Eulogy for an Independent Woman

About Me

I have recently turned 80 and had always considered my life journey to be unexceptional. Some soul-searching over the past few months has encouraged me to tease out the different stages of my journey. I hope you can identify with some of them as we travel together through this blog. 

 

About this site 

Dive into the heartfelt journey of Eulogy for an Independent Woman, a platform dedicated to sharing the wisdom and experiences of women. This is a space for personal reflection, empowering stories, and a community where women can connect, and share insights into personal growth and self-discovery. If you are a man, you are not excluded. I can only write from a female perspective but if something resonates with you, feel free to share. 

Navigating life’s choices with courage and humour

It sometimes feels that there is no light at the end of the tunnel. We are caught up in the complexities of the moment. Nothing we can envisage has positive shape and the negativities drag us down. Yet, we are resilient women and emerge from each phase with renewed strength. It is only in retrospect that we can see how we were formed and forged by those adversities, how the difficulties of the time have helped make us the women we are today. When you share on this platform, you may have to use a dark zone as your jumping-off point but please, if you can, take us to a positive or encouraging outcome.

Invitation

I intend to post about once a week. I invite you to check in regularly. Your comments will be gratefully received.

Apple Crumble Generation Three

 

My life has been very different from that of my mother and my grandmother. I was born towards the end of World War Two. By the time I reached young adulthood, the world was vastly changed from that which I was born into. Although not many girls completed secondary school, I was fortunate to earn a teaching scholarship which meant that I finished Senior (now Year 12) and went on to Teachers College. Most women saw employment as something to engage in until they were married.  Nursing and teaching were probably exceptions, though many did not return to the job after marriage and children.

We were the first generation to have access to superannuation but without security. The ‘marriage bar’ was set high. When I got married, I was forced to resign and become a part-time worker. My superannuation contributions were returned (and bought a fridge - which would have been at least $30,000  at retirement.)  When I became eligible for permanent work, I had the temerity to have children and stay home to mother them with casual work at TAFE. My super, at retirement was less than one third of my male counterparts. To make it even more difficult, it was not until 1972 that female teachers were paid the same amount as men, despite the fact that as early as 1949, the teachers union endorsed equal pay. I really must share my status when I worked in Western Australia. Because I was married, I was designated ‘Temporary Mistress’. When I was stood down during the Christmas holiday, I became ‘Temporary Mistress Lapsed.’ How low can you go?

When I was divorced, I had three children under 10, full time work and part time study. I had completed my Bachelor of Educational Studies and was working on a Grad Dip in Human Resource Management which involved some volunteer work. For me, that was a fortnightly shift with Lifeline telephone counselling. I went on eventually to get a second Grad Dip and a Masters in Educational Administration. I was also heavily involved in Toastmasters which I have continued to this day.

I would probably have remained in a primary school classroom but I took on a District Relief role. That was a permanent position and involved relieving teachers on long service leave and principals and deputy principals on long term leave. One off those stints was so difficult that I was ready to leave teaching but instead applied for a one-teacher school where I rediscovered my love of teaching. As an experienced teacher in the bush, where most are in their early years of teaching, I came to the attention of the Executive Director and was offered one year of paid study in New Zealand to set up and run the Reading Recovery program in Queensland.

Now I was working with teachers, a role that fitted me to a T. My teaching and Toastmasters came together to give me a twelve-year highlight to my teaching career. It was a heady time for me and gave me another opportunity – to work overseas in Northern Ireland, London and Vancouver Island in Canada, with lots of travel in school holidays.

I retired at 60 with a love of travel but not a good travel budget. I bought a very small camper, followed by a slightly larger campervan – a converted ambulance - and set off. Over a period of 13 years, I travelled almost every highway and byway in Australia, often in the company of fellow Solo travellers. That was an incredible way to see the country and I have made life-long friends. I have finished my road tripping now and settled into quite a busy lifestyle which I will continue for as long as I can.

My vehicle didn’t have many expensive features, or even many basic features! With limited cupboard space, a very small fridge and not much interest in cooking, my meals were rather straightforward – even boring. However, there were times when we shared meals and I had to have something quick and easy and foolproof. What better than an apple crumble! Nana had a simple recipe. Mum made it simpler. Was it possible to simplify it even more? Yes, and without an oven or even a reliable stovetop, I developed my own version which was always popular. I rarely had leftovers to worry about.

My version of apple crumble:

·        Pie apples from a ring-pull can

·        Empty pie apples into a good-sized dish

·        Top with granola and serve

Monica O’Rourke 1944 - now

Apple Crumble Generation Two

 

Moving on to the next generation, Mum Enid, was the third daughter. She was a wonderful mother and a hard worker but she would be the first to say she was not a cook. I doubt that Nana had time to teach her daughters to cook or, if she had, the enthusiasm would have worn off by daughter number three. Maybe Mum did some fancy cooking when she was first married and when her family was small. But she went on to have eight sons and five daughters. Some of my earliest memories were of the time before my sisters were born. I had an older brother and five younger ones before my next sister was born.

Big families were the norm around us. Most of my aunts and uncles on my father’s side had six to nine children and many families at our small Catholic school were also large. We took big families for granted. Our cousins were our best friends. We visited each other often and also met at my grandparent’s farm at Traveston. I think people were surprised at how well-mannered we were and we were certainly kept in line. However, when a couple of groups of cousins got together, it brought out the devil in all of us. We did things when our cousins visited that we would never have done alone because we knew that the adults were sitting and talking in the kitchen and no taking much notice of us. The adults, like us kids, were best friends and good talkers.

The kitchen was the heart of the house. As the family grew, we moved a couple of times until, when I was about 14, Dad built in Turner St, Scarborough. The family lived there for 47 years – and the house is still standing strongly to this day. The front has never changed but a deck and a swimming pool have been added and the inside is unrecognisable. It would be rare that there weren’t visitors around the long specially-made red laminex table on the weekend, drinking strong, sweet tea and munching on toast cooked in the slow combustion stove. My brother Denis once wrote about the kitchen as a place where issues were resolved, hurts were healed, and ambitions were polished.

Mum was the first of her sisters and sisters-in-law to have a drivers licence. Dad was very forward thinking and insisted that Mum needed to be self-sufficient and able to cope if he wasn’t around. I was always fascinated by her small hands on the steering wheel – but they were very practical hands as well. I remember that she got her hand stuck in the wringer of the washing machine and I had to call a neighbour to release it. Her hand was never quite the same again. To augment his Public Service salary and manage expenses, especially school fees, Dad always had a patch of pineapples or bananas and it was not unusual for Mum to take on the heavy work there at busy times like planting or picking. One patch was at Kobble Creek and we sometimes stopped at the creek to cool down and clean up on the way home.

As you could imagine, there was not much time for gourmet cooking. We always had meat and at least three veges, dessert and we could ‘fill up on bread’ if we were still hungry. Mum was probably better at desserts than main meals. Most nights after the dishes were done and the babies had been put to bed, Mum would prepare what we called ‘pudding’ for the next day, pop it in the oven, and let the fire go out. In the morning, there was a bread-and-butter pudding or baked rice or an apple pie ready to go into the fridge. On washing day, a whole day’s work, we often had rice and prunes because these both took most of the day to cook. Jelly and custard was also a staple. Homemade ice-cream was an occasional treat because it took hours to make, freeze, beat, and refreeze and yielded two silver ice-block trays – a very small serve for a grateful family.

However, like her mother Mum also had the old-faithful apple crumble. She taught me the proportions for the crumble, one of butter, two of sugar, three of flour which always worked, not matter what the unit used. She managed to simplify even Nana’s simple recipe:

·        A tin of pie apples, aided by her trusty can opener

·        Her 1 + 2 + 3 crumble mixture

·        Overnight in the oven or cooked during the day if someone was there to keep the stove going.

Enid Hardy O’Rourke 1920 - 2012

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Apple Crumble Generation One

 

A group that I am part of has a project being developed over the next few months. They are planning a recipe book intertwined with personal stories. The idea is to capture the history of members, to explore the different pathways which have brought us to this point Collectively, we span all family combinations, economic circumstances, and cultural backgrounds. I imagine that most people who contribute to the book would consider themselves good cooks. I don’t pretend to be a cook but I liked the concept of favourite recipes being inextricably linked to our lifestyles. I’m sure my story is not what the organisers had in view but I like the challenge of tracing a recipe through three generations.

Some skills are taught and passed down through generations. Others almost seem to be genetic, where there is no history of that particular aptitude. There are so many examples of parents and grandparents with amazing creative output and the offspring are only happy with a golf club or a wooden spoon in their hands. We’ve seen families like the Douglas’s and Redgraves who shine on the cinematic stage while their children are happy to drop into obscurity. Equally, there is that prodigy who appears without warning.

I am setting the scene for my culinary skills. I can confidently trace them back two generations on the maternal side. My grandmother, Annie Hardy, was born in Australia but her parents and older siblings migrated from Scotland. In fact one sister was born on the ship enroute to Australia. While all the other girls were given a single name, Great-aunt Elizabeth also had the name of the nurse and the delivering doctor – Elizabeth Mowatt McCann Roderick.  

One regret I have is that I didn’t follow up on the history of my mother’s family and there is no one left to tell me. I have only one cousin older than me and I have lost touch. I don’t know how Annie met and married James Hoban Hardy. My story starts when she moved to Mackay in central Queensland in about 1918. She had been on the goldfields of Mount Morgan with her husband. Travelling to Mackay was quite arduous. She came on a small coastal vessel from Rockhampton. When she arrived in Mackay, the ship moored in the Pioneer River near where the Forgan Bridge is now, decades before the Harbour was constructed. They tied up to the Leichhardt Tree and she and her three small children were swung across in a basket to the river bank. I can only assume that they had already purchased a property of some sort and that the little family walked about 800 yards to their permanent home at 65 River Street, which was sold for a unit development soon after Caneland Shopping Centre was built in 1979. Meanwhile Grandfather had come by train to St Lawrence which was the northern end of the railway line at the time. He had the family’s goods and chattels on a bullock dray and he walked with it to Mackay over about three weeks, sleeping under the dray, I imagine, at night.

James and Annie went on to have five daughters and two sons. My mother Enid was born in 1920, to join her first three siblings. Grandfather was at Michelmores[MO1]  for his entire working life. As expected at that time Nana looked after the house and her family. I have photos of James’ mother, Great-grandmother Hoban in the front garden so she obviously had her mother-in-law with her at some time. As a child, I had occasional holidays with Nana where I got to know Aunty Ag (Agnes) and her kids, especially her youngest Patricia who is the same age as me. Agnes came back to live at River Street when she was divorced – almost unheard of in those days.  Having raised her own family, Annie had another five people in the house again.

When I got a teaching position in Mackay in 1968, I went to stay temporarily with Nana and Aunty Ag. Two and a half years later, I left to get married. Nana had always been what she called ‘a good plain cook’. When I was there, she was almost 80 and she was still cooking and cleaning for me and Aunty Ag who had often worked two or three jobs at meagre female wages to keep everyone fed and clothed. We always had meat and veges and dessert. One of her favourites (and ours) was apple crumble, quick to prepare and easy to cook.

Her recipe was simple:   

·        3 or 4 apples, peeled, cored and sliced, stewed gently on a temperamental stove to soften

·        Apples were lined carefully in an over-proof dish and sprinkled with cinnamon

·        Crumble was prepared and layered thickly over the apples

o   3 scoops of plain flour, 2 scoops of sugar and enough butter

o   Combine flour and sugar, rub butter through until combined

·        Cook in unreliable oven until the crumble was browned and crisp. 

Annie Hardy 1890 - 1980

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 [MO1]

I Had a Fall

 A few years ago I wrote a poem about falling. I've always been a bit of a klutz and spent most of my childhood recovering from scrapes and abrasions. I know every way to describe falling over but, for the first time, I have to say I had a fall. I'm not sure what happened. I was on my way to Trivia Night at the club (not on my way home!) I walked up four or five external steps. As I got to the top, I seemed to turn a bit and went down the steps faster than I had come up. I have scrapes of differing severity on my shin, both knees, elbow and shoulder.

A First Aider  cleaned my wounds as best she could. I rang for family to come and drive me home. Fortunately now we have a teenage driver who was able to drive one car home. The next day I presented to the GP and started a three-week routine of having my leg dressed every second day. Today I was told that the worst was over and I could manage the dressings myself.

This sounded like a good idea as my family from Mackay will be at the Gold Coast for the next ten days and I was going to take advantage of an apartment at Surfers Paradise ... except that about a week ago I developed a severe cold and have coughed and spluttered non-stop since then. We have new neighbours this week and I'm sure they can hear me coughing all night and probably think I'm an ageing chain smoker.

Apart from the pain in my legs and the raw throat and sore tummy muscles, I am exhausted from lack of sleep. I wanted to put another post up, so this is short and sweet but I will copy the Falling poem to fill the space.

I Did Not Have a Fall

Believe me, I did not have a fall.

That only happens when you're old.

Sure, I tripped and yes I fell

But that's not what you'll be told

I might have come a cropper

And nosedived near the door.

I maybe took a tumble,

Measured my length on the floor.

I went end-over-end and head-over-heels,

A over T and bum over brain.

I took a quick land-based dive,

Faceplanted near the laundry drain.

Perhaps I had a topple, tumble or trip

I certainly turned base over apex.

I went arse over tea-kettle too

And definitely went for a six.

I plummeted to the ground,

I bit the dust and took a spill.

Whichever words you want to use,

Call it what  you will -

I did not have a fall.

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