A Colourful Tapestry

By Joan Turnour

From life in Malta in the nineteen thirties, when Britannia ruled the waves and her father was part of the Grand Fleet, Joan describes the start of World War II and life in an English village under the threat of invasion. But memories of the Mediterranean stay with her, and in 1952, seduced by posters with a tropical background and the promise of a new life in the land of milk and honey, Joan migrates to Australia as a Ten Pound Pom.

Working as a secretary, a housemaid, and a waitress, Joan finally settles in outback Darwin where she meets Jack, an inveterate pioneer, and her real adventures begin. Joan describes the challenges of farming in the Northern territory, accompanying her husband on aid projects in Indonesia and the Philippines, and raising four children.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris AU
• Release date: Mar 16, 2017
• ISBN: 9781524522049

Joan Turnour

Joan was born In 1931 when King Geroge V was on the throne and Britannia ruled the waves. Her father was leading signalman on the Egmont, part of the Grand Fleet based in Malta and families enjoyed an expatriate life. In 1939 England declared war on Germany and they returned to an English winter with snow up to the windowsills. Joan describes the threat of invasion; nights playing monopoly waiting for the siren to give the all clear; and the excitement of D Day when thousands of planes and gliders filled the sky and Winston Churchill announced Allied troups had landed in Normandy. There were no ‘mod cons’. On Monday morning the copper was lit for washing and clothes were ironed on Tuesday with a heavy flat iron heated on a wood stove. Floor coverings of linoleum were softened by hand made rugs; hot water bottles and bricks heated in the oven warmed your bed. In 1952 posters of beautiful young people in a tropical background persuaded Joan to migrate to Australia. The voyage to Melbourne took six weeks on the 28,000 ton MV Somersetshire and on arrival she was delighted to find work with a wage twice that of England. After two years Joan set off to work around Australia and her adventures really began in Darwin when she met Jack, in charge of seed production for the Humpty Doo rice project. Five months later on the 20th December 1956, Jack and Joan were married; four days after the proposal because the United Church Minister needed three-day’s notice. The wedding was a complete surprise to their friends invited for drinks at the Hotel Darwin and then told that in half an hour they would all leave for the church. Joan moved to Humpty Doo to live in a demountable hut and when Jack opened a new research station further south on the Adelaide River drove over buffalo plains to take spare parts to the men. In 1958 they bought 20 square miles of undeveloped land and pioneered their own property. Their four children were born in the Darwin hospital. In the 1970’s Jack joined an overseas consulting firm and they lived up country in Indonesia. Joan describes the challenge of cultural differences; of learning a new language; and of home schooling the younger two children while the older children were at boarding school in Australia. Over the next twenty five years Joan shared life with Jack in both Indonesia and the Philippines until he retired to Brisbane, Australia in 1997.

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Copyright © 2017 by Joan Turnour.

Library of Congress Control Number:        2017901181

ISBN:                    Hardcover                       978-1-5245-2194-3

                             Softcover                         978-1-5245-2193-6

                              eBook                             978-1-5245-2204-9

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Rev. date: 11/20/2019

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CONTENTS

It Seemed Like A Good Idea

Part One Of An Autobiography 1931-1970

Acknowledgments

Preface

Chapter One

Malta

Chapter Two

Repatriated to England

Elstead

Predictable Routine

My father dies

Threat of Invasion

Women with nothing to do

Granddad was not impressed

The True Meaning of Christmas

Christchurch

It was the days of conscription

Chapter Three

The voyage

Through the Porthole

Visiting Ports

Chapter Four

Melbourne - Down the gangplank

A Mountain of froth

Doctors’ Maid

Drinking Glucose

I called the affair off

Sydney

Chapter Five

Brisbane - Tropical Rain

Living in Paradise

Chapter Six

Darwin

Promoted to Head Typist

I meet Jack

Jack proposes

The Honeymoon

Settling into Married Life

My Move to Beatrice Hill

The 60-Mile

Back to England

Meeting the Challenge

Marketing

Matthew is born

The house that Jack built

Problems with Bureaucracy

Jennifer is born

Mother comes from England

Bushfire

Townsville Lucerne

Jim is born

Caroline is born

Local Farmers

We decide to sell

Life Begins At Forty

Part Two of an Autobiography, 1971–2016

Chapter One

1971–1973

Conondale

Chapter Two

1973–1977 - Going Overseas

Chapter Three

1978 - 1982 The Philippines

Chapter Four

1982–1986 - Kendari

Chapter Five

1986 - Round the World

Madagascar

Nairobi

Belgium

England

Caroline in America

Back in Australia

Chapter Six

1987 – 1992 - Jack in Kalimantan

Chapter Seven

1991 - Joan in Kenya with Jennifer

Zanzibar

Chapter Eight

1992 – 1995 - Back in the Philippines

Chapter Nine

1995 - 2010 Back at Mount Coot-tha

Jack’s Weather Theories

2011–2016

Eulogy in Honour of John Winterton Turnour

Chapter Ten

Reflections

Dedication

This book is dedicated to my husband Jack whose remarkable capacity for work and achievement in the fields of agriculture and cattle husbandry gave confidence to others to reach their potential:

To my children, in appreciation of their resilience during the expatriate years, and in proud recognition of their individual career achievements:

To my grandchildren that they might have an understanding of life in the 20th century.

Thanks to my son Jim for suggesting the title A colourful tapestry.

Thanks to my grandson Benjamin Turnour for painting the cover.

IT SEEMED LIKE A GOOD IDEA

Part One of an Autobiography 1931-1970

Jack and Joan Turnour were true pioneers in proving that rice growing, intensive cattle breeding on improved pastures, and horticultural production could be highly successful enterprises in the Top End. They showed how the tropical monsoonal weather and the floodplain soils could be made productive and profitable for food production for increasing populations. And at the same time, they played a part in the uplifting and modernizing of indigenous peoples.

It is sad that the public service in the Lands Branch of the NT Administration worked against them in taking a negative attitude to them continuing their good work for the Territory as primary producers and entrepreneurs. However when they left the NT they did wonderful work to help the Indonesians in Sulawesi and the rice growers in the Philippines.

Their children have all done great things for Australia.

Their story is fascinating, inspiring and most interesting.

Ernie Friend

Formerly Chief Agronomist Agriculture Branch

Northern Territory Administration

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

When my daughter Caroline took me to an exhibition in Melbourne, entitled Migration to Australia after the Second World War, I was captivated by the dioramas of the 1950s. As I reflected on my arrival as a £10 Pom, she said You’re living history, Mum. You should write your story. It seemed like a good idea.

But it never would have materialized without the encouragement of my daughter Jennifer, who put my early chapters on a website and believed my story was worthy of print.

My husband Jack has always encouraged my writing and deserves recognition for his pioneering days in the Northern Territory.

PREFACE

In England, back in 1952, very large posters advertising life in Australia had been everywhere. From the sides of buses, from town hall walls, beautiful young people beamed at me from a tropical background promising a new life in the land of milk and honey. Larger than life, their eyes followed me as I passed by … as though extending a personal invitation.

One miserable grey English day, I imagined that sunshine which was embracing them and felt compelled to find out more about Australia.

My boy friend, newly conscripted into the English Army, had left for Germany. He would be gone for two years, the time I must stay in the colony to qualify for the migrating fare of ten pounds.

It seemed like a good idea.

CHAPTER ONE

Malta

I was born at the Floriana Hospital in Malta on 26 March 1931 three years after my mother married her handsome sailor. Stanley Richard Pearce and Ethel Elizabeth Underell exchanged vows in an old stone church at Farncombe, in Surrey, England, on 3 September 1927. Stan led Ethel in her white bridal gown and lace headdress through a Girls’ Brigade honour guard to the cheers of friends and family.

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At fifteen he joined the navy, now twenty-five was successfully climbing the career ladder. As a leading signalman on the Egmont based in the Grand Harbour at Valletta, Malta, he was part of an expatriate community properly layered in the English tradition. Stan and Ethel would have enjoyed a privileged lifestyle. These were the Depression years of the 1930s and I am sure being in the service isolated my parents from the hardships endured in England.

Malta was a strategic maritime centre at the height of the British Empire, with the navy patrolling between Colombo and Gibraltar. Artefacts from Ceylon and Aden evidenced my father’s role in those days of British dominance, together with photographs of King George V being piped aboard. Stan and Ethel rented a third-floor flat at 79 Isoard Street in Sliema at a rent of three pounds five shillings per month. I have photographs of me at six weeks and six months and later in a fairy costume taken on the rooftop balcony: a safe playground with its high wall. Mother had a maid named Elena. Every morning Elena helped me carry the jug downstairs to the milk vendor to be filled with goat’s milk as women in traditional black hooded dress passed by on the stepped street.

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Six Weeks

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Six Months

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Posing on the Rooftop Balcony

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Il-Karozzin

Sliema had a promenade where I skipped beside the sea wall. A small playground kept me amused as mother chatted with friends and horse drawn carriages called Karozzin trundled by. Mother also enjoyed tennis at the Union Club while I ran round bouncing balls with other children on a lower court. I was enrolled at Chisholm House Preparatory School at a term fee of two guineas with private lessons in ballet and tap dancing. As a spoilt little girl I can remember looking up into the dresses hanging in my wardrobe and refusing to wear what Elena had chosen.

In a misguided effort to impress my father, I once claimed a coloured drawing to be my own work. It was obviously untrue. There was a dreadful row, but I would not admit I had not coloured it and say Sorry. I so wanted him to think I was a clever little girl. Nowadays every encouragement is given to empower children but in my day there was a culture of children should be seen and not heard. As I got older my mother would tell me not to be too big for my boots. When I grew out of preparatory school and was enrolled at the Dockyard Primary School I played with a young boy named Alan Fields. We were friendly with his family; I have photos of his father Jimmy holding a tennis trophy with my father. At the time, I was big enough to walk home from school without being met by Mother or Elena and remember smashing light bulbs with Alan at a local dump, but no other memories come to mind.

Sliema was separated from Valletta, the capital, by a narrow strip of water. Sometimes Mother and I took a ride on one of the small working boats, to be ferried across to the capital. Valletta was built as a fortress city - its foundation stone had been laid by the Medieval Knights of the Order of St John in 1566. We climbed the stone steps to the Barrakka Gardens to look down on the Grand Harbour, and when the fleet returned from a tour of duty we watched excitedly knowing that Daddy was home again.

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Dockyard School (2nd row pigtails)

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Then came Adolf Hitler and his threat of war. British expatriate families were sent from our whitewashed villas in Mediterranean sunshine back to an English winter with snow up to the windowsills.

CHAPTER TWO

Repatriated to England

We returned to England 24 May 1939 on the Strathallan to live with Mother’s sister Lily for a time. She had two boys, Bob one year older, and Ted one year younger than me. They taught me to ride a bike, wobbling along their garden wall. Auntie Lily introduced me to A.A. Milne. She read me poems and Poo Bear stories and I can still recite James James Morrison Morrison Wetherby George Dupree took great care of his mother though he was only three. But I was absolutely petrified of my uncle Jack who dominated dinnertimes. We all shook in our shoes when he demanded to know whose were the footprints in the garden beds. I was only eight that summer, making me an easy scapegoat for my boy cousins, who dared me to get the ball from among the roses.

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Mother never really recovered from the loss of those halcyon days in Malta. She had three sisters, Lily, Emily and Alice. They joked about Ethel and her pretensions. She just loved chitchat and afternoon teas and was adept at cueing off others’ conversations to focus attention her way.

Early in 1940, in his letters from Malta, my father complained of severe chest infection. He was admitted to the Haslar Naval Hospital in Portsmouth, diagnosed with tuberculosis and transferred to a sanatorium in Milford. Mother rented Crabtree a semi-detached house in Moors Lane, Elstead, near Milford, opposite her other sister Emily and Uncle Bert. This gave me more cousins; Mick, six years older; Pauline three years older (whom I idolized), Jimmy who was still a baby and Granddad, who had moved in when my grandmother died in 1932. We made regular visits to see my father propped up in bed in a small room, one of a series with doors opening to verandahs on both sides. It was always cold. Having come from the sunny Mediterranean, I wondered how he survived. In those days the claimed cure for consumption was Switzerland, or a climate approaching it with altitude and fresh air!

After a failed operation and a collapsed lung Father came home to be nursed by my mother. She turned the sitting room into his bedroom to make it easier for people to visit. This also saved her running up and down stairs. I remember saying goodbye to him every morning before leaving for school but have no recollection of spending time sitting with him or sharing stories from school. Maybe I was sent out to play.

Elstead

Elstead was a small village buttressed by miles of hedge-rowed fields on two sides and common ground of heather and hops on the others. Narrow winding roads led to a village green overlooked by picture-postcard inns on two sides. The Golden Fleece with its thatched roof side by side with The Star, gabled and whitewashed, stood directly opposite The Woolpack, well known for its ploughman’s lunch. The thatched post office with its flower garden and hanging baskets stood on the intersecting road which formed a triangle facing north from The Green with an old stone church and terraced cottages within walking distance. We were a community served by buses, not yet invaded by the motor car.

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The Woolpack

For me Elstead had its challenges. Pig tailed and slightly freckled, I walked to the village green on school days to catch the bus to Farnham and a town primary school. Like most of the other children in the village my cousins went to the local school. Some grammar-school children, primarily those who had won scholarships, or whose parents could afford private education, also travelled out of the village to Farnham or Godalming. My father had enrolled me at East Street School. It was an old, red brick building set in a slightly sloping bitumen playground that iced over in winter and gave us tremendous slippery slides. Other times it was a good surface for spinning tops. The expansive brick walls resonated with the rhythm of two-ball at playtime.

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Aged Nine

At home I spent as much time as I could across the lane with my cousin Pauline. We rode our bikes to The Rec (recreation ground) where we climbed the parallel bars. Pauline was so much more adventurous and could hang no hands. We played cartwheels and leapfrog. We gathered plantain and thistles for our rabbits and played marbles on the window sill at her house. Our giggles frequently annoyed our grandfather, Old Joe. Each evening at six o’clock Uncle Bert turned on the wireless and listened to the news. He followed the progress of the war on a world map on the wall.

We all felt sorry for the starving Russians, and though our own rations of butter and meat and processed goods were quite inadequate, we were well fed on vegetables from Uncle Bert’s allotment, part of a community area at the top of the lane. ‘Dig for Victory’ was a national slogan and everyone took it seriously by turning flower beds into vegetable gardens. Mother planted a few rows of Brussel sprouts close to the house. They were a winter vegetable and gave me frozen fingers when I picked them for Sunday lunch. Pauline and I belonged to the Girl Guides. Every Saturday morning we pulled a cart through the village, collecting newspapers and old rags to be sorted at the British Legion, the club for ex-servicemen. Men who were too old to go to this war sorted things into bundles for the war effort.

Granddad was gamekeeper for the Bryce Smiths. Their estate lay hidden behind the manor house at the end of the lane. I have fond memories of him in his brown corduroy trousers, gun under his arm, disappearing into the trees to watch for poachers. He rode his bike down to the village on Saturdays to lay bets on the races. Auntie Em milked the Bryce Smith’s house cow every morning. Pauline sometimes helped and I tagged along. Pauline’s brother Mick was a constant tease who once locked me in their little bathroom. I climbed through the very narrow window with Pauline pulling me from outside. Little Jimmy carried round his dinga dunga a cotton quilt that was his companion and consolation.

Predictable Routine

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Auntie Em

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Uncle Bert

The week at Auntie Em’s was predictable with the copper boiling early on Monday morning to wash the sheets. A wooden stick was used to pull them out into the laundry troughs for rinsing in Reckett’s Blue. Pauline and her mother then took each end of a sheet twisting out the water before they hung it across the washing line, strung the length of the back garden, and held up by wooden props.

Tuesday was ironing day. Black flat irons were heated on the wood stove to swap as each became cool. Other days Auntie Em spent in the garden. She was a keen gardener with flower borders in the front and sweet peas on a trellis close to the back door. A relation had worked at Kew Gardens cross pollinating sweet peas and she hoped to emulate him. The back garden was dedicated to vegetables. She was an energetic little lady and spring cleaned every March. Armed with a bucket of lime solution and a broad brush she whitewashed the inside walls of the house making them wonderfully clean and bright.

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Jimmy

My father dies

I spent the school holidays with my father’s older brother Philip and his wife Nancy. They lived near Guildford, not far away, opposite a farm. Every morning Auntie took her two Scottie terriers on long walks through the fields. She would glean after the grain harvest and other times took me to pick mushrooms. I knew that when she popped into the pantry she was taking a pinch of snuff to push up her nostril.

It was the August holidays in 1940 that one morning Uncle sat on my bed and told me my father had gone to heaven. There was no cuddle or sympathetic hug. I realize now that he was dealing with his own grief and at a loss to know how to console a bereaved nine year old niece. Both his parents died when he was in his teens. He had grown up in a household of boys, and had no children of his own.

In those days children did not attend funerals and when I did go home the rooms were back to normal. I missed my father downstairs. It was lonely with just Mum. She was unhappy and I was angry I had not been born a boy. I was convinced life was easier for boys and took long walks on the common to berate my father for dying. I was sure he could hear me. I hope at his funeral his twenty-three years dedicated to the Navy were recognized. He had enlisted as a boy of fifteen and medically discharged aged thirty-eight. I know now the service was held in the Anglican Church in the village and he was buried in the adjacent cemetery. His grave has a cement border with his name etched into one side and on my visits over the years I have kept it maintained.

Because his death was not caused by actual war injuries the Navy was not generous in a pension allowance. My mother was granted eighty pounds a year with a child allowance of eighteen pounds, later revised to twenty-four pounds. School bus fares were reimbursed if an expired pass was handed in enabling mother to buy one for the following term. In a letter from the Officers’ Benevolent Fund Mother is granted five pounds because of difficult circumstances. Another letter from the Secretary of the Fund suggested Mother inform them of the size and details of my father’s uniforms that they might be sold on her behalf. She obviously found it hard to make ends meet.

Threat of Invasion

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Mick joins the Army

There was always the threat of invasion and Elstead was inundated with troops, both English and Canadian. We recognized the famous beret of Field Marshall ‘Monty’ Montgomery as tanks rumbled along the narrow roads. After my father’s death Manpower seconded mother for work as a clerk at the engineering firm at the edge of the village and I came home every afternoon to an empty house. It was my job to light the fire in the combustion stove which dominated the living room and governed the hot water system. If we didn’t keep the fire going overnight the pipes could freeze. I cooked my favourite meal of macaroni on the gas stove in the kitchen once I had negotiated my way past the Moody brothers, who lived at the top of the lane. They waited for me to come home from school, taunting me with ‘Malteser, Malteser’. During the winter they would push snow down my back.

I hated being called names but most of all I hated the cold. I still remembered Malta and my father waving us goodbye as we sailed out of Grand Harbour. Now I was struggling with too many clothes, knee deep in snow. I couldn’t even buy the damn Maltesers. All I ever had was a penny to buy sherbert. I did like sherbert though. It tickled as it fizzed and went up your nose. The straws were small so you couldn’t suck up much at a time but this made it last longer. We popped the paper bags. Mr. Novel’s little newsagent-tobacconist shop, round the corner from Moors Lane, had glass jars on the counter with aniseed balls and gob stoppers, and packets of pretend cigarettes. Pauline and I spent a long time deciding what to buy with a penny. He also sold dolls, teddy bears and gollywogs.

Elstead was in the flight path of the doodle bug bombs directed at London. A popular catchphrase was ‘When you hear the doodle bug and the engine stops, dive into a shelter before it goes off pop’. All the time the engine was running we were safe but once it stopped the device dived to earth. On one occasion a dairy farm received a direct hit on the milking shed. The village was agog with vivid descriptions of dismembered animals.

If the siren sounded as I walked along East Street I was to look for a house with a