 1

Possibly something else. Yeah. So we enjoyed seeing the buildings there, the houses there. And again, we have an opportunity to study a lot of the early history of America from when the Pilgrim Fathers landed there in 1620 in that area.

00:40:20 Speaker 1

However.

00:40:22 Speaker 1

I'll jump back now to Australia in 1971.

00:40:26 Speaker 1

Bruce and I landed here on the 28th of October. Sorry, the 28th of December.

00:40:33 Speaker 1

We had left America.

00:40:35 Speaker 1

On the 26th.

00:40:38 Speaker 1

On the 25th of December, we had stopped our work of packing, ready to come home. So we packed our cases and we also packed.

00:40:49 Speaker 1

I think there were about four.

00:40:52 Speaker 1

Boxes that were shipped back, things that we wouldn't need for a while here and we stopped our packing and actually had ourselves.

00:41:03 Speaker 1

A Christmas dinner.

00:41:06 Speaker 1

And then we got back to packing on the 26th. Some of our friends drove us to the the Kennedy airport.

00:41:17 Speaker 1

And on the 28th, we landed back in Australia. It's a lovely warm weather.

00:41:24 Speaker 1

And one of the first things Bruce and I did was to go into Adelaide to a firm called.

00:41:32 Speaker 1

I've forgotten the name for the moment.

00:41:35 Speaker 1

To one of the Holden dealers anyway, and we looked at the cars.

00:41:43 Speaker 1

And at that stage, 2 tone cars were very popular and we did. We chose a.

00:41:51 Speaker 1

A Holden HG station wagon for Kingswood.

00:41:57 Speaker 1

And we said Ohh, we'd like one that was.

00:42:01 Speaker 1

Green with a white top and they said, well, we've got the white top here ready for you, but it's white all over and you'll have to wait two days for the bottom of the car to be sprayed with green paint. Bruce and I looked at one another and said, no, we're not willing to wait that long. We will have the white car.

00:42:22 Speaker 1

Thank you. And at that stage, we had a choice of colour of the interior trim, which could have been.

00:42:30 Speaker 1

Red, Blue or thorn. We chose the blue one, and so we drove away with our first brand new car that we'd ever had. And actually that 1970 Kingswood is still in the family. It now belongs to our son Graham.

00:42:50 Speaker 1

And is currently housed up at.

00:42:54 Speaker 1

Near Shepparton, in Victoria, at Graham's father-in-law's property, where there's room in the garage for the Kingswood.

00:43:04 Speaker 1

And it also started a tradition in our family where ever since then, Bruce and I have bought white cars, we we just don't consider any other colour. Makes life simple.

00:43:17 Speaker 2

Mm-hmm.

00:43:18 Speaker 1

So we settled back to life in Australia.

00:43:24 Speaker 1

It took up.

00:43:26 Speaker 1

Playing lots of sport.

00:43:28 Speaker 1

And I got back to singing in the church choir here.

00:43:34 Speaker 1

In 1972, our daughter Linda was born.

00:43:39 Speaker 1

She's five years younger than Graham, but they've always got along pretty well for brother and sister and and still do.

00:43:50 Speaker 1

And interestingly enough, they both followed their father's footsteps and studied electrical engineering at Adelaide University.

00:44:00 Speaker 1

Although at present neither of them are working as engineers, but their engineering skills have come in handy in many, many ways over the years, and I'm sure that the jobs that they currently do also benefit from their.

00:44:19 Speaker 1

Solving problem solving skills, which are always a good part of an engineer's.

00:44:29 Speaker 1

Toolkit, right, so we had.

00:44:34 Speaker 1

Linda was born in 1972. Graham attended the local kindergarten.

00:44:43 Speaker 1

Which at that stage was called the Lincoln Borthwick Kindergarten, which was 0200 metres.

00:44:54 Speaker 1

Maybe 300 at the most from our house.

00:44:57 Speaker 1

And then he went off to primary school at E Martin Primary School for a little while, I think I was part of a carpool that drove some of the little children to the East Marden Primary School, which was.

00:45:18 Speaker 1

1 1/2 to 2 kilometres away. But eventually the children.

00:45:23 Speaker 1

Rode bikes to school?

00:45:30 Speaker 1

And.

00:45:37 Speaker 1

By the time Linda was old enough to go to kindergarten, which would have been in.

00:45:43 Speaker 1

1977 Bruce was due for another year sabbatical from the Adelaide University and we actually went back to America for another year. Now. This meant that Graham, who was.

00:45:59 Speaker 1

Nine years of age actually attended school in America. He went to elementary school there.

00:46:07 Speaker 1

And Linda attended a private.

00:46:11 Speaker 1

School called Tinton Falls Nursery School again we because we're at Bell Labs or Bruce was working at Bell Labs in New Jersey. We looked for accommodation nearby.

00:46:25 Speaker 1

And this time we were a little bit South of Holmdel.

00:46:29 Speaker 1

In a town called Eatontown.

00:46:33 Speaker 1

The apartment complex we lived in there was called Eaton Crest Village. It was quite large, but the apartment buildings were spread out, though only two stories tall, and they were spread out by a lot of lawns and parking lot so that each.

00:46:52 Speaker 1

Each set of apartments you drove into a yard behind the apartments and that was where you could park your car and then walk across the lawn to your back door, and also where the big garbage bins were. And so we emptied all of our rubbish into the garbage bins. And early in the morning.

00:47:11 Speaker 1

A garbage truck would come into the yard behind the apartments and pick up, and there was always a lot of garbage. I think Americans create even more a lot more garbage than we do. Umm, they still do.

00:47:30 Speaker 1

We also.

00:47:32 Speaker 1

Had to.

00:47:35 Speaker 1

Share or use a shared laundry, a coin OP laundry.

00:47:41 Speaker 1

Which was separate from.

00:47:44 Speaker 1

The apartment buildings and so I used to go over there and wash the clothes, feed the coins into the washing machine and then.

00:47:57 Speaker 1

I had to. I used to partly dry the clothes in the dryer. The first thing I did was to empty the limp filter in the dryer. I don't think anybody else ever did it, but if you didn't do that, if you trusted that the last person who you had done that you ended up with clothes that were very grey because there was a lot of lint got into them in the.

00:48:17 Speaker 1

Dryer so I used to empty the lint filter twice.

00:48:21 Speaker 1

1st when I.

00:48:23 Speaker 1

Got before I used it and then after I used it so that it would be clean for the next person.

00:48:30 Speaker 1

After I've had the clothes in the dryer for one cycle, I used to take them back to our apartment.

00:48:38 Speaker 1

And in the cold weather, because there was central heating, they would finish airing off in the apartment inside the apartment. But Bruce made me a wooden clothes horse, similar to the ones that we use here in Australia. And so during the summer time, I would also finish airing off the clothes.

00:48:59 Speaker 1

On the lawn outside of our back door and.

00:49:04 Speaker 1

Also, there were some bushes growing there and I throw some of the clothes over them and the locals were always amused at how white my clothes looked. I thought, no, no lint, they're clean, so I think we we were a source of amusement to some of the locals because another thing that we did.

00:49:26 Speaker 1

Was to buy a tiny little BBQ from the local hardware store and in summer time we would BBQ lamb chops again outside our back door.

00:49:40 Speaker 1

And the comment from.

00:49:44 Speaker 1

The people who lived around us was.

00:49:47 Speaker 1

But when we cook lamb, it doesn't smell like that. And I thought, no, we found the American meat to be very fatty. They locked it with a lot of fat in it. We didn't. And so I used to buy frozen New Zealand lamb, which I could buy it at the local supermarket. And that was what we were cooking on our little BBQ.

00:50:08 Speaker 2

OK.

00:50:08 Speaker 1

And that was what smelled so good.

00:50:11 Speaker 1

I'm I need to.

00:50:24 Speaker 1

Umm.

00:50:33 Speaker 1

Because that was a big apartment complex.

00:50:37 Speaker 1

There would have been several 100 people living there and we had.

00:50:43 Speaker 1

Coloured folk living next to us. Their back door was near ours 2 ladies called Kate and Alice. Kate was the mother. Alice was the daughter and we got on very, very well with them.

00:51:01 Speaker 1

Alice discovered that I liked to sew, but didn't have a sewing machine, and she said Ohh, I've got two and we discovered that Americans are very, very good at putting their old equipment into the basement or into a storage unit when they get a new piece of equipment.

00:51:20 Speaker 1

And so most Americans have got.

00:51:24 Speaker 1

Two sewing machines at least.

00:51:27 Speaker 1

Three dinner sets, three sets of cutlery, two sets of saucepans, and you could go and add infinitum. And the ones that they're not using are stored away. So Alice kindly lent me her old singer sewing machine, which was still in very, very good condition.

00:51:47 Speaker 1

And because although she, too, was working at Bell Labs in the administration area, she had previously worked in a fabric shop. And she.

00:51:57 Speaker 1

Had a lot.

00:51:58 Speaker 1

Of fabrics that she'd never used. And so she gave me fabric and I made things like.

00:52:06 Speaker 1

And nurses costume for Linda.

00:52:11 Speaker 1

Dress to wear at least one dress to wear skirts.

00:52:18 Speaker 1

And then when it came to Thanksgiving and Graham had two parts in the Thanksgiving play at the elementary school, I was able to make him a costume. He was chief Massasoit, who was the chief of one of the local Indian tribes. When the white people first came to that area.

00:52:38 Speaker 1

And he also had to be a Puritan father. So again, the sewing machine that Alice lent me was put to good use, and we made costumes for those two parts he had.

00:52:54 Speaker 1

And that reminds me when it was Halloween, the children.

00:53:01 Speaker 1

Went out with some older children who belonged to friends of ours for trick or treat.

00:53:09 Speaker 1

It was always safer to go in.

00:53:12 Speaker 1

Larger groups with some older people with you.

00:53:16 Speaker 1

And.

00:53:18 Speaker 1

And again, it was handy to have that sewing machine to help make things for their costumes.

00:53:28 Speaker 1

Kate the mum was a lovely grandmotherly type who was very, very nice to our two children, so they were excellent neighbours, as were the white folk on the other side of us. I think we also had coloured folk living up above us but.

00:53:48 Speaker 1

They didn't have a back door like we did. They had a front door and their stairs came down and they just went out the front door of the building.

00:53:54 Speaker 1

But we actually.

00:53:57 Speaker 1

Saw very little of our neighbours upstairs.

00:54:00 Speaker 1

Perhaps twice in the year, we also discovered that when you live in the big apartment complexes, the repair men were not very keen to do repairs very quickly. And when we moved in in January, we reported that one of the windows.

00:54:20 Speaker 1

It's cracked.

00:54:23 Speaker 1

Now that when there's double glazing to help keep the cold air outside and the warm air in, that's actually quite important.

00:54:32 Speaker 1

But it wasn't until.

00:54:36 Speaker 1

And we had complained two or three times during the year that it still wasn't done and it wasn't until we were almost due to leave in December that the repairman knocked on the door one day and said now about this window that you had broken.

00:54:53 Speaker 1

And I thought no mate, it was broken when we came, and it has taken you 11 months to come to repair him. Anyway. I'll let him repair it. I thought the next people would appreciate if they weren't paying for warm air to escape.

00:55:10 Speaker 1

Outside. So it was sort of interesting things like that little things.

00:55:18 Speaker 1

Where we notice the difference between the life and the two countries because we all spoke English.

00:55:25 Speaker 1

One of the favorite places that our son Graham loved visiting was a place called delicious Orchards. Now this was an apple orchard and they.

00:55:40 Speaker 1

During the summer you could go there and the trees were covered in leaves and there were apple crops.

00:55:51 Speaker 1

They use the apples to make cider. You could have clear cider, cloudy cider, cider or even alcoholic cider. They also made things like Apple tarts.

00:56:07 Speaker 1

All sorts of things made with apples, but then they also branched out and made other things like chocolate, cream carts and other things like that. So we would often go there on a Saturday morning because we would have a drink of cider while we're there.

00:56:26 Speaker 1

Maybe buy some apples.

00:56:29 Speaker 1

To fresh apples to take home and eat, and we would also buy cartons of apple cider to take home because it was. It was indeed beautiful apple cider that was pressed freshly on the premises.

00:56:46 Speaker 1

The apples that they sold there weren't limited to the local varieties.

00:56:53 Speaker 1

One of the types of apples they sold was Granny Smiths. They weren't grown in America. They were grown in Australia and imported. Hmm, so I could actually go there and buy beautiful Granny Smith apples.

00:57:07 Speaker 1

Not terribly expensive.

00:57:11 Speaker 1

Because I still love Granny Smith apples for cooking.

00:57:16 Speaker 1

Graham loved it because he loved the chocolate cream, tarts and other goodies that you could get there. And interestingly enough, he took.

00:57:28 Speaker 1

One of his sons.

00:57:29 Speaker 1

Then for a trip to America.

00:57:34 Speaker 1

Nine years ago now, when Ben was 10, the age that Graham turned when he was living there and he showed Ben where he used to go to elementary school and also took him to delicious orchards, which is still there to sample what he used to sample at that age. Hmm, Needless to say.

00:57:53 Speaker 1

They liked it too, so obviously that was a very good memory for Graham to go back there 50 years later. Mm-hmm. Nearly 50 years later.

00:58:04 Speaker 1

The other thing that we noticed as I.

00:58:08 Speaker 1

Said I could buy.

00:58:09 Speaker 1

Frozen New Zealand lamb at a very reasonable price. I could buy Granny Smith apples at delicious orchards. I could also buy KY brand tinned fruits, which had been grown.

00:58:24 Speaker 1

Preserved and packed at Kyabram in Victoria and was shipped over to America and I could buy those the big tins.

00:58:34 Speaker 1

Of preserved fruit, Peaches, pears and so on. And I think it was for $0.39 US a tin the buying power. When you've got a country of over 200 million people is absolutely huge. And so a lot of food.

00:58:54 Speaker 1

Was quite cheap in many ways, and if local producers tried to put the price up, which the egg producers did at one time, the importers got busy and brought in eggs from Spain.

00:59:11 Speaker 1

Which again was something like 20 or 3029 or $0.39 a dozen.

00:59:17 Speaker 1

And they just cut the throats of the local farmers until the local farmers reduce their prices. So with a huge.

00:59:30 Speaker 1

Population you can do things like that. Mm-hmm. But it was nice to be able to buy a few food products that were exactly how we liked.

00:59:41 Speaker 2

Them we we've got a couple of.

00:59:45 Speaker 1

Minutes. Couple of minutes, yes.

00:59:51 Speaker 1

I think that.

00:59:53 Speaker 1

That sums up ohh. Except to say during that year Bruce has nine days of holiday from Bell Lab. We spent going down South this time and so we went down through Virginia and.

01:00:12 Speaker 1

Sum of Maryland.

01:00:14 Speaker 1

In Delaware.

01:00:16 Speaker 1

And we visited the original capital city in Richmond, VA, and enjoyed the historical aspects there. We drove across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge tunnel and admired the engineering feet there.

01:00:37 Speaker 1

And we also saw.

01:00:42 Speaker 1

Where they did some of the space rocket launching from and I noticed that again Graham took his son Ben to see some of those same things when they went to America too.

01:00:58 Speaker 1

But then again straight after.

01:01:00 Speaker 1

Christmas. It was time to come back to Australia and we were very lucky to escape on time because there was a a Blizzard coming in and I think that we were one of the last flights to leave before the airport was closed down.

01:01:22 Speaker 1

Our plan though was that we would get to the airport before the roads were closed with too much.

01:01:27 Speaker 1

Price on them and that once we were there, we would go to stay in the airport until we could catch a plane home. The thought of coming back to a warm Australia was very appealing.

01:01:38 Speaker 2

So you went in January and came back in?

01:01:41 Speaker 1

January. Yeah, both times.

01:01:42 Speaker 2

OK.

01:01:44 Speaker 2

Another thing is in 1960s Australia's living standard was one of the highest in the world. Yes? And how did they compare to America?

01:01:58 Speaker 2

I mean, you, you, you, you lived in fairly I I guess reasonably upper middle class environment bell lab and.

01:01:58 Speaker 1

Very well.

01:02:11 Speaker 1

Because we had, we knew we weren't going to stay. We just took an apartment for the year.

01:02:17 Speaker 1

So it wasn't opulent or upper class.

01:02:21 Speaker 1

But it was it was quite OK. We were astounded because.

01:02:27 Speaker 1

A lot of Americans said they couldn't possibly afford to buy a house, and we looked at their wages, their salaries and thought.

01:02:36 Speaker 1

Why not?

01:02:37

Umm.

01:02:37 Speaker 1

But I think.

01:02:40 Speaker 1

I don't know. They they were happy to rent.

01:02:43 Speaker 2

Hmm.

01:02:44 Speaker 1

And we thought if we if we were going to stay there, we would have been buying a House and a very nice one on the salary, too. Different mindset. Yeah, there were rich people and there were some very rich people who lived along the shore in New Jersey.

01:02:50 Speaker 2

I see.

01:03:00 Speaker 1

In places like Atlantic City and Romson.

01:03:05 Speaker 1

And a lot of famous people used to.

01:03:06 Speaker 1

Go there for.

01:03:08 Speaker 1

The summer where the people like Frank Sinatra.

01:03:12 Speaker 1

And one one time we went to a concert put on there where Victor Borger played the piano and entertained.

01:03:17 Speaker 2

Hmm.

01:03:18 Speaker 1

Us.

01:03:21 Speaker 1

And there was an arts centre called the New Jersey Arts Centre. And again, I remember going there one night.

01:03:30 Speaker 1

Twice I think I went there. I can't remember the performance I saw there now.

01:03:35 Speaker 1

So there were some good things. Oh, the other thing you asked about the standard of living in 1970, the Australian dollar was worth more than the American dollar. Yeah. So we thought that prices over there were dirt cheap.

01:03:50 Speaker 2

Hmm.

01:03:51 Speaker 1

Not so now.

01:03:53 Speaker 1

Because in terms of the Australian dollar, which has fallen.

01:03:57 Speaker 2

Another thing is I guess.

01:04:00 Speaker 2

Density population was fairly low in Australia. In Adelaide, I mean compared to New Jersey. So yeah.

01:04:07 Speaker 1

Absolutely yes, which is why in 1970s, sometimes we went across into Pennsylvania, just get out just bigger spaces 1970, that didn't worry us so much because by then life in Australia was getting busier even in little old Adelaide.

01:04:16

Hmm.

01:04:28 Speaker 1

And.

01:04:31 Speaker 1

Yeah, we we were more used to.

01:04:33 Speaker 1

It.

01:04:34 Speaker 1

And I guess we.

01:04:35 Speaker 1

Had.

01:04:36 Speaker 1

More activities we were involved in.

01:04:40 Speaker 2

Since you were talking about late 60s and seven early 70s.

01:04:46 Speaker 2

That was a time of Vietnam War. Did did you?

01:04:51 Speaker 1

No, we were more aware of Vietnam War protests and 70s. Well here in, in Australia. I don't think I ever heard it.

01:04:57 Speaker 2

The thing.

01:04:59 Speaker 2

Alright, in.

01:05:04 Speaker 1

Mentioned beyond what you had seen, the and not a lot in the papers over there, America was focusing on their space program. OK yeah.

01:05:15 Speaker 1

Beat the Russians into space, so that was.

01:05:19 Speaker 2

Yeah, 69 was that's where they went to Moon.

01:05:24 Speaker 1

That's right. Yeah, July, July the 20th over there, July the 21st. Here. I had to be careful when I was asked what day they landed on the moon.

01:05:34 Speaker 1

Yeah, here it was. July the 21st, but.

01:05:37 Speaker 1

July the 20th there. Yeah.

01:05:40 Speaker 1

So that was very much in people's minds at that stage. And I think that some of the communications work that was done at Bell Labs was probably involved with their space with the space program there. So there were interesting times.

01:05:59 Speaker 2

OK.

01:06:02 Speaker 1

More work for you.

01:06:02 Speaker 2

Else.