My Hunchbacked Nana

Nana with Neville and Aileen

Nana came home with a bottle of pills from the chemist. She opened the bottle and counted the contents to make sure she had received what she paid for. Strange? Well I thought it was weird, but Nana’s life had been much harder than anything I have ever experienced.

Nana’s father died before she was born, leaving Granny with two young children and another on the way. This was towards the end of the 1890s, before the days of social security when widows and their children depended on the support of others to survive.

For a while - I don't know how long - the young family lived in a slab hut with a dirt floor on the property of Granny's brother-in-law Lavender, known affectionately as Uncle Lav. A few years after they married Nana and Pa bought the farm adjoining Uncle Lav’s and Nana lived there until after Pa died. It was only a short walk along the creek bank to pay what were frequent visits.

It must have been around 10 kilometers into Maclean and Granny would often walk the distance carrying eggs or chickens to sell.

Nana spent her 12th birthday in bed with a pillow on her bottom to keep a space between it and her head, such was the condition of her spine. The family always believed she had suffered meningitis but not long before she died - well into her 80s - the doctor said it must have been something else. Whatever it was she was not expected to live at the time.

The disease left Nana with a significantly deformed back. As an adult she suffered what were then known as nervous breakdowns occasionally requiring treatment in Sydney or Brisbane. I often wonder if this was not a result of her childhood illness.

Nana lived through two world wars. Her brother Roy was seriously wounded in France where their uncle was killed in action. Her cousin Winnie Davis, a nursing officer, died a prisoner of the Japanese in WWII. Then there was the depression and the swaggies moving around looking for work and other support.

Nana and Pa raised two children, Dad and his sister Aileen. They lived without electricity or the telephone until well into the 1950s. And Nana was a farmer’s wife, not housewife. There is a real difference. Nana was a partner in the family business, one to which she contributed her labour to support its viability. She milked cows, fed pigs and planted cane when it was largely manual labour. She helped work the fields, bred chickens and sold eggs. And, like many women of her day she kept a vegetable garden, made her own bread and butter, preserved fruit from the orchard, boiled the copper and kept house without those things we take for granted today.

Nana was part of the generation that backed Sir Robert Menzies for over 15 years, from the end of 1949 until his retirement in 1966. Despite the very real threat posed by communism they voted down his attempts to outlaw it. The Colombo Plan, launched in 1951, enabled Asian students to study in Australia and proved valuable in opening up our relationships with Asia and contributed to the end of our White Australia policy. Foreign aid to South-East Asia was part of his Government’s strategy to combat communism in the region.

The Menzies Government accepted refugees from the war-torn countries of Europe with all the language and cultural difficulties that entailed. Australia was the sixth country and the first outside Europe to ratify the Refugee Convention in 1954. Menzies considered, in the light of Japanese attacks on Australia in WWII, it was possible that one day Australian’s might become refugees and a sense of reciprocity lay at the heart of international law.

With the memories of the War and Japanese atrocities still fresh in the minds of voters Menzies paid his first visit to Japan in 1950, one that lead to a full resumption of trade with our former enemy in 1957.

Nana, I am certain, knew little of international affairs, economic theory, free trade, protectionism, and all those other ‘important’ things that affected her life. But she was not uniformed. She read the Daily Examiner and listened to one of the two radio stations available on the family's battery-powered wireless - one being the local commercial station in Grafton, the other the ABC. This was before social media, post truth, alternative facts, and false news. Without these she may well have been better informed than we are today.

She could never forgive the Japanese for an atrocity associated with her cousin Winnie. Winnie was evacuated from Singapore on a ship carrying mainly nurses and the wounded when it became apparent the Island was going to fall. The ship was sunk by the Japanese and the passengers attempted to find safety in its lifeboats. The mainly women passengers in one of those boats - not Winnie’s - on finding land were marched back into the sea by the Japanese and machine gunned.

Yet despite a childhood of poverty, her significant disfigurement, the hardships of two world wars and depression, she supported Menzies and his vision of compassionate engagements in the wider world, especially with our near neighbours.